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Las Siete Leyes.
province, they faced unified resistance that included the vast majority of Anglo colonists and many prominent members of the Tejano elite. In November, delegations from twelve Texas communities met at San Felipe de Austin, declared allegiance to the federalist constitution of 1824, and cut off ties to the centralist regime.
Santa Anna’s centralist government not only disregarded these sentiments but moved ahead with its plan to dissolve state militias, the safeguard of state sovereignty. That plan, if successful, would have left much of Texas wide open to Comanche attacks, and the federal government’s resolve with the issue alienated many Tejano leaders and pushed them to support the revolt.
Comanches’ ascendancy over New Mexico was in many ways a straightforward matter of economic size and reach. Comanchería dwarfed the densely populated but spatially unimposing colony, and Comanches’ thick and far-reaching exchange network isolated New Mexico almost completely from North America’s interior.
Many of their inhabitants were genízaros, who had lived in captivity among the Comanches before being ransomed by New Mexicans. Although nominally Spanish subjects, genízaros often maintained attachments to their former masters.
At the same time that some administrators still entertained plans for the Hispanization of the Comanches, eastern New Mexico was rapidly blending into Comanchería. By the early nineteenth century, Comanche was widely spoken in New Mexico’s eastern frontier, and in such border towns as Taos and San Miguel del Vado one often heard Comanche phrases mixed with Spanish.
the bison hunter, cibolero, was emerging as the cultural embodiment of frontier New Mexico.
1821, Jacob Fowler encountered a “Spanish” comanchero party whose members “were painted like the Indians the day they traded.” Many nineteenth-century observers found it impossible to differentiate ciboleros, comancheros, and Comanches from one another.
New Mexico’s final decade as a Spanish colony was marked by mounting Comanche influence within its borders. As revolutionary spasms gripped the empire’s core areas after 1810, compromising Mexico City’s ability to support the frontier provinces, New Mexico grew increasingly dependent on the Comanches for resources and protection.
This unflinching pro-Comanche stance set New Mexico apart from the other Spanish colonies. While New Mexican communities clung to Comanchería, replicating its culture and economy like a double helix,
Gradually, Comanches divided the vast span of northern New Spain from the Nueces River to the upper Río Grande into distinct zones: they raided in one region, drew tribute in another, traded in the third, and peddled stolen Spanish goods in the fourth.
After having maintained an uninterrupted peace with New Mexico for thirty-five years, Comanches began raiding in the province again. The first flash of violence occurred in August 1821,
It was at this juncture of escalating Comanche violence that New Mexico began to cut loose from Mexico City. The colony had began to turn from central Mexico toward the power and wealth of Comanchería during the late Spanish era, and the rise of the American-dominated Santa Fe trade after 1822 had accelerated that eastern reorientation.
This independent maneuvering ran up against Mexico City’s ambitious nation-building project, which gathered momentum after 1830. In 1835 political power in Mexico City moved from liberal federalists to conservative centralists, a momentous shift that immediately sparked a secessionist revolt in Texas and a federalist revolt in California. New Mexico followed suit in August 1837 when an armed rebellion erupted in Río Arriba.
the Chimayó Rebellion was a full-fledged popular revolt against the centralists’ plans to impose direct national taxation and introduce nationwide religious reforms.
The repression of the Chimayó movement, together with Mexico’s loss of Texas a year before, resulted in an outpouring of patriotic rhetoric in New Mexico and launched a nationalist campaign to preserve Catholicism and the Mexican culture.
In 1844 a Comanche delegation visited Santa Fe and told Mariano Martínez, now governor of New Mexico, that three hundred Comanche warriors were about to invade Chihuahua.
New Mexican elites had been forced to choose between appeasing one of two imperial cores and, in more cases than not, they chose Comanchería.
serve as agents of capitalist expansion,
On March 2, 1836, at Washington-on-the-Brazos, delegates from more than forty Texas communities voted to separate from Mexico.
at the time the declaration of independence occurred, General Antonio López de Santa Anna was besieging the San Antonio garrison with more than two thousand troops.
May 14, Santa Anna signed the Treaty of Velasco, in which he recognized the independence of Texas and promised to withdraw Mexican troops below the Río Grande.
The government of Mexico refused to ratify the treaty and continued the war for nine more years,
The Republic of Texas was a political anomaly, an independent nation that did not expect—or much want—to remain as such. Anticipating fast annexation by the United States, it kept its eastern border open and took in thousands of American immigrants each year.
