THE COMANCHE EMPIRE
T H E L A M A R S E R I E S I N W E S T E R N H I S T O R Y
The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general pub-
lic interest that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the American West and contribute to a wider understanding of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural life of America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and illustrated history of the American West.
E D I T O R I A L B O A R D
Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus,
Past President of Yale University
William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan
John Mack Faragher, Yale University
Jay Gitlin, Yale University
George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Martha A. Sandweiss, Amherst College
Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico
David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University
Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian National Park Service
R E C E N T T I T L E S
Vicious, by Jon T. Coleman
The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen
Frontiers, by Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher
Revolution in Texas, by Benjamin Heber Johnson
Emerald City, by Matthew Klingle
Murder in Tombstone, by Steven Lubet
Making Indian Law, by Christian W. McMillen
Fugitive Landscapes, by Samuel Truett
Bárbaros, by David J. Weber
F O R T H C O M I N G T I T L E S
The War of a Thousand Deserts, by Brian Delay
The Bourgeois Frontier, by Jay Gitlin
Defying the Odds, by Carole Goldberg and Gelya Frank
The Far West in the Twentieth Century, by Earl Pomeroy
César Chávez, by Stephen J. Pitti
Geronimo, by Robert Utley
The Comanche
Empire
Pekka Hämäläinen
Published in Association with The William P. Clements Center for
Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
Set in Electra type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hämäläinen, Pekka, 1967–
The Comanche empire / Pekka Hämäläinen.
p. cm. — (The Lamar series in western history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
“Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center
for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.”
ISBN 978-0-300-12654-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Comanche Indians—History. 2. Comanche Indians—Government relations.
3. United States—History—19th century. 4. Mexico—History—To 1810.
I. William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. II. Title.
E99.C85.H27 2008
978.004'974572—dc22
2007041809
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Reversed Colonialism 1
ONE Conquest 18
TWO New Order 68
THREE The Embrace 107
FOUR The Empire of the Plains 141
FIVE Greater Comanchería 181
SIX Children of the Sun 239
SEVEN Hunger 292
EIGHT Collapse 321
Conclusion: The Shape of Power 342
List of Abbreviations 363
Notes 365
Bibliography 445
Index 475
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Acknowledgments
Several individuals and institutions helped me complete this book. I would
like to thank Markku Henriksson, David Wishart, and John Wunder, who guided
me into the world of academia, whose own scholarship has been an inexhaust-
ible source of inspiration, and who have never failed to challenge me intellectually and otherwise. This book would not exist without the counsel and en-
couragement of David Weber. He has been a staunch supporter of my work and
read the manuscript in its various stages, steering my formulations toward balance, precision, and clarity. Elliott West read the manuscript twice, improving it greatly with his keen insights and shrewd criticism. My debt to him is large.
A research fellowship at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest
Studies at Southern Methodist University offered me a stimulating environment for revising and rethinking my work. The Clements Center’s manuscript workshop brought together several prominent scholars to discuss my project. I am deeply indebted to the workshop participants—Edward Countryman, David
Edmunds, Morris Foster, Todd Kerstetter, James Snead, Daniel Usner, Omar
Valerio-Jiménez, David Weber, Elliott West, and John Wunder—for their cri-
tique and advice. I want to give a special note of thanks to Andrea Boardman for all her help during my stay at SMU. Subsequently, a generous two-year fellowship at the University of Helsinki’s Collegium for Advanced Studies allowed me to write the bulk of this book in an intellectually lively setting. I would also like to thank Texas A&M University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, for financial support.
Many people have read all or parts of the manuscript and let me test my
ideas in spirited conversations and debates. I am deeply grateful to Gary Clayton Anderson, Matthew Babcock, Ned Blackhawk, Guillaume Boccara, Colin
vii
viii
Acknowledgments
Calloway, Brian DeLay, Jason Dormandy, Ross Frank, Sarah Griffith, Andrew
Isenberg, Ben Johnson, John Lee, Andrea McComb, Patrick McCray, Cecilia
Méndez, Susan Miller, Jean Smith, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Paul Spickard, Todd Wahlstrom, and Martina Will de Chaparro. Thomas Kavanaugh generously
shared his vast knowledge of Comanche culture and history. There are also
debts that dissolve into friendships forged in shared experiences: I was fortunate to write my first book while my good friends Mark Ellis, Mikko Saikku, and Sam Truett finished theirs. I could always rely on them for support and solid advice.
