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ranchería was a social extension of a single headman, paraibo, whose kinship ties, political influence, and personal charisma held the unit together.
By the 1730s, the Comanches had accumulated enough horses to put all their people on horseback, thus reaching the critical threshold of mounted nomadism.
Riding in full speed alongside a fleeing herd and firing arrows into selected animals, a group of hunters could bring down two to three hundred bison in a single chase that took less than an hour.
northeastern corner, Taos lay beyond the effective reach of Spain’s colonial authority, allowing its inhabitants to engage relatively freely in the officially prohibited captive trade. Slave traffic was well established by 1730, and in 1737 Governor Henrique de Olavide y Michelena tacitly approved it by ordering that the citizens should notify the proper officials before engaging
Comanches, it seems, had become too prosperous for the confines of the Arkansas basin.
since Comanches had by now developed an advanced equestrian war machine. They fought with long metal-tipped spears and short bows that were specially designed for mounted warfare and shielded their mounts and their own bodies with thick leather armor.
At the fairs, Spanish traders exchanged gifts with Comanche visitors and participated in ceremonies and rituals, but they also violated Comanche codes of proper behavior by haggling over prices, pushing inferior commodities, and refusing to sell certain goods, such as guns.
By the mid-1740s, they had forced all Wichita communities save two adjoining Taovaya villages to relocate from the middle Arkansas southward to the Red River, and their path onto the western buffalo plains and into the Comanche range appeared wide open.
Spanish officials grasped the overall structure of the trade, but they underestimated the extent of the slave traffic. In 1753 the governor of Louisiana concluded that the colony held so many Apache slaves that it was becoming difficult to maintain the old trade and alliance network with the Apaches.
But even more shocking to Varo was the Comanches’ behavior at the fairs. Before handing over female captives, he reported, they “deflower and corrupt them in the sight of innumerable assemblies of barbarians and Catholics … saying to those who buy them, with heathen impudence: ‘Now you can take her—now she is good.’” The horrified priest attributed such acts to Comanches’ “unbridled lust and brutal shamelessness,” but it is likely that the public rapes were a way to generate markets for captives.
The serial rapes were a graphic forewarning of the horrors captive women would—at least supposedly—endure in Comanche hands should Spaniards refuse to ransom them.
Brutality, in other words, helped legitimize slave markets in Spanish eyes. In 1751, indeed, the inspector of war in Mexico City called the New Mexic...
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Although the idea of Comanches as savages persisted, Spanish reports reveal a sophisticated Comanche political organization, complete with distinctive hierarchies, established procedures for broadly inclusive decision making, and effective communication systems.
That council, apparently sponsored by a chief called Nimiricante (Man Eater?), became an arduous one. The chiefs of various rancherías debated heatedly over Cachupín’s peace offer, struggling to reach consensus.
More broadly, the treaty recognized the Comanches as a sovereign nation—a concession Spaniards denied many smaller Native societies—thereby setting a precedent that Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States would later follow.
during fairs, for a refusal to sell could anger the Comanches. Without fully realizing (or admitting) it, Cachupín had begun adjusting Spanish trading practices to Comanche principles, which demanded that material possessions should flow freely among friends and allies. In Comanche culture, reluctance to share signified more than stinginess; it was tantamount to enmity.
In 1751 the allied Comanches, Taovayas, and Pawnees launched a massive assault on their common enemy, killing twenty-two chiefs and delivering a devastating blow to the Osage nation.
it also led to the collapse of the long-standing union between the Comanches and the Utes. The Comanche-Ute alliance was in shambles by the early 1750s, having lived out its usefulness in the fluid, rapidly changing world.
Cachupín retired, the French and Indian War broke out, a little captive boy rejected redemption—and the Comanche-Ute conflict exploded into a sprawling war that engulfed the borderlands.
While Comanches quickly severed their ties to the Rocky Mountains, Utes continued to migrate seasonally between the mountains and the grasslands.
Comanche leaders claimed nonparticipation with vicious bravado. “‘Don’t be too trusting,”’ one chief said. ‘“Remember, there are rogues among us, just as there are among you. Hang any of them you catch.’”
The summer fair of 1760 in Taos was even more unruly than usual, featuring not only lively bartering but also a ritual dance in which the Taoseños displayed twenty-four fresh
When the Comanches were about to depart, the townspeople, as if to test the sincerity of Comanche statements that the “rogue” raiders could be killed at will, revealed that the scalps had been taken from Comanches. The Comanches left the pueblo peacefully but returned with an enormous military force.
