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Thanks, what I find really interesting in the maxims for success common to Comanche society and our own.

1) A great emphasis was placed on personal initiative.
2) The right to accumulate personal wealth was inviolate.
3) Said wealth was reinvested to create more wealth.
4) And nobody really gave a damn who your father was, there were numerous examples of captives rising through the ranks, including a few White and Black folks.

What Hamakeinen does noticeably omit however is what looms large in the Texas conciousness; nowhere does he make anything more than vague and indirect references to the sadistic torture of captives.

Unfortunate, as it brings the whole work into question.

Birdwatcher

My take on the book was that he was emphasizing the economic aspects of the Comanche rise to power.

When horsepower was king, the Comanches ruled, when the Comanches outnumbered the anglos, they dominated, when the Comanches had a quiver of 20-30 arrows against the whites single shot rifles and pistols, they ruled.

When the Texans became horsemen, when they got repeating rifles and pistols, and became proficient with them, when their population went from 20,000 to 600,000, Texans started to dominate (some measles, cholera or smallpox might have helped as well.)

Clearly, any sodbusters caught out alone were toast.

Torture is a cultural construct, that doesn't really impact the economics, except as it reduces the ability of slaves to do economic work (for the purposes of this analysis).

Sycamore

The problem is, where's the bodies? 'Cept for one or two occasions, the Texans and then US forces fought nothing more than skirmishes with the handfuls of Comanches they occasionally caught up to.

Things remained that way until the the US Cavalry using overwhelming force systematically ran them down in the 1870's, even then managing to kill but few, but making their continued existence on the plains as anything but impoverished wraiths impossible.

Disease? Indications are that it carried off 10,000 Comanches within a five year period beginning in 1849. If so, no other cause even came close, a familiar pattern that had been recurring over and over again since before the Pilgrims landed in Massachussetts and found piles of human bones.

Next to that, rainfall. Aint for nothing the symbol of the Plains in general and Texas in particular is the Aeromotor windmill, pumping water from underground, necessary for livestock even in wet years. The Comanches didn't have that option.

No place I am aware of can make one more aware of the catastrophic power of drought than Central Texas. In wet years the herbaceous growth is literally over your head, in dry years those very same areas are bare dirt. Horses and buffalo cant eat dirt, Hamalainen talks about the appearance of the classic signs of malnutrition among Comanche kids during the continuing drought in the 1850's.

1860's: the rains come back so the Comanches had mobility again, this coincident with the disappearance of anything resembling organized frontier protection in wartime Texas. Even so, by the 1870's the couple of thousand Comanches still out were best classed as not wild but merely feral, in that they were working a scam of seasonally relying upon handouts from the reservations in Oklahoma, and then deriving a living based upon stealing Texas cattle of all things.

Hanalainen going on to describe how this trade in stolen livestock was actively abetted for years by moneyed interests in New Mexico.

Naturally, Comanches successfully rustling Texas cattle by the thousands every year, just like the serious whupping the Texas Confederate forces got from the Kickapoos during those same years, aint something thats gonna get immortalized in popular Texas lore. Said systematic livestock raiding continuing after the end of the war into the 1870's despite an exploding Texas population.

One is reminded of Blue Duck's line in "Lonesome Dove"...

"I stole horses, burned farms, killed men, raped women and stole children all over your territory and until today, you never even got a good look at me!"

It was overwhelming forces of US Cavalry guided by Tonkawas, Shawnees, Delawares and Black Seminoles that finally put a stop to it, and brung down the end of an era.

Birdwatcher

The demise of the Buffalo is what ended the Comanche nation, as well as that of the Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho allies. The soldiers hastened their roundup onto the reservations, but the Buffalo hunters and the killing off of the Bison herds is what sealed the doom of the southern plains Indians. The Kansas herd, roughly those Buffaloes in Kansas and extending clear into Indian Territory and extreme north Texas, were essentially gone by the winter of 1873-74. The hunters moved onto the Llano Estacado during that winter and were not molested by the US Army. The combined force of southern Plains Indians attacked them at the 'walls in 1874 and were rebuffed-and the slaughter of the Bison continued.

Quanah Parker's band surrendered at Fort Sill in 1875. IIRC, the last Indian action in Kansas was in 1878. Texas is more problematic due to Apaches in extreme western areas, but the Bison were gone by 1878 too.

The US Army was incidental. The lack of Buffalo doomed the Comanch way of life.

A tad more complex than that, and a testimony to Comanche ingenuity.

