The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

In the Southwest, European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance; it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.

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 more traditional imperial powers ruled by making things rigid and predictable, Comanches ruled by keeping them fluid and malleable.5 This informal, almost ambiguous nature of Comanches’ politics not only makes their empire difficult to define; it sometimes makes it difficult to see.

Indeed, the fact that Comanches did things differently may well have been one of their greatest political assets. Their ability to move nimbly from raiding to trading, from diplomacy to violence, and from enslaving to adoption not only left their colonial rivals confused; it often left them helpless. Western insistence upon uniformity in principle and action, a disposition that manifested itself most clearly in centralized state bureaucracies, rendered their policies slow and heavy-handed in comparison to Comanches’ strategic fluidity. Euro-Americans compartmentalized foreign relations into distinct, often mutually exclusive categories and found it exceedingly difficult to deal with peoples who refused to recognize such categories. Unable to dissect, classify, and comprehend the Comanches and their actions, colonial agents were also unable to contain them.

Similarly, during a five-month period in the winter of 177172, Comanches carried out six raids in northern New Mexico and sent six trade convoys to Taos, sometimes arriving to the fairs only a few days after attacking other towns. Sometimes the raiding and trading parties arrived in chorus, convincing Mendinueta that they were part of a “crafty stratagem.” On May 31, 1768, six Comanche chiefs rode to Taos carrying a white flag and announcing that a larger party would come to the pueblo on June 2 with a captive to ransom. On that day four hundred Comanches did indeed arrive in Taos where they “were provided with muskets and munitions.” But Comanches had also “dispatched one hundred men to attack Ojo Caliente, confident that, at the news of peace and trade they had announced at Taos, the people [of Ojo Caliente] would attend” the Taos fair. Only a propitious intervention by Spanish troops saved the village from attack.

The raids were more than simple plundering excursions; they were also an instrument of power politics that helped restructure Texas and its borderlands for further exploitation. In 1780 Comanche pillaging forced Texas ranchers to suspend their vitally important livestock drives to Louisiana. This deprived Texas of a major source of imports just as Spain’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War began to generate material shortages throughout the empire, but it was a boon for the Comanches themselves: the cessation of drives fueled the demand for their horses and mules in Louisiana, where animals were needed for the Spanish and Patriot troops fighting the British along the Gulf Coast. Like western Comanche raids in New Mexico, eastern Comanche raids in Texas served a double function: they yielded valuable goods while also creating markets for those plundered goods.

When Bourbon officials cast themselves as fathers for Comanche children, they meant to command, not compromise. They intended to be less benevolent parental figures than authoritarian patriarchs.

This unflinching pro-Comanche stance set New Mexico apart from the other Spanish colonies. While New Mexican communities clung to Comanchería, replicating its culture and economy like a double helix, Comanche raiders exploited and devastated large tracts of Texas, northern Coahuila, and northern Nuevo Santander. Gradually, Comanches divided the vast span of northern New Spain from the Nueces River to the upper Río Grande into distinct zones: they raided in one region, drew tribute in another, traded in the third, and peddled stolen Spanish goods in the fourth. Spanish administrators never managed to develop a uniform response to this onslaught, a failure that both denoted New Spain’s helplessness in the face of Comanche power and exposed it to further exploitation.

In their efforts to protect the vulnerable province—and their own positions within it—New Mexican elites had been forced to choose between appeasing one of two imperial cores and, in more cases than not, they chose Comanchería.

Indeed, it seems justifiable to ask to what extent the New Mexicans who paid tribute to a Comanche nation at war with the rest of northern Mexico, who made profit by trafficking in goods Comanches had stolen from other Mexican departments, who openly defied federal orders to sever unsanctioned ties to Comanchería, and whose way of life was permeated by Comanche influences were still Mexican subjects?

The Republic of Texas was a political anomaly, an independent nation that did not expect—or much want—to remain as such. Anticipating fast annexation by the United States, it kept its eastern border open and took in thousands of American immigrants each year. Its government, modeled after that of the United States, was strong only on paper and soon proved incapable of accommodating the prodigious demographic and material growth. There was no treasury to speak of, no functioning taxation system, and no money economy. Geographically, the republic was a patchwork of disparate and in many ways incompatible parts. Its division into a flourishing Anglo cotton kingdom and a poor Tejano Texas clustered around San Antonio and Goliad prevailed, but in the late 1830s, as the immigrant flow from the United States swelled, yet another distinctive subsection emerged: a restless northern frontier of poor, land-hungry subsistence farmers. Texas, in short, was disjointed, expansionist, volatile, and potentially self-destructive. Those were also the attributes of its Indian policy.

