The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

it is a story in which Indians expand, dictate, and prosper, and European colonists resist, retreat, and struggle to survive.

At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Comanches were a small tribe of hunter-gatherers living in the rugged canyonlands on the far northern frontier of the Spanish kingdom of New Mexico.

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 sou...

course of three generations carved out a vast territory that was larger than the entire European-controlled area nor...

They became “Lords of the South Plains,” ferocious horse-riding warriors who forestalled Euro-American intrusions into the American Southwest...

Comanche barrier

Comanches reinvented themselves once more, this time as a hegemonic people who grew increasingly powerful and prosperous at the expense of the surrounding societies, Indian and Euro-American alike.

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

Indeed, Comanche ascendancy is the missing component in the sweeping historical sequence that led to New Spain’s failure to colonize the interior of North America, the erosion of Spanish imperial authority in the Southwest, and the precipitous decay of Mexican power in the north. Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.

Indeed, the fact that Comanche territory, Comanchería, was encircled throughout its existence

Their overwhelming military force, so evident in their terrorinspiring mounted guerrilla attacks, would have allowed them to destroy many New Mexico and Texas settlements and drive most of the colonists out of their borders. Yet they never adopted such a policy of expulsion, preferring instead to have their borders lined with formally autonomous but economically subservient and dependent outposts that served as economic access points into the vast resources of the Spanish empire.

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.

When Comanches subjected Texas and New Mexico to systematic raiding of horses, mules, and captives, draining wide sectors of those productive resources, they in effect turned the colonies into imperial possessions.

When New Mexico was founded at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was expected to fuel Spain’s imperial veins with raw materials and laborers, but by the eighteenth century the colony was leaking so much wealth into Comanchería that it could survive only by continuous financial backing from Mexico City.

By subsidizing its far northern frontier, then, the Spanish empire in effect drained itself to feed and fend off an indigenous empire.

the fate of indigenous cultures was not necessarily an irreversible slide toward dispossession, depopulation, and cultural declension.

Before their final defeat in the canyonlands of the Texas Panhandle in 1875,

Negotiating from a position of growing physical and political power, Comanches adopted an increasingly assertive stance toward colonial powers.

From a Comanche point of view, in fact, there were no frontiers. Where contemporary Euro-Americans (as well as later historians) saw or imagined solid imperial demarcations, Comanches saw multiple opportunities for commerce, gift exchanges, pillaging, slave raiding, ransoming, adoption, tribute extracting, and alliance making.

they shredded Euro-American frontiers into their component parts—colonial towns, presidios, missions, ranches, haciendas,

James Brooks has recast the region as an ethnic mosaic connected by an intercultural exchange network that revolved around “kinship slavery”

but also argue that their relations with the Spaniards, Mexicans, Wichitas, and others remained grounded in conflict and exploitation.

sites of extortion, systematic violence, coerced exchange, political manipulation, and hardening racial attitudes.

this book looks at developments from Comanchería outward.

They were racially color-blind people who saw in almost every stranger a potential kinsperson, but they nevertheless built the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest.

The introduction of horses, guns, and other Old World technology arguably prompted Comanches to view their place and possibilities in the world in a different light, while close political and commercial interactions with colonial powers exposed them to the logic and laws of European diplomacy and the market.

On the face of it, Comanche actions fell into unambiguous categories—trading, raiding, enslaving,

Unlike Euro-Americans, Comanches did not separate trade from larger social relations but instead understood it as a form of sharing between relatives, either real or fictive. They considered theft a legitimate way of rectifying short-term imbalances in resource distribution rather than an antagonistic act that automatically canceled out future peaceful interactions.

They killed, waged war, and dispossessed other societies, not necessarily to conquer, but to extract vengeance and to appease the spirits of their

Like most American Indians, Comanches considered gift exchanges a prerequisite for peaceful relations, yet they demanded one-sided gift distributions from Euro-American colonists, readily relying on violence if denied.

they later turned the tables on Europe’s colonial expansion by simply refusing to change.

Numunu

New Mexico’s Spanish officials noted their arrival to the southern grasslands in 1706 and wrote it off as a minor event.

midcentury, the Numunu, then bearing the name Comanches, had unhinged the world they had almost unnoticeably entered.

century-long war with the Apaches and resulted in the relocation of Apachería—a massive geopolitical entity in its own right—from the grasslands south of the Río Grande,

The Comanche invasion of the southern plains was, quite simply, the longest and bloodiest conquering campaign the American West had witnessed — or would witness until the encroachment of the United States a century and a half later.

three other sweeping colonizing campaigns. In 1716, after several aborted colonizing attempts, Spain laid the foundation for a new outpost, Texas, on the southern edge of the Great Plains, thereby pinching the grasslands between the new colonial base and its older counterpart in New Mexico.

Just as they faced the Comanche assault, the Apaches solidified their control over the entire southern grasslands by simultaneously annihilating and absorbing the last of the Jumanos, a once-prominent nation of hunter-traders that vanished from the historical record by 1715.

And finally, Comanches arrived in the southern plains just as European technology—horses, guns, and iron tools—began to spread there in mass.

The Comanches entered recorded history in 1706, when residents of Taos pueblo in the far northern corner of New Mexico sent word to the Spanish governor in Santa Fe that the village was expecting an imminent attack from Ute Indians and their new allies, the Comanches.

Rivera also learned, apparently from a Comanche captive, that their ancestors had begun their exodus to the New Mexican frontier from a land that lay three hundred leagues northwest of Santa Fe. In Spanish imagination, this put the Comanche place of origin in the fabled kingdom of Teguayo, a land of great riches and the birthplace of the Aztecs.

Most scholars today believe that the Comanches are part of the Uto-Aztecan-speaking people, who in the early sixteenth century occupied an enormous territory stretching from the northern Great Plains and the southern Plateau deep into Middle America.

from a place they called Aztlán and the Spanish knew as Teguayo, somewhere in the deserts of the Great Basin or the Southwest. They traced the arc of the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Madres into the central valley of Mexico,

the Aztecs migrated southward, another branch of Uto-Aztecans, the Numic people, left their core territory in the southern Sierra Nevada and moved to the east and north.

This Numic expansion was spearheaded by the Shoshones, the parent group of the Comanches,

the beginning of the Little Ice Age, which ended the long dry spell and brought colder temperatures and higher rainfall.

A smaller faction headed south and disappeared from archaeological record for several years. They reemerged in the early eighteenth century in Spanish records as Comanches,

It is not entirely clear why these proto-Comanches split off from the main Shoshone body, abandoned their lucrative bison-hunting economy on the central plains, and migrated several hundred miles into an unfamiliar territory, but pressure from other Native groups seems to have played a role.