Conclusion
The study of horse-borne Native American imperial formations is fairly new. The Comanche and Lakota regimes have drawn most attention, and they now embody the notion of the nomadic indigenous imperial formations that emerged in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans and their animals.
There were compelling similarities between the two—both were shape-shifting kinetic regimes that relied on distinctly nodal imperial imposition—but there were also pronounced differences. Comanches dominated the southern Great Plains for over a century by forging a layered system of dependencies that allowed them to extend their power beyond their homelands into distant regions without occupying them. Lakotas dominated the northern plains for half a century by rearranging the region's human geography to serve their interests, but their imperial formation was lighter and less sweeping than that of Comanches, and it was extinguished in mid-surge. The composition of this chapter reflects these differences, with most of the attention devoted to the Comanche empire.But Comanches and Lakotas were not the only Native Americans to capitalize on equestrian mobility to extend their influence and power over vast distances. Two cases warrant special attention.
In a vast belt of mountains, deserts, scrublands, and grasslands stretching across what today are southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and northern Mexico, several Apache groups (many of them driven out from the North American grasslands by the Comanches) ranged widely, evading Spanish imperial designs through a highly mobile way of life. Descending from their mountainous homelands, Apache war parties fanned southward through elongated raiding corridors to plunder agricultural Indians and Spanish settlements for livestock, crops, and captives. The wide-ranging Apache bands absorbed large numbers of people from rival native groups into their ranks and reduced the Spanish presence in northern Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya to a narrow strip of presidios, ranches, and mines that stood isolated in the midst of what the Spaniards called gran apacheria.
A century later, the Apache field of action spanned nearly a thousand miles from the Sonoran Desert to the Gulf of Mexico.[2409]Nearly a continent away, in what today is south-central Chile, a similar biomespanning regime arose in the early seventeenth century. There the Araucanians, a populous multiethnic people, mustered light cavalry units to keep Spanish colonists out of their homelands below the Rio Biobio. Mobile warfare, a decentralized social structure, and hard terrain—swamps, thick tropical forests, and high elevation— frustrated Spanish colonizing efforts, and the Araucanians remained an independent power well into the nineteenth century. Other native peoples sought refuge among them and adopted their language and aspects of their culture, fostering a sweeping process of Araucanization that lasted for generations. In the late seventeenth century, Araucanian-speakers pushed eastward across the Andes into the grass-rich Argentine pampa, where they began systematic pillaging of Spanish frontier settlements. By the late eighteenth century, Araucanian-speakers dominated a territory 10 times larger than their original Chilean homeland. Many of their leaders grew spectacularly wealthy by driving stolen livestock from the pampa to Chilean markets.[2410]
Like the Comanches and Lakotas, the Apaches and Araucanians spread out to dominate vast expanses through horse transport, equestrian raiding, border trade, and cultural dissemination. However, unlike the Comanches and Lakotas, neither developed unifying institutions—such as multidivisional councils—that could have fostered political cohesion in vastly expanded geographical settings. At the peak of their influence, Apache and Araucanian domains were shared by several independent tribes, many of them major regional powers in their own right. These were realms of weak and overlapping sovereignties where different groups nurtured kinship ties and formed short-term alliances for warfare and diplomacy while retaining distinct political identities.
Based on current scholarship, it is possible to speak of expanding Apache and Araucanian worlds but not of Apache or Araucanian imperial regimes.[2411]Bibliography
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