El imperio comanche

by Pekka Hämäläinen

dedd

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Native American, American History, Native Americans, Native American History, Indigenous

728 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Pekka Hämäläinen is the Rhodes Professor of American History and Fellow of St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University. He has served as the principal investigator of a five-year project on nomadic empires in world history, funded by the European Research Council. His previous book, The Comanche Empire, won the Bancroft Prize in 2009.

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was growing up in eastern Missouri it was de rigueur that the man-children of the clan become Boy Scouts. Thus, despite little aptitude or interest, I was duly enrolled in the Cub Scouts and spent summer weekends attending den meetings and going on the occasional camping trip. (Don’t fear that this diversion is going to descend into horror stories about mental and physical abuse – happily my life as a Scout was quite banal. I never got beyond the Cub stage, truth be told, and my parents were “cool” with that.) I bring this episode in my life up because it was as a Scout that I first encountered the Native American. Admittedly it was a highly white-washed (there’s a loaded word!) version that stressed the most admirable aspects of Indian culture (at least “admirable” in Anglo eyes) and ignored the complexities and less savory history of relations between Indians and Europeans (and between Indians and Indians). It also tended to focus exclusively on Plains Indians, blinkering my perception of non-Plains tribes for the longest time. Subsequent reading (remember, I’m not the Grizzly Adams type) led me to other works sympathetic to the Native perspective. In particular I remember a YA biography of the Seminole chieftain Osceola (giving me the animus I bear toward Andrew Jackson to this day). It was a kid’s book so the more gruesome details of the war against the Seminoles didn’t figure in the narrative but I understood that the white man had been grossly unjust to the Indian. Even my fiction reading favored the Indian (or at least sympathized with their plight). I remember a book about the lost Roanoke colony (they were saved and incorporated into one of the local tribes); and Andre Norton wrote many novels with Native characters (The Sioux Spaceman, among others, and one (title unremembered) where, in an alternate Earth, there’s a powerful, modern Iroquois empire). All this prepared me to accept the great myth of our national epic with an appropriately jaundiced eye; all this prepared me to accept this wonderful book about a near-forgotten era in the history of the New World.

Despite a writing style that’s sodden with academic jargon (like “fundamentally a study of indigenous agency”), I’m giving this book four stars because of the intense pleasure I felt discovering a world and era I never realized existed and enriching my understanding of my country’s history. To be fair, Hamalainen’s language becomes less turgid once you get past the first chapter or so (he only relapses in the Conclusion but I’m all for forgiving him). This book is divided into eight chapters that cover an era from about 1700, when the Comanches arrived in the southern Great Plains with their then-allies the Ute, to 1874, when the tribes were finally confined to reservations by the US Army. The author chronicles the Comanches’ rise as the dominant power on the plains and their sudden, catastrophic collapse.

Before going on, I wanted to say that one of the strongest overall features of the book is that Hamalainen doesn’t ennoble or demonize anyone. The Comanches are not noble-but-doomed indigenes standing up to European imperialism; nor are they mindless savages futilely resisting the advance of modern civilization. They (and the other actors in our drama – Spaniards, Mexicans, Texans, Americans and other Native nations) are just human beings acting like human beings have acted for thousands of years. There are instances of noble and generous behavior just as there are instances of the most savage cruelty. That balance, for me, makes the book all the more convincing.

What follows are brief synopses and impressions gleaned from reading each chapter. If you’re interested in Hamalainen’s arguments and proofs, read the book yourself :-)

Introduction: If you can hack through the jargon, the Introduction sets up the basic arguments of the book. Thus: (1) The rise of a Comanche hegemony on the southern Great Plains (roughly from the Arkansas river south to the Rio Grande, and stretching c. 200 miles from the eastern face of the Rockies) foiled Spain’s (and Mexico’s) attempt to create a stable inland empire. (2) Again, we have an examination of a frontier zone as a region of flux and innovation similar to the situation along the Rhine in the Roman histories I’ve been reading lately. And (3), an examination of the character of Comanche imperialism and an analysis of why it failed in the face of US expansion.

The first five chapters - Conquest, New Order, The Embrace, The Empire of the Plains, Greater Comancheria - document the Comanches’ rise from just one of many tribes moving into the area in the 18th century to the zenith of their power in the first half of the 19th.

In the early 1700s, the first tribes that could be called “Comanche” wandered down out of Utah with the Utes, one of the first Native cultures to adopt the horse. “Comanche” is the Spanish form of a Ute word that probably meant “enemy” or “those guys who won’t stop attacking us” (I freely paraphrase here as I don’t have the reference in front of me but that’s the gist). Comanches called themselves numunu, which (as is often the case) simply means “The People” (cf. German deutsche).

Though Spain claimed northern Mexico and the southern Great Plains it could not colonize it nor even properly hold it, and the Comanches moved into the power vacuum. The Apache, the original, dominant power in the territory, were overmatched by the newcomers’ command of horses and their more cohesive political organization. This shouldn’t suggest that the Comanche had any form of government recognized by Western eyes nor that they had a conscious plan of expansion. To the Spaniards (and their American successors) the Comanche appeared as savage marauders without mercy, appearing out of the plains to murder and ravish. To most of them. Spain was fortunate in mid-century to have a man named Cachupin as the territory’s governor. He possessed an understanding of Comanche culture and sensibilities that allowed him to create a modus vivendi that gave the provinces of New Mexico room to prosper in (relative) peace. Not surprisingly, it was rare that a man of Cachupin’s quality occupied the post so Spanish/Comanche relations always hovered close to outright hostilities. Even under Cachupin, Hamalainen argues that the Spaniards made a fundamental error in believing that they were in control of the situation. Much like our own politicians in Washington, those in Mexico City and Madrid ignored the reality and the reports of their agents on the ground in preference for a world where their desires and power signified. It made for a delicate balance that only the ablest governors could maintain.

Spanish policy attempted to make the Comanche dependent upon them but the exact opposite occurred – the Spanish colonies became dependent upon the Comanche for their survival. This dependence became so great in New Mexico’s case that she had practically severed relations with the Mexican government. Texas’ case became so desperate, Mexico invited American colonists into the province.

Internally, Comancheria (the region dominated by the Comanche) could be divided into eastern and western halves, which developed differently and faced different challenges along their borders but which maintained unity via complementary trade and periodic general councils that met to deal with regionwide issues. Below these councils, Comanche political/economic society rested on nomadic rancherias of a few hundred souls (at their largest). Chiefs, called paraibos, ruled by common consent of the adult males. Warriors (sometimes from several rancheria) would organize under warchiefs for raids but such figures only commanded during the raid, they had no authority otherwise (though often paraibos in their own right).

In the 1820s, Spain disappeared as a factor in plains history to be replaced by a newly independent Mexico and a rapidly, aggressively expansionist US. For the moment, though, no one enjoyed an overwhelming advantage. Mexico’s position steadily eroded as it proved incapable of creating an effective presence north of the Rio Grande (and only a minimal one south of the river). The US’s attention was focused on lands beyond the Rockies – the plains were just a path to the riches of the far West. Without direct interference from the Americans, Comancheria continued to expand and tighten its economic stranglehold over the region. In 1840, no Comanche would have believed that in a little over a generation they would be a broken remnant dependent upon American generosity to survive.

Children of the Sun – the anthropology chapter: And one of the most fascinating. Comanche society was in a constant state of flux, balancing hunting vs. pastoralism, a market vs. a subsistence economy, localism vs. centralization, egalitarianism vs. inequality, the individual vs. the group and slavery vs. assimilation.

Two animals – the horse and the bison – were essential to creating and maintaining Comanche superiority. Hamalainen contends that the Comanche were the only Native culture to wholly devote itself to an equine-based, pastoral lifestyle. In the process, they sacrificed the “gathering” side of their previous hunter-gatherer existence, becoming dependent upon the more sedentary Native and European societies around them for goods (like metal tools and guns) and staple crops. In essence, the Comanches became the New World equivalent of the steppe tribes of Eurasia.

Becoming pure pastoralists brought about a significant change in the division of labor and a deleterious shift in women’s status: Boys tended the great horse herds; women maintained the households and provided much of the labor that converted horse and bison products into marketable goods; and men occupied themselves with scouting for pasture, taming feral horses, raiding and commerce (two sides of the same coin in Comanche eyes). Beyond relegating women to servility, the changeover to pastoralism also militarized Comanche society – a man’s worth depended upon his prowess in battle and his ability to secure and protect his wealth (i.e., horses). This chapter is all too short and I would have liked more information about Comanche society. Evenso, I haven’t touched upon the author’s discussion of slavery or the Comanche tradition of individualism and meritocracy that mitigated the strong pressure toward political centralization and economic stratification.

As the final chapters - Hunger and Collapse - show, by the 1830s, the Comanche had created a flourishing and stable polity that preserved much of traditional Comanche culture while accommodating the demands of “empire.” But it was supremely vulnerable to the disruption of its foundation – the horse and the bison. Comancheria’s tragedy was that its success sealed its doom. Access to the wealth generated by their trade monopolies led to larger populations and pressure to expand. Combined with treaties which allowed outsiders to hunt the bison, the Comanche fatally weakened the herds. A 20+ year drought beginning in 1845 broke the “empire.” The only reasons the Comanche didn’t succumb until 1874 was that America was distracted in the 1850s and 1860s with the slavery question and the Civil War and the rains returned in the mid-1860s. Comancheria enjoyed an “Indian” summer (sorry, couldn’t resist) but when the US government determined to eliminate the Comanche threat, it unleashed a total war against them (tactics perfected in the Civil War); Comancheria proved unable to survive the onslaught.

