The Rise of the Comanches

In the seventeenth century, the Comanches did not exist as a distinct society, and there was little in their condition to suggest an imperial future. They were part of the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Shoshones, who hunted bison on foot in the central Great Plains, transporting their possessions with dog travois (a structure made of two trailing poles joined by a frame or a net).

These were Spanish horses that had spread northward from central Mexico with Spanish colonialism. The settlers had built substantial herds in New Mexico, the

¹ Wallace and Hoebel 1954, 6-11.

Pekka Hamalainen, The Kinetic Empires of Native American Nomads In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by:

Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0038. northernmost Spanish colony, and, desperate to retain their military edge, they had managed to limit native access to the animals. That changed abruptly in 1680, when the Pueblo Indians rose against their overlords, banished them from New Mexico, and seized most of their steeds. Much of that horse wealth soon spread among the neighboring Indians through trading and raiding. Descendants of desert- bred African Barbs, the animals thrived on the semiarid plateaus and grasslands around New Mexico, allowing the Indians to fit them into their societies with re­markable speed.

By the early eighteenth century, the Utes and the Numaim had accumulated enough horses to stage mounted raids into New Mexico, where Spaniards ruled once more, having overpowered the fractious Pueblo insurgents. Spaniards came to know the Nummw as the “Comanches,” a corruption of Ute word kumantsi, “anyone who want to fight me all the time,” and the name stuck. By the 1730s, Comanches and Utes had pushed from the Rocky Mountains into the southern Great Plains, where they could access the Rio Grande-bound New Mexico across its length. But the expansion into the grasslands also brought the Comanche-Ute co­alition on a collision course with various plains Apache tribes that had dominated New Mexico's borderlands for generations.^[2370]

The next three decades were a formative period for the Comanches. Together with the Utes, they reinvented themselves as equestrian plains nomads who moved, hunted, and waged war on horseback. The equestrian shift enabled Comanches to track and kill the bison with unprecedented efficiency and to store more food, and this fueled a rapid population growth. It also made them more acquisitive and aggressive. They now needed reliable access to river valleys and bottomlands where they could find the vital resources—low-s aline water, high-c alorie ri­parian grasses, and shelter against the elements—that sustained their burgeoning horse herds. Such bottomlands were not only few and far between; they were also crowded. Like Comanches, Apache tribes had adopted horses, but many of them had chosen to pursue hybrid economies that mixed mounted hunting with riverbed irrigation farming.

By mid-century, the Comanche-Ute coalition controlled much of the southern Great Plains. But it was on this cusp of regional dominance that the partnership collapsed. The Utes, who had preserved ties to their Rocky Mountain homelands through annual migrations, seemed to have recoiled at the prospect of a steppe he­gemony. They dismantled the alliance and retreated into the mountains and plateaus in the west, while the Comanches committed themselves to the life of the plains and expelled the remaining Apache groups to the west and south. In 1763, when the Treaty of Paris divided North America into neat Spanish and British halves along the Mississippi Valley, the Comanche domain, Comancheria, encompassed a vast section of the projected Spanish half. Comanches dominated the short and mixed grass plains from the Arkansas River to the Texas scrublands, some quarter of a mil­lion of miles in all, the largest indigenous realm in the Americas by far.^[2371]

Because of its sheer size, Comancheria was both central and isolated. It had a European colony on three of its flanks—New Mexico in the west, Texas in the south, and Louisiana in the east—each a potential source of crucial technology, foodstuffs, and allies. But few long-distance trade routes reached into the heart of Comancheria, converging instead in ancient commercial centers along the Rio Grande, Missouri, and lower Arkansas and Red rivers. While this gave the Comanches a measure of pro­tection against European pathogens—trade corridors were also disease corridors—it also left them without reliable access to guns and iron. Possibly numbering as many as 15,000, the Comanches were now the largest Plains Indian society, but they were technologically disadvantaged.

Comancheria was also politically fragmented. Comanches had expanded across the southern plains not as a monolith, but as highly individualistic and relatively egalitarian kinship groups, and that is also how they occupied Comancheria once it took its shape. Their basic political unit was a rancheria, a local band of extended families held together by real and Active kinship ties. Rancherias were led jointly by paraibos (band leaders) and councils of adult men, and they made autono­mous decisions about membership, camp movements, and small-scale raiding and trading. There may have been as many as 200 of them.^[2373]