Book Review: The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen
An academic examination of the most feared of plains tribes.
Yale University Press, 2008, 500 pages
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.
This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches' remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.
There used to be a certain idealistic narrative popular in histories of Native Americans, which went something like this: once upon a time, indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature, stewards of the Earth, in mostly peaceful kinship groups that maybe every once in a while had a wee bit of a territorial dispute. Then Europeans showed up and rolled across their lands, stomping everyone in their path and converting and genociding and shit, as wypipo do.
Modern histories are a little more nuanced (usually), but there is still a tendency to portray Native Americans as universally victims of colonialism, doomed peoples who were just minding their own business on their own land until the European powers showed up. This both whitewashes and does a disservice to the tribes who in many cases were not powerless, not hapless, and whose crushing defeat and eventual confinement to reservation life and poverty was perhaps not inevitable.
The Comanche Empire is the second book about the Comanche I have read, the first being S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon. Gwynne's book, which almost won a Pulitzer, focuses mostly on the late Comanche period, when they were known to Americans only as bloodthirsty savages. While Gwynne certainly wasn't trying to demonize the Comanche, he did paint a picture of a people who were essentially violent plains marauders who lived for war and conquest, and had very little in the way of art or culture, or anything enduring once they were finally crushed by the U.S. Army. I wondered if this was an entirely fair picture: surely the Comanche were not just real-life orcs?
The Comanche Empire is a much more scholarly work, and Pekka Hämäläinen, a history professor, presents a heavily academic treatment of the Comanche in which he argues persuasively that yes, in fact, the Comanche practiced sophisticated power politics, managed an empire that was as much about economics as it was about raiding, and that while their culture contained little of what Europeans valued, they were still people who understood politics, trade, and diplomacy. He explicitly sets out to correct the view that the American empire expanded into a power vacuum, sweeping aside all native resistance. Hämäläinen claims that the Comanche were actually an imperialistic power in their own right, if not exactly an empire in the way Europeans understood empires. He also argues that the Comanche dramatically affected the history and political evolution of the vast region once known as Comancheria.
He persuaded me that the Comanche were neither orcs nor helpless victims. He also persuaded me that Europeans did nothing wrong.
Okay, obviously, that is not literally true. I think conquest, slavery, and genocide is bad, just like everyone else in the 21st century...
And like almost nobody back when that shit was happening.
See, there is another narrative popular in the modern era that Europeans invented colonialism and genocide and slavery. All the tribes the Comanche enslaved and exterminated would like a word with you. You know, if they were still around.
I'm not saying historical atrocities weren't bad, or that, being modern and enlightened, we should not now strive to do better and address past wrongs. But the story of the Comanche is of a tribe that routinely moved onto other peoples' land and wiped them out or enslaved them and took their stuff. In fact, this is the story of almost all Indian tribes before Europeans ever showed up. (Not to mention, you know, the entire rest of the world throughout history.) European imperialism was not unique, or uniquely terrible: it was just uniquely successful.
As much as I loved this book and its deep dive into Comanche history, and seeing them as a vibrant, adaptable, and formidable people, I also kept thinking "Yeah, but honestly... they were pretty terrible."
Unlike S.C. Gwynne, who is a journalist, Pekka Hämäläinen is a university professor, and it really shows. The opening chapter nearly put me off, with its talk of "conceptual spaces" and "subaltern identities," and going on and on about colonialism, imperialism, colonialism, and did I mention imperialism?
In this book I examine the Comanche power complex as part of an emerging transatlantic web that had not yet consolidated into an encompassing world economy. Seen from this angle, the eighteenth-and early nineteenth century Southwest and Mexican North emerge as a small-scale world-system that existed outside the controlling grip of Europe's overseas empires. Comancheria was its political and economic nucleus, a regional core surrounded by more or less peripheral societies and territories whose fortunes were linked to the Comanches through complex webs of cooperation, coercion, and extortion, and dependence. The world-system approach to history has often been criticized for being overly strict and mechanistic, which it is. I have used spatial language and metaphors selectively but also advisedly, fully aware that they convey a certain kind of rigidity and permanence. Viewed against the backdrop of constantly shifting frontiers of North America, the intersocietal space the Comanches occupied and eventually dominated was marked by unusually hard, enduring, and distinctive power hierarchies.