In a pattern repeated a few years later in the northern Great Plains, the final days of Comanche resistance were dominated by an apocalyptic religious movement that fell apart at the “battle” of Adobe Walls, when its leader (Isatai) fell to US Army-issue bullets. In 1874, all resistance disappeared and the remnants of the Comanche nation were herded into reservations and forced to give up their way of life, enduring second-class status in the triumphant American empire. This last point brings up a characteristic of Comancheria that I neglected to mention earlier: the Comanches’ Roman-like capacity to accommodate and assimilate. Like Rome, as long as Comanche partners adopted or accommodated Comanche culture, stable and relatively peaceful relations pertained. A far cry from America’s xenophobia. It still smacks of imperialism but of a “gentler” species. (And we shouldn’t forget that when neighbors couldn’t mesh with the Comanche, they suffered the savage raids the nation was known for.)

In concluding, Hamalainen asks, “Why the Comanches?” and comes up with 5 answers:

1. Geography favored horse breeding and bison hunting, and the Comanches were in the right place at the right time to exploit it.

2. Their timing was also fortunate in that they could play the Europeans off against each other to achieve hegemony.

3. Comanche culture was remarkably flexible and innovative.

4. The horse allowed Comanches to shift wholly to pastoralism, opening routes to wealth and the ability to dominate the trade routes across the plains.

5. Diseases which decimated more sedentary Native tribes had a smaller impact on the dispersed populations of Comancheria, and the Comanche were able to maintain a relatively larger population up through the 1840s.

This is only a snapshot of the wealth of information contained in this volume. Considering the rating I’ve given Comanche Empire it should come as no surprise that I highly recommend this book to the interested, especially as you don’t need a particularly deep background in Southwest American history.

[Edward Gwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love reading about the Comanche and their fascinating history. This book did a wonderful job.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Really wow. A truly great work of history. This book has everything. It is a compelling story, a mind bendingly different view of commonly accepted fact and a very well researched uber serious history with over one hundred pages of notes. Oh yes and it is well written. It has clear structured prose that is a pleasure to read.

All I knew about the Comanche before I read this book were that they were a fierce tribe who lived in the south west of present day U.S.A. and had a deadly rivalry with the Apache. That is all true but everything one assumes one knows about Indigenous/European relations is simple not true in the case of the Comanche.

They were definitely an empire. They had a considerable portion of what is todays South West U.S. under their sway. I reckon about 10 to 15% of the present continental U.S. This was called Comancheria by the Spanish. They virtually held the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas as vassal states who gave them 'gifts' which were a lot more like tribute to keep the peace. They so influenced this part of the world that they had soft power ie they held cultural power over political entities they dealt with. The peasants of New Mexico often identified with them. Other tribes tried to emulate them. Some individuals moved into Comancheria to become part of the strongest hegemonic power in the region. They were a flexible, multicultural dynamic society that saw all human relations through the lens of kinship. Trading was about kinship. If you traded with them you became a category of kin. If they lost members of their rancheria ( the basic unit of people numbering between 100 to 2000) they simply replaced them with captives from other peoples be they Mexican, Indian or European.

Their empire was built upon the horse. With the horse they could hunt bison. With the horse they raided far and wide but mostly concentrated on horse and mule theft with a considerable secondary trade in kidnapping for the slave trade. This raiding and trading was astounding in its scope. They supplied horses to the Northern Plains peoples and to the American colonizers in the south. In fact America could not have been settled and the wilderness tamed without the stolen mules and horses the Comanche supplied.

At the zenith of their power there were chiefs who resembled 19th Century capitalists rather than the hardened warrior one thinks of as an Indian chief. One had to borne on a litter because he was so corpulent!

I will tell no more since half the pleasure of this book is the constant surprisingly new way of viewing an astonishing piece of American history. I will leave you one little puzzle. How are the Comanche indirectly responsible for the American Civil War? I bet you can't guess.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, I'll get this out of my system first: skip chapter 6. There, that's better.

It's not often that I read a book that fundamentally changes my sense of a major part of American history, especially not in one of the areas I read a lot in. PH's reconsideration of the history of the southern plains and Southwest does just that. The basic argument is clear: in order to understand the history of the region she (he? Finnish names confuse me) focuses on the areas encompassing Texas, New Mexico and extending both north and south, concentrating on the 18th and 19th centuries. The way I was taught the story, it focused on the struggle for dominance between Spain, France, the United States and the Republic of Texas. If the Comanche appeared at all, it was as a savage tribe impeding the march of European conquest: what PH refers to as the "barrier hypothesis."

Toss that one in the dumpster.

What PH shows is that Comanche were in fact the controlling presence in the story. Not simply warriors and raiders, they constructed a complex multi-ethnic, economically diversified society capable of manipulating the other players in the game for its own needs. It was far more important for settlers around San Antonio or the pueblos around Taos to accommodate the Comanche than Mexico City or Washington. The Comanche formed alliances with various powers (Native and European) at various times; by the early 19th century they pretty much ran the joint. As PH argues, the key is recentering our attention to the interior and rethink events from there. It's a brilliantly executed book, one that illuminates all sorts of moments. To cite just one example, she argues convincingly that the American victory in the Mexican war happened in large part because the Comanche had already routed Mexican defenses. Equally fascinating and convincing is PH's discussion of the decline of the Comanche power, which took place in two waves: the first caused in large part by economic over-expansion and drought; the second by the ascendency of American military power in the 1870s.

Back to chapter six. The one clunker, and it's not trivial, is PH's superficial treatment of Comanche culture. In the rest of the book, she deals very nicely with sources that are pushing their own agendas: Spanish bureaucrats and governors, trappers, captives. IN chapter six, she goes simplistic, relying on reports from white outsiders who very clearly don't understand the difference between various Native cultures. She glides over Comanche religion in a couple of superficial pages. I don't know the literature on Comanche culture in any detail, but I do know that any treatment that purports to reflect the internal dynamics needs to know something about how the Comanche themselves understand the story. Oral tradition is key to that. It's not a minor glitch because the image of the comanche in chapter 6 reduces them back to stereotype. PH contradicts herself on the nature of Comanche slavery and the question of hierarchy within the tribe. It's just a mess.

On a more general level, while I'm convinced of PH's argument, I'm not convinced that what they had was an "empire" in any meaningful sense. In the epilog (which is a nice overview in general), she defends the phrasing, but to my mind undercuts it every two or three sentences. The Comanche relationship with the ethnic groups (Native and European) they incorporated into the tribe differs so starkly from that of the Brits or Romans (take you pick of other clear empires) that what's left doesn't feel imperial at all tome. The key to Comanche relations with the world, as PH makes clear, was in kinship, fictive or otherwise. Not in simple domination. I'm guessing that a deeper understanding of the culture would result in a clearer sense of the differences.

Despite the quibbles, this is a major work of Native, Western and American history.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is described as part of the Lamar Series in Western History, which includes scholarly works of interest to the general reader for the purpose of understanding human affairs in the American West and adding a wider understanding of the West's significance to America's existence. This is certainly a book fit for academic use, but it also is informative to the general historical reader. The extensive source material used in the book's research produces extensive documentation of the facts while providing a fresh look at the way Native Americans, and particularly the Comanches, are portrayed in print.

Hamalainen's title drives home his point that the American Southwest was dominated for over a century, from roughly 1750 to 1850, by an indigenous imperial society, similar to the Aztecs, Incas and the Iroquois confederacy before them. Unlike those other societies, however, the Comanches, while fighting and subjugating other Native groups, ascended in power while reducing Euro-American colonial regimes to serve their dominance. Proof of this was New Spain's (Spain's Mexican empire) failure to colonize the interior of North America and, indeed, the erosion of Spain's, and later Mexico's imperial authority in its own northern provinces of New Mexico and Texas.

The Comanches established an empire without a single central authority. There were no large settlement colonies; no ostentatious architecture was created; no effort was made to maintain control over subject peoples. Their power's reach was demonstrated in their ability to impose their will upon their neighbors (Native and European-based), harness the economies of others for their own use, and persuade their rivals to adopt their customs.

Hamalainen explains the American Southwest as a place where disparate ethnic groups clashed and competed bitterly with one another, but where resources, people and power gravitated to Comancheria, which dominated the region through trade exchange, organized raiding and deliberate destruction fused into a complex economy of violence.

The various Plains Indian groups are firmly fixed in our imaginations as horse riders but most didn't become equestrians until the eighteenth century. The Comanches were among the earliest Plains horse riders. Their ancestry is the Shoshone, who left the Great Basin for the Great Plains over the sixteenth century. Late in the seventeenth century, they splintered into two factions, the smaller group emerging in Spanish records in the early 1700's with the name Comanche. They were introduced to the iron manufactured goods and the horses of the Spanish by their kinsmen, the Utes. They began an equestrian culture of using horses to follow and hunt buffalo herds in the Southern Plains. They traded buffalo hides and slaves for tools, tobacco, flour, cloth, iron tools, firearms and horses at Spanish trade fairs held at Taos and Pecos Pueblos. This was mostly beneficial for the Spanish at first, since they benefitted doubly by the Comanche practice of eliminating their mutual enemies, especially the Apache from New Mexico, and by obtaining Apache captives from the Comanche for use as servants, and slaves in Northern Mexican silver mines.

As the eighteenth century progressed, however, the Comanches started obtaining their horses and mules, and Spanish/Mexican captives for their domestic uses, by engaging in raiding of New Mexican settlements that they would also, at times, alternatively trade with. Hamalainen describes the early 1750's as a time of explosive Comanche growth. He provides helpful maps to show how the area of Comancheria grew. Essentially, the entire plains of new Spanish colony Texas, and northeastern New Mexico, were Comanche dominions. Hamalainen's point is that, over the next several decades, the Comanches became a territorial superpower who called the shots regarding trading and raiding over a wide area which witnessed constant bloodshed.

The Spanish government in Mexico was eventually able to wrangle a workable treaty with the Comanches in 1786 which brought peace to its northern provinces of New Mexico and Texas, but the Spanish were not able to use the treaty to further their aims of making the Comanches their dependents. In fact, their schemes in this regard backfired. The gifts bestowed on Comanche leaders to bribe them into submission became mandatory, periodic payments needed to keep the Indians from destroying New Mexico and Texas.

