The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

European technology among nonconquered, nonsedentary Indians.

They have made themselves the lords of all the buffalo country, seizing it from the Apache nation, which formerly was the most widespread of all known [Native nations] in America.

Accounts such as this capture an elemental truth: Comanches were superior fighters who had matched and then surpassed Spaniards in mounted combat.

Comanches’ power complex was much more than a military creation; it was also, and indeed primarily, a political construction. Their colonization of the southern plains was a military enterprise built on astute and pragmatic diplomacy.

Taovayas, Skidi and Chaui Pawnees, Tonkawas, Hasinais, and French Louisiana. That cluster of alliances turned the nascent Comanchería from an isolated, militarized landscape into a nexus point of multiple trade routes while leaving the Apaches and Spaniards politically and commercially marginalized.

As the first people on the plains to fully commit to mounted nomadism and hunting, Comanches enjoyed a decisive advantage: they could exploit the vast reserves of bioenergy stored in the plains’ bison herds more thoroughly than any of their competitors.

few societies in history have relied so totally on a single food source, and few have experienced such a sudden increase in total caloric intake as the early eighteenth-century Comanches did.

possible a rapid and sustained population growth, the single most important factor behind the Comanchenization of the southern plains.

According to one estimate, there were fifteen hundred Comanches in 1726 (probably an underestimation), but by 1750 their population seems to have exceeded ten thousand and was probably approaching fifteen thousand.

Having begun at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this process had gathered considerable force in the early eighteenth century. By then, the farming complex—its distinctive annual cycle, labors, social relations, beliefs, and ceremonies—had permeated the very core of the Apache culture, making a return to full-time nomadism and hunting all but unthinkable.

It ceded Florida to Britain in Paris but balanced that loss with the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau in which Spain gained Louisiana from Louis XV, who was eager to get rid of the money-draining colony.

The British then provoked a massive pan-Indian uprising, Pontiac’s War, by claiming possession to the entire eastern half of North America, by treating Indians as conquered subjects, and by building unauthorized forts on their lands.

Comanches had reduced the Spanish borderlands to a hinterland for an imperial system of their own.

Sustained by their growing wealth and power, Comanches yanked themselves free from New Mexico’s economic grip and then went to war.

centrality of the upper Arkansas basin, the heart of early Comanchería.

marked the northern limit for intensive horse husbandry on the continental grasslands.

noticeably harsher north of the Platte River and outright hostile above the Missouri.

The long and cold northern winters took a heavy toll on foals and pregnant mares, and the vicious blizzards could literally f...

kept most northern tribes chronically horse-poor: only a few groups beyond the Arkansas valley managed to acquire enough animals to meet ...

Recent converts to equestrianism, all these groups coveted horses and were willing to travel hundreds of miles to the Arkansas valley to obtain them. They

of Indian nations of the interior, he noted this realignment: “all the wealth of the Indians on the Missouri consists in having many horses which they get from the Laytanes [Comanches].”

allied with France or Britain for an attack against Spanish colonies. This disparity in the patterns of diffusion gave the northern and eastern plains tribes a decisive military edge—something that Comanches painfully learned in their early wars with the Pawnees and Osages.

Moreover, in a reversal of the typical roles of colonial trade, western Comanches started to sell guns and other manufactures to Spanish New Mexico.

Comanches lashed New Mexico with more than a hundred attacks,11 turning the Río Grande valley into one of the most violent places in early America. Mixing small hit-and-run guerrilla raids with massive destroy-and-plunder operations, they killed and captured hundreds of settlers, stole thousands of horses and mules, slaughtered countless sheep and cattle, and left dozens of villages burned and abandoned.

Comanche raids on Spanish and Pueblo Indian horse herds in the late 1760s and 1770s generated the first of many wholesale property transfers that marked the Comanche-colonial relations into the mid-nineteenth century. In 1757, according to an official census, New Mexico possessed more than seven thousand horses, but by the mid-1770s Comanche raiders had moved the bulk of that animal wealth into their own camps and market circuits.

