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the Apaches, up till then a minor presence on the central plains, began to build mud houses and irrigate fields along the region’s river valleys. Apaches thrived in their new villages,
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico and the subsequent banishment of Spanish conquerors from the colony had left large numbers of horses to Pueblo Indians,
Yet the only clue to what actually occurred is a single word, kumantsi, the Ute name for the newcomers.
it was a reunion of two Numic-speaking peoples, who probably originated from the same Sierra Nevada core area, had taken different routes during the sprawling Numic expansion, and now, despite centuries of physical separation, found a unifying bond in their persisting linguistic and cultural commonalities.
Utes were locked in an on-and-off war with the Navajos over raiding and trading privileges in northern New Mexico
efforts to keep the numerically superior Navajos in the west and farther away from New Mexico.
the Indians of Tewa, Tano, Jémez, Picurís, and Keres pueblos, who had seized Spanish weapons, armor, and horses during the Pueblo Revolt and encroached into ...
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In the spring, the scattered bands congregated into larger units and traveled eastward to the upper Arkansas River valley, where they hunted bison and lived as tipi-dwelling plains nomads.
Taos and San Juan where, under temporary truces, they bartered robes, meat, and Navajo slaves
Comanches began to distinguish among three broad subdivisions, whose names evoke diversifying economic and dietary frontiers: Yamparikas (Yap Eaters), Kotsotekas (Buffalo Eaters), and Jupes (People of Timber).”
the 1710s, only a generation after obtaining their first horses, Comanches were lashing northern New Mexico with uncontainable mounted raids.
Horses, in contrast, drew their strength directly from plant life, allowing their masters to eliminate one arduous phase in their search for power.
Utes had accumulated enough guns and metal tools to pass some of them on to their Comanche allies, who now moved, literally overnight, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
Iron knives, awls, needles, and pots were more durable and effective than their stone, bone, and wooden counterparts, making the daily chores of hunting, cutting, scraping, cooking, and sewing faster and easier.
By the time Comanches arrived in the region, commerce in Indian captives was an established practice in New Mexico, stimulated by deep ambiguities in Spain’s legal and colonial system.
strict restrictions prohibited their exploitation as laborers. Encomienda grants of tributary labor, the economic keystone of early Spanish colonialism in the Americas, were abolished in New Mexico in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt.
Spanish laws specifically prohibited the buying, selling, and owning of Indian slaves, but the colonists in New Mexico cloaked the illegal traffic as rescate (ransom or barter), whereby they purchased captive Indians from surrounding nomadic tribes, ostensibly to rescue them from mistreatment and heathenism.
Utes had first entered New Mexico’s slave markets as commodities seized and sold by Spanish, Navajo, and Apache slave raiders, but the allied Utes and Comanches soon inserted themselves at the supply end of the slave traffic.
but their main target were the Carlana and Jicarilla Apache villages
By the late seventeenth century, the people in New Mexico possessed some five hundred non-Pueblo Indian captives and were emerging as major producers of slave labor for the mining camps of Nueva Vizcaya and Zacatecas; they even sent slaves to the tobacco farms in Cuba.
Many of those Apaches were purchased from Utes and Comanches, whose mutually sustaining alliance had put them in a position of power over their neighboring Native societies.
Spain’s shallow imperial control of its northern frontiers could not keep the villages united, and the region began to disintegrate socially and politically.
By 1716 Ute and Comanche raiders had so exhausted northern New Mexico’s horse reservoirs that the settlers were not able to “march out in defense.”
Comanches had discovered unexpected riches and opportunities in their adopted homeland, but the same forces that helped them prosper in the valleys and mountains of the southern Rockies also pushed them out of the region.
The more tightly they geared their lives around mounted hunting, slave trade, and European markets, the more they felt the pull of the great eastern grasslands.
began as extended slave raids.
Rather than bringing relief from raids, however, the retreat drew Comanche and Ute slavers into the very heart of Apachería.
Comanches and Utes turned the upper Arkansas basin into a war zone.
By the time Valverde penned his report, the transitory slave raids of Comanches and Utes had already escalated into a full-blown colonizing project, which was aimed at carving out a new home territory in the plains and displacing the resident Apaches.
