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In the Southwest, European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance; it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.
The Comanche empire was powered by violence, but, like most viable empires, it was first and foremost an economic construction.
ability to reduce Euro-American colonial regimes to building blocks of their own dominant position.
subdued, exploited, marginalized, co-opted, and profoundly transformed near and distant colonial outposts,
Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.
Preferring informal rule over formal institutions for both cultural and strategic reasons, Comanches nevertheless created a deeply hierarchical and integrated intersocietal order that was unmistakably imperial in shape, scope, and substance.
The Comanches, then, were an imperial power with a difference: their aim was not to conquer and colonize, but to coexist, control, and exploit. Whereas
The idea of land as a form of private, revenueproducing property was absent in Comanche culture, and livestock and slaves in a sense took the place of landed private property. This basic observation
Beneath the martial surface were adaptable people who aggressively embraced innovations, subjecting themselves to continuous self-reinvention.
the request, but for unknown reasons the viceroy failed to deliver the animals. A year
It was an exploitative, essentially colonial relationship, the essence of which was captured by the ever-candid Fray Domínguez in an offhand remark: “Whether they are at peace or at war, the Comanches always carry off all they want, by purchase in peace and by theft in war.” The
fictive kinspeople who were socially obliged to supply for each other’s needs through material sharing.
This process had its most dramatic manifestation in the massive intergroup gatherings along the upper Arkansas valley, where thousands of Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Shoshones, Americans, and New Mexican comancheros regularly gathered to trade, socialize, and mediate political issues,
By dominating the major east-west and south-north trading arteries on the southern plains and in the Southwest, Comanches were able to regulate the flow of crucial commodities over vast areas and extend their sphere of influence far beyond their borders.
they could literally control the technological, economic, and military evolution in the North American interior.
As much as their trading partners may have detested their dependence on Comanche suppliers, few were willing to jeopardize their access to Comanchería’s livestock reserves by starting an uncertain trade war.
Cheyenne traditions speak of extensive mimicking of the Comanches that ranged from equestrian lore to the basic techniques of nomadic culture.
they speak of Indians’ understanding of defining historical trends.
Comanches, whose spectacularly successful pastoral culture represented the ideal for the indigenous societies across the Great Plains.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, Comanches were able to conduct most of their business at New Mexico’s border fairs in their own language,
Whether the newcomers blended into the Comanche society, becoming in effect naturalized Comanches, adopted a subordinate status as junior allies, or retained a larger measure of political and cultural autonomy, the net effect of their arrival was Comanchería’s transformation from an ethnically homogenous national domain into a multicultural and politically stratified imperial realm.
Even their best friends are in danger when they visit a Charitica encampment if there are no Comanches present at that time. The Comanches exert certain influence over the Chariticas, and the latter do not dare do some things in their presence.” By midcentury, the Chariticas were considered part of the Comanche nation.
Over time, Comanches absorbed entire Wichita bands into their realm, which served two immediate purposes: it removed the last remnants of the Wichita trading barrier to eastern markets and allowed Comanches to recruit warriors against the Osages, their principal enemy.
Untold numbers of Wichitas, Caddos, Apaches, Pawnees, Shoshones, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Delawares, Shawnees, Seminoles, Quapaws, and black slaves from Indian Territory voluntarily left their communities to join the increasingly multiethnic Comanche nation, evidently lured by its growing prosperity and security.
Comanche rancherías several people of “light Brown or Auburn Hair & Blue or light Grey Eyes.” A half century later voluntary immigration and ethnic incorporation had transformed the very fabric of Comanche society,
People, in other words, exchanged themselves—their bodies and their labor—for the protection and wealth that kinship bonds with Comanches made available.
social and psychological process.
Race for early nineteenth-century Comanches was essentially a political conception. They talked about their mistrust and hatred toward the whites (taiboo?s), but it was always in a specific geopolitical context and generally directed toward the encroaching Anglo-Texan settlers.
They could marry into Comanche families, enter kinship networks, and achieve positions of power.
As stories like Jesús Sánchez’s show, outsiders embraced Comanche identity precisely because that identity was at once distinctive, accommodating, and negotiable.
American pan-Indian alliance by appealing to race—a more exclusive concept than tribe or nation—but in the early part of the century they still believed that almost anyone could become Comanche.
The newcomers provided Comanches with information about distant lands and markets, defense systems on colonial frontiers, and raiding opportunities within them. They introduced novel ideas about animal husbandry, explained the workings of exotic diseases and perhaps provided new cures, and offered new skills that could repair guns or heal the wounds inflicted by them.
The epidemics claimed thousands of lives, grinding deep dents into Comanchería’s demographic base.
This drop, moreover, occurred when the communities around Comanchería experienced steady and at times explosive growth.
This was an empire that marginalized, isolated, and divided Spanish and Mexican colonies, demoting them, in a sense, from imperial to peripheral status.
They subjected Texas to systematic stock-and-slave raiding and tribute extortion, bringing the colony on the verge of collapse, but they traded peacefully in New Mexico, using the colony as a source of political gifts and an outlet for surplus stock.
Texas, in a doomed attempt at self-preservation, opened its borders to U. S. immigration.
Comanches shifted their market-driven raiding operations south of the Río Grande, turning much of northern Mexico into a vast hinterland of extractive raiding.
Comanches refused to recognize national and international boundaries as Euro-Americans defined them.
doing so, they imposed an alternative spatial geometry on what historians have called the Spanish and Mexican borderlands.
Rather than following the orthodox temporal organization of dividing the early nineteenth-century Southwest into Spanish, Mexican, and American periods, I adopt a spatial approach in order to make visible the geopolitical structures, divides, and continuities enforced by Comanches.
They not only lacked the military muscle to repel the raids but knew that hard-line policies ran the risk of alienating the Comanches and pushing them toward Americans.
Comanches would step up and cut back raiding in the province in line with the availability of
Most Spanish officials refused to acknowledge this unsettling reversal of power relations and insisted on calling the payments presents or charity, and the Comanches, who thought that gifts symbolized social bonds, never explicitly articulated the connection between peace and gifting.
The collapse of Comanche-Spanish peace occurred just as the livestock trade between the Comanches and Americans was becoming big business, and the consequences were disastrous for Texas. American traders had a seemingly insatiable demand for horses and mules, and the collapse of the Spanish alliance allowed the Comanches to pillage Texas with impunity to meet that demand.
Texas Governor Manuel María de Salcedo proposed a series of campaigns against them — only to be denied by his uncle the commanding general who insisted that “war against the Comanches had always been considered the greatest evil that could befall the province.”
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. Spanish officials had worked since the 1770s to weaken the Lipans by isolating them from the other Native groups in southern Texas and northern Coahuila.
Lipans, one observer noted, also “served as guides to the Comanche, since they knew the roads, the villages, and the arms, to the great detriment of all the populations along the Rio Bravo del Norte.”
The number of Hispanic settlers dropped from approximately four thousand in 1803 to roughly two thousand in 1821. Nacogdoches was hanging in by a thread, and San Antonio, the economic heart of the colony, was besieged by the Comanche-Lipan coalition.10
Why did Comanches adopt such a relentlessly aggressive policy toward Texas and why did they nearly destroy a colony that posed virtually no military or political threat to them?