I owe special thanks to Lee Goodwin, who shared her deep knowledge of archi-
val depositories, located crucial documents, and engaged me in many sparkling historiographical discussions. She also read the manuscript with an unfailing eye for detail, saving me from many mistakes. Jennifer Mundy from the Special Collections Office of UCS
B’s Davidson Library offered invaluable assistance in retrieving obscure sources.
Several people at Yale University Press made the transformation of the manu-
script into a book a delightful experience. My editor, Chris Rogers, immediately shared my vision for the book, and his perceptive editorial suggestions were immensely helpful during the final revisions. Laura Davulis and Jessie Hunnicutt steered the manuscript through production with reassuring aplomb, and Eliza
Childs, my copyeditor, streamlined my prose and engaged me in fruitful discussions on style and syntax.
My greatest debt is to Veera Supinen who read and edited numerous versions
of this book and often directed my thinking on new paths. Her intelligence, wisdom, and grace have sustained this project from its inception to conclusion.
INTRODUCTION
Reversed Colonialism
This book is about an American empire that, according to conventional his-
tories, did not exist. It tells the familiar tale of expansion, resistance, conquest, and loss, but with a reversal of usual historical roles: it is a story in which Indians expand, dictate, and prosper, and European colonists resist, retreat, and struggle to survive.
At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Comanches were a small tribe of
hunter-gatherers living in the rugged canyonlands on the far northern frontier of the Spanish kingdom of New Mexico. They were newcomers to the region,
having fled the political unrest and internal disputes in their old homelands on the central Great Plains, and they were struggling to rebuild their lives in a foreign land whose absorption into the Spanish world seemed imminent. It was
here, at the advancing edge of the world’s largest empire, that the Comanches launched an explosive expansion. They purchased and plundered horses from
New Mexico, reinvented themselves as mounted fighters, and reenvisioned their place in the world. They forced their way onto the southern plains, shoved aside the Apaches and other residing nations, and over the course of three generations carved out a vast territory that was larger than the entire European-controlled area north of the Río Grande at the time. They became “Lords of the South
Plains,” ferocious horse-riding warriors who forestalled Euro-American intrusions into the American Southwest well into the late nineteenth century.¹
The Comanches are usually portrayed in the existing literature as a formi-
dable equestrian power that erected a daunting barrier of violence to colonial expansion.² Along with the Iroquois and Lakotas, they have been embedded in
collective American memory as one of the few Native societies able to pose a significant challenge to the Euro-American conquest of North America. But the 1
2
Introduction
idea of a Comanche barrier leaves out at least half of the story. For in the mid-eighteenth century Comanches reinvented themselves once more, this time as
a hegemonic people who grew increasingly powerful and prosperous at the ex-
pense of the surrounding societies, Indian and Euro-American alike. Gradually, a momentous shift took shape. In the Southwest, European imperialism not
only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance; it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.
That overturn of power relations was more than a historical glitch, a momen-
tary rupture in the process of European colonization of indigenous America. For a century, roughly from 1750 to 1850, the Comanches were the dominant people in the Southwest, and they manipulated and exploited the colonial outposts in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and northern Mexico to increase their safety,
prosperity, and power. They extracted resources and labor from their Euro-
American and Indian neighbors through thievery and tribute and incorporated
foreign ethnicities into their ranks as adopted kinspeople, slaves, workers, dependents, and vassals. The Comanche empire was powered by violence, but, like
most viable empires, it was first and foremost an economic construction. At its core was an extensive commercial network that allowed Comanches to control
nearby border markets and long-distance trade, swing surrounding groups into their political orbit, and spread their language and culture across the midcontinent. And as always, long-term foreign political dominance rested on dynamic internal development. To cope with the opportunities and challenges of their rapid expansion, Comanches created a centralized multilevel political system, a flourishing market economy, and a graded social organization that was flexible enough to sustain and survive the burdens of their external ambitions.