Fortunately, once you get past the opening chapter, the prose becomes much less Oxfordish, if still dense at times, and Hämäläinen puts forward a lot of interesting ideas.
"Comanche," like many tribal names, is not what they called themselves. They called themselves the Numunu. "Comanche" was Ute for, roughly, "Those guys who always want to fight us."
The Comanche were originally an offshoot of the Shoshone who arrived in the Great Plains sometime in the early 1600s. They became allies of the Utes against the Apaches (who were originally a more pastoral tribe, not the warlike plains Apaches of later American history). The Comanche and the Utes drove the Apache out of their homelands, then began warring with each other.
The Comanche were not uniquely warlike; like Europeans, their greatest sin was that they were better at it. Plains warfare was always brutal. Slaughtering other tribes, capturing and enslaving the women and children and torturing captured warriors to death was the norm. Capturing a man's family unmanned him, and could only be compensated by recapture, by capturing the captors' family, or "ceremonially burying your lost loved ones in the bodies of the enemy." This was the way of all plains tribes long before Europeans showed up.
And yet, if you were abducted into a Comanche tribe, once you endured the hardships (to call it "hazing" would be an understatement) of your initial captivity, you could eventually become a full-fledged Comanche. Hämäläinen describes the Comanche as a racially "egalitarian" people in which being Comanche was not defined by blood, but by understanding and adhering to Comanche social norms. If you lived with the Comanche and acted like a Comanche, you were a Comanche.
One of Hämäläinen's more intriguing propositions is that "Wars in the plains were about carbohydrates." The Comanche hunted bison and almost all their food came from bison meat. They needed other foods they could obtain by trading with tribes in the Arkansas river valley markets. Much of their expansion and trade activities, according to Hämäläinen, can be understood as an effort to secure enough carbs for survival.
The Spaniards were the first Europeans to come into conflict with the Comanche. Plains warfare was transformed in a major way by the arrival of Spaniards, and horses. The Comanche traded with the Spanish for horses and within a generation were a horse tribe. Indeed, one of the few "technological" developments the Comanche could be credited with was their mastery of horse breeding, which eventually surpassed that of Europeans. According to Hämäläinen, the Comanche recognized at least seventeen distinct breeds of their own.
The Spanish of course had an enormous sense of racial superiority and in all their dealings with the Comanche, viewed them as either current or future subjects. The Spanish regarded their trade agreements as tying the Comanche to them in vassalage. The Spanish used lots of "Father/Son" metaphors in their treaties, and treated the Comanches as children, but to the Comanche, it was a sibling relationship. Both maintained the fiction of the Comanche accepting "subordinate" status to the Great Father, the King of Spain, though the Comanche never saw it that way, and the Spaniards knew better. The western Spanish colonies did better, as Texas was poorer and had less to trade with the Eastern Comanche. Some Spanish governors were good at negotiating peace with the Comanches, others would let peace fall apart. The Spanish and the Comanche became allies, with Comanche sometimes allied and sometimes at war with the Utes, but everyone attacked the Apaches. (If there's one tribe I felt sorry for after reading this book, it was the Apaches, because pretty much everyone ganged up on them for over a century.)
Bartering among Spaniards was about market economics, but among Comanches, it was about establishing kinship networks. If you traded with someone, you were making them part of your extended family, and thus implicitly agreeing to provide for each other. Haggling, trying to get "better deals," or refusing to trade something you owned, was seen as not just greed, but being a bad relation. This was the cause of a lot of grief between the Comanche and their European trading partners.
The Comanches had sophisticated political systems, but not coordinated ones. They had no "great chief" who led a tribe and made command decisions; decisions were made by consensus. Being wise, accomplished in war, and having a lot of horses brought prestige and gave your words greater weight, but Comanches practiced collective decision-making, and while they thought of themselves as a vast, extended people, individual bands only spoke for themselves (which led to quite a few misunderstandings with whites who thought they were making a treaty with the entire Comanche tribe).