New Mexico—captive seizure. The rapidly growing horse herds, together with probable negative demographic effects of the drought years, increased the demand for imported labor in Comanchería.

Some of these captives were returned to New Mexico for ransom — Spanish bureaucracy established in 1780 a formal limosna (alms) fund to facilitate such rescues—and some were sold to the Wichitas, Pawnees, and French. But

as horse herders and hide processors, thereby

would see the emergence of a large-scale slave econom...

where horseless troops watched in passive frustration as Comanche raiders destroyed towns and drained ranches, and where impoverished settlers subsisted on roasted hides, old shoes, and “the vellum from the saddletrees.”

1777 and 1778 alone, Comanches killed or captured almost two hundred New Mexicans.

Settlers continued to pour out, risking losing their lands or simply relinquishing their titles. One of them, Diego Gomes, offered what was a common reason: five of his relatives had been killed in “his presence” and “he was not able to prevent

A single raid on Tomé, apparently provoked by the refusal of one of its citizens to give up his daughter to a Comanche chief, nearly stripped the village of its male inhabitants.

Comanches’ two raiding spheres were separated by a relatively peaceful twenty-mile belt, and at the center of that belt stood Santa Fe, its garrison utterly incapable of repressing the escalating violence.

one thousand nine hundred and fifteen souls of all ages, sexes, and conditions, having been augmented progressively by the settlers at the cost of the depopulating frontier where the workers, not being able to withstand the invasions, abandoned the ranches where they were cultivating and took refuge in the capital.”

Like most North American Indians, Comanches understood hostile and friendly acts differently from Europeans. They saw trade and theft not as mutually exclusive acts but as two expressions of a broad continuum of reciprocity.

Whenever a group failed to trade sufficient amounts of goods to its allies—whether due to internal problems or environmental reversals—those allies could carry out periodic raids without canceling the partnership.

accepted response to such a situation was to rely on theft in order to ensure continuous circulation of goods.

Such logic was alien to Spaniards who saw trade and theft as mutually exclusive acts that canceled one another out.

Not only were they unable to defend the frontier against “barbarous onslaughts,” they could not even prevent their own subjects from interacting with the enemy who was slowly consuming the colony.

In 1776, when Comanche raids had nearly depleted the colony’s horse and mule reserves, New Mexicans were still willing to pay Comanches “a shemule and a scarlet cover” or “two good horses” for the most valuable human commodity, “an Indian girl from twelve to twenty years old.”

they supplied Comanches’ economy with plunder while stimulating artificial demand for their exports in New Mexico.

also embarked on an active horse and mule trade in Taos, often selling the villagers the very animals they had pilfered elsewhere in New Mexico.

They drove back New Mexican hunting parties from the plains and slaughtered cattle and sheep, depriving the province of animal protein and robes; they torched pastures and fields and destroyed irrigation systems and crop caches across New Mexico, disrupting the traditional agricultural cycle.

The raids were particularly hard on the widely dispersed Hispanic ranches and farms. Morfí remarked how the Hispanic settlers “dare not go out and work the land, or if they do, they become victims of their indolence, because the swiftness and daring of their enemy [allows them to] penetrate the villages at will, due to their disorderly layout.”

Seemingly haphazard, the strategy of slotting peaceful exchanges between nearly constant raiding was highly sophisticated, allowing Comanches to simultaneously plunder and purchase New Mexico’s resources and push their own products on the colony. It was an exploitative, essentially colonial relationship,

The parallel versions evoke New Mexicans’ struggle to come to grips with their capitulation to the exploitative, manipulative, and divisive power policies of the Comanches.

Over time, however, the raids escalated into a sustained expansion that carried several Comanche rancherías deep into Ute territory.

The map also places a Yamparika ranchería on the western side of the Green River, where it stood separated from Comanchería proper by four hundred miles of rugged mountains, deep canyons, and thick forests. Those Comanche rancherías may have been temporary outposts for long-distance raids, but they may also have been more permanent settlement colonies signifying actual territorial takeover.

Terrified of the wide-ranging Comanche war bands, they were unable to conduct hunts and suffered from starvation.