Kinetic Empire

Like all viable empires, the Comanche empire was built on enduring relationships of hierarchy and difference. It commanded a distinct core territory and an exten­sive periphery of subordinated peoples, and it offered multiple social places for outsiders who could be slotted in as junior allies, tributary dependents, captive slaves, or naturalized Comanches.

The Comanche empire presents an ontological dilemma: What are we to make of a regime that behaved like an empire without really looking like one? One op­tion would be to follow scholars who have labeled expansionist nomadic regimes as shadow, mirror, or quasi empires. Such formulations focus on the structural linkages between mobile and sedentary regimes and assert that nomadic regimes needed exploitable agrarian states to materialize in the first place and remained structurally dependent on them, even when they overshadowed them.^[2392] This dual unity is an important insight, and it captures something about the intimate and tor­turous relationship between Comancheria and its adjacent colonial outposts. Yet, regardless of the prefix, the available definitions conceal as much as they reveal. They accept state-based territorial empires as paradigmatic and define nomadic regimes against them, focusing less on what they are than what they are not. They are, at their core, negative definitions that reduce nomadic empires to secondary historical phenomena: too parasitical, too imitative, and organizationally too hollow to achieve the self-sufficiency of primary empires.

Along with many other nomadic empires, the Comanche regime might be best understood as a kinetic empire.^[2393] Perhaps more fully than any other known im­perial formation, the Comanche empire was built on mobility. Mobility defined its foreign policy, which revolved around long-distance mounted raids, border incursions, transnational diplomatic missions, semi-permanent trade fairs, and seasonal expansions that doubled as pastoral migrations. Reliance on grass and bison tethered Comanches to the plains, but equestrian mobility allowed them to project power far beyond them. It compressed time and distance and brought re­mote resources near while keeping violence afar, allowing them to create a vari­egated imperial geography: Comancheria’s sheltered prosperity and its expansive raiding hinterlands were two sides of the same imperial coin.

Comanches ranged widely but ruled lightly. They wanted resources and loy­alty, not unconditional submission or likeness, and they were highly selective conquerors. Their ascendancy rested not on sweeping territorial control but on a capacity to connect vital economic and ecological nodes—trade corridors, grassy river valleys, grain-producing peasant villages, tribute-paying colonial capitals— which allowed them to harness resources without controlling societies. Portability was the key. Above all, Comanches sought loot with legs: horses and humans that could transport themselves from distant lands into Comancheria. Comanches moved constantly through space, seeking trade, tribute, plunder, and pastures, and it was that mobile action that demarcated the limits of their power and jurisdiction. Theirs was a malleable regime that thrived on partial territorial control, porous borders, and tangled sovereignties.

Mobility and mutability also marked Comancheria’s internal composition. The Comanches were a network society in which power worked horizontally rather than vertically, binding people together through intimate ties of loyalty and kinship.

Such pliability actually helped stitch the larger Comanche community together, for the constant movement of people created a thick lattice of kinship ties that transcended local and divisional identities. The contrast to nearby agricultural regimes was striking, which was not lost on Spanish officials, whose own impe­rial project was repeatedly encumbered by stifling bureaucracies and defiant sub­ject people.^[2395] Malleability also gave the Comanches tremendous staying power. They could expand their sphere of operations with remarkable speed when new opportunities arose, and they could withdraw from acquired positions with equal swiftness when facing reversals. It was a quality that set them apart from territorial empires, which almost invariably have held on to their frontiers even when doing so endangered the entire system. The Comanche empire expanded and contracted throughout its existence as Comanche rancherias and divisions responded to com­mercial openings, military challenges, epidemics, droughts, and other unexpected changes.

That is also how it collapsed.

Just as Comancheria was starting to crumble, the United States declared war on Mexico and won a decisive victory—a victory the Comanches had inadvertently made possible by destabilizing and weakening northern Mexico with system­atic raiding. In 1848 Comancheria was engulfed by an Anglo-American empire whose border now extended to the Rio Grande. And while the United States boxed Comancheria in, Texas, now a US state, thrust its burgeoning ranching economy deep into Comanche home territory. Struggling to simply stay alive, Comanches retreated into the heart of Comancheria and made themselves small. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, they were refugees in their own country. They had stopped collecting tribute and had withdrawn from northern Mexico, and their trade had ground to a halt. That was the end of their empire. Theirs had been an action-based regime with a light institutional edifice, and when the action ceased, so too did the regime, instantaneously.

And then, just as quickly, the Comanches returned. The end of the US Civil War in 1865 left the defeated Confederate Texas weakened and vulnerable. Its frontier settlements suffered from an acute shortage of workers, and soon there were millions of free-roaming cattle in the state. Then the drought passed, slowing down the bison’s decline. Comanches began to recover and resumed large-scale raiding across Texas. A treaty with the United States in 1867 only deepened the confusion: federal officials believed that Comanches had agreed to settle on a res­ervation, but Comanches used the reservation as a seasonal supply base to collect federal annuity goods that helped them sustain nomadic existence on the plains.

The resurgence posed a direct challenge to the American vision for the Southwest as an industrial hinterland. The US Army launched a total war in Comancheria, attacking winter camps, killing horses, and burning lodges and food caches. In the soldiers' wake, professional bison hunting outfits descended into Comanche hunting grounds, killing hundreds of thousands of animals. The bison numbers plummeted, and Comanches began to starve. By 1875 nearly all of them had moved into a reservation. There remained only about 1,700 of them.^[2398]