Spanish interests, and power, declined in the New World partly as a result of shifting power in Europe. Hämäläinen's thesis is that Comanche actually dictated the course of several colonial powers, helped collapse the Spanish regime in the New World, and indirectly aided American expansion. As Spain's Mexican empire collapsed, its centralized government stopped sending soldiers, and the outlying territories had to fend for themselves. With Mexican independence, the peace forged by the Spanish became increasingly an extortionate relationship. Mexicans became very weak against the Comanche, and were essentially paying tribute. It virtually bankrupted some territories, who were forced to spend a significant part of their budgets buying off Comanche with "gifts." Soon Comanche violence was proportionate to how much they were gifted. Comanche still framed it as being good relations, as "gifting" kept the Mexicans as part of their kinship network, but it was essentially danegeld. When Mexican towns and territories ran out of money and could only give poor gifts, treaties ended and raids resumed.
Comanche war trails were a thousand miles long, and Comanches raided all the way down to the tropics. Hämäläinen argues that the Comanche were largely responsible for hollowing out the early Mexican economy and causing internal political collapse. When the Mexican-American War happened in 1846, it was a crushing, one-sided war partly because Mexico had been so badly weakened by decades of Comanche depredation.
The Comanche were creating a genuine empire, with trade and buffer zones around their heartland, and while this made them increasingly powerful, it was also causing internal conflicts that would eventually contribute to their collapse.
When the first American traders moved into Comancheria, the Comanche welcomed them. Americans had lots of stuff to trade with. But unknown to the Comanche, their empire was already in trouble. They had become not just horse nomads, but were running a far-flung trading empire that relied on trading bison hides and meat for maize, beans, and squash and later metal and guns and powder. They were also granting other tribes (and Europeans) license to hunt in their territory, which they had never permitted before, because they needed more and more goods. Their population was growing, which increased pressure even more. They needed more horses per capita. But this meant they were beginning to overhunt bison, and while they began to realize this, their religious beliefs were such that they could never really reconcile the idea that bison might run out. Plagues and famines compounded their problems. Things were already beginning to go downhill for the Comanche in the 1840s, though it did not seem that way for another decade or two.
Americans and Texans were distinct peoples to the Comanche. Relations with Texans went from bad to worse in 1840, during the Great Council House Fight. A delegation of Comanche came to San Antonio for peace talks, but only brought one white captive to free. When the Texans demanded the Comanche hand over all their other white captives, the Comanche explained that the other whites were scattered in various places in Comancheria. Texans (and Americans) never did quite understand that Comancheria wasn't a single polity, so they took it as a rejection of peace talks, and opened fire. They slaughtered the Comanche leaders, which caused bad feelings the Comanche did not soon forget.
Sam Houston tried to treat with the Comanches, and he was better at diplomacy, but the Comanche, who previously had never really recognized "territory" or "borders," were finally adopting a geographical mindset and demanding that whites stay within proscribed boundaries.
Meanwhile, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 had relocated the Cherokee and Shawnee and other tribes west. They were forced right up against the Comanche border, and tribes resettled on the plains could not sustain themselves with farming, so they began hunting bison, which cut into the Comanche's supply.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War, was the zenith of Comanche power and also the beginning of their decline. As part of the treaty, the U.S. was obligated to protect Mexico from Indian raiding parties crossing the border, which meant the beginning of American efforts to contain the Comanche. Although the Comanche weren't immediately affected much, the combination of the U.S. Army and population pressures meant a series of droughts and famines left them devastated by the 1850s. They made a treaty with the U.S. government that guaranteed them about 40,000 square miles, though not all Comanche had agreed to it. Ironically, the American Civil War gave them a temporary respite (along with the return of rains, which slowed the decline of bison). Because Texas was occupied territory during Reconstruction, and American troops in Texas were mostly there to suppress any Confederate hangers-on, the Comanche were able to run amok in large parts of the state. But their patterns were now different, and instead of being mostly horse raiders, they became castle rustlers. They were also terrorizing white settlements in revenge.
As Americans continued pressing into Texas and the West, Comanches continued to transform their economy but remained raiders and plains warriors. At first the U.S., overseen by a Quaker Indian official, negotiated a "peace plan" that would settle the Comanche on reservations and provide them with necessary provisions. But the Comanche continued raiding. The U.S. Army said it was reservation Comanches spending part of the season on the plains, but it was really plains Comanches who only came to the reservation when it was time to collect government benefits. The Army became angry as Comanches often were being paid in goods and guns they then used to go out raiding. Texans and Americans were angry that Comanche were still ransoming captives.
