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Overt dispute among the Penatekas had broken out in 1851 when Ketumsee met with Texas Indian agents on the San Sabá River and asked the United States to “set apart a Section or peice [sic] of Country” for his people “to settle on and cultivate.”
next year Ketumsee received rations at Fort Graham, met again with federal agents, released twenty-seven Mexican captives, and renewed his request for a reservation.
Sanaco soon left the reservation, but hunger drove other bands in, and within a year more than five hundred Comanches were collecting annuities of beef, flour, and corn meal on the Clear Fork.
although much of the tilling had been done by the Comanches’ Mexican captives.
Lacking a clear target amidst the chaos, Texans and the U.S. Army struck randomly. Ranger companies and spontaneously organized Texas militias killed all Indians they could find, and U.S. troops were ordered to “search out and attack all parties or bands … whether these [depredations] be notoriously attributable to the whole band, or only chargeable
“The strangest feature of this state of affairs,” agent Neighbors wrote in 1857, “is the fact that, at the same time that those bands of Camanches … are depredating on our citizens, waylaying our roads, destroying our mails to El Paso, &c., an agent of your department is distributing to them a large annuity of goods, arms, and ammunition on the Arkansas river.” That, Neighbors seethed, “is arming them, and giving them the means more effectually to carry on their hostile forays.”
northern Comanche chiefs, was nothing less than the extermination of white settlements in Texas.
By late 1859, Comanches had all but vanished from Texas. Their departure left a vacuum that was rapidly filled by settlers,
By 1860, Palo Pinto, Erath, and Comanche counties, all within the historical Comanche range, had emerged as the core area of Texas ranching.
The Comanches had suffered a sickening collapse from hegemonic dominance to poverty and starvation in a mere decade. The two great foundations of their international power—long-distance raiding into Mexico and long-distance trading across the Great Plains—had crumbled, and their empire lay in ruins.
As many as four thousand Comanches may have perished during the early 1860s, leaving a total population of only five thousand in 1865.46
First, in the mid-1860s, the rains returned. The catastrophic, generation-long drought passed, rainfall bounced back to the normal level, and the grasses began to heal.
Yet, on October 18, the two sides signed a final treaty, in which the United States reaffirmed Comanches’ claim on some forty thousand square miles of Texas territory.
That was the setting for an extended Comanche raiding spree that lasted into the early 1870s, devastating not only Texas but large parts of New Mexico, Indian Territory, and the central plains.
By 1867, after two years of raiding, Texas had lost almost four thousand horses and more than thirty thousand head of cattle. Human casualties mounted as well: 162 people were killed and 43 carried into captivity during the same period. And once again Comanche war bands began crossing the Río Grande into Mexico.
The numbers signaled a momentous change: Comanches were becoming full-fledged pastoralists who relied on domesticated animals for their material well-being.
rifles. Comanches paid for the goods mostly with stolen Texas cattle and horses, but they also offered Mexican and Indian captives, who remained “very much in demand among the ‘ricos’ and prospective bride-grooms” in New Mexico even though the territory had prohibited all forms of involuntary servitude and slavery in accordance with the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The contraband cattle and captive trade and the violence it fueled in Texas were a stinging embarrassment for the federal agents in New Mexico, Kansas, and Indian Territory. They had failed to restrain the Comanches, who ignored the reservation boundaries as defined in the Treaty of Little Arkansas, refused to relinquish slave traffic,
Determined to extend emancipation from the South to the Southwest, federal agents repeatedly demanded that the Comanches and Kiowas relinquish their captives. But instead of eradicating slavery and captive trade, such interventions ended up supporting them. Comanches and Kiowas did turn numerous captives over to U.S. agents, but only if they received handsome ransoms in cash or goods.
They boastfully say that stealing white women is more of a lucrative business than stealing horses.”
base: the demilitarized western part of the state lay wide open for Comanche slaving parties.
The persistence of slavery and captive traffic convinced U.S. policymakers that the Southwest was not big enough for both traditional borderland cultural economies and the new American system of state-sponsored, free-labor capitalism.
1867, when presented with the case of a captured thirteen-year-old Texas boy for whom Comanches demanded “remuneration,” General William Tecumseh Sherman, the commander of the U.S. Army, responded that the officials should no longer “Submit to this practice of paying for Stolen children. It is better the Indian race be obliterated.”
The young Texan captive may have brought it to the surface, but Sherman’s racial wrath had other, deeper causes. The Comanches, supposedly subjugated reservation dwellers, still raided all across the American Southwest, frustrating the United States’ modernizing plans for the region.
pastoralism, by diversifying their bison-centered hunting economy, and by accepting U. S. annuities.