The Comanches, then, were an interregional power with imperial presence,
and their politics divided the history of the Southwest and northern Mexico
into two sharply contrasting trajectories. While Comanches reached unparal-
leled heights of political and economic influence, material wealth, and internal stability, the Spanish colonies, the subsequent Mexican provinces, and many
indigenous agricultural societies suffered from a number of disruptions typical to peripheral regions in colonial worlds. Without fully recognizing it, the Spaniards, French, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans were all restrained and over-
shadowed in the continent’s center by an indigenous empire. That empire—its
rise, anatomy, costs, and fall—is the subject of this book.
Great American Indian powers have captivated scholarly imagination since
Hernán Cortés fought his way into Tenochtitlán and Francisco Pizarro marched into Cuzco. Over the years, historians and archaeologists have uncovered sev-
Introduction
3
eral imperialistic or quasi-imperialistic Native American polities that dominated other indigenous societies. The Aztecs, Incas, and other empire-builders in the precontact Americas come easily to mind, but one might, with a little more
effort, also think of the Powhatans in early seventeenth-century Tidewater Virginia, Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois confederacy—in the seventeenth-century
Northeast, or the Lakotas on the nineteenth-century northern plains.³
This book belongs to that genre while also stepping outside of it. Comanches, it shows, fought and subjugated other Native societies, but more important to their ascendancy was their ability to reduce Euro-American colonial regimes
to building blocks of their own dominant position. Comanches achieved some-
thing quite exceptional: they built an imperial organization that subdued, exploited, marginalized, co-opted, and profoundly transformed near and distant colonial outposts, thereby reversing the conventional imperial trajectory in vast segments of North and Central America.⁴
Comanches, moreover, did that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the high tide of imperial contestation when colonial powers jostled for preeminence across North America. The colonial Southwest was a setting
for several dynamic and diverging imperial projects that converged and clashed in unexpected ways. As Spanish, French, British, and U.S. empires vied with
one another over land, commerce, and raw materials, Comanches continued
to expand their realm, profoundly frustrating European fantasies of superi-
ority. The result was a colonial history that defies conventional wisdom. A long-standing notion has it that the course and contours of early American history were determined by the shifts in Euro-American power dynamics and the reactions of metropolitan headquarters in Madrid, London, Versailles, Mexico
City, and Washington to those shifts. The Southwest, however, is a striking exception. Metropolitan visions mattered there, but they often mattered less than the policies and designs of Comanches, whose dominance eventually reached
hemispheric dimensions, extending from the heart of North America deep into
Mexico. Indeed, Comanche ascendancy is the missing component in the sweep-
&n
bsp; ing historical sequence that led to New Spain’s failure to colonize the interior of North America, the erosion of Spanish imperial authority in the Southwest, and the precipitous decay of Mexican power in the north. Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American
Southwest.
Yet for all their strength and potential for expansion, Comanches never at-
tempted to build a European-style imperial system. A creation of itinerant
nomadic bands, the Comanche empire was not a rigid structure held together by a single central authority, nor was it an entity that could be displayed on a map
4
Introduction
as a solid block with clear-cut borders. Unlike Euro-American imperial powers, Comanches did not seek to establish large-scale settlement colonies, and their vision of power was not direct rule over multiple subject peoples. They did not publicize their might with ostentatious art and architecture, and they left behind no imperial ruins to remind us of the extent of their power. Preferring informal rule over formal institutions for both cultural and strategic reasons, Comanches nevertheless created a deeply hierarchical and integrated intersocietal order that was unmistakably imperial in shape, scope, and substance. The numerous Comanche bands and divisions formed an internally fluid but externally
coherent coalition that accomplished through a creative blending of violence, diplomacy, extortion, trade, and kinship politics what more rigidly structured empires have achieved through direct political control: they imposed their will upon neighboring polities, harnessed the economic potential of other societies for their own use, and persuaded their rivals to adopt and accept their customs and norms.
To understand the particular nature of Comanche imperialism, it is nec-
essary to understand how Comanche ascendancy intertwined with other im-
perial expansions—New Spain’s tenacious if erratic northward thrust from central Mexico, New France’s endeavor to absorb the interior grasslands into its commercial realm, and the United States’ quest for a transcontinental empire.
Comanches, to simplify a complex multistage process, developed aggressive
power policies in reaction to Euro-American invasions that had threatened their safety and autonomy from the moment they had entered the southern plains.