In 1871, General Tecumseh Sherman began a campaign of total war against the Comanche, using the same tactics he'd used in Georgia. He took a very utilitarian view that destroying their economic base and wiping out their homes was the quickest and most humane way to end the violence. Of course it meant a lot of starving Comanche, forced back onto the reservation when their women were captured.
In 1873, the buffalo hunters came to the plains, driven by the industrialization of buffalo hide processing, and a deliberate plan to deprive Indians of their economic base. The shocked Comanche witnessed the absolute devastation of the plains and their way of life as buffalo were slaughtered in unimaginable numbers.
The last gasps of Comanche resistance came with a prophet, Isa-Tai (which seems to have translated literally as either "Coyote's Asshole" or "Wolf Pussy") who in 1873-1874 followed a playbook seen in many other Indian tribes during their long struggle against whites: the "prophet" would preach that the Great Spirit had told him to fight the white man and granted him powers that would make them invincible in battle. He led a confederation of plains tribes, one of the only such attempts to unite the Comanche with many other tribes, including some of their traditional enemies. They were never really cohesive or organized, and predictably, they suffered a crushing defeat, and the Comanche, starving, returned to their reservation and were essentially a defeated people after that. (Some tribes, such as the Lakota, would continue to fight the U.S. Army into the 1890s.)
The Comanche Were Not Nice People
The Comanche Empire is a very thorough and deeply fascinating book. It taught me a lot more about the Comanche than S.C. Gywnne's book did. (Gwynne spent a lot of time talking about the most famous Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, while Hämäläinen only briefly mentions him.)
I do have some issues with Hämäläinen's narrative, though.
First, he presents Comancheria as a genuine empire, with imperialism (of a kind), and strategic economic decisions that rationalize their far-flung raiding, enslaving, and trading practices. Yet this implies some sort of central planning, which the Comanche explicitly did not have. So were Comanche activities just a natural evolution of strategic self-interests, without anyone guiding it, or were they really an empire? I was not quite convinced by Hämäläinen's thesis that the Comanche demonstrated understanding of economics and diplomacy beyond the local level.
Second, while he does not exactly try to whitewash the Comanche's brutal ways of war and enslavement, he describes it all in detached, anthropological fashion, not dwelling nearly as sympathetically on their victims, Indian and European (women publicly gang-raped and men scalped alive and tortured to death) as he does on how sad it was that the Comanche were eventually reduced from lords of the plains to starving reservation Indians.
Any argument that the Comanche should have been left alone and allowed to continue their way of life is an argument that they should have been allowed to continue raiding, raping, killing, and enslaving. The Comanche would honor peace treaties, yes, but only so long as they were propitiated. It's not an exaggeration to say that warfare and raiding was intrinsic to their culture. I do not think there is any alternate history scenario in which they permanently agreed to coexist and never menace their neighbors.
As their empire grew, their economy became more and more dependent on slavery and horse and cattle raiding. Additionally, the status of Comanche women, while never great, became worse as their economy became more dependent on women's labor while polygamous practices expanded until very rich Comanche men would sometimes have as many as ten wives. The Comanche were always a male-dominated society, but towards the end, Comanche women (and the women of other tribes, including whites whom they took captive) appeared to have been little more than chattel. (Hämäläinen makes some arguments that whites only saw things from the outside and that women had "a lot of influence" inside the home, but this is a very old and rather unpersuasive argument - sure, first wives probably got to boss around secondary wives, and the women made housekeeping and child-rearing decisions. They were still treated terribly even by European standards of the time.)
In his closing chapter, Hämäläinen mentions Cormac McCarthy and his harrowing description of the Comanche in Blood Meridian as an example of white writers who have depicted the Comanche as nothing more than plains warriors and terrors.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."
The thing is, while Cormac McCarthy's descriptions are gruesome and exaggerated for literary effect, he wasn't making this shit up. Blood Meridian was based on historical events, and the Comanche, when they made war, really were terrors. It's absolutely true that that's not all there was to them, and I appreciate Hämäläinen showing us a more complete view of the Numunu.
But I cannot say I'm sorry that the Comanche no longer ride the plains.