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
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As a half century earlier, in the late Spanish and Mexican eras, Texas was disintegrating under Comanche pressure.
non-combatant group of Cheyennes and Arapahoes at Sand Creek, slaying some 130 men, women, and children. Enraged by the unprovoked massacre, Cheyennes and Arapahoes approached their Lakota allies and declared war on the United States.
They attacked wagon trains, stage stations, military posts, and ranches across the Platte River valley and burned the town of Julesburg. Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Dog Soldiers, a militant multitribal faction, shunned peace talks, and by winter 1866 the central plains were the scene of unrestrained violence.
war in fall 1866, and in December Lakotas ambushed and killed Captain William Fetterman and eighty soldiers near Fort Phil Kearny.
With the trauma of the Civil War still fresh, the American public demanded humanitarian rather than military solutions, and Congress created an Indian Peace Commission to negotiate treaties with the Plains Indians.
They could hunt within the bounds of their territory as long as the bison remained, but the nominal ownership of the off-reservation lands would shift to the United States. In exchange for surrendering their claim to more than 140,000 square miles, the commission offered the Comanches and Kiowas twenty-five thousand dollars per year for three decades.
The proposals outraged the Indian delegates, provoking several chiefs to deliver angry speeches. Yet within a week, all five nations had signed treaties. Standard explanations to this change of heart assert that the Indians failed to understand the treaty-making process and were overwhelmed by the government’s inducements: the commissioners handed out $120,000 worth of presents, a sum so large that it supposedly clouded the chiefs’ judgment.
but rejected the idea that they were compensation for relinquished lands. Instead, he invoked the Comanche ideal of mutual affection: “When
As in previous treaties, Comanches would permit limited right-of-ways across their lands in exchange for annuities:
Paruasemena’s proposal, in short, stemmed from the position that had guided Comanche policies with the United States since the early 1850s: he was willing to make minor concessions to secure annuities but categorically rejected demands that could have jeopardized the traditional Comanche way of life.
On those lands they retained only a temporary hunting privilege, which would remain in effect “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.”
Whereas Americans made a clear distinction between the use and ownership of land, Comanches regarded them as inexorably linked; they saw themselves as custodians, looking after the land for their future generations simply by living on
In fall 1868 Sherman authorized General Philip H. Sheridan to launch a winter campaign to drive all Cheyennes south of the Kansas line.
In 1869 newly elected President Ulysses S. Grant introduced his Peace Policy, which advocated Christian education over coercion and brought Protestant missionaries to oversee the reservation programs.
In practice, the army patrols could detain Indian raiders only if they managed to catch one of the highly mobile trading parties with stolen livestock before the animals were sold to the comancheros, eaten, or rebranded and absorbed into the vast Comanche herds.9 Comanches took the new approach as a mandate to continue their traditional ways and policies.
These new units were led by men like Satanta, Pacer, Quanah Parker, Mowway (Shaking Hand), Paruacoom (He-Bear), and Tebenanaka (Sun’s Noise), men who have entered the frontier mythology as iconic, unyielding tribal leaders
Son of Peta Nocona, a Comanche chief, and Ann Cynthia Parker, an Anglo-Texan captive woman,
The Peace Policy stipulated that reservations were demilitarized zones under the Indian Office’s exclusive control and that army patrols could not pursue Indian raiders into reservations.
Agent Tatum received intense criticism for his actions, but unwilling to concede the failure of Quaker policies, he put the blame on the shortcomings of the annuity system—corrupt contractors, delayed shipments, and substandard goods.
Yet blaming the annuity system missed the fundamental point: most Comanches refused to stay on the reservation simply because they could still support their families out of it. Although federal agents repeatedly proclaimed it obsolete, Comanches’ off-reservation economy remained viable, generating a strong pull to the plains.
The continued existence of Comanches and their allies on the southern plains collided with the United States’ desire to make the Great Plains and the Southwest safe for agrarianism, industrialism, and free-labor capitalism. Americans dreamt of a new empire of rails, ranches, farms, and firm borders, which was diametrically at odds with the Comanche political economy of hunting, raiding, ransoming, and fluid borders.
For federal Indian officials, the Comanche situation was a stinging embarrassment: half a decade after the Civil War had eradicated institutionalized slavery, Comanches were trafficking in human merchandise on U.S. soil and with U.S. agents.
The flustered agent conceded that the Quaker experiment was failing.
The Lakota wars had revealed that regular soldiers, although armed with Colt revolvers and Winchester repeating rifles, were a poor match for the highly motivated and mobile Indian warriors, convincing the military leadership that the army needed a decisive numerical advantage to defeat Plains Indians on the battlefield. But numbers were exactly what the army lacked.