Comanche captains entered the pueblo to meet with Manuel del Portillo Urrisola, the interim governor. The talks collapsed when one of the captives, a nine-year-old boy, refused to leave his captors. Portillo seized the boy and the Comanche captains.
The chiefs and elders decided to send nine secondary chiefs, two of whom had the right to give “opinions in their government,” to meet with the governor.
Cachupín recognized several of the nine chiefs from his previous term that had ended eight years earlier, which indicates that the Comanche political system was based on institutionalized leadership positions.
“Dispatched by the two superior chiefs” of their nation,
Cachupín had realized that peace with Indian nations depended on gifting and personal bonds rather than institutional ties.
With Spaniards and Comanches now united, Utes could no longer rely on Spanish support in their struggle to maintain a foothold on the plains-mountain ecotone.
Muaches retreated deep into the mountain parks to join the other Ute bands, leaving New Mexico’s eastern borderland for the Comanches, their former allies and kin who had grown out of their union.
several Kotsoteka bands plunged south, crossing the vast table of the Edwards Plateau to the Balcones Escarpment, where the high plains dissolve into the lowlands of Texas.
was one of the most explosive territorial conquests in North American history. In less than a decade, the entire Texas plains—a huge spread of undulating hill country and plains stretching from the Pecos River in the west to the Cross Timbers in the east and from the Red River in the north to the Balcones Escarpment in the south—became a Comanche dominion.
This expansionist burst turned the Comanches into a territorial superpower. The Comanchería that emerged covered some quarter of a million square miles, casting a long shadow on Eur...
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Gathering decreased, eating fish became a taboo, and fowl was reduced to an emergency food eaten only when other provisions failed.
An even greater incentive were innumerable wild horses roaming in the hill country just north of the Texas frontier, perhaps more than one million in all, ready to be seized and tamed.
The accord was prompted by the rising Comanche threat.
This sudden shift in commercial gravity must have been a strong incentive for Comanches to relocate south as well, for they had grown heavily dependent on the French-Taovaya trade axis, their principal source of maize, guns, and metal.
political interests. Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais—like Comanches—were alarmed by the Lipan-Spanish pact, which threatened to exclude them from Texas markets and leave them vulnerable against the Apaches.
Spain’s decision to ally with the Lipans at the exclusion of the other Native groups.
was a near repeat of the previous Comanche-Apache wars. Like their northern relatives, Lipans had gradually taken up small-scale riverside farming,
least 1,000” French muskets, and led by a Comanche chief clad in a French officer’s uniform,
The attackers slaughtered oxen and other animals, destroyed church ornaments and sacred jewels and pictures, and overturned and beheaded the effigy of Saint Francis.
They left behind stripped, scalped, eyeless bodies and placed the beheaded body of a friar on the church altar. If the intention was to use strategic violence to coerce the Spaniards to cut off their support to the Apaches,
Realizing that Spanish presidios and soldiers could not protect them on the plains, the Lipans began to retreat south and east and established new villages along the Colorado, Guadalupe, and Frio rivers on the edge of the grasslands.
year, all Lipans had retreated to the coastal plains of Texas, the deserts around the Río Grande valley, and the mountains of Coahuila, where they joined their Natagé cousins to build a new economy on poaching Spanish villages and ranches in southern Texas,
The Apache diaspora from the plains was now complete, and a largely depopulated hundred-mile-wide buffer zone separated the Apache realm from the southern border of Comanchería.
Much after the fact, Spaniards began to reenvision their plains borderlands as a bipolar world where there were two great powers, the Comanches and Spain, and no room for the ailing Apache nation.
separated from San Antonio, the main population center of Texas, by the distance of one day’s ride. Rather than the seat of a grand colonization project, San Antonio had become the frontline on a Spanish frontier that had caved in at the center, folding itself around Comanchería.
Apache groups in raiding Spanish villages, haciendas, and ranches. By midcentury the Apaches had forged an immense war zone that stretched 750 miles from northern Sonora through Nueva Vizcaya to Coahuila, posing a severe threat to northern
Indeed, if Spanish troops and travelers wanted to reach Santa Fe from San Antonio, they struck south and circled to their destination by way of Saltillo
