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.