The Spanish horses they had pilfered in New Mexico and then rode onto the plains found a nearly perfect ecological niche on the southern grasslands. Descendants of the North African Barb stock, the resilient, smallish Spanish mounts had been bred to survive in desert conditions, to live entirely off grass, and to cover enormous distances between water sources.
When Comanches acquired manufactured goods from New Mexico and the Utes in the late seventeenth century, they soon found themselves in a quandary. Impressed by the efficiency and durability of the new weapons, tools, and utensils, they were anxious to obtain more, but northern New Mexico, with its limited reserves of manufactured goods, failed to meet their needs.
1700, trading guns and metal to Apaches, and turning the Arkansas channel into a major artery of colonial commerce.
Comanches and their Ute allies moved in masses to the southern plains during the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. The result was a drawn-out and deadly conflict with the many Apache groups,
the Apache expansion was driven by a contrasting process of economic diversification. Like Comanches, Apaches had expanded their horse herds during the Pueblo Revolt, when the Pueblo Indians seized Spanish horses and traded them to other Native groups, but unlike Comanches, only a few Apache groups specialized in mounted hunting.
Apache-Jumano wars raged until the mid-1710s when the Jumanos, weakened by disease and droughts, moved into Spanish missions or joined the Lipans.
Spanish officials responded with punitive campaigns, which were frequently transformed into slave raids, and Franciscan priests pleaded with the Apaches to embrace Catholicism and mission life, but both met with little success.
The main contention point was the control of river valleys. Both groups needed these precious zones for their survival, which gave rise to a war over microenvironments. During warm seasons, Apaches needed the stream bottoms for their maize fields and irrigation systems while Comanches needed them for the grass and low-saline water they provided for their growing horse herds.
one estimate suggests that Comanches lost two-thirds of
their plant lore upon moving to the grasslands.
An extremely high-protein and low-carbohydrate diet can be hazardous for pregnant women and fetuses, causing miscarriages, lowered birth weight, and cognitive impairment. If the protein intake exceeds 40 percent while the intake of both carbohydrates and fat drops—as could easily happen on the plains during late winters when bison’s body fat plunged—the entire population could become susceptible to protein poisoning.
The second, and strategically sounder, alternative was to further intensify their hunting economy, eliminate the Apaches from New Mexican markets, and then exchange their surplus meat, fat, and hides for maize and other carbohydrate products at the Pueblo fairs. In essence, then, the Comanche-Apache wars were fought over carbohydrates.
Comanches soon dominated the war and kept up the pressure until the last Apache villages disappeared from the southern plains.
The Jicarilla, Carlana, and Sierra Blanca bands were caught in an on-and-off war with the Faraone Apaches, who had specialized in the late seventeenth century in captive and livestock raiding,
Tied to the soil at exact times of the year, Apache farmers were defenseless against their mounted rivals who turned the once-protective farming villages into deathtraps. Capitalizing on their long-range mobility, Comanches and Utes concentrated overwhelming force against isolated Apache villages, raiding them for crops and captives or obliterating them with devastating guerrilla attacks.
The collapse of Apaches’ trade network not only weakened their ability to repel the Comanche-Ute onslaught; it also left them vulnerable in their old rivalries with the Wichitas and Pawnees, rivalries that had intensified markedly around 1700 when Wichitas and Pawnees began to sell Apache captives to French traders.
The Apache offer, exactly because it mixed strategic and religious elements, appealed to Spanish authorities, who in August held a war council in Santa Fe and decided to side with the Apaches and declare war on the Comanche-Ute bloc.
As the expedition drew closer to the river, they entered a wasteland of deserted Apache villages and burned maize fields the Comanche-Ute invasion had left in its wake.
Beaten by the Comanches and Utes and abandoned by Spain, the Apaches vacated all the lands north of the Canadian River, which became the southern border of the Comanche-Ute domain.
By withdrawing from the plains, Spain left the door wide open for the Comanches, who within a generation would sweep through the southern plains and press against the entire length of Spain’s far northern frontier from New Mexico’s northern tip down to central Texas.
The most valuable portion of the nascent Comanchería was the Big Timbers of the Arkansas, a thick grove of cottonwood trees stretching over some sixty miles downriver from the Purgatoire junction. Known to Spaniards as La Casa de Palo, “the house of wood,” the Big Timbers was a winter haven for horses.