Yet in the end, the Comanches’ avalanche-like expansion below the Río Grande mirrored Mexico’s weakness. For all their creative countermeasures, the Mexicans were often powerless against Comanche guerrilla tactics. Most farms, ranches, and villages in northern Mexico were small, isolated, and poorly manned—sitting ducks for highly mobile, well-organized mounted raiders. The large haciendas, too, were vulnerable, their sheer size making them difficult to defend against fast hit-and-run assaults. The Hacienda de la Encarnación in southern Coahuila lost six hundred horses and mules between 1840 and 1845, and the heavily fortified La Zarca rancho in northern Durango lost six hundred horses in March 1844 alone. Frontier defenses across northern Mexico were in pitiable condition. Volunteer militia units were ill-fed, ill-trained, and often undisciplined, and provincial troops suffered from chronic shortages of quality horses, guns, and munitions. The antiquated presidio system, a leftover from the Spanish era, was decaying, undermined by Mexico City’s preference to reinforce the nation’s core at the expense of its perimeters. The popularity of army service collapsed in the far north, forcing the presidios to fill their ranks with convicts and vagabonds. Local officials pleaded with Mexico City to revive the presidial system and send more soldiers, horses, and weapons to the north, but the chronically bankrupt federal government was slow to react. The result of this federal negle...

Starting in 1840 Comanches, together with their Kiowa allies, each year dispatched several major expeditions below the Río Grande. These campaigns were noticeably larger than in the previous years, typically involving between two hundred and one thousand fighting men. Massive war bands ranged wider than ever before, hitting Corpus Christi some 150 miles north of the Río Grande, then penetrating deep into southern Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Jalisco, where they entered a new world of jungles and high sierras. Perhaps to debilitate local defenses, the first excursions to the far south were unusually destructive; the fall of 1840 saw some three hundred Mexican deaths. After such spectacular demonstrations of power, a grinding routine set in. With their lines greatly elongated, Comanches lived off the enemy, slaughtering cattle and sheep and attacking pack and merchant trains loaded with supplies and ore. Their deep, looping maneuvers cut off vital lines of communication and commerce; imperiled the mining towns in Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí; and ravaged the countryside to the extent that tending fields became difficult. Communities from northern Nuevo León to southern Durango were reduced to operate near or below subsistence level.

When Comanche war parties finally returned home with trains of captives, horses, and mules, the war trails that had carried them south served them as commercial highways. They could stop in Mexican towns, ranches, and presidios in northern Coahuila, Chihuahua, and New Mexico and peacefully trade fresh Mexican booty for food, guns, and manufactured goods. All across Chihuahua, southern New Mexico, and southern Texas, they could also sell stolen livestock to American contraband traders and gunrunners, who pushed south from Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio, and Goliad, hoping to tap into the enormous northbound current of wealth from Mexico.

War-torn northern Mexico was also deeply divided, so much so that it can be asked whether Mexico itself had become a mere collection of semiautonomous provinces. Most northern provinces put little value in the policies emanating from the distant, neglectful Mexico City and harbored deep-seated antipathies toward one another. This antagonism had crystallized during the long decades of Comanche violence when most provinces adopted self-interested policies, which often brought destruction to neighboring communities. (Comanches themselves seem to have been well aware of these developments: an Anglo captive held in Comanchería reported how Comanches, when planning a large-scale invasion into Mexico in the late 1830s, “expected to be joined by a large number of Mexicans who are disaffected by the government.”) All this ate away at the already fragile sense of common identity, to the point that it was not unusual for high-ranking officers to openly rejoice when Comanche war parties left their departments for the neighboring ones. By 1846, northern Mexico was a compilation of disconnected communities with ambivalent identities and loyalties.”

south. Building on a long tradition forged under Comanche violence, many northern Mexican communities put self-preservation first and cooperated with the invaders. They sold U.S. troops supplies, rented out lands for camping, and served as guides. The Mexican Army fought fiercely at Resaca de la Palma and Buena Vista, but Matamoros, Monclova, Parras, Mier, Camargo, and Santa Fe all surrendered without a fight. In occupied Matamoros, U.S. Army officials dined at the homes of middle-class Mexicans and soldiers took Spanish lessons from the townspeople. In the lower Río Grande villas of Reynosa and Mier, Mexican officials requested General Taylor to send American troops to protect the settlements against Comanche raiders, and in Chihuahua, General William Worth dispatched dragoons to protect villages from Comanche depredations.

Behind northern Mexicans’ rebellious fraternizing with invaders was a virulent bitterness toward the federal government, which had been unable and, as it seemed in the north, unwilling to invest resources to solidify the frontier against Indian incursions. They perceived the unchecked growth of Comanche power as a sign of Mexico City’s indifference, which it was. The centralist regime that assumed power in 1835 had never taken the Indian threat seriously and had actually reduced the armaments and manpower of local militias to weaken state power, effectively abandoning the north to the mercy of Indian raiders. So when the distressed Mexico City appealed to the northerners in 1846 and 1847, many refused to join the fight against the Americans.

