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Delawares, Kickapoos, and Shawnees
but there was an important new element: slave trade. The removed Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had brought with them approximately five thousand black slaves, and the bondage institution persisted in Indian Territory
More improvised than organized, the slave traffic offered multiple opportunities for its practitioners. Removed Indians purchased kidnapped Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and black slaves from Comanches either to augment their own labor force or to resell them to American Indian agents, who generally ransomed the offered captives, especially if they had fair skin.
Comanches even kidnapped black slaves from Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks and then sold them to Delawares, Kickapoos, and Shawnees. They also captured black runaway slaves from Indian Territory and incorporated them into their ranks.
1845 the Arkansas Intelligencer reported that Osages had purchased twenty white captive children from Comanches, a transaction that would earn Osages several thousand dollars’ worth of goods if they ransomed the children to American agents.
Rather than a political adhesive affixing Comanches to Spain as faithful allies, they became payments for loyalty Comanches were not willing to give.
Just as American trade and markets had drawn the eastern Comanches away from Texas’s sphere of influence, so too did American commerce cause western Comanches to turn away from New Mexico.
new trading relations with other Plains Indian nations.
After the peace had been consolidated, Kiowas and Naishans moved from the central plains into north-central Comanchería, thereby gaining access to the milder climates and fertile horse pastures of the southern plains.
Collaboration with the relatively small Kiowa and Naishan nations—approximately twelve and
three hundred people, respectively—augmented their military and political weight without putting excessive pressure on Comanchería’s resources.
Pushed out from their homelands near the Black Hills by the expanding Lakotas around 1800, several Cheyenne and Arapaho bands moved southward to the central plains, where they gradually ousted the Kiowas and Naishans from the middleman trading niche
Cheyennes and Arapahoes abruptly cut off diplomatic and commercial ties with western Comanches and forced their way into the upper Arkansas basin.
The “Great Peace” of 1840 was a momentous diplomatic feat that spawned an enduring alliance among the Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes,
America’s historical memory, Bent’s Fort stands as a vanguard of the westward expansion. It was the pioneering frontier post that introduced modern capitalist institutions and ideology to the Plains Indians and into Mexican New Mexico, preparing the ground for the U.S. takeover of the Southwest.
For example, Cheyenne traditions speak of extensive mimicking of the Comanches that ranged from equestrian lore to the basic techniques of nomadic culture.
Later in the nineteenth century, when the U.S. expansion threatened their very existence, Comanches tried to build an anti-American pan-Indian alliance by appealing to race—a more exclusive concept than tribe or nation—but in the early part of the century they still believed that almost anyone could become Comanche.
Comanche population may have peaked around forty thousand in the late 1770s, but most estimates in the 1820s and 1830s put it between twenty and thirty thousand.
Natural increase and immigration from the United States boosted New Mexico’s population from thirty-one thousand in 1790 to forty-two thousand in 1821 and to some sixty-five thousand in 1846.
In Texas, a deluge of American immigrants and their slaves swelled the province’s population from approximately two thousand in the early 1820s to some forty thousand in 1836.
Texas, in a doomed attempt at self-preservation, opened its borders to U. S. immigration.
Comanches shifted their market-driven raiding operations south of the Río Grande, turning much of northern Mexico into a vast hinterland of extractive raiding.
That subjugated hinterland was what the United States Army invaded and conquered in 1846–48.
They treated New Spain and Mexico not as undivided imperial realms but as collections of discrete entities, devising distinct policies toward New Mexico, Texas, and other colonial states.
adopt a spatial approach in order to
The fleeing hunters exacted arbitrary vengeance on a lone Comanche they accidentally met and brought his scalp to Governor Juan Bautista Elguézabal in San Antonio.
Spain insisted that Louisiana comprised no more than the west bank of the Mississippi and the cities of New Orleans and St. Louis, while the United States asserted that it extended to the crest of the Rockies and to the Río Grande, encompassing half of New Mexico and all of Texas.