Spain's Mexican empire collapsed in 1821. The ensuing Mexican governments did not follow Spain in providing even minimal military protection to its northern provinces. The Hispanic residents of the provinces became politically estranged from Mexico City and identified even more culturally, economically and in many cases, through intermarriage with the native groups.

The Comanches used all of these changes in their environment to grow and prosper. They could deal with the Spanish, the Mexicans, the French, or the various native tribes who constantly pushed at their borders, They therefore took in stride the arrival of American traders and immigrants who began flooding into the area after the United States purchased Louisiana from France. The almost inexhaustible demand for livestock by the new immigrants was met by an equally boundless supply. Whatever the Comanches could not supply from their own huge stock, they could obtain by stealing herds from New Mexicans. Very rapidly, Americans became the Comanche preferred trading partners.

Before the American war with Mexico began in 1846, New Mexico was basically an orphaned province with no allegiance to Mexico, and Texas was splintered into two distinct halves: the section East of the Colorado River was populated mostly by Americans, who were duplicating the Deep South's cotton-growing, slave-holding economy; Mexican (West) Texas was under the domination of the Comanches.

The collapse of the Comanche civilization occurred fairly rapidly during the 1850's, a time in which the United States experienced explosive economic and population growth. Part of the decline was environmental, with the start, in 1845, of a prolonged dry spell in the Southern Plains. Part of it was due to the Comanches' own practices of over-hunting, and at times allowing other native groups to hunt, bison on their hunting grounds; this bison depletion, combined with the practice of the Comanche to maintain probably the largest Plains Indian horse herds, had a great impact on the ability of their main source of food and commerce (the buffalo) to replenish. There was also the factor of viruses (cholera and smallpox) which hit the Comanche population especially hard at this time in their history.

The Comanche became weak at the time forces wanted to take advantage of them for economic exploitation. Return of rain and rejuvination of the buffalo herds was matched by the entrance of commercial hide hunters to Comencheria during the 1870's, turning the Plains into the scene of heaping piles of rotting bison viscera. By this time, the U.S. government, trying to control the rampant Comanche raiding in Texas and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) after the American Civil War, negotiated the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty which intended to keep them on reservation land at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The Comanche dislike of staying confined to one place led to the government's decision to use the Army to engage the non-reservation Indians with force and by destroying their economic lifeline with the Comencheros (New Mexican itinerant traders). A Comanche assault on Adobe Wells, a buffalo merchant trading center, in 1874 spurred the government's position on ending Indian resistance. The end of Comanche freedom as a Plains-living tribe began with their defeat against General Mackenzie's 4th Calvary at Palo Duro Canyon.

Hamalainen states his primary purpose in writing this book is to change the misconceptions which were made prevalent in Twentieth-Century histories and literature to the effect that memories of Comanches have become linked to impressions of nativistic resistance and mindless violence. He wishes to revise these visions of early American history by recovering the Comanches as full-fledged humans and key actors under the distortions of historical memory.

"The Comanche Empire" is also an effort to revise certain historical assumptions about the conquest of America's West. Hamalainen states the following:

New Mexico and Texas did not perform as intended, as buffers shielding Spain's northern Mexican silver mining district from incursion by hostile Indians. Actually, the Comanche subjugation of these two "buffer provinces" drained the Spanish empire financially. Concurrently, the Apaches who had been displaced from the Plains by Comanches pillaged the silver districts of Nueva Vizcaya and Coahuila at will.

The effect of the Comanches on Plains Indian horse culture was central, not tangential. They were pioneers among Indian societies in the horse-centered way of life and their example forced, and enabled, all of the plains tribes to adopt the horse as a necessary economic and military device.

The U.S. Army's invasion across the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1846 was greatly enabled by the earlier actions of the Comanches in turning vast areas of the Mexican heartland into an economically underdeveloped and psychologically shattered area that was ripe for invasion. As Hamalainen states, U.S. imperialism in northern Mexico descended directly from Comanche imperialism. This is at odds with historians who have traditionally downplayed the idea of American imperialism, explaining American expansionism in the West as a process of merely the occupation of semi-virgin land, overcoming natural obstacles along the way, including bad weather, lack of water, rough terrain, and, oh yes, Indians. As Hamalainen writes, the American invasion of Mexico in 1846 was nothing if not a result of imperialism.

Finally, there is the issue of the modern legacy of an Indian empire which supported a slave complex: the capture, assimilation, and ransoming of thousands of northern Mexicans in the nineteenth century, which profoundly affected the process of "mestizage" in the current U.S. Southwest. This mixing and reconfiguration of racial identities framed official "notreamericano" opinions about the place of Mexicans in the Southwest. In many instances, Mexicans could not be easily distinguished from Comanches, and this Mexicanness-Indianness and its resulting incompatibility with Anglo-Americanness and U.S. citizenship has given birth to Anglo-American understandings of Mexicans as a mixed, stigmatized and subordinated class.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

There used to be a certain idealistic narrative popular in histories of Native Americans, which went something like this: once upon a time, indigenous peoples lived in pastoral splendor, in harmony with nature, stewards of the Earth, in peaceful extended kinship groups that maybe every once in a while had a wee bit of a territorial dispute. Then Europeans showed up and rolled across their lands, stomping everyone in their path and genociding and shit, as wypipo do.

Modern histories are a little more nuanced (usually), but there is still a tendency to portray Native Americans as, universally, victims of European colonialism, doomed peoples who were just minding their own business on their own land until the colonial powers showed up. This both whitewashes and does a disservice to the tribes who in many cases were not powerless, not hapless, and whose crushing defeat and eventual confinement to reservation life and poverty was probably not inevitable.

The Comanche Empire is the second book about the Comanche I have read, the first being S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon. Gwynne's book, which almost won a Pulitzer, focuses mostly on the late Comanche period, when they were known to Americans as bloodthirsty raiders. While Gwynne certainly wasn't trying to demonize the Comanche, he did paint a picture of a people who were essentially violent plains nomads who lived for war and conquest, and had very little in the way of art or culture, or anything enduring once they were finally crushed by the U.S. Army. I wondered if this was an entirely fair picture: surely the Comanche were not just real-life orcs?

The Comanche Empire is a much more scholarly work, and Pekka Hämäläinen, a history professor, presents a heavily academic treatment of the Comanche in which he argues persuasively that yes, in fact, the Comanche practiced sophisticated power politics, managed an empire that was as much about economics as it was about raiding, and that while their culture contained little of what Europeans valued, they were still people who understood politics, trade, and diplomacy. He explicitly sets out to correct the view that the American empire expanded into a power vacuum, sweeping aside all native resistance. Hämäläinen claims that the Comanche were actually an imperialistic power in their own right, if not exactly an empire in the way Europeans understood empires. He also argues that the Comanche dramatically affected the history and political evolution of the vast region once known as Comancheria.

He persuaded me that the Comanche were neither orcs nor helpless victims. He also persuaded me that Europeans did nothing wrong.

Okay, hold up. That's not exactly true. Europeans did a lot wrong. Taking other people's land: bad. Genocide: bad. Slavery: bad. Etc.

The thing is, though, Europeans did absolutely nothing the Comanche (and most other Indian tribes) hadn't been doing long before Europeans ever showed up. It may sound like a weak justification today, but it is the way things were done. Everywhere.

The idea that conquest is bad, taking land that doesn't belong to you is bad, exploiting people weaker than you is bad, is a very modern notion. Everyone before the 19th century, from the Comanche to the Normans to the Conquistadors and the Chinese, would have looked at you and said "Wtf are you talking about?"

This does not, of course, justify historical atrocities. Or ongoing suffering that results from it. But I have long been of the opinion that the only real sin of European imperialism was winning. Everyone (including just about every Indian tribe) grabbed land and slaughtered its previous inhabitants: people with guns were just better at it. Then we invented modern morality and learned to feel guilty about it.

Yes, yes, I'm being a little bit flippant. But really, as much as I loved this book and its deep dive into Comanche history, and seeing them as a vibrant, adaptable, and formidable people, I also kept thinking "Yeah, but really... they were pretty terrible."

When I say this is an academic book and that Pekka Hämäläinen is a university professor, it really shows. The opening chapter nearly put me off, with its talk of "conceptual spaces" and "subaltern identities," and going on and on about colonialism, imperialism, colonialism, and did I mention imperialism?

In this book I examine the Comanche power complex as part of an emerging transatlantic web that had not yet consolidated into an encompassing world economy. Seen from this angle, the eighteenth-and early nineteenth century Southwest and Mexican North emerge as a small-scale world-system that existed outside the controlling grip of Europe's overseas empires. Comancheria was its political and economic nucleus, a regional core surrounded by more or less peripheral societies and territories whose fortunes were linked to the Comanches through complex webs of cooperation, coercion, and extortion, and dependence. The world-system approach to history has often been criticized for being overly strict and mechanistic, which it is. I have used spatial language and metaphors selectively but also advisedly, fully aware that they convey a certain kind of rigidity and permanence. Viewed against the backdrop of constantly shifting frontiers of North America, the intersocietal space the Comanches occupied and eventually dominated was marked by unusually hard, enduring, and distinctive power hierarchies.

Fortunately, once you get past the opening chapter, it becomes more straightforward, if still dense reading at times, and Hämäläinen puts forward a number of interesting ideas.

"Comanche," like many tribal names, is not what they called themselves. They called themselves the Numunu. "Comanche" was Ute for, roughly, "Those guys who always want to fight us."

The Comanche were originally an offshoot of the Shoshone who arrived in the Great Plains sometime in the early 1600s. They became allies of the Utes against the Apaches (who were originally a more pastoral tribe, not the warlike plains Apaches of later American history). The Comanche and the Utes drove the Apache out of their homelands, then began warring with each other.

