The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

The Lobos and other warrior societies played a central role in these councils, maintaining order, evoking martial ethos through war dances, and providing a sense of cohesion though membership that transcended divisional boundaries.

“The Comanches have a custom of helping the neighboring rancherias share in the victory just won by one of their tribes. They send the neighbors an arm or a leg of the victim so that they may celebrate their own festival.

The exhibition of enemy body parts around Comanchería was more than a gory victory ceremony; it was a symbolic performance of solidarity that dramatized the power and unity of the Numunu in the face of common, vanquished enemies.

favorable to the Comanches. Oral traditions suggest that the Comanches also had a specific society, the Big Horses, which was responsible for completing peace treaties with other Native nations.

Sometimes, as when El Sordo’s Yamparikas relocated to eastern Comanchería and reinvented themselves as Tenewas, entirely new divisions developed and sometimes old ones dissolved. The Jupes vanished from the historical record in the early nineteenth century, probably as a result of the amalgamation of Comanche divisions.

they lived almost half of each year in large, nearly stationary villages.

egalitarian society had yielded to a configuration in which there was room for strictly gendered and ethnically segmented production groups and vast gradations in possession and privilege. Political power had become both concentrated and curiously

Americans resumed their expansionist thrust in the late 1860s, the Comanches, along with more than twenty other Plains Indian nations, were swiftly swept aside. Abruptly and almost effortlessly, the United States overthrew the formidable Comanches.

the American expansion did not trigger their decline.

1840s. That crisis sent the Comanches into a spiraling decline; by the time they came into critical contact with the United States in the 1850s, they had ceased to be an imperial power.

their population hovered near the twenty-thousand level, making them by far the most populous Native nation of the southern and central plains.

There were still an estimated six to eight hundred Mexican slaves and countless Native captives in Comanchería.

Calculations based on the range-use efficiency of livestock in the early twentieth-century southern plains suggest that the nineteenth-century Comanchería could support approximately seven million bison. These vast herds thrived on Comanchería’s dense and nourishing shortgrasses, but they also faced severe hazards: wolves killed huge numbers of calves, grass fires annihilated entire herds, and droves of buffalo drowned attempting to cross frozen rivers in winter.

Modern bison reproduce at an average annual rate of 18 to 20 percent, while the nineteenth-century bison’s annual losses to nonhuman causes—natural mortality, accidents, and predation—can be estimated at 15 percent.

Based on these figures, the Comanches and their allies could kill approximately 280,000 bison a year without depleting the herds.

of 6.5 bison per person for food, shelter, and clothing, which means that the Comanches and their allies were killing approximately 175,000 buffalos a year for subsistence alone. Moreover, although first and foremost horse traders, Comanches also produced bison robes, meat,

Comanches slaughtered disproportionate numbers of pregnant cows, thus impairing the herds’ reproductive capacity.

By 1841 the region’s bison populations were thinning rapidly.

A typical trade caravan consisted of some two dozen freight wagons and several hundred oxen and mules, and each year hundreds of such caravans trekked back and forth along the Arkansas corridor, destroying vegetation, polluting springs, accelerating erosion, and driving out the bison from their last ecological niches in the valley. It is also possible that the traders’ livestock introduced anthrax, brucellosis, and other bovine diseases to the bison herds.7

1840s the herds had thinned perceptibly across the region. In 1843 one Mexican official in Taos warned that the bison would soon become extinct as a species, and a few years later another observer noted, “It is a singular fact that within the last two years the prairies, extending from the mountains to a hundred miles or more down the Arkansa, have been entirely abandoned by the buffalo.”

thus blocking the bison’s access to their drought refuges. Already strained by grazing competition and human predation and now left to endure the drought without the vital resources of the river valleys, Comanchería’s bison herds collapsed.

It is impossible to know exactly how many animals perished, but it is not infeasible that the total population was reduced to 3.5 million by 1860.9

Although an unexpected climatic swing brought on the bison crisis, the Comanches’ actions had contributed to the damage. By monopolizing the river basins for their horses, by slaughtering vast numbers of bison for subsistence and for trade, and by opening their hunting grounds to outsiders, Comanches had critically undercut the viability of the bison population, rendering it vulnerable to ecological reversals.

They adopted steps to preserve the herds, insisting, for example, that the ciboleros take fewer pack animals on their hunting sojourns and curb the amount of robes and meat they carried back to New Mexico.

That slaughter translates to an average of 9.3 bison per capita, nearly three more animals per person than subsistence hunting alone would have required. The extra animals, Whitfield noted, were killed for their robes, which were sold to American traders.

