The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

The full extent of the devastation the Comanches were sowing did not become clear until the spring and summer of 1867, when Texas Governor John W. Throckmorton solicited data on Indian depredations across the state. As reports arrived in the governor’s office in Austin, an alarming picture emerged: the frontier was caving in across a three-hundred-mile stretch from the Red River to San Antonio, exposing the very center of Texas to destruction. Clay, Montague, Cooke, Jack, Erath, Comanche, Coleman, Comal, and Medina counties reported severe losses of population as settlers fled the Comanche attacks from the north and Lipan assaults from the south. Towns were crumbling, farms lay abandoned, and killings were becoming commonplace. “The murders that have been Committed on our frontier,” one official despaired, “are so frequent that they are only noticed by their friends and acquainted as they would notice ones dying a natural death.”