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November six hundred western Comanche households, some six thousand people, gathered at the Big Timbers of the Arkansas to prepare for peace talks with Anza.
is possible that the Ecueracapa of the western Comanches and Camisa de Hierro of the eastern Comanches were the same person: the Spaniards in New Mexico knew Ecueracapa also as Cota de Malla (Coat of Mail),
Soon after, Kotsoteka agents assassinated Toroblanco, demolishing the war faction.
Spaniards, he demanded, should make an unequivocal commitment to the Comanches, cut off all support to the Apaches, and, if necessary, help Comanches eliminate the remaining Apaches from Pecos’s and Santa Fe’s vicinity by force.
“quarrel with a Spaniard who was present.” He then “delivered (on his knees) a native of Santa Fe whom they had [held] … prisoner among them for eleven years.”
The Comanche treaty was a momentous coup for Anza and it gave him leverage to enter into negotiations with the powerful Navajos who dominated a vast territory west of New Mexico.
The Spanish-Navajo-Comanche treaty completed a burst of cross-cultural diplomacy that, in the space of two years, reconfigured the cultural and geopolitical landscape of the Southwest.
now the region’s four major nations—the Spaniards, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes—came together in diplomacy and trade.
Ugarte addressed the politically and culturally charged question of captives and slaves.
All the while Comanches also raided the Apaches on their own, seizing captives whom they absorbed into their ranks or sold to Spanish authorities in New Mexico and Texas, who in turn shipped shackled Apache slaves to labor camps in central Mexico and sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
This collaboration was given particular urgency by the revival of the Lipan Apaches, who had gradually rebuilt their economy and military power in the early 1780s, at a time when smallpox devastated the Comanches and the American Revolutionary War preoccupied the Spaniards.
By the early 1790s, then, northern New Spain had entered a new era. The Apaches who had kept vast expanses of the Spanish empire in chaos since mid-century appeared pacified. From Sonora to southern Texas, different Apache groups accepted subordinate positions under Spanish rule and settled in establecimientos de paz, peace establishments, where they were to live in towns near presidios and missions and learn the civilized arts of farming, ranching, and self-government under Spanish tutelage and control.
Sons of Comanche elite lived among the Spaniards to learn their customs and language, and several Comanches accepted baptism in New Mexico.
The Indians cannot live without our aid.
As detailed as they were sweeping, Gálvez’s Instructions specified that guns should have “weak bolts without the best temper” and long barrels, which would “make them awkward for long rides on horseback, resulting in continual damages and repeated need for mending or replacement.” This, he explained, would make the Natives dependent on the Spaniards for repairs
argued that by elevating Ecueracapa “above the rest of his class” Spaniards could reduce the entire Comanche nation to vassalage. The idea was to create a well-defined hierarchical structure extending from principal chiefs to the bottom of Comanche society though strategic distributions of political gifts.
Except for Cordero, all these principal chiefs asked Spanish authorities to formally recognize their status and pledged loyalty to Spain.
Despite Spanish assertions, Comanches considered the principal chieftainship not as a real political office but rather as an instrument to derive economic and political favors from Spaniards.
Rather than implementing Spain’s imperial objectives, they subverted them.
When conferring with Spanish colonists, Ecueracapa was a commanding supreme chief; inside Comanchería, he remained a typical Kotsoteka headman with limited, clearly defined authority.
This alone was enough to reduce the office to honorific title, because power without physical presence was meaningless among Comanches, who believed that authority could be exercised and validated only in direct face-to-face interaction.
The Bourbon strategy of political manipulation failed even more glaringly in Texas,
Even more alarming to Spanish officials was the unauthorized war Comanches declared in the early 1790s on the Utes and the Navajos. The Comanche-Ute-Navajo peace had unraveled soon after its inception in 1786, evidently because Utes and Navajos feared that the Comanche-Spanish union would marginalize them and shut them out of New Mexico’s markets:
And out of this configuration would emerge an imperial order the Spaniards could not have imagined: the Comanche empire.