From Hamaleinen...

..in 1865 there were several million head of unprotected cattle wandering in Texas, free of fences and free for the taking ...an extended Comanche raiding spree lasted into the 1870's.... Comanches were becoming full-fledged pastoralists who relied on domestic animals for their material well being...

The decline in the bison herds slowed after 1865, but the herds had settled at such a low plateau that Comanches were forced to search for alternate means of subsistence...

..an Indian agent from New Mexico inspected the Eastern Llano Estacado in 1867, he found there a mixed Comanche group of seven hundred lodges with some fifteen thousand horses and three to four hundred mules. "They also have Texas cattle without number" Labadi reported "and almost every day bring in more." Eighteen war parties were in Texas plundering for horses, mules and cattle....

In 1872... a Yamparika [Comanche] speaker retorted that "..if the buffalo herds might fail... the Comanches determined to hunt buffalo only the next winter, then they would allow them a year or two to breed without molestation, and they would rely on Texas cattle for sustenance in the meantime....

...Texas lost 6,255 horses and 11,395 head of cattle to Indian pillaging between 1866 and 1873, but the real losses may have been several times higher... in 1873, in the space of three months, Comanches brought more than thirty thousand head of Texas cattle to New Mexico. Comanches also raided in southwestern Indian Territory - Chickasaws filed 123 separate depredation claims between 1869 and 1873...

Near collapse in 1865, the Comanches had experienced a dramatic revival after the Civil War. Shedding what had become a burden and keeping and modifying what was still usable, they pieced together a dynamic new economy from the fragments of the old one. They repaired a crippled subsistence system by shifting to intensive pastoralism, by diversifying their bison-centered hunting economy, and by accepting US annuities....

"The murders that have been Committed on our frontier" one 1867 Texas official despared "are so frequent that they are only noticed by their friends and acquaintances as they would notice ones dying a natural death." The cattle ranching industry whose prospects in 1860 had seemed so promising was nearly paralyzed "nearly every drove of Cattle that attempt to cross the plains are captured by Indians which will cut off the Stock raisers of the frontiers from a market for their beef cattle."


So, buffalo remained important, perhaps especially for bands that may have been separated from their livestock herds by contant pursuit, but buffalo weren't the only things with four legs out on the plains. Heck, Hamanlienen even cites a report of Comanche tipis made from horsehides.

Of course, all of this from one author, but a good one, who looked at things not recognised by popular lore.

News to me too.

Birdwatcher

Yes it's a tad more complex...than the US Army being credited for driving them onto reservations. The Army was able to do so due to the lack of hunting. The Plains Indians subsisted on Buffalo and the Buffalo on the Staked Plains were literally there in 1874 and not there by 1878. Not there as in having vanished from the face of the earth.

If you haven't read it, read Getting a Stand. The Time of the Buffalo is also good reading.

Look, the Comanche adapted. Of that there can be no question. The problem is, for the old ways of raiding to continue, the Comanch had to be nomadic. To be nomadic, the Buffalo had to exist. They were wiped out in the Comancheria in about six years. Thus, the raiding way of life vanished in the six years that the Buffalo were wiped from the area.

The Comanche also were just the dominant tribe, not the only one. The other three were there too.

...and yet the Comanches themselves, up until the Eastern Tribes showed up in such well-armed and capable numbers, were able to drive out and exclude competitors from those same buffalo plains at a time when buffalo were still present in the millions across six hundred miles of country.

By 1873 the gig was up for the Comanches and time was closing in. Heck, ALL the tribes eventually gave up, even Geronimo, whatever their way of life. Turns out constant pursuit and insecurity, even if you can escape death, is an untenable way to live. The Lipan Apaches in Texas for one discovered that very same thing when the Comanches arrived, and at that time there were still buffalo everywhere.

JMHO,

Birdwatcher

p.s. thirty thousand cows delivered to New Mexico in just three months by Comanches is quite a statement about lifestyle and economy.

"Even" Geronimo? I thought one of the big points of the thread was that the Comanch actually drove those Apaches out of their territory?

The Comanch were driven to the reservation literally, by the US Army, but the Army was only one of the forces that combined to bring about the set of circumstances that made the Comanch quit the raiding lifestyle. My point is that if you want to look at THE biggest factor, it was probably the Buffalo Hunt. The soldiers just rounded them up at that point and put them on the reservation, where they had to stay because it was game over.

You're quite a historian and thinker on this subject Birdy. My hat is officially off to you.

You and your family have a happy New Year.