My complete list of book reviews.
Yale University Press, 2008, 500 pages
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.
This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches' remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.
There used to be a certain idealistic narrative popular in histories of Native Americans, which went something like this: once upon a time, indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature, stewards of the Earth, in mostly peaceful kinship groups that maybe every once in a while had a wee bit of a territorial dispute. Then Europeans showed up and rolled across their lands, stomping everyone in their path and converting and genociding and shit, as wypipo do.
Modern histories are a little more nuanced (usually), but there is still a tendency to portray Native Americans as universally victims of colonialism, doomed peoples who were just minding their own business on their own land until the European powers showed up. This both whitewashes and does a disservice to the tribes who in many cases were not powerless, not hapless, and whose crushing defeat and eventual confinement to reservation life and poverty was perhaps not inevitable.
The Comanche Empire is the second book about the Comanche I have read, the first being S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon. Gwynne's book, which almost won a Pulitzer, focuses mostly on the late Comanche period, when they were known to Americans only as bloodthirsty savages. While Gwynne certainly wasn't trying to demonize the Comanche, he did paint a picture of a people who were essentially violent plains marauders who lived for war and conquest, and had very little in the way of art or culture, or anything enduring once they were finally crushed by the U.S. Army. I wondered if this was an entirely fair picture: surely the Comanche were not just real-life orcs?
The Comanche Empire is a much more scholarly work, and Pekka Hämäläinen, a history professor, presents a heavily academic treatment of the Comanche in which he argues persuasively that yes, in fact, the Comanche practiced sophisticated power politics, managed an empire that was as much about economics as it was about raiding, and that while their culture contained little of what Europeans valued, they were still people who understood politics, trade, and diplomacy. He explicitly sets out to correct the view that the American empire expanded into a power vacuum, sweeping aside all native resistance. Hämäläinen claims that the Comanche were actually an imperialistic power in their own right, if not exactly an empire in the way Europeans understood empires. He also argues that the Comanche dramatically affected the history and political evolution of the vast region once known as Comancheria.
He persuaded me that the Comanche were neither orcs nor helpless victims. He also persuaded me that Europeans did nothing wrong.
Okay, obviously, that is not literally true. I think conquest, slavery, and genocide is bad, just like everyone else in the 21st century...
And like almost nobody back when that shit was happening.
See, there is another narrative popular in the modern era that Europeans invented colonialism and genocide and slavery. All the tribes the Comanche enslaved and exterminated would like a word with you. You know, if they were still around.
I'm not saying historical atrocities weren't bad, or that, being modern and enlightened, we should not now strive to do better and address past wrongs. But the story of the Comanche is of a tribe that routinely moved onto other peoples' land and wiped them out or enslaved them and took their stuff. In fact, this is the story of almost all Indian tribes before Europeans ever showed up. (Not to mention, you know, the entire rest of the world throughout history.) European imperialism was not unique, or uniquely terrible: it was just uniquely successful.
As much as I loved this book and its deep dive into Comanche history, and seeing them as a vibrant, adaptable, and formidable people, I also kept thinking "Yeah, but honestly... they were pretty terrible."
Unlike S.C. Gwynne, who is a journalist, Pekka Hämäläinen is a university professor, and it really shows. The opening chapter nearly put me off, with its talk of "conceptual spaces" and "subaltern identities," and going on and on about colonialism, imperialism, colonialism, and did I mention imperialism?
In this book I examine the Comanche power complex as part of an emerging transatlantic web that had not yet consolidated into an encompassing world economy. Seen from this angle, the eighteenth-and early nineteenth century Southwest and Mexican North emerge as a small-scale world-system that existed outside the controlling grip of Europe's overseas empires. Comancheria was its political and economic nucleus, a regional core surrounded by more or less peripheral societies and territories whose fortunes were linked to the Comanches through complex webs of cooperation, coercion, and extortion, and dependence. The world-system approach to history has often been criticized for being overly strict and mechanistic, which it is. I have used spatial language and metaphors selectively but also advisedly, fully aware that they convey a certain kind of rigidity and permanence. Viewed against the backdrop of constantly shifting frontiers of North America, the intersocietal space the Comanches occupied and eventually dominated was marked by unusually hard, enduring, and distinctive power hierarchies.