The conquest of Mexico, as scripted and sold by U.S. policymakers, morphed into an ideological crusade to stop the advance of savagery, to extend the dominions of peace, and to purify a racially defiled landscape.”

Ignored and isolated, New Mexico had, as it were, turned its back on central Mexico and embraced foreign wealth and foreign influences, entering the path that eventually led to Santa Fe’s peaceful surrender in 1846.”

But contrary to the conventional view, New Mexico’s separation from the rest of Mexico did not begin in 1821, when it opened its borders to American merchandise and markets; it had begun three and a half decades earlier, in 1786, when New Spain formed a broad diplomatic and commercial alliance with the Comanches. That alliance wedded New Mexico to Comanchería through intimate political, economic, and cultural ties and increasingly set it apart from other Spanish colonies. While Texas languished during the late Spanish period as a virtual tributary state of the Comanche empire, New Mexico’s border communities drew closer and closer to Comanchería. They plugged their lagging economy to Comanchería’s expansive market circuits, adopted Comanche cultural influences, did business in stolen Texas and Coahuilan livestock, and fiercely defended their ties with the Comanches against Mexico City’s or Santa Fe’s interference.

That erosion of political ties went hand in hand with a sweeping economic realignment that saw New Mexico shifting its commercial system from south to east. Comanche raiding south of the Río Grande dissolved old economic lifelines between Mexico City and the northern frontier, pushing New Mexico to intensify its reliance on the markets and goods of Comanchería and the United States. Mexico City fought this development, trying to infuse the northern frontier with national institutions, rules, and rituals, but it was powerless to offset the combined gravitational power of Comanchería and the United States. By the mid-1840s, just prior to the Mexican-American War, New Mexicans across the social strata had grown openly defiant toward Mexico City’s centralist government, whose nation-building project they thought was at odds with their economic and political interests, which had long ago become affixed to the power and wealth flowing in from the east.

The Comanches were a nation that was in a state of constant and at times uncontrolled change, a society that creatively reinvented itself while scrambling to absorb outside pressures, and an imperial people who both savored and struggled with their newly found might. Comanches’ external dominance rested on a series of internal compromises, which kept them balancing between hunting and pastoralism, market production and subsistence production, localism and centralization, egalitarianism and inequality, individual ambition and group solidarity, slavery and assimilation. This internal balancing and compromising sustained the Comanche hegemony, but it was also precarious and dangerous: the Comanche society was a high-strung organism that was constantly threatened by political disarray, economic overheating, and intersocietal conflict. Such hazards would come to haunt the Comanches later in the nineteenth century, but for some 150 years balancing and compromising served them well, supporting their continued expansion and dominance.

The horse was to Comanches what ships, guns, and gold were to European imperial powers—a transportation device that compressed spatial units into conquerable size, an instrument of war that allowed them to wield much more power than their numbers would have suggested, and a coveted commodity around which a trading empire could be built.

Individual status competition and large-scale raiding were closely interwoven in the Comanche society, but that does not mean that the Comanche raiding industry was a mere reflection of raw individual ambition, a blind social impulse. Status competition among men served as a potent engine for violent external action, but its thrust was checked and controlled by overarching political institutions that gave direction to Comanche foreign policy. Comanches never developed a unitary, statelike decision-making system, but their evolving political structures were powerful enough to harness young men’s competitive urges for the greater national good and cohesive enough to incorporate the raiding economy into a coordinated diplomatic and military policy. This was as much a psychological process as it was a political one, involving a creative and sometimes uneasy dialogue between individual self-interest and group solidarity, and it takes us to the very core of the polity that built the most enduring empire in the colonial Southwest.

The root of the disaster, then, was that Comanches may have realized that the bison herds were dwindling yet remained convinced that there would always be bison as long as the proper rituals were observed. Unable to envision the bison’s extinction, Comanches were also unable to envision a policy to conserve them.

But favorable geography is just potential, a historical opportunity that could be transformed into tangible power by human initiative.

Pastoralism also gave rise to internal social dynamics that fueled external expansion. Like many other powerful pastoral societies, Comanches developed into a rank society in which men amassed material possessions, especially horses and slaves, to increase their family wealth and to enhance their personal prestige and political influence through gifting and advantageous marriages. Since pillage provided the fastest and broadest avenue to horses and slaves, status competition generated a forceful incentive for external aggression; in this respect, the livestock-and-slave raiding economy, a key component of the Comanche power complex, was a social institution. It would be an exaggeration to say that Comanches became an imperial power because of internal social pressures, but it would also be impossible to understand their expansion without acknowledging the motivational thrust of those pressures.