Under the ever-present possibility of violence, offerings of diplomatic presents became fixed tribute payments to protect the exposed colony.
In August 1812, as the Salcedos debated the Comanche situation, a detachment of Mexican and American revolutionaries and filibusterers invaded Nacogdoches to launch a popular revolt against the Spanish regime.
its aftermath left Texas vulnerable and exposed to Comanche
The victorious royal army carried out violent purges in San Antonio and Nacogdoches, reducing the colony’s manpower by hundreds, and the Spanish crown prohibited settlers from carrying arms, inadvertently compromising their ability to defend the province against Indian assaults.
The repercussions of the 1808 Napoleonic invasion of Iberia and the subsequent rebellions throughout New Spain had tied up resources, forcing the officia...
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Soon Comanches were raiding from San Antonio all the way down to the Río Grande, attacking supply convoys, razing ranches, killing farmers in the field, and slaughtering entire herds of cattle. By 1814, Texas was expiring. Having lost tens of thousands of animals to Comanchería, it was nearly destitute of li...
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With the truce, El Cojo’s Lipans won hunting privileges in southern Comanchería and in return opened their territories to Comanches, who swiftly extended their stock and slave raids to the lower Río Grande valley and its many villages and haciendas.
joint Comanche-Lipan effort—ran over the town of Refugio near the Gulf Coast, stealing some ten thousand horses and mules, slaughtering cattle, sheep, and goats, and killing several settlers.
Texas spent its last years under Spanish rule as a raiding hinterland of the Comanches, who used it as a stockroom for their export-oriented livestock production system.
The number of Hispanic settlers dropped from approximately four thousand in 1803 to roughly two thousand in 1821.
The idea that the near-destruction of Texas was ultimately the work of American borderland agents who provided Comanches with the motive (the market for livestock) and the means (guns) to raid became in time etched in the common Texas consciousness.
When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited in Texas a bankrupt province whose ruinous state endangered the very existence of the infant nation.
As the gift flow fluctuated, so too did the frontier relations; Comanches intensified and cut back their raiding activities in proportion to the availability of presents.
Faced with what it saw as an entangled threat of Comanche aggression and American expansion, the Mexican Congress adopted in the fall of 1824 a desperate measure: it opened the northern provinces to foreign immigration, hoping to solve both outstanding frontier threats at once.
The wealthy and well-connected Austin eventually managed to organize effective militia or “ranger” units,
in the mid-1830s his colony boasted more than eight thousand settlers, extensive cotton plantations, regular mail service, and a dynamic capital, San Felipe de Austin, with three thousand residents and four schools.
Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, the future president of the Republic of Texas, remarked how the Mexicans “used to have to purchase peace from the Comanchees, who came to Bexar [San Antonio] regularly every year to get their annual tribute.”
Gift payments, in short, had become the condition for peace, turning Texans into tributaries of the imperial Comanches.
By the mid-1830s, it was clear that the Indian policy of Texas was a complete failure. The decision to open the province to American immigrants had backfired. Rather than moving to the interior to shield the province’s core areas around San Antonio from Comanche attacks, most Americans stayed east of the Colorado River, beyond the Comanche range and within an easy reach of Louisiana, their main commercial outlet.
Anglo-dominated eastern half experienced steady growth, developing a flourishing export-oriented cotton industry and spawning nearly twenty new urban centers by 1835. This half was part of Mexico only in name. Its main economic and political ties extended eastward to the powerful mercantile houses of New Orleans, and its settlers often spoke no Spanish, held slaves in spite of a widespread aversion toward the institution in Mexico, and harbored separatist sentiments.
The Tejano-dominated western half, meanwhile, descended int...
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besieged. The fields were left to run wild, and often even the solitary farmers were massacred in the midst of their households. The Comanche so thoroughly devastated most of the eastern interior states that many families there are still poverty stricken.”
It was this divided Texas that in 1835 rebelled against the central government and in 1836 became an independent republic with close ties to the United States.