Plains warfare was transformed in a major way by the arrival of Spaniards, and horses. The Comanche traded with the Spanish for horses and within a generation were a horse tribe. Indeed, one of the few "technological" developments the Comanche could be credited with was their mastery of horse breeding, which eventually surpassed that of Europeans. According to Hämäläinen, the Comanche recognized at least seventeen distinct breeds of their own.

The Comanches had sophisticated political systems, but not coordinated ones. They had no "great chief" who led a tribe and made command decisions: decisions were made by consensus. Being wise, being accomplished in war, having a lot of horses, were all things that brought you prestige and made your words carry more weight, but Comanches practiced collective decision-making, and while they thought of themselves as a vast, extended people, individual bands only spoke for themselves (which led to quite a few misunderstandings with whites who thought they were making a treaty with "the Comanche").

One of Hämäläinen's more intriguing propositions is that "Wars in the plains were about carbohydrates." The Comanche hunted bison and almost all their food came from bison meat. They needed other foods they could obtain by trading with tribes in the Arkansas River Valley markets. Much of their expansion and trade activities, according to Hämäläinen, can be understood as an effort to secure enough carbs for survival.

Bartering among Spaniards was about market economics, but among Comanches, it was about establishing kinship networks. If you traded with someone, you were making them part of your extended family, and thus implicitly agreeing to provide for each other. So haggling, trying to get "better deals," refusing to trade goods you owned, was seen as a violation of this principle. This was the cause of many misunderstandings between the Comanche and their European trading partners.

The Comanche were imperialists and slave traders before they ever met Europeans. They weren't unique in this regard. And plains warfare had always been brutal. Slaughtering the men, capturing and enslaving the women and children, and torturing captives to death was the norm. Capturing a man's family unmanned him, and could only be compensated by recapture, by capturing the captors' family, or "ceremonially burying your lost loved ones in the bodies of the enemy."

And yet, if you were abducted into a Comanche tribe, once you endured the hardships (to call it "hazing" would be an understatement) of your initial captivity, you could eventually become a full-fledged Comanche. Hämäläinen describes the Comanche as a racially "egalitarian" people in which being Comanche was not defined by blood, but by understanding and adhering to Comanche social norms.

The Spaniards were the first Europeans to come into conflict with the Comanche. The Spanish of course had an enormous sense of racial superiority and in all their dealings with the Comanche, viewed them as either current or future subjects. The Spanish regarded their trade agreements as tying the Comanche to them in vassalage. The Spanish used lots of "Father/Son" metaphors in their treaties, and treated the Comanches as children, but to the Comanche, it was a sibling relationship. Both maintained the fiction of the Comanche accepting "subordinate" status to the Great Father, the King of Spain, though the Comanche never saw it that way, and the Spaniards knew better. The western Spanish colonies did better, as Texas was poorer and had less to trade with the Eastern Comanche. Some Spanish governors were good at negotiating peace with the Comanches, others would let peace fall apart. The Spanish and the Comanche became allies, with Comanche sometimes allied and sometimes at war with the Utes, but everyone attacked the Apaches. (If there's one tribe I felt sorry for after reading this book, it was the Apaches, because pretty much everyone ganged up on them for over a century.)

Spanish interests, and power, declined in the New World partly as a result of shifting power in Europe. Hämäläinen's thesis is that Comanche actually dictated the course of several colonial powers, helped collapse the Spanish regime in the New World, and indirectly aided American expansion. As Mexico collapsed, its centralized government stopped sending soldiers, and the outlying territories had to fend for themselves. With Mexican independence, the peace forged by the Spanish became increasingly an extortionate relationship. Mexicans became very weak against the Comanche, and were essentially paying tribute. It virtually bankrupted some of their territories, who were forced to spend a significant part of their budgets buying off Comanche with "gifts." Soon Comanche violence was proportionate to how much they were gifted. Comanche still framed it as being good relations, as "gifting" kept the Mexicans as part of their kinship network, but it was essentially danegeld. When Mexican territories ran out of money and could only give poor gifts, treaties ended and raids resumed.

Hämäläinen argues that the Comanche were largely responsible for hollowing out the early Mexican economy and causing internal political collapse. When the Mexican-American War happened in 1846, it was a crushing, one-sided war partly because Mexico had been so badly weakened by decades of Comanche depredation. During the Mexican-American War, Comanche war trails were a thousand miles long. Comanche raided all the way down to the Mexican tropics.

When the first American traders moved into Comancheria, the Comanche welcomed them. Americans had lots of stuff to trade with. But soon, things started to change. The Comanche were creating a genuine empire, with trade and buffer zones around their heartland, and while this made them increasingly powerful, it was also causing internal conflicts that would eventually contribute to their collapse.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 relocated the Cherokee and Shawnee and other tribes west. They were forced right up against the Comanche border, and tribes resettled on the plains could not sustain themselves with farming, so they began hunting bison, which cut into the Comanche's supply.

Texas was also becoming a thorn in the Comanches' side, and vice versa. Long after Texas was no longer an independent nation, the Comanche would distinguish between Americans, whom they hated, and Texans, whom they really, really hated. This started possibly way back during treaty talks in San Antonio where the Comanche only brought one white captive to free. When the Texans demanded the Comanche hand over all their other white captives, the Comanche explained that the other whites were scattered in various places in Comancheria. Texans (and Americans) never did quite understand that Comancheria wasn't a single polity and no one Comanche band spoke for all of them. The soldiers in San Antonio opened fire on the Comanche leaders and slaughtered them. This caused bad feelings for a long time.

Sam Houston tried to treat with the Comanches, and he was better at diplomacy, but the Comanche, who previously had never really recognized "territory" or "borders," were finally adopting a geographical mindset and demanding that whites stay within proscribed boundaries.

Unknown to the Comanche, their empire was already in decline when they ran into Americans. They had become not just horse nomads, but were running a far-flung trading empire that relied on trading posts, trading bison hides and meat for maize, beans, and squash and later metal and guns and powder. They were also granting other tribes (and Europeans) license to hunt in their territory, which they had never permitted before, because they needed more and more goods. Their population was growing, which increased pressure even more. They needed more horses per capita. But this meant they were beginning to overhunt bison, and while they began to realize this, their religious beliefs were such that they could never really reconcile the idea that bison might run out. Plagues and famines compounded their problems. So by the time they came into conflict with Americans, in the 1840s, they were already in trouble.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War, was the zenith of Comanche power and also the beginning of their decline. As part of the treaty, the U.S. was obligated to protect Mexico from Indian raiding parties crossing the border, which meant the beginning of American efforts to contain the Comanche. Although the Comanche weren't immediately affected much, the combination of the U.S. Army and population pressures meant a series of droughts and famines left them devastated by the 1850s. They made a treaty with the U.S. government that guaranteed them about 40,000 square miles, though not all Comanche had agreed to it. Ironically, the American Civil War gave them a temporary respite (along with the return of rains, which slowed the decline of bison). Because Texas was occupied territory during Reconstruction, and American troops in Texas were mostly there to suppress any Confederate hangers-on, the Comanche were able to run amok in large parts of Texas. But their patterns were now different, and instead of being mostly horse raiders, they became castle rustlers, as well as terrorizing white settlements out of revenge.

As Americans continued pressing into Texas and the West, Comanches continued to transform their economy but remained raiders and plains warriors. At first the U.S., overseen by a Quaker Indian official, negotiated a "peace plan" that would settle the Comanche on reservations and provide them with necessary provisions. But the Comanche continued raiding. The U.S. Army said it was reservation Comanches spending part of the season on the plains, but it was really plains Comanches who only came to the reservation when it was time to collect government benefits. The Army became angry as Comanches often were being paid in goods and guns they then used to go out raiding. Texans and Americans were angry that Comanche were still ransoming captives.

In 1871, General Tecumseh Sherman began a campaign of total war against the Comanche, using the same tactics he'd used in Georgia. He took a very utilitarian view that destroying their economic base and wiping out their homes was the quickest and most humane way to end the violence. Of course it meant a lot of starving Comanche, forced back onto the reservation when their women were captured. In 1873, the buffalo hunters came to the plains, driven by the industrialization of buffalo hide processing, and the shocked Comanche witnessed the absolute devastation of the plains and their way of life as buffalo were slaughtered in unimaginable numbers.

The last gasps of Comanche resistance came with a prophet, Isa-Tai (which seems to have translated literally as either "Coyote's Asshole" or "Wolf Pussy") who in 1873-1874 followed a pattern that would be seen in many Indian tribes during their long struggle against whites: the "prophet" would preach that the Great Spirit had told him to fight the white man and granted him powers that would make them invincible in battle. He led a confederation of plains tribes, one of the only such attempts to unite the Comanche with many other tribes, including some of their traditional enemies. Predictably, they suffered a crushing defeat, and the Comanche, starving, returned to their reservation and were essentially a defeated people after that. (Some tribes, such as the Lakota, would continue to fight the U.S. Army into the 1890s.)

(conclusion in comments)

[Kate Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became interested in the Comanches after reading Empire of the Summer Moon, a bestseller last year about Comanche chief Quanah Parker and the last few decades of the tribe's nomadic life on the Southwestern grasslands. Unlike Summer Moon, which was written by a journalist, Comanche Empire begins at the beginning, when the tribe first appears on the scene as a distinct group in the 17th century. Written by a history professor, it is focused on their political and economic dominance in the region and spares us the grisly details of their violence so prominent in Summer Moon. Comanche Empire is more like a textbook, calm and thorough, while Summer Moon is a popular account drenched in blood.