The expansion culminated in the Mexican-American War in 1846–48, in the aftermath of which the United States bought New Mexico and California for fifteen million dollars and extended its territory to the Río Grande by assuming responsibility for the three million dollars
Finally, in 1853, the United States purchased a strip of land south of the Gila River from Mexico, thereby stretching its border to what today are southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
They had halted the expansionist Texas in its tracks and carved out a vast raiding domain in northern Mexico.
They held several nearby peoples in a state of virtual servitude and their market-oriented and slavery-driven economy was booming.
because the Comanche and U.S. expansions stemmed from disparate impulses and advanced on divergent levels. Comanche power politics were aimed at expanding the nation’s access to hunting grounds, trading outlets, tributary gifts, and slaves, whereas U.S. expansion, shaped by a bitter sectional dispute over slavery, focused on securing formal territorial claims and extending the nation’s boundary to the Pacific.
Comanches are at the center of the story and the westward-pushing Americans remain in the sidelines, stepping in, often unknowingly, to seize territories that had already been subjugated and weakened by Comanches.
Like the Iroquois to the British, the Comanches were to Bourbon Spain the Indian proxy through which a vast continental empire could be claimed and commanded. In 1800 Spanish authorities in New Mexico and Texas thought they had a firm hold over the Comanche nation. Border fairs thrived across the frontier from Taos to Natchitoches, and Comanche delegations often stayed for weeks in Santa Fe and San Antonio, interacting freely with the Hispanic and Indian residents.
For Spanish Texas, such a union was quite literally a matter of life and death, for it shielded the colony against Comanche raids, which had wreaked unimaginable havoc in the 1770s and early 1780s and nearly destroyed the all-important ranching industry.
after having failed to people the province with immigrants from other Spanish colonies, opened its borders to American settlers.
1785–86 treaties. Comanches refused to return Hispanic captives without ransom, turned down requests to participate in joint military campaigns that did not advance their interests, and made unauthorized raids into Apache reservations, jeopardizing the delicate peace process between Apaches and Spaniards.
Comanches to choose between devotion to Spain and hospitality to Americans, Texas officials eventually wrecked their alliance with the Comanche nation.
By establishing exchange ties with Americans, and by linking their pastoral horse-bison economy to the emerging capitalist economy of the United States, eastern Comanches set off a sustained commercial expansion that eventually swept across Comanchería.
As in the 1770s, Wichitas locked the Comanches out of eastern markets, and as before, they demanded what Comanches considered excessive prices for serving as middleman traders.
the Osages had embarked on yet another expansionist round. This time, however, Osages’ aggression in the west was triggered by their dispossession in the east.
the 1790s the expansion of Anglo-American settler frontiers in the Southeast exiled large numbers of Choctaws, Cherokees, Delawares, and Shawnees west of the Mississippi, where they clashed violently with Osages, forcing several villages to relocate closer to Comanchería.
they had grown dependent on imported products.
the Wichita confederacy suffered a paralyzing blow. Awahakei, longtime principal chief of the confederacy,
suffering under Osage pressure from the north, Wichitas abandoned their Red River villages and scattered across the southern prairies.
Then, in 1821, Spain’s American empire collapsed, and the resulting
By the 1820s, those Comanche immigrants had assumed a new identity as Tenewas (Those Who Stay Downstream) and established a distinct political organization on the middle Red River, where they joined the eastern Kotsotekas in trading with the Americans.
As gateway traders, Comanches no longer had to travel to trade; they could simply wait in their rancherías for American trade convoys to arrive.
The eastern Comanche gateway also drew Native nations into its sphere. One such nation was the Panismahas, a three-thousand-member offshoot of the Pawnees
With the passing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the United States government began a wholesale relocation of eastern Indians across the Mississippi valley—the proclaimed permanent Indian frontier—into Indian Territory in what today are Oklahoma and Kansas.
The westernmost bands of the Delawares, Kickapoos, and Shawnees developed a typical prairie economy of farming and foraging and started making regular hunting excursions to the plains, tapping into Comanchería’s bison reserves.
by raiding deep into Indian Territory to exact revenge and to plunder maize, cattle, and captives.
hoping to quell the violence that threatened to abort the entire Indian removal policy.