Fortunately, once you get past the opening chapter, the prose becomes much less Oxfordish, if still dense at times, and Hämäläinen puts forward a lot of interesting ideas.
"Comanche," like many tribal names, is not what they called themselves. They called themselves the Numunu. "Comanche" was Ute for, roughly, "Those guys who always want to fight us."
The Comanche were originally an offshoot of the Shoshone who arrived in the Great Plains sometime in the early 1600s. They became allies of the Utes against the Apaches (who were originally a more pastoral tribe, not the warlike plains Apaches of later American history). The Comanche and the Utes drove the Apache out of their homelands, then began warring with each other.
The Comanche were not uniquely warlike; like Europeans, their greatest sin was that they were better at it. Plains warfare was always brutal. Slaughtering other tribes, capturing and enslaving the women and children and torturing captured warriors to death was the norm. Capturing a man's family unmanned him, and could only be compensated by recapture, by capturing the captors' family, or "ceremonially burying your lost loved ones in the bodies of the enemy." This was the way of all plains tribes long before Europeans showed up.
And yet, if you were abducted into a Comanche tribe, once you endured the hardships (to call it "hazing" would be an understatement) of your initial captivity, you could eventually become a full-fledged Comanche. Hämäläinen describes the Comanche as a racially "egalitarian" people in which being Comanche was not defined by blood, but by understanding and adhering to Comanche social norms. If you lived with the Comanche and acted like a Comanche, you were a Comanche.
One of Hämäläinen's more intriguing propositions is that "Wars in the plains were about carbohydrates." The Comanche hunted bison and almost all their food came from bison meat. They needed other foods they could obtain by trading with tribes in the Arkansas river valley markets. Much of their expansion and trade activities, according to Hämäläinen, can be understood as an effort to secure enough carbs for survival.
The Spaniards were the first Europeans to come into conflict with the Comanche. Plains warfare was transformed in a major way by the arrival of Spaniards, and horses. The Comanche traded with the Spanish for horses and within a generation were a horse tribe. Indeed, one of the few "technological" developments the Comanche could be credited with was their mastery of horse breeding, which eventually surpassed that of Europeans. According to Hämäläinen, the Comanche recognized at least seventeen distinct breeds of their own.
The Spanish of course had an enormous sense of racial superiority and in all their dealings with the Comanche, viewed them as either current or future subjects. The Spanish regarded their trade agreements as tying the Comanche to them in vassalage. The Spanish used lots of "Father/Son" metaphors in their treaties, and treated the Comanches as children, but to the Comanche, it was a sibling relationship. Both maintained the fiction of the Comanche accepting "subordinate" status to the Great Father, the King of Spain, though the Comanche never saw it that way, and the Spaniards knew better. The western Spanish colonies did better, as Texas was poorer and had less to trade with the Eastern Comanche. Some Spanish governors were good at negotiating peace with the Comanches, others would let peace fall apart. The Spanish and the Comanche became allies, with Comanche sometimes allied and sometimes at war with the Utes, but everyone attacked the Apaches. (If there's one tribe I felt sorry for after reading this book, it was the Apaches, because pretty much everyone ganged up on them for over a century.)
Bartering among Spaniards was about market economics, but among Comanches, it was about establishing kinship networks. If you traded with someone, you were making them part of your extended family, and thus implicitly agreeing to provide for each other. Haggling, trying to get "better deals," or refusing to trade something you owned, was seen as not just greed, but being a bad relation. This was the cause of a lot of grief between the Comanche and their European trading partners.
The Comanches had sophisticated political systems, but not coordinated ones. They had no "great chief" who led a tribe and made command decisions; decisions were made by consensus. Being wise, accomplished in war, and having a lot of horses brought prestige and gave your words greater weight, but Comanches practiced collective decision-making, and while they thought of themselves as a vast, extended people, individual bands only spoke for themselves (which led to quite a few misunderstandings with whites who thought they were making a treaty with the entire Comanche tribe).