After reading Summer Moon, I had an opportunity to visit Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, the site of the Comanches'"last stand" as an independent people, now a state park. In the park's visitor center bookstore, Summer Moon was conspicuously absent and I asked why. The staff person explained that a descendant of Quanah Parker had told them it contained factual inaccuracies and the park management decided not to stock it. A review of Summer Moon in the Austin Chronicle calls it "awkwardly romanticized," relying on "wispy strands of Comanche social history." However, Summer Moon got me interested and led me deeper, so it was helpful in that way. I'd barely heard of the Comanches before that, but their role in the history of the West was major and totally fascinating.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A history of the Comanche Indians that follow their conquest of the Apache for control of the southern plains to their eventual demise as a major power by the United States government. Many individual Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans are mentioned by name but not so the Comanche. The work does demonstrate how Native Americans were just as guilty as Europeans in displaced others to take over territory.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of the best resuscitation of Native American history from the dark depths of politically correct pity-party of romanticized-by-hippies nonsense back to what they really were, people with interests, dynamic historical actors, power players, and asskickers.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In chronicling the history of the Native American Comanche peoples of the southwest, Pekka Hamalainen tells a story in many ways at odds with the Indians of our national mythology. The Comanche finally were forced as a group onto reservations in the 1870s after a 20-year drought, the breakdown of their pastoral economy and lifestyle following the demise of the huge bison herds of the plains, and military pressure from the expansionist United States. They were largely ignored on the reservations until the 1930s. When they again began to be studied by ethnographers they were described as a warrior society, which they were to a large extent, as were most plains peoples. But the description reduces the true scale of Comanche economic and social power over the southern plains, what's now western Texas and eastern New Mexico. The Comanche did follow a lifestyle similar to that our history most commonly ascribes to the plains Indians--they rode in bands to raid and steal, they moved seasonally following the bison herds, hunting them in dramatic running style from horseback, lived in tipis. But for 200 years the Comanche controlled their vast Texas-New Mexico base with a trade economy organized around a pastoralism which provided the U. S. to the east and Mexico to the south with horses, mules, and animal hides in exchange for guns and other metal products like knives and kettles, textiles, and foodstuffs like corn and other grains. Their ever-increasing pastoral economy demanded more horses and mules demanding more raiding to acquire them plus more captives to be enslaved as herders. Texans, Mexicans, and neighboring tribes formed a symbiotic relationship with the Comanche. They all needed what each provided. Need fed upon need. The huge Comanche population used their ability to raid in mass formations to sustain large herds to be traded to meet the needs of neighbors for horses and mules--cattle, too--who in turn provided material goods and carbohydrate-rich foods. The powerful Comanche trade economy was backed by an equally powerful warrior ethos that allowed them to flourish and dominate their neighbors. Empire.

What I've described only scratches the surface of the Comanche history Hamalainen tells. His study begins with their origins in the interior Rocky Mountains and follows their migration to the southern plains, their adoption of the horse and horse culture, their wars of conquest against the Apache and others which gave them dominance over the region, their advantageous trade relations with the Mexicans, and their political dominance over the early Texans. It's an engaging story, and it's remarkable one because it's a story we haven't--or I haven't--been aware of before. It gives us a new perspective of a historical era we thought we knew. Larry McMurtry's blurb calls the book "Cutting-edge revisionist western history." My favorite section of the book, though, isn't concerned with Comanche economy or politics. I was fascinated by the long Chapter 6, "Children of the Sun," which describes in detail Comanche culture and way of life. Ever wonder what it would have been like to live as a Comanche on the southern plains in the mid-1700s? Hamalainen will tell you.

[Ernest Spoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A straight, no chaser, ethno-history book on the rise and fall of what author Pekka Hamalainen accurately call the Comanche Empire of the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries on the southern plains region of what is now the United States.

The rise of the Comanche hegemony was facilitated by an economic system based on their mastery and perfection of equestrian culture and husbandry. Their fall hinged on the failure of that culture modify the basic economic model due to climatic change and environmental degradation.

[Martin Riexinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hämäläinen demonstrates convincingly that a Eurocentric approach to North American history has concealed the important and independent role native nations played in the 18th and early 19th century. The Comanche are the most impressive example. After they had acquired horses and the ability to ride, they established - according to Hämäläinen - an empire based on horse breeding, bison hunting, trade and slave raids. Their military ability enabled them to challenge Spanish, thereafter Mexican rule in New Mexico, Texas and even northern parts of the current state of Mexico. Settlers adopted their lifestyle and the military threat led the Mexican government to accept Anglo settlement in Texas, which paved the way for US expansion in the South West.
Hämäläinen does in no way contribute to a kitsch view of native Americans. Their warfare against other nations and settlers was marked by brutality. Unlike in Euro,- in particular Anglo-American, slavery, the Comanche's slaves had, however, the opportunity to become integrated in their society. They Comanche were either no eco-saints. They overhunted bison herds which led to the collapse of their society when droughts further diminished the herds in the 1840s and 50s. Although there occurred a resurgence in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Comanche were finally subdued by the US while Northern Plains nations continued their resistance for some more years.

Although I appreciate his effort to give the Comanche their due place in history, I think the use of the term empire is over the top. Of course the Comanche acted with coordination when it comes to warfare, trade and diplomacy. And they subdued ad integrated other ethnic groups. But other aspects of statehood associated with the term, as for example an administrative system did not exist under their dominance.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening and fascinating portrait of the enormous nomadic hunting/slave capturing/horse pastoralists/raiding empire the Comanches carved out for themselves on the southern Great Plains (i.e.: those plains south of the Arkansas River) from the early 1700s until after the American Civil War. The introduction of the horse, the rifle and metal weapons (all European imports) revolutionized the lives of American Indians, and few changed as fundamentally as the Comanches. Originally an unimportant tribe that had been pushed by more powerful neighbors, like the Ute, into the barren Eastern Rocky Mountains. It was at this point (towards the end of the 17th century) that the Comanches adapted the horse. Nursing their ancient grudges, they first carried out a war of extermination against the Apaches. They used the old Spanish settlements in New Mexico and Texas as their raiding prey for slaves, livestock, food, etc., and this continued after those colonies changed to Mexican and eventually American ownership. In addition to following the bison herds and raiding, the Comanche polity also needed, nutritionally, at least, the products of the farming tribes around them to complete and supplement the protein super-charged diet that the bison alone could supply. If nothing else, the interaction of these nomads and their neighbors was both violent and beneficial, mostly to the Indians, it must be said. The Comanches would be suppressed, defeated and confined to reservations after the Civil War ended, the American government not being accepting of independent polities in their midst. This book changed the way I look at the American west and the types of interactions with the indigenous tribes.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Comanche Empire (Lamar Series) by Pekka Hämäläinen

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...

Native American history/the history of early America is a topic I've mostly skipped. I was induced to read this book because the recent fad for "land acknowledgments" left me with a few questions. For example, what is the likelihood that the Native Americans we are acknowledging were conquerors of the land we acknowledge them as owning? That may be an unpopular and heterodox question, but I assume that Native Americans were humans like everyone else.

This book pays dividends on that question and more. The author explains that the Comanche started as a small band associated with the Shoshone who moved through the mountains of southern Utah onto the plains of north-eastern Texas/northern Mexico. They arrived at a fortuitous moment when the Indian/settler culture of New Mexico had temporarily lifted the control of Spain from its shoulders. As a result - or coincidentally - New Mexicans allowed the exfiltration/trade/looting of horses to the Indians north of New Mexico.

Within the space of 50 years, formerly pedestrian Indian tribes became full-fledged horse nomads. That topic is worth anthropological exploration by itself. I've read some books on Steppe nomads. The parallels between the Mongol/Turk steppe nomads and the Indian horse cultures are remarkable. Both cultures inhabited a central position against surrounding civilizations, which could be exploited through raiding and trade. For the Mongols, it was China, Central Asia, and Russia; for the Comanche, it was the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas, and the French territories of Louisiana.

The author claims that the Comanche constituted an "empire." While this is debatable in the classic sense of "empire," it is definitely the case that the Comanche served as a cork in the bottle of European expansion. It is also remarkable how few Comanche were able to control so much territory. At their height, the Comanche population probably numbered around 20,000 individuals, yet they were able to throttle and threaten the Spanish colonies with extinction. Admittedly, those colonies never numbered more than a few thousand.

Eventually, of course, the Europeans - specifically, the English/Americans - would build up their population to the point where the Comanches could be pushed to the side with little problem.

The Comanche were the reason that Americans became situated in Texas. The Mexican government was concerned with the lack of population in its Texas territories. In order to correct that issue, the Mexicans opened the borders to Anglo immigration. Moreover, because the Mexican government could not control the Comanche problem, the Anglos and Hispanics in Texas decided that they would be better served with liberty.

The Comanche strategy of raiding did to Spain and Mexico what that strategy did to the neighbors of the steppe nomads (and their descendants, such as the Turks.) Northern Mexican territory was repeatedly raided and smashed. Slaves were taken. Property was looted. Confidence in the ability of the central government plummeted. It can be argued that the American victory over Mexico in 1848 was due to Comanche plundering.

Author Hämäläinen shows the appropriate empathy for understanding his subject. However, he certainly does not white-wash the darker aspects of the Comanche legacy, which are often forgotten in virtue signaling about "land acknowledgments," such as slave-raiding and genocidal wars on other Native Americans. Because this will be the controversial bit, here are some excerpts from the book:

"Comanches had raided other Native societies for captives long before European contact, and they became in the early eighteenth century the dominant slave traffickers of the lower midcontinent. It was not until after 1800, however, that human bondage became a large-scale institution in Comanchería itself. Comanches conducted frequent slave raids into Texas and northern Mexico during the second and third decades of the new century and soon emerged as the paramount slaveholders in the Southwest.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 250). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

"It was here, at the advancing edge of the world’s largest empire, that the Comanches launched an explosive expansion. They purchased and plundered horses from New Mexico, reinvented themselves as mounted fighters, and reenvisioned their place in the world. They forced their way onto the southern plains, shoved aside the Apaches and other residing nations, and over the course of three generations carved out a vast territory that was larger than the entire European-controlled area north of the Río Grande at the time.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 1). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

"But the Apaches’ main weakness was their mixed hunting and farming economy, which now, when they were at war with the Comanches and Utes, turned from an economic asset into a military liability. Tied to the soil at exact times of the year, Apache farmers were defenseless against their mounted rivals who turned the once-protective farming villages into deathtraps. Capitalizing on their long-range mobility, Comanches and Utes concentrated overwhelming force against isolated Apache villages, raiding them for crops and captives or obliterating them with devastating guerrilla attacks.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 32). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

"Beaten by the Comanches and Utes and abandoned by Spain, the Apaches vacated all the lands north of the Canadian River, which became the southern border of the Comanche-Ute domain.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 36). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Please understand that this book is not a diatribe about the Comanches or Native Americans. Far from it. It is an honest and fascinating history. I am providing these excerpts for future reference in dealing with the anti-historical, anachronistic philosophy that underlies modern romantics who want to guilt Americans with "land acknowledgment" and similar nonsense.