Exactly, by denying those Plains Apaches peace and security, even in the midst of plenty.

Simply put, the Comanches gave up raiding because they could no longer get away with it. They came onto the reservations when staying off them became too costly.

Anyhow, Moore, Gwynne and Hamaleinen are the creative ones, I've just been parroting them.

..and a Hapy New Year to you too Sir

There's the understatement of the year, LOL!!

It was a multifactorial decline that led to the Comanche and other Indian tribes being subdued to reservation life, and I mean no disrespect nor am being quarrelsome when I say that disease was the primary force that defeated the Comanche.

Disease drove the decline of the Comanche, as it ded on the rest of the Plains, and had done in the Eastern tribes and on the West coast as well. Populations don't drop from 40,000 to 4,000 in 30 years for any other reason than disease (and its close cousin, famine, which clearly didn't apply to the Comanche in that time period). Warfare, loss of buffalo, economic forces are all contributing factors, but smallpox, measles and diphtheria killed 10 native Americans for every one killed by a white bullet.

This continues to be a fascinating thread, gentlemen. I've learned far more from you guys on this topic than I ever could have expected to when I posted the original book review. Thanks a bunch.

Scored "The Empire" and "Rip Ford's Texas" from Santy.

Enjoy, poboy!

I've got Hamlainen and Rip Ford on my Amazon wish list...

Thank You guys and Happy New Year.
'Though contributing nothing I have learned much and I'm grateful.

for you Comanchists, this timeline is kind of cool.

http://www.comanchelanguage.org/Comanche%20Timeline.htm

my family settled in Wise County in 1861, got chased out back to Missouri during the Unpleasantness when the Comanche pushed the frontier back, then returned in 1866 and ranched there again.

Wise County was a battleground, before and after the WBTS, as the attached map shows:

http://www.forttours.com/pages/hmwise.asp

next time I'm up there I'm going to spend a day with that map and visit some of the sites.

my great-grandfather Jeremiah was born in Texas in '61, lived to be 104 so I got to spend a lot of time with him. he had ridden in a punitive raid as a young teenager after their cattle were rustled by Comanche bravos raiding off their reservation in Oklahoma, and had bloodcurdling Indian raid stories he used to love to tell his great-grandkids.

The last Indian raid in Wise county was in 1875. Jeremiah had 17 children by three wives, many of whom moved farther west to Haskell and Stonewall counties in the late 1800s after it began to develop....although the counties were set up in the 50s, whites couldn't live there until the Comanche wars were over.

Nice timeline Steve. I would like to also say Thanks to all of you making this a most interesting thread.

What is known for certain is that on August 5th, 1840 a sizeable force of Comanches came down from the Texas Hill Country and crossed above San Antonio heading Southeast towards the Gulf.

Moore (Savage Frontier) who devotes the four books in his series to just ten years of Texas history (1835-1845) and so has the luxury of details, puts the number at over 600, including some women and children, and many Kiowas in the mix. The Kiowas lived north of the Comanches, in Western Oklahoma and the High Plains, so indeed at least some of this war party could have come down direct from the large treaty gathering up at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas.

Moore also states that there were a small number of Mexicans accompanying the war party. Coulda happened, in popular Texas history we generally overlook the fact that Mexicans had been wandering those plains for more'n a hundred years before Texas was independent.

There seems little question that the Cherokees, prior to their forcible expulsion from East Texas the year before this raid, had been in independent communication with Mexico. Wasn't mere chance either that Kickapoos, Seminoles and Black Seminoles while living in Oklahoma more than a decade later, were able to enter into contractual agreements with Mexico independent of any involvement by or knowledge of Americans.

Moore does a better job of pointing out too than most how indefinite the prospects of Texas really were in 1840. Though probably unexpellable by that time by Mexican forces, there weren't yet the critical mass of Anglos in the State to render the point moot. Indeed, IIRC, hostile Mexican forces would occupy San Antonio twice (??) more in the next few years.

Earlier in 1840, before the Comanche raid, defeated forces of a Federalist Mexican faction under General Antonio Canales had retreated into Texas as far north as the Medina River just south of San Antonio. These troops were allowed sactuary and Canales himself travelled to Austin and Houston to purchase supplies. Arrangements were made such that if an invasion from Mexico by the opposing Centralist faction was attempted, the Texan Frontier Regiment in San Antonio was to ally themselves with these Mexican Federalist troops to oppose the invasion.

The Commander of the Frontier Regiment, Lt. Col. