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begged the Franciscans to come and build permanent houses among them and they promised to “live as the tatas [friars] … taught them.”
In 1776 Comanches came upon and attacked a Mescalero village near the headwaters of the Colorado River and reportedly killed three hundred families.
At the same time that western Comanches realigned New Mexico and its surrounding regions to serve their interests, eastern Comanches imposed a similar Comanche-centric order on the Texas borderlands.
the early nineteenth century the Tonkawas lived in pitiful conditions along the lower Guadalupe River, unable to hunt bison “out of fear of meeting the Comanches.”
The flow of Apache slaves from Comanchería to Taovaya villages and Louisiana continued uninterrupted through the 1770s.
Spanish officials made the nearly five-thousand-strong Wichita confederacy the focal point of an ambitious three-stage frontier strategy.
Chief Povea, the supposed head chief of the eastern Comanches,
Raiding and looting, they gradually forced their way deep into the Wichita realm,
Harassed in the north by the Sauks and Foxes and blocked in the west by the Comanches, Osages shifted to the south and moved to monopolize hunting, raiding, and trading privileges across the prairie belt between the Missouri and Red rivers.
1778 how Comanches, “in the guise of friends, make them repeated visits, always with the purpose of stealing.”
In 1777 and 1778 a virulent epidemic, perhaps smallpox, struck the Wichitas twice, spreading devastation in the crowded villages. The Wichitas lost nearly one-third of their population, including many head chiefs, and they collapsed into poverty and political disarray.
Apaches had destroyed 116 haciendas, killed and captured nearly 2,000 people, and stolen more than 68,000 head of livestock from 1771 through 1776.
First, King Carlos III rejected the planned Spanish-Comanche-Wichita campaign against the Apaches on the grounds that a genocidal war had no place on an enlightened state’s agenda.
eastern Comanches launched a raiding war in Texas. Highly mobile and seemingly unpredictable in their actions, their war parties were everywhere and nowhere, attacking villages, missions, ranches, and farms
Mirroring the concurrent developments in New Mexico, eastern Comanche raids reduced Texas to a captive territory. Its population dropped by 10 percent between 1777 and 1784, from 3,103 to 2,828.
By 1781, Croix had accepted that peace with the Comanches would be possible only if Spaniards began annual gift distributions at San Antonio.
for further exploitation. In 1780 Comanche pillaging forced Texas ranchers to suspend their vitally important livestock drives to Louisiana.
palladium
As Spanish strategists scrutinized the new imperial order created by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, they made a fateful miscalculation.
1770, as a result, the Spanish empire had expanded into Alta California to fend off the British from North America’s Pacific shores, turned lower Louisiana into a buffer colony against British West Florida,
The Apaches—Gileños, Mescaleros, Natagés, and Lipans—many of them banished from the Great Plains by the Comanches, were forging a new Apachería in the midst of Spanish settlements.
The availability of more and better food translated into an explosive population growth. Numbering between ten and fifteen thousand at midcentury, the Comanches may have tripled their population during the next three decades. In 1773, Gaignard learned, either from Taovayas or from Comanches themselves, that the Comanches “comprise fully four thousand warriors.” Assuming that warriors made up half of the total male population and that the Comanches had more or less balanced gender ratio, Gaignard’s account suggests a total Comanche population of sixteen thousand.
This would mean that the total Comanche population in the early 1780s reached or exceeded forty thousand people—more than the Spanish colonies in New Mexico and Texas had combined.68 Comanches
Mexico, Governor Mendinueta learned from a Comanche captive that “a barbarian has raised himself up among that nation with the appearance and accouterments of those of a little king.” This man, Cuerno Verde (Green Horn), was said to have “near his person a guard of armed men, pages who serve him when he mounts and dismounts from his horse, holding a canopy or shade of buffalo skins for him in which he takes his seat.”
In 1779 Juan Bautista de Anza,
The estimated eight thousand eastern Comanches were divided into twelve local rancherías led by capitanes (captains) or capitanes chiquitos (little captains). The rancherías did not have a fixed number of people, which suggests that the local chiefs competed among
As in most nomadic societies, band membership was fluid, and each capitane competed with the others for the critical mass of adherents needed to form a functioning ranchería.
The local chiefs, the visitors observed, considered themselves “subjects” to two head chiefs whom they listened to with “much respect.”
Those general councils also served as a forum where the head chiefs were selected in formal elections in which all eastern Comanche chiefs and warriors were entitled to participate.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, the three original Comanche divisions—Yamparikas, Jupes, and Kotsotekas—
Western Comanches fashioned a raiding and trading economy that spanned New Mexico and the northern plains, and they were drawn, both politically and physically, to the west and north. Eastern Comanches focused on raiding Texas and trading toward the Mississippi valley, gravitating to the south and east.
The interdivisional trade was a means for material sharing, but, less obviously, it also doubled as a social and political adhesive. The regular trade fairs that convened around Comanchería served as an arena where Comanches nourished their sense of common identity.
The unity of the larger Comanche community made a deep impression on foreign visitors. “Cumanches Occidentales,” one wrote, “are differentiated from the Orientales only by the haircut.
Ecueracapa, the capitan general of the western Comanches, emerged at the end of a corridor of shouting people.
The embrace brought together two men and two nations, and it saved New Mexico. The meeting of Anza and Ecueracapa put an end to a century of on-and-off warfare, which in the 1770s had nearly broken the kingdom of New Mexico.
Collectively known as the Bourbon Reforms, these initiatives seemed to have given New Mexico and Texas the power to stop the Comanche tide.
The Bourbon Reforms
He founded a colony in the valley of Sonora and initiated the colonization of Alta California.
A third generation army officer, a veteran Indian fighter, the pioneer of the Sonora-California overland trail, and one of New Spain’s ablest servants, Anza
almost six hundred presidial soldiers, militias, and Indian auxiliaries and equipped each man with a good horse. He set out in mid-August from Santa Fe. As the expedition made its way toward Comanche camping grounds northeast of Taos, some two hundred Utes and Jicarillas joined it, making Anza’s party the biggest military expedition Spain would ever send on the plains.
The prisoners divulged startling information: Anza’s troops had stumbled upon the ranchería of Cuerno Verde, the legendary “little king” of the western Comanches.
Comanche raids to New Mexico stopped immediately, and some Comanche leaders began to make peace overtures to Anza.
The causes of the rift are not clear, but it is possible that the two nations collided over hunting privileges in the upper Arkansas basin, where bison herds had became depleted during the drought years of the mid-1770s.
The early 1780s also saw the Comanches’ seemingly unstoppable expansion into the Ute territory west of the Rockies turn into a retreat.
In 1780 or 1781 a sprawling continent-wide smallpox epidemic descended into Comanchería, causing unforeseen destruction among its nomadic population that had not yet been exposed to the disease and thus formed a virgin soil for the virus to spread and kill. The epidemic, raging from Mexico City to Hudson Bay and the warravaged East
The devastation was unfathomable. Eastern Comanches stated that they lost two-thirds of their population, perhaps as many as sixteen thousand people.
Spain’s chief tactic in checking the expansionist United States was a new secularized Indian policy.
“the two great capitanes of the nation”—Camisa de Hierro (Iron Shirt), so named for wearing a coat of mail he had taken from a fallen Apache chief, and Cabeza Rapada (Shaved Head) who shaved half of his head and kept the hair on the other half very long.
Finally, Vial presented Cabello’s personal peace offer, which rested on four pillars: general war against the Apaches, cessation of all other hostilities, mutualistic trade, and political gifts.
that he not oppose our making war against the Lipanes, our ancient enemies.”