[Cori · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a non-fiction book, I was surprised how I couldn't put it down at some points. It isn't just packing information into a book, it tells the story of the Comanches. I thought it had a great balance in helping understand the Spanish and why they did what they did (and later other groups) and understanding the Comanches and why they did what they did. Neither were portrayed as outright victims or oppressors, and the book allowed the reader to make their own judgments based on evidence.

After too much bombardment in life showing Native Americans as helpless victims, this book was refreshing in that it showed the good and the bad of Comanche relations with Europeans and Americans.

[Mary Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was really thrilled that this book lived up to my expectations--I've been meaning to read it for close to a decade now.

As far as I am now concerned this is pretty much essential reading to supplement an understanding of North American history in the 18th-19th centuries in particular. It is densely packed with information and novel observations (the ecological history of the bison in particular--wow!) and filled in a huge gap in my knowledge. It will challenge assumptions that you may have made or been taught about the lives of indigenous Americans and the dynamics of imperialism. What a remarkable book.

Brilliant.

[David Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

This award-winning book announces its theme in its title. The Comanches, masters of the southern Plains and one of the most powerful of American Indian nations, were an imperial power, capable of “impos[ing] their will upon neighboring polities” - including Europeans – extracting those neighbors' resources, and convincing “their rivals to adopt and accept their customs and norms” (p. 4). His study, author Pekka Hämäläinen argues, allows us to see Indians as a proactive, rather than reactive, force, capable of building their own spheres of influence, exploiting and manipulating Europeans as thoroughly as they did one another, and in the process contradicting our preconceived ideas about colonies and frontiers. The Comanche sphere of influence was, indeed, for a long period the most prosperous region in the southern American interior, and European colonies like New Mexico and Texas merely its violent and unstable peripheries (pp. 1-17).

The Comanches were a Uto-Aztecan people who migrated to the Great Basin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, acquired horses from the Utes, and moved again to the Texas plains after 1700. By 1740 their population had increased to 10,000, and they were able to prevail in wars against the Apaches for access to grazing land and the New Mexico trade fairs. At the latter, Comanches traded bison and human captives for firearms and carbohydrate-rich foods, the latter of which they needed to sustain their own fertility. They also developed connections with the French in Louisiana, via the Taovaya branch of the Wichita confederacy. Eventually, the Comanches compelled New Mexico to sign peace treaties (1752 & 1762), which freed them to expand into central Texas grasslands. There they “caved in” the Spanish presence by sacking San Saba and San Lorenzo (1758, 1766, quote p. 64). By the 1760s the Comanches' rich bison resources had allowed them to increase their population to 15,000 and gain a decisive edge over the agrarian Apaches (18-67).

After 1770 the Comanches developed trading connections with the British to the east and with Kansas, Iowas, and other Indian nations to the north. These trading partners served as sources of plant foods and imported metals. The nation directed its raiding toward New Mexico, which served them as a source of horses and captives, but they also continued to frequent the province's fairs and sell bison and slaves there. In the late 1770s, after smallpox weakened the neighboring Wichitas, the Comanches reduced them to “vassalage” (p. 96). The eastern Comanches also used raids to sever the commercial links between Spanish Texas and Louisiana, the former of which became another of their vassals. By the 1780s the Comanches had turned New Mexico and Texas into their own colonies, and their population had reached its historic peak of 40,000 people, resting on a resource base of seven million bison. Comanche leaders used general political councils to achieve “macroscale political cooperation” between the nation's eastern and western divisions (68-106, quote 105).

Weakened by the smallpox pandemic of the early 1780s, the Comanches signed a treaty of alliance with New Mexico in 1786, accepting Spanish gifts and agreeing to a joint war against the Apaches. This was an alliance the Comanches dominated: they refused to settle in Spanish missions or end their raiding for slaves, and by the late 1790s they had ceased their joint campaigns (107-140). A couple of decades later, the Americans opened trade with Comancheria via the Red and Brazos Rivers. Southeastern Indian emigrants joined them by the 1830s. The Comanches sold the newcomers bison robes, mules, horses, and slaves of all races; their aggregate trade was worth up to 60,000 dollars per annum. They turned the Arkansas River into a major trading conduit, and the Big Timbers became a trading fair attracting Crows, Mandans, Pueblos, and Saint Louis traders. Comancheria became a relatively safe and prosperous place, surrounded by Indian allies who adopted the Comanche language and dress and intermarried with them. The Comanches were now prestigious enough to project soft power, not just military force (141-180).

Moreover, the Comanches imposed an “alternative spatial geometry” (182) on the Spanish borderlands. Texas remained their prime raiding zone and source of mules and horses; New Mexico was their colonial periphery; and their own “rancherias” on the Red, Brazos, and Arkansas Rivers became the principal trading centers of the southwest. New arrivals in the region had to reach accommodations with them: Anglo settlers in Texas initially (under Houston) tried to make peace with the Comanches, then, under Lamar, conducted a bloody and ruinous three-year war with them that ended in a peace treaty and the cession of Texas lands to the Comanches. The nation's warriors then redirected their raids into the northern Mexican states, as far south as the Tropic of Cancer (221). In the 1830s Comanches created a settlement on Bolson de Mapimi in Mexico, and by the 1840s they were capturing and employing as slave laborers hundreds of Mexicans. Several provinces, following New Mexico's lead, bought off the Comanches with food and tribute, effectively turning themselves into part of Comancheria. The devastation wreaked on northern Mexico by the Comanches made the region vulnerable to military takeover by the United States in 1846-47 (181-238).

Comanche society during these decades centered on horse herding; the nation owned about 100,000 horses by the nineteenth century, This activity required considerable labor, which slaves and plural wives provided. Slavery never became a permanent “social death” for captives, but the status of women certainly declined. The ownership of horses and control of female labor allowed Comanche chiefs (or paraibos) to control the allegiance and labor of young men. (Some civil chiefs became so prosperous and fat they couldn't even ride horses!) Chiefs also controlled trade and organized inter-band councils that reinforced Comanches' unity and common “legal culture” (277). Comanches' winter camps, which were large and persistent enough that one may consider them as towns, reinforced these larger political structures (239-91).

The nation's decline began in the 1840s, when the bison herds began, despite Comanches' efforts at conservation, to show stress from overhunting and drought. The Comanches drove Osages and southeastern Indian emigrants out of their homeland, but their expulsion of these peoples also severed their commercial ties. Growing malnutrition made the Comanches vulnerable to cholera and smallpox, which reduced their numbers to 10,000 by 1855. Gold-seeking white travelers and German farmers depleted water and grass resources in the Arkansas Valley and southeastern Comancheria; the Comanches fought a war with the latter group from the late 1850s to the 1870s. The Civil War and an 1865 treaty with the United States gave the Comanches breathing space, and they were able to obtain enough cattle through raids into Texas and New Mexico to survive and renew old trading connections (292-320).

The Comanches based this revival on cattle raids and the use of Fort Sill as a refuge – on, that is, the forbearance of the U.S. Army. In the 1870s that Army decided to subjugate the Comanches, attacking their camps, seizing their horses, and arming civilian hunters who decimated the southern bison herds. In 1874 cavalry cornered Comanche warriors under Quanah Parker and the prophet Isatai at Palo Duro Canyon, routing the Comanches and capturing 1,400 horses. The survivors surrendered in 1875 (321-41). The Comanche empire had been a real one, but it was based on exploitation of a fragile resource (bison) and on trading networks that, once shattered, proved hard to repair. Comanche power lasted for a century, but its decline became precipitous because the nation lacked the institutions that could have preserved its influence and prestige. In the long term, the Comanches' principal impact was to clear the way for the American conquest of the southwest (342-61).

Hämäläinen does note, however, that for 100 years Comanches were the most dynamic and successful society in the southwest, capable of obliging both Indians and Europeans to learn their language, pay tribute, and play by their rules. His book joins a proud new tradition of scholars, like Juliana Barr, Ned Blackhawk, James Brooks, Brian Delay, and Kathleen DuVal, who characterize the Trans-Mississippi West not as a frontier but as “native ground,” and who explain how Indians, rather than Europeans, set the rules of engagement there. The only flaw I can perceive in this masterful work is that Hämäläinen occasionally loses his footing when venturing into other parts of American history – e.g. his shallow discussion of Reconstruction (which he characterizes as the subjugation of the South) or his claim that France lost all of its American territory in 1763 (the Caribbean was a noteworthy exception). Fortunately, these are only minor flaws in an otherwise magisterial monograph.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work challenges the image of Native Americans as victims. It focuses on warfare and migration of the Native Americans and mainly relates to the Comanche people. A new perspective on American historry.

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommend at 4+ level for learning about Comanche.

CIP Subjects
1. Comanche Indians-History
2. Comanche Indians-Government relations
3. United States-History-19th century
4. Mexico-History-To 1810

Very useful book, excellent index, one to read and refer to over time rather than straight through ... my evaluative searches found clear information. Print size too small for comfort. My interest in the Lipan Apache and Kiowa Apache led to following quote that reflects content and style :

"Soon Comanches were raiding from San Antonio all the way down to the Rio Grande, attacking supply convoys, razing ranches, killing farmers in the field, and slaughtering entire herds of cattle. By 1814, Texas was expiring. Having lost tens of thousands of animals to Comancheria, it was nearly destitute of livestock and the governor ordered the ranches around San Antonio to be abandoned. Food was scarce, soldiers were left without supplies and pay, and settlers began to flee the colony.