This might also explain why Plains Indian societies developed relatively few social taboos against overhunting and why the hunters, whose very way of life rested on the buffalo, routinely indulged in wasteful acts, such as taking only the choicest parts of the fattest cows.

Social checks against overhunting were an important part of their environmental policy, but they mattered less than the ceremonies, which alone could ensure that the bison would return and the herds would be renewed.

An integral part of this belief was a conviction that buffalos were supernatural in origin and therefore infinite in numbers. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote that Plains Indians “firmly believed that the buffalo were produced in countless numbers in a country under the ground; that every spring the surplus swarmed, like bees from a hive, out of great cave-like openings to this country, which were situated somewhere in the great ‘Llano Estacado,’ or Staked Plain of Texas.”

and their oral histories relate how bison could take human form, appear among starving Comanches, and lead them to large buffalo herds and great kills.12

In 1852 Horace Capron, special Indian agent in Texas, found seven hundred Comanches on the upper Concho River “suffering with extreme hunger, bordering upon starvation.”

Three years later, agent Whitfield reported that the disappearance of bison from the “sterile wilds” of the upper Arkansas basin had forced the starving Comanches to eat so many horses and mules that their herds were shrinking at an alarming rate.

William Bent closed his post in 1860 and with that ended almost 150 years of organized Comanche trade in the Arkansas valley.

No longer able to subsist by the hunt, they settled by the mid-1850s on a reservation on the Brazos River, where they set up houses, cleared fields, and began raising hogs and cattle.

Then, in June 1854, the United States Office of Indian Affairs and immigrant Indians concluded a series of treaties, which opened the Kansas Territory for white settlement and removed thousands of Indians to the central and western Indian Territory, at the very edge of Comanchería.

fifteen hundred Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Wichitas, and Osages joined their forces “to ‘wipe out’ all frontier Indians they could find on the plains.”

crushing defeat against a much smaller group of Sauks and Foxes, who killed more than one hundred warrio...

By 1851 the agents had redeemed some twenty Mexican captives, making a dent in comanchero business.

The decline of comanchero commerce left the Comanches weakened and impoverished. Their access to guns, shot, and powder was severely compromised, but even more troubling, they had lost their only reliable source of maize and other garden produce.

protein and fat, and by the late 1850s the Comanches were vulnerable to several types of malnutrition, including kwashiorkor (protein deficiency, especially in infants), marasmus (combined protein and calorie deficiency), and ketoacidosis (severe carbohydrate deficiency, especially in pregnant women).

Serious malnutrition alone would have pushed the Comanche population into a decline, but a combination of starvation and disease turned the decline into a veritable demographic collapse. In 1848, three years into a dry spell, smallpox ravaged Comanchería, a...

bound overlanders carried away uncounted numbers, including many prominent leaders. And finally in 1862, the seventeenth year of famine, smallpox struck again. In previous decades, the Comanche population had repeatedly rebounded from epidemic losses, but malnutrition and ...

Comanches tried to fend off hunger by hunting large numbers of deer, elks, and bear, and some bands even began to keep sheep and goats.

Fish and fowl were originally considered taboo, but from midcentury on Comanches routinely ate both, especially during the dietary nadir in February and March, the season “when babies cry for food.”

have been as many as twenty thousand Comanches, but by the mid-1850s only a half or less of that number remained.

In 1849 some three thousand hopefuls rushing to the California goldfields blazed an overland route along the Canadian River, where they found more grass, timber, and fresh water than along its heavily trafficked northern counterpart, the Santa Fe Trail.

But in 1858, when gold was discovered in Colorado, the arrangement fell apart. In spring 1859 tens of thousands of migrants poured through the Arkansas valley to the gold fields around Denver.

whose population swelled from 140,000 in 1847 to 210,000 in 1850 and more than 600,000 in 1860. A new slavery-based cotton plantation system flourished along the broad, muddy rivers of the coastal plains, and corn farming thrived in the rich soil of blackland

A collision was inevitable. Texas launched a forceful northward expansion, and the boundary line Comanches and Texans had so carefully constructed in the mid-1840s to separate the two powers became a dead letter.28

Southern Comanches, whom Anglo-Americans knew as Penatekas (Honey Eaters), killed the first German surveyors, but in 1847 the colonists managed to negotiate a treaty with Penateka leaders, who opened their southern lands for settlement in exchange for three thousand dollars’ worth of presents.

By 1850 the frontier had pushed beyond the military cordon to the arched perimeter of the Balcones Escarpment, impinging on Penateka range.30 The result was the first full-blown territorial war between Comanches and Euro-Americans.