Spanish interests, and power, declined in the New World partly as a result of shifting power in Europe. Hämäläinen's thesis is that Comanche actually dictated the course of several colonial powers, helped collapse the Spanish regime in the New World, and indirectly aided American expansion. As Spain's Mexican empire collapsed, its centralized government stopped sending soldiers, and the outlying territories had to fend for themselves. With Mexican independence, the peace forged by the Spanish became increasingly an extortionate relationship. Mexicans became very weak against the Comanche, and were essentially paying tribute. It virtually bankrupted some territories, who were forced to spend a significant part of their budgets buying off Comanche with "gifts." Soon Comanche violence was proportionate to how much they were gifted. Comanche still framed it as being good relations, as "gifting" kept the Mexicans as part of their kinship network, but it was essentially danegeld. When Mexican towns and territories ran out of money and could only give poor gifts, treaties ended and raids resumed.
Comanche war trails were a thousand miles long, and Comanches raided all the way down to the tropics. Hämäläinen argues that the Comanche were largely responsible for hollowing out the early Mexican economy and causing internal political collapse. When the Mexican-American War happened in 1846, it was a crushing, one-sided war partly because Mexico had been so badly weakened by decades of Comanche depredation.
The Comanche were creating a genuine empire, with trade and buffer zones around their heartland, and while this made them increasingly powerful, it was also causing internal conflicts that would eventually contribute to their collapse.
When the first American traders moved into Comancheria, the Comanche welcomed them. Americans had lots of stuff to trade with. But unknown to the Comanche, their empire was already in trouble. They had become not just horse nomads, but were running a far-flung trading empire that relied on trading bison hides and meat for maize, beans, and squash and later metal and guns and powder. They were also granting other tribes (and Europeans) license to hunt in their territory, which they had never permitted before, because they needed more and more goods. Their population was growing, which increased pressure even more. They needed more horses per capita. But this meant they were beginning to overhunt bison, and while they began to realize this, their religious beliefs were such that they could never really reconcile the idea that bison might run out. Plagues and famines compounded their problems. Things were already beginning to go downhill for the Comanche in the 1840s, though it did not seem that way for another decade or two.
Americans and Texans were distinct peoples to the Comanche. Relations with Texans went from bad to worse in 1840, during the Great Council House Fight. A delegation of Comanche came to San Antonio for peace talks, but only brought one white captive to free. When the Texans demanded the Comanche hand over all their other white captives, the Comanche explained that the other whites were scattered in various places in Comancheria. Texans (and Americans) never did quite understand that Comancheria wasn't a single polity, so they took it as a rejection of peace talks, and opened fire. They slaughtered the Comanche leaders, which caused bad feelings the Comanche did not soon forget.
Sam Houston tried to treat with the Comanches, and he was better at diplomacy, but the Comanche, who previously had never really recognized "territory" or "borders," were finally adopting a geographical mindset and demanding that whites stay within proscribed boundaries.
Meanwhile, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 had relocated the Cherokee and Shawnee and other tribes west. They were forced right up against the Comanche border, and tribes resettled on the plains could not sustain themselves with farming, so they began hunting bison, which cut into the Comanche's supply.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War, was the zenith of Comanche power and also the beginning of their decline. As part of the treaty, the U.S. was obligated to protect Mexico from Indian raiding parties crossing the border, which meant the beginning of American efforts to contain the Comanche. Although the Comanche weren't immediately affected much, the combination of the U.S. Army and population pressures meant a series of droughts and famines left them devastated by the 1850s. They made a treaty with the U.S. government that guaranteed them about 40,000 square miles, though not all Comanche had agreed to it. Ironically, the American Civil War gave them a temporary respite (along with the return of rains, which slowed the decline of bison). Because Texas was occupied territory during Reconstruction, and American troops in Texas were mostly there to suppress any Confederate hangers-on, the Comanche were able to run amok in large parts of the state. But their patterns were now different, and instead of being mostly horse raiders, they became castle rustlers. They were also terrorizing white settlements in revenge.
As Americans continued pressing into Texas and the West, Comanches continued to transform their economy but remained raiders and plains warriors. At first the U.S., overseen by a Quaker Indian official, negotiated a "peace plan" that would settle the Comanche on reservations and provide them with necessary provisions. But the Comanche continued raiding. The U.S. Army said it was reservation Comanches spending part of the season on the plains, but it was really plains Comanches who only came to the reservation when it was time to collect government benefits. The Army became angry as Comanches often were being paid in goods and guns they then used to go out raiding. Texans and Americans were angry that Comanche were still ransoming captives.