"The year 1816 brought more alarming news. Comanches had made a truce with the Lipan Apache group led by El Cojo, ending more than sixty years of on-and-off warfare."

[Ana Díaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bueno en realidad la puntuación son 2.5 estrella, porque la primera es Ok y la segunda me gustó.

Lo primero que quiero decir es que el libro parece (y digo parece porque yo de historia no entiendo mucho) muy bien documentado y completo. Pero yo, viéndolo desde una lectura más divulgativa o incluso de placer opino que es un poco pesado. La primera mitad, con todos los follones que se traían en Nuevo México, Texas y demás me interesaba más bien poco. Fue cuando empezó el capítulo "Hijos del Sol" cuando realmente empecé a disfrutar esta lectura: la descripción de los usos y costumbre de los comanches, como tuvieron que adaptar su sociedad para formar su imperio, la pequeña descripción de su religión y como se organizaban políticamente. Los siguiente capítulos también me parecieron más interesantes ya que narraban los hechos aproximándose más al punto de vista comanche y a lo que sucedía en su sociedad.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give 6 stars, I would. This is one of those rare books that forces me to discipline myself. It was so good that I was on pace to finish it in a couple of days, but I intentionally slowed down to savor it. I wish more history books were as well written, thoroughly researched, and liberally footnoted.

[Lucy Inglis · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have any interest in the history of America (South West, admittedly, but still), or the American Indians and their culture, this is essential reading. I loved it. Serious without being dry, and full of good writing.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

In general, the history of North America has been portrayed as an unrelenting expansion of Euro-American colonialism sweeping away the myriad of Native tribes, despite the occasional valiant, but futile resistance from them. A number of recent works, however, have come out to that have begun to challenge the image of natives as supine actors against colonial aggression. In particular, Richard White’s The Middle Ground focusing on the practical arrangements between the various Algonquin people and colonial powers in the Great Lakes, reveal Native people’s ability to adapt and survive, and even thwart colonial attempts to subjugate and remove native powers. Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire goes a step further, placing the colonists as the subjected ones and a native group, the Comanche, as the expanding empire.
Comanche Empire turns the conventional view of the American history on its head. With great use of a large block of Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and American historical and ethnographic sources, the author convincingly argues that the Comanche turned the Southwest into their own imperial domain. His arguments hinge on loose definitions of the terms empire, conquest, and imperialism. Classically these terms require the dominant power to directly control, govern, and exploit their possessions. Being a nomadic steppe peoples, the Comanche would not be able to assert themselves along these lines without changing their entire lifestyle to a sedentary way. For the Comanche, there was little reason to convert to this style. The Comanche were able to create an expansive economy and thriving lifestyle centered around the bison, newly adopted horses, and captured slaves. Trading these for guns, maize, and other tools, the Comanche gained a powerful edge over their native rivals and went on par with the European colonizers. With a complex mixture of raiding, trading, and diplomacy with various peoples on their borders the Comanche homeland, Comancheria, was able to thrive and dominate the southwest.
Spanish, and later Mexican, colonies like New Mexico and Texas, could only thrive or die based on how the Comanche acted toward them. New Mexico grew closer economically and culturally to the Comanche through trade, while Texas was reduced to poverty through Comanche raiding. The Comanche thwarted Spain’s great imperial dreams of expansion on to the Southern plains and thwarted attempts to transform their northern colonies into economic and military bastions. When Mexico achieved independence the newly born empire was at a loss on how to handle the Comanche. At their height in the 1830s and 40s, the Comanche were able to launch devasting raids that crippled northern Mexican providences, treating them as a warehouse of captured mules and horses. The destruction wrought by these long distant raids paved the way for the sweeping American conquest in the Mexican-American war. The newly born Republic of Texas was also held in check by the might of the Comanche, even despite genocidal campaigns the Texans tried to wage against them.
Equally, the Comanche were able to deal with tribes new and old to the Southwestern plains. Some were dealt with through war, such as the expansionist Apaches who were driven off the plains in the early part of Comanche expansion in the early 1600s. Also, their former allies and ones who introduced horses to them, the Utes, were driven into the mountains. Other tribes such as the Wichita, Cheyanne, Kiowa, Arapaho were brought into the Comanche fold through diplomacy, trade, and kinship. Kinship, based on trade and gift giving, played a major role in how the Comanche were able to establish strong lasting alliances, both with European and native powers.
The author also invests a great deal in examining how the Comanche partially brought about their own collapse. Overhunting and overgrazing combined with drought lead to the collapse of the bison and horse populations. Without these two integral commodities the Comanche economy collapsed, and famine set in. Their population drastically dropped, and they were driven back from territories they had long held sway in. Weakened and threated from all sides by the United States, Comanche resistance was broken by an overwhelming assault from the U.S. army forcing the remaining Comanche onto reservations. His last chapters on the collapse of the Comanche illustrates the hand the Native Americans could have on their own demise, without lessening the effect American scorched earth campaigns waged on their final demise.
Well cited and armed with an impressive bibliography and detailed notes the books help unlocks numerous sources for the reader. The writing is clear, entertaining, and does not deviate from supporting the author's arguments. A clear and concise political history of the Comanche comes alive in a vibrant text while melding the economic and changing culture of the Comanche that adds depth and historical context to the people’s decision making and lifestyles in both good times and bad. As a whole, the book is a fantastic piece of work and should be read by anyone interested in American history or just history in general.

[Nate Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent piece of American historiography. Read it.

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! There is so much information in this book that you would really need to re-read it several times to fully appreciate the full span of the Comanche empire and its effect on the settlement patterns of the US.

The lack of some images was strange - I think you have to have a picture of Quanah Parker at the very least for a book like this - but that isn't the author's fault. Really, whoever is the publisher should have ponied up for the images to be shared.

[Laika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, second history book of the year!

Anyway, this has been on my tbr for something like a year now, having ended up there for the incredibly nerdy reason of ‘got cited in a blog post about how bad the historical accuracy of the Dorthraki in game of thrones is’, and more broadly just because I remain shamefully uniformed about North American indigenous history beyond the highlights. So, for example, this book has expanded my knowledge of the 17th-19th century southwest several times over, and my knowledge of the indigenous people’s there from, well, not quite nothing, but not too far from it either.

This is actually the second book of Hamalainen’s I’ve read -I’d previously gotten my hands on his Lakota America, which is the more recent work. I rather wish I’d taken better notes as I read it, honestly, feels like a more complete/detailed compare and contrast would be interesting.

Anyways – so the book’s got both a broader historiographical/polemical thesis and then also the specific guiding narrative for its particular subject matter. The broader thesis is essentially that indigenous peoples in the Americas were full and active agents of history, and for centuries after the Columbian Exchange many of them were quite rich and powerful and had significant freedom of action – history isn’t just something that rolls in from the east, which people were then effected by or reacted to, they weren’t just trapped in antediluvian ways of life politely waiting for Progress to arrive. It’s a point he returns to in his latter work, but it certainly one that still seems like it needs making.

His specific thesis for the book, though, is that between the early 18th and late 19th centuries, the Comanche were able to create a real nomadic empire in what became the American southwest, driving out or incorporating rival nations to essentially dominate all the best land for the intensive dual pastoral/hunting economy they developed on the southern plains, and reducing the colonial states of New Mexico and Texas (and at different times Louisiana and almost all of northern Mexico) to the status of imperial tributaries or raiding hinterlands. It was only with the collapse of the buffalo population and the resulting famine (combined with smallpox) that the US Army and the rivers of settlers from Texas and further east were able to seize the southwest and convert it into an agrarian economy.

The book’s very much published by Yale University Press, and not exactly easy reading. It is, however, really very light on jargon, or at least makes sure to introduce all its terms and be clear in their use and meanings. The lack of Comanche written records means Hamalainen mostly has to rely on colonial sources or the reports of merchants and traders, so he has made an explicit point of trying to cross reference multiple such sources from different colonizers whenever possible, and especially for all his significant claims. Besides only barely glancing at the endnotes, I honestly found it really very readable, if dry.

Politics and colonialism aside, one thing Hamalainen really does an excellent job getting across is how revolutionary the (re-)introduction of horses to the Great Plains was. He frames it in terms of access to energy – having horses allows you to being exploiting the massive amounts of calories in the grasses and inedible plant life of the prairies, increasing the total amount of energy you have to do work several times over. Especially when the southern great plains are basically the ideal environment for horses, and their population started exploding basically the second the Spaniards lost track of a breeding pair.

You don’t realize how much easier a nomadic life gets when you upgrade from dogs to horses or mules for pack animals, and how much incredibly more efficiently you can hunt buffalo when you’re not doing it on foot and don’t have to haul back everything you take by hand. Not even getting into how much it shrinks the world in terms of trade and communication, or the massive advantage in being able to dominate hunting grounds and win wars. All incredibly obvious things I just hadn’t particularly thought about.

All this is especially relevant with the Comanche, because from the late eighteenth through mid nineteenth centuries they basically made themselves the fulcrum of the horse trade on a continental scale, with herds that put basically everyone else to shame and an incredibly lucrative business raiding Texas for horses and mules and trading them along with ones they’d raised or tamed themselves north and east.

Speaking of ‘raiding’ – the ‘empire’ in the book’s title isn’t just there to grab attention. The whole book is organized around the thesis that the Comanche both essentially migrated into and conquered the southern Great Plains with a mixture of warfare, diplomacy, and incorporating other groups, and then – along with making themselves the centre of an incredibly lucrative trading network that reached across most of the continent, with Comanche becoming an increasingly common language for trade even quite far from their actual territories – reduced the sedentary and agrarian communities around them (both indigenous and colonial) to the status of an exploited imperial periphery.