Unlike most prominent Texan officials, Houston, who had married a mixed-blood Cherokee woman and lived for years in Indian Territory, believed that Texas could have peace only if the republic made concessions to Indian nations.
To solve the Indian problem, Lamar recruited nine companies of mounted volunteers and rangers, which routed the Cherokees, Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos north of the Red River.
Waterloo (soon to be renamed Austin) at the fringes of Comanche
Texas launched a genocidal war against the Comanches. The first non-Indians to bring the war to Comanchería since Juan Bautista de Anza’s invasion in 1779, Lamar’s soldiers hunted down Comanche bands, often indiscriminately killing men, women, and children. Comanches retaliated by razing farms, slaughtering cattle, seizing captives, and killing settlers and mutilating their bodies.
In January 1840, after a destructive smallpox epidemic swept Comanchería, Comanches sued for peace and sent representatives to San Antonio.
Meanwhile, Texas Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston
In the following weeks Comanches exchanged Anglo and Mexican captives for their own in San Antonio, but the massacre had left them distraught and enraged.
By the winter, most Comanches had retreated north, leaving thousands of square miles open for settlers from Texas.
Lamar’s three-year campaign had taken countless lives, drained the republic’s treasury, and ruined its credit.
It was a demand that no Texas official could concede, for Texas law did not recognize land titles to Indians,
The chief, in other words, claimed all of Texas except for a 125-mile belt along the Gulf Coast, insisting that his people needed the land for their bison and wild horses.
1847, then, Comanchería’s southern border stood almost exactly where it had been ten years before. By enforcing a formal boundary line, Comanches had drawn a major concession from the far richer and far more populous Texas: although official maps failed to show it, Texans had signed away nearly half of their claimed territory to the Comanche nation.
Comanches, too, had compromised. When they imposed a fixed border, they in effect gave up their arrogated privilege to raid Texas for livestock and slaves and extort it for tribute, privileges that had sustained their economic growth for nearly a century.
so thoroughly and suppressed local resistance so completely that, in economic and military terms, much of northern Mexico became an extension of Greater Comanchería.
out which nation they procure slaves.”
Lipan and Mescalero hunting and war parties from entering the contested raiding and trading grounds around San Antonio. Comanches also seized Apache captives, who fetched high prices in San Antonio, Santa Fe, and Nacogdoches, and whose enslavement underwrote the Comanche-Spanish alliance.
From there on, the raids escalated steadily, eventually engulfing much of northern Mexico. In 1828 Comanches razed the recently built military town of Palafox on the lower Río Grande, killing most of its inhabitants.
services, Comanches imported enough horticultural produce to sustain a population of twenty to thirty thousand
They transformed themselves
into large-scale slaveholders, and they did so by combing northern Mexico for captives
Mexico’s northern provinces lost more than two thousand men, women, and children to Indian captivity between 1816 and 1821.
The scalp wars devastated the Apaches who, unlike the Comanches, could not evade mercenary scalping squads by escaping far to the north. James Kirker, the most notorious of the soldiers of fortune, focused his business-style operations almost solely on Apaches, delivering almost five hundred Apache scalps to Chihuahuan authorities by 1847, but he largely avoided the more mobile and better-armed Comanches. In fact, as scalp payments became an established practice in Chihuahua in the late 1830s, Comanches, too, began to hunt Apaches for the standard bounty prize, a crown with an ear on each end.
Ruxton lacked answers, it was because he could not see the big picture: Comanches had turned a large section of Mexico into a semicolonized landscape of extraction from which they could mine resources with little cost.
Mexico lost more than half of its territory to the United States. Historians have customarily attributed Mexico’s capitulation to the overt material and military superiority of the United States, but they have missed a crucial element: the Native American expansion that paved the way for the Anglo-American one. The U.S. takeover of the Southwest was significantly assisted by the fact that Comanches and Apaches had already destabilized Mexico’s Far North.
The linkages between Comanche power politics and U.S. expansion culminated in the Mexican-American War, a war so one-sided that Ulysses S. Grant called it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
When U.S. troops marched south of that river in 1846, they did so alongside Comanche warriors who had raided there for decades, sabotaging Mexico’s nation-building project in the far north and unintentionally preparing the ground for the American invasion.
