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In 1848, for example, the Chihuahua legislature explained Mexico’s defeat by noting that its northern half had been ravaged for years by Indian war bands. This wasteland of plunder, it derided, was a “worthy stage” indeed for the United States to display its might.
Taylor’s Army of Occupation had entered Mexican soil the moment it crossed the Nueces, but there was no meaningful Mexican presence above the Río Grande to bolster that claim.
shatterbelt
The centralist regime that assumed power in 1835 had never taken the Indian threat seriously and had actually reduced the armaments and manpower of local militias to weaken state power, effectively abandoning the north to the mercy of Indian raiders. So when the distressed Mexico City appealed to the northerners in 1846 and 1847, many refused to join the fight against the Americans.
The signature event of the United States-Mexican War was not the Battle of Buena Vista or the Battle of Mexico City, but the bloodless takeover of New Mexico.
Numbering between 30,000 and 40,000 in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Comanches may have possessed between 90,000 and 120,000 excess animals.
In 1750, Felipe de Sandoval, a French explorer-trader, noted how the Comanche rancherías along the Arkansas valley had embraced the essential element of pastoralism: they orchestrated the timing and destinations of their movements to accommodate their horses’ foraging and watering needs.
Comanche rancherías seem to have shifted campsites every two
to five days, frequently leaving behind exhausted pastures where “ground in every direction is cut up & the grass eaten close.”
After reaching their targets, raiding parties often spent several days assessing the situation to ensure the greatest results with the fewest losses. The act of theft was usually a swift surprise attack, preferably carried out at midnight in moonlight,
By the time they committed to pastoralism, Comanches had perfected horse-mounted hunting to such a level that it was reasonably easy for them to combine it with pastoral pursuits.
Some households failed or chose not to acquire more horses and mules than they could comfortably maintain, but others sought ways to increase their labor force, market production, and wealth. They found a solution in polygyny and slavery.
Polygyny, a marriage system in which men have several wives, was traditional among the Comanches, but the practice expanded dramatically under the pressures of escalating
This social degradation resulted from the dynamic that has undermined women’s status in many strictly gendered nonagricultural
The escalation of polygyny went hand in hand with the escalation of slavery.
Comanches had raided other Native societies for captives long before European contact, and they became in the early eighteenth century the dominant slave traffickers of the lower midcontinent. It was not until after 1800, however, that human bondage became a large-scale institution in Comanchería itself. Comanches conducted frequent slave raids into Texas and northern Mexico during the second and third decades of the new century and soon emerged as the paramount slaveholders in the Southwest.
Since the total eastern Comanche population
in the early nineteenth century was around ten thousand, the slave component seems to have ranged between 10 and 25 percent.
Comanches ritually tortured and killed some captives to avenge the deaths of slain members of their community, seeking consolation for grieving relatives and reassurance of their superiority over enemies.
Under mounting market pressures, then, Comanches gave the indigenous slave systems of the Southwest a new face: they practiced slavery for distinctively economic purposes.
The presence of thousands of enslaved people in Comanchería posed a daunting challenge to a noncoercive society that lacked institutionalized mechanisms to control a large unfree population.
Comanches never drew a hard line between masters and slaves, and they possessed neither the necessary means to enforce unconditional submission nor a racist ideology to mentally suppress the slave population.
Unskilled male slaves, if they escaped death upon capture, faced abuse and exploitation that amounted to symbolic emasculation. “The men prisoners are terribly maltreated,” Tixier wrote. “They are made to attend the work which women alone are supposed to do. This in itself is a mark of contempt; besides, they are forced to train the horses, which are reputed untamable.”
All captives also went through an often brutal indoctrination phase during which they shed their former identity and, in a sense, became a socially blank slate. Comanches stripped new captives off all visible vestiges of their former life by renaming them and dressing them in Comanche clothes.
For most captives the first days in Comanchería were filled with horror and humiliation inflicted by beatings, whippings, mutilations, and starvation.