In 1871, General Tecumseh Sherman began a campaign of total war against the Comanche, using the same tactics he'd used in Georgia. He took a very utilitarian view that destroying their economic base and wiping out their homes was the quickest and most humane way to end the violence. Of course it meant a lot of starving Comanche, forced back onto the reservation when their women were captured.
In 1873, the buffalo hunters came to the plains, driven by the industrialization of buffalo hide processing, and a deliberate plan to deprive Indians of their economic base. The shocked Comanche witnessed the absolute devastation of the plains and their way of life as buffalo were slaughtered in unimaginable numbers.
The last gasps of Comanche resistance came with a prophet, Isa-Tai (which seems to have translated literally as either "Coyote's Asshole" or "Wolf Pussy") who in 1873-1874 followed a playbook seen in many other Indian tribes during their long struggle against whites: the "prophet" would preach that the Great Spirit had told him to fight the white man and granted him powers that would make them invincible in battle. He led a confederation of plains tribes, one of the only such attempts to unite the Comanche with many other tribes, including some of their traditional enemies. They were never really cohesive or organized, and predictably, they suffered a crushing defeat, and the Comanche, starving, returned to their reservation and were essentially a defeated people after that. (Some tribes, such as the Lakota, would continue to fight the U.S. Army into the 1890s.)
The Comanche Were Not Nice People
The Comanche Empire is a very thorough and deeply fascinating book. It taught me a lot more about the Comanche than S.C. Gywnne's book did. (Gwynne spent a lot of time talking about the most famous Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, while Hämäläinen only briefly mentions him.)
I do have some issues with Hämäläinen's narrative, though.
First, he presents Comancheria as a genuine empire, with imperialism (of a kind), and strategic economic decisions that rationalize their far-flung raiding, enslaving, and trading practices. Yet this implies some sort of central planning, which the Comanche explicitly did not have. So were Comanche activities just a natural evolution of strategic self-interests, without anyone guiding it, or were they really an empire? I was not quite convinced by Hämäläinen's thesis that the Comanche demonstrated understanding of economics and diplomacy beyond the local level.
Second, while he does not exactly try to whitewash the Comanche's brutal ways of war and enslavement, he describes it all in detached, anthropological fashion, not dwelling nearly as sympathetically on their victims, Indian and European (women publicly gang-raped and men scalped alive and tortured to death) as he does on how sad it was that the Comanche were eventually reduced from lords of the plains to starving reservation Indians.
Any argument that the Comanche should have been left alone and allowed to continue their way of life is an argument that they should have been allowed to continue raiding, raping, killing, and enslaving. The Comanche would honor peace treaties, yes, but only so long as they were propitiated. It's not an exaggeration to say that warfare and raiding was intrinsic to their culture. I do not think there is any alternate history scenario in which they permanently agreed to coexist and never menace their neighbors.
As their empire grew, their economy became more and more dependent on slavery and horse and cattle raiding. Additionally, the status of Comanche women, while never great, became worse as their economy became more dependent on women's labor while polygamous practices expanded until very rich Comanche men would sometimes have as many as ten wives. The Comanche were always a male-dominated society, but towards the end, Comanche women (and the women of other tribes, including whites whom they took captive) appeared to have been little more than chattel. (Hämäläinen makes some arguments that whites only saw things from the outside and that women had "a lot of influence" inside the home, but this is a very old and rather unpersuasive argument - sure, first wives probably got to boss around secondary wives, and the women made housekeeping and child-rearing decisions. They were still treated terribly even by European standards of the time.)
In his closing chapter, Hämäläinen mentions Cormac McCarthy and his harrowing description of the Comanche in Blood Meridian as an example of white writers who have depicted the Comanche as nothing more than plains warriors and terrors.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."
The thing is, while Cormac McCarthy's descriptions are gruesome and exaggerated for literary effect, he wasn't making this shit up. Blood Meridian was based on historical events, and the Comanche, when they made war, really were terrors. It's absolutely true that that's not all there was to them, and I appreciate Hämäläinen showing us a more complete view of the Numunu.
But I cannot say I'm sorry that the Comanche no longer ride the plains.
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