This was especially the case in Texas and New Mexico, the former being used as an intensive raiding hinterland and source of livestock well into the mid nineteenth century (at several points raided until the point of near-collapse), and the latter a collection of entrepots, whose governors provided annual tribute and whose towns traded at favourable rates for Comanche goods with the variably explicit promise that failure to do so would be rectified by raiding to make up the difference of a fair exchange. By the time of the Mexican-American War, the governor of the state was more or less openly defying the central government and maintaining a stance of pro-Comanche neutrality in the conflicts between the two.

This peaked in the early-mid nineteenth century, with essentially all of northern Mexico being reduced to an extraction zone for massive annual raids, and individual states or towns negotiating without any real reference to the larger Mexican state, often providing information and scouts to help attack their neighbours in exchange for immunity.

Which actually leads into one of what seemed to me to be one of the book’s more striking claims – that Mexico’s performance in the Mexican-American war can largely be put down to the fact that northern Mexico was only nominally part of the country even before the Americans invaded. There was little appetite for fighting and dying for Mexico City as the Americans moved in because from locals perspective Mexico City had been failing them quite comprehensively for years. (The decision to invite Anglo settlers into Texas is also put down as an attempt to create a shield against Comanche raiding, and the failures of Mexican attempts to reconquer it down to the lack of logistics and organization that resulted from all the possible staging grounds being de facto hostile territory).

Anyways, war and high politics aside, the book was excellent at describing what was actually involved in a nomadic economy on the southern Great Plains. The yearly schedule of raids and hunts, and the importance of river valleys to winter in (and the resulting conflict with sedentary/agricultural communities living in those valleys full-time) is just fascinating. The massively increased efficiency of an entirely hunting/pastoral lifestyle being matched by how fragile it was, likewise- it was vitally importance to get maize and other plant calories through trade or tribute to avoid protein poisoning from an all-meat diet. (Which, like, not actually a thing I’d known to worry about!) Likewise, the fact that horses and buffalo ate basically the same grasses and flourished in the same habitats imposed some real tensions on raising herds of the one while hunting the other – and the fact that even just passing through en route to California, a wagon train of settlers was immensely destructive, stripping river valleys of feed and firewood that was needed for winter camps, not even mentioning all the hunting they did.

One thing that definitely struck me – and the same thing happened with the Lakota, if I’m recalling Hamalainen’s other book correctly – is how the massive increase in prosperity over the 18th/19th century actually made Comanche society massively more patriarchal. Hunting was traditionally a man’s role, and treating/preparing the hide his daughter or wife’s. But a mounted and firearm-wielding man can kill way more buffalo than a single woman can possibly handle, and buffalo robes were, along with horses and captives (either for ransom or as slaves) one of the main trade goods Comanche rancherias used to buy guns, maize, metal cookwear, or whatever else they might need.

The result was a massive spread and institutionalization of polgyny, with junior wives essentially being labourers in the household manufacturing business. With the wealthiest and most important men often having dozens of wives, this rather unsurprisingly had the effect of creating a large class of peripheral young men with strong collective interests in raiding or feuding with neighbouring communities, either to win enough prestige and wealth to attract a wife, or just to kidnap and forcibly marry someone during the raiding. The fact that even as inequality grew more and more extreme, social mobility remained fairly high – among men, of course, but there don’t seem to have been real aristocratic dynasties – is a big part of the explanation Hamalainen gives for why the pressure and tension was all focused outward, and internal Comanche politics remained fairly peaceful and consensus driven (if increasingly oligarchic.)

The economic importance of slavery and the slave trade to just...everything in the region until the late 19th century was also something I probably should have known but still kind of took me by surprise, honestly. Kidnapping people from outlying ranches or other indigenous nations on the Great Plains and selling them to the colonial elite was an extremely lucrative trade throughout the Spanish colonial period, which mostly just transitioned to ‘ransoming’ them after theoretical legal crackdowns. According to Hamalainen, the Comanche didn’t initially practice slavery internally, but after a smallpox epidemic decimated their population several times over around the turn of the nineteenth century they turned to it in a pretty big way to have enough labor to sustain their economy and trade relationships (a fairly temporary kind of slavery, it should be noted, with most seemingly eventually being integrated as full members of the community. Which did mean the pressure to go raid for more was ever present.)

The book was an incredible trove of examples of things where I had previously sort of thought something that was just the result of individual greed or brutal social pressures was actually just, like, consciously racist/imperialist state policy on the part of New Spain or the United States. Either ineffective and kind of comical (Spanish policy for a good bit was to intentionally sell the Comanche secondrate and fragile guns so they’d break more often and they’d be more continually dependent on Spanish goodwill. They just started buying from the British) or extremely effective and pretty consciously genocidal (buffalo overhunting for greed and capitalism reasons was absolutely cratering the population, but at a certain point it was absolutely the policy of the US Army to just destroy the economic basis of Comanche independence.)

I honestly have no idea whether Hamalainen is trying to prove too much, but the argument he makes for the eventual American invasion and conquest of the plains – that the actually armed conflicts were kind of besides the point, because Comanche power had already been pretty thoroughly decimated by a late breaking smallpox outbreak and buffalo-overhunting induced famine, combined with mostly successful efforts to suppress their trading connections in now-American New Mexico, and that the actual campaigns were less battles and more intentional campaigns to destroy their winter villages and the food and goods stores within – seems to hold together and make sense.

Anyway, yeah, heavy and dry book, not exactly cheery reading, but incredibly interesting and informative read. Would recommend, if ‘350 pages of book followed by 150 of endnotes, index and bibligography’ is the sort of thing that appeals.

[Relstuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superb book. There is some academic jargon (mostly in the author's introduction which was somewhat off-putting starting out). As another reviewer pointed out the author does an excellent job of telling the history of the Comanche Empire and the peoples they interacted with without demonizing any of the sides.

The significance of this book is placing the Comanche people in an imperial context and explaining why that is appropriate. The Comanche were not thought of as an empire by some in their heyday because of their diffuse leadership system and a full understanding of their economy and treaties was not easily discernible to outsiders. However, the Comanche ruled a huge area of land that is now multiple states in the USA. They defeated or pushed out the tribes that lived in those areas. They extracted tribute from Mexico, Texas, and other tribes. There was a period of time where they ranged deep into what is now Northern Mexico killing and looting at will. There were areas of the country that had been settled that were later abandoned because the Comanche kept raiding and the survivors were in such fear they abandoned their homes and fled the area. The failure of the Mexican government to check the Comanche raids was the single greatest factor in Texas and New Mexico becoming part of the USA rather than remaining Mexican states. Comments from contemporary sources said the only reason any of the Mexicans survived was because the Comanche wanted to preserve somewhere to raid since that was an important part of their culture. The author explores the treaties and trade that preserved the Comanche Empire for well over 100 years. He points to the factors that led to the fall of the Empire that were not fully understood at the time it happened, such as 17 years of drought and the creation of Texas as part of the United States and the military action that brought to bear against them.

It was interesting that the Comanche were slave owners for many years after the American Civil war. Well into the 1870s the government was buying back captured people from slavery. The Comanche held from 10 to 25% of their population as slaves. There were many examples of people being captured that eventually were adopted as full members of the tribes. This is one of the ways the Comanche continued to grow or maintain their population. One of the saddest stories mentioned was of a girl captured by the Comanche. Her family found out where she was being held and tried to arrange to redeem her from slavery. She wrote them and said she did not want to be redeemed as her face had been tattooed and she was pregnant. She didn't believe she could ever rejoin normal society again. There is no way to know how many times stories like this one happened. It was probably rare that a family found out what happened after their children or women (the usual targets) were taken. But we know it happened many times.

[Pat Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My brother gave this to me, bless his heart. He was very enthusiastic about it and figured I would love it. Unfortunately, I thought the book would be propaganda pushing the idea that the Native Americans were not treated all that bad by the people migrating here from Europe and the government they formed. I was wrong. I will say that my brother has argued anti liberal points with me such as global warming is a hoax and electric autos wouldn't exist without government subsidy. This prepped me into an attitude that I have to be careful about what he gives me to read. Anyway, I told him I didn't intend to read the book for that reason, and he argued with me that I was wrong with enough intensity that I gave up and told him I would read it and stop only if I considered it propaganda. I took notes in a spiral notebook as I read. I was actively looking for propaganda but by the time I got about one third through the book, I realized that I wasn't really going to find any. My notes were mostly nit picking about vague displays of racism or questioning statements that went against what I considered to be common belief such as how the bison disappeared from the great plains or misuse of Spanish words. All of which didn't matter in the telling of the Comanche history in North America. So, in my opinion the book seems to tell a complete and believable history of the Comanches and the remarkable things they accomplished in their time. If you have an interest in this specific subject I would recommend it to you. Personally, even though the book appears to be an excellent effort, I didn't find it all that interesting. That is life sometimes.

[Rohit · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing overview of the rise and fall of the Comanches, and their impact on the Great Plains, the South-West, and northern Mexico. The book strives to, and succeeds in, giving the Comanches their rightful place as a crucial imperial power that clashed with the other empires that were seeking to conquer the region, and changing the course of history. The analysis of how the Comanches subjugated Spanish New Mexico and Texas was fascinating, as were the narratives of how they navigated the rival power politics of the British, French, and other native nations; but perhaps the most interesting and surprising narrative thrust was the point about how the quick US victory in the Mexican-American War was in no small part due to the devastation that the Comanches had wrought across northern and central Mexico, during the height of their power.

The only complaint would be that the book seemed to get a little thin toward the end; the collapse of the Comanches seemed abrupt, and could have used more descriptions and analysis. Nonetheless, overall this book is an excellent and engrossing history of not only the Comanches, but of North American south-west in the 1700s and 1800s, a must-read for anybody with even the vaguest interest in these topics.

[Aydan]

ur honor,,, its a serve