Human bondage in Comanchería was not a rigid, nonnegotiable institution, but a fluid, spacious, and inherently ambiguous social
There are no exact figures, but it is possible that only a minority of slaves remained true slaves, tiri?aiwapls.32 For adult women
were a continuously evaporating resource in Comanchería, and Comanches had to invest vast amounts of time and energy in renewing that resource.
Yet all epithets one might attach to Comanche slavery—soft, pliable, voluntary—fail to capture the full human dimensions and costs of the institution. While ascending the Canadian River to Santa Fe in 1839, Gregg encountered in a Comanche ranchería a captive Mexican boy who was “ten or twelve years old, [and] whose nationality could scarcely be detected under his Indian guise.” When he learned from the boy, who still spoke Spanish, that he was from Parral, Gregg offered to ransom him and take him back to his relatives. But the boy, hesitating a little, said “in an affecting tone” that he had
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“She sent word to her father, that they had disfigured her by tattooing; that she was married and perhaps enceinte [pregnant];
fell outside that circle of respect. Spaniards called them gandules (loafers) since they lived in all-male gangs on the outskirts of rancherías, sleeping in makeshift shelters, subsisting on small animals, and serving wealthy senior men as hunters and raiders.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the injection of privately owned horse and human wealth had turned the Comanches into a stratified society with pronounced distinctions in prestige and privilege among individuals and families. Wealth, status, and power had become conflated, giving rise to widening inequalities organized around age, marriage, and uneven access to women and labor.
These meritocratic elements went hand in hand with the belief that a man’s status was not fixed but forever contestable. A Comanche man had to reaffirm his standing and manhood again and again in relation to other men, which made social standing a matter of unending negotiation.
Operating within the open parameters of fulfillment and failure, young Comanche men were culturally conditioned to be ambitious, aggressive, and competitive.
Comanches actively encouraged young men to be competitive in war. They valued selflessness in their elders but expected junior men to be preoccupied with proving themselves as warriors.
the Lobos. The Lobos was an elite society consisting of prominent warriors who had designated military duties and distinctive regalia and ceremonies and who were willing to take extreme risks in battle. The members, in Ruíz’s words, marched separately, wearing “profuse adornments which only they can use, including wolf-skin belts which reach to the ground….
The basic political unit among the Comanches was the ranchería, a network of related and allied extended families. A product of compelling economic, ecological, and political forces, the ranchería was agile enough to pursue the migratory bison herds, small enough not to exhaust local pastures with its domestic herds, and large enough to organize local defenses.
acted as virtual autocrats in diplomatic and exchange settings seemed curiously weak in, or even excluded from, warfare and raiding.
Seen from the outside, the Comanche nation was an amorphous entity that lacked a clear center to negotiate with—or obliterate—and an explicit internal structure that would have rendered its external actions predictable.
It can be visualized as a recurring political process whereby local and divisional headmen came together in interdivisional councils to discuss common concerns, to offset the perils of social fragmentation, and to express and reinforce their sense of national unity.
Although rancherías and divisions had distinct geographical identities, Comanches regarded Comanchería as a common domain available to all.
Designated police societies—apparently a post-1800 innovation—maintained order in the massive camps where thousands of people hunted, feasted, danced, and sought medicine powers together for weeks.
where vital domestic, diplomatic, and military matters could be
puha
In the end, regardless of their band or divisional affiliation, all Comanches were children of the sun.
Ruíz wrote extensively of their uniform, sun-centered religion: “The whole Comanche nation believes in the existence of a supreme being which is the sun. They call it the ‘father of the universe.’
the Sun Dance ceremony, which reflected the inclusive, integrated nature of the Comanche society:
as one people, the Numunu,
“Their fathers inculcate the ideal of vengeance in them from their tenderest infancy,”
If the decision is for war, the rallying points are first established, then the strategy and tactics to be used against the enemy in all foreseeable circumstances.” In such national campaigns—which often included several thousand warriors—Comanches employed a rigid if temporary command structure:
