Imperial Power

That was the situation in the 1750s and early 1760s. In the 1770s, however, the scattered Comanche rancherias began to coalesce around broader political ambitions. They tightened their bonds and began to bend the bordering societies under their will, seeking arrangements that could sustain their fragile existence on the plains.

Yet, the Comanche empire was not some accidental outcome of countless small moves aimed at meeting immediate needs. As their foreign political ambitions grew, Comanches began to develop more centralized political institutions. Local rancherias intensified their collaboration and assumed more distinct political identities as divisions or tribes. By the late eighteenth century, Comancheria was the domain of three divisions. The Yamparikas (Yap Eaters) ruled in the north, the Jupes (People of Timber) in the middle, and the Kotsotekas (Buffalo Eaters) in the south, each featuring elected head chiefs and grand councils, which made consensus-based decisions on community-wide issues. Periodically, moreover, Comanche tribes came together into massive interdivisional meetings, where vital political matters—such as treaties with colonial powers—were exposed to public scrutiny and sanction. Although intermittent, such gatherings diffused internal strife and held the local particles in a common orbit. Gradually, they gave rise to a horizontally integrated confederacy capable of concerted foreign political action.^[2374]

The main arena of that action was the Spanish Southwest and its main instru­ment was the mounted raid.

While exposing Spanish New Mexico and Texas to systematic exploitation, Comanches also expanded their repertoires of power. They blended raiding and terror with diplomacy and trading into a flexible economy of violence that opened multiple access points into New Spain's vast resources. They rejected the Spanish notion of undivided sovereignty and broke New Mexico and Texas into their com­ponent parts: colonial towns, presidios, missions, ranches, haciendas, and Indian villages. They pillaged horses and captives in one section of the frontier, destroyed fields and livestock in another, and traded bison products for corn in a third, pitting their interests against one another. Large areas of New Mexico became desolate, while others prospered. Taos, a major trading village in northeastern New Mexico, became a virtual Comanche satellite, where Comanches found ready markets even as their war parties were draining the rest of the colony. Spanish officials in Santa Fe and San Antonio were powerless against this raid-and-trade strategy, a mobile variation of divide-and-rule policy, and they struggled to preserve a modicum of order on their frontiers.

The massive inflow of wealth allowed the Comanches to transform themselves into a trading power. Comancheria was bustling with horses, and the bordering native societies began to see it less as a threat than a resource. They sought diplo­matic and commercial ties with Comanches, who responded by sponsoring trade gatherings on their borders. Major trade centers rose along the upper Arkansas, middle Red, and upper Trinity rivers, attracting trade convoys from several native nations as well as from New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana (which in 1762 became a Spanish colony). By the late eighteenth century, Comancheria had become a trade pump that funneled horses northward among numerous nomadic native societies and eastward among native farmers and European settlers. Isolated newcomers just a generation ago, Comanches were now trading from a position of consider­able strength. A long growing season and abundant grass cover made Comancheria one of the world's great natural equine habitats, but farther north longer and colder winters put severe limits on animal husbandry, creating permanent deficit regions where would-be equestrians had to rely on imported animals. By meeting that need, Comanches generated a robust counterflow of guns, powder, iron tools, cloth, corn, squash, and other essentials that kept them healthy, protected, and powerful.

It was one of the great exchange systems in the Western Hemisphere. Spanning from Mesoamerica to the Canadian plains and anchored in Comancheria, a key pivot in the hemispheric equine flow, it was comparable to the intercontinental Mongol trade network that disseminated goods and ideas across vast distances, shaped societies and cultures, and integrated Eurasia.

And just as Mongol influence stabilized large sections of Eurasia under the Pax Mongolica, so too did the Comanche stranglehold on horse trade foster political pacification. Desperate to keep the trade channels open, native groups attached themselves on the Comanche orbit as allies. Except for sporadic Apache and Osage incursions, the Comanches, the richest horse-owners in North America, were shielded from horse raiding. Comancheria became one of the safest places in early America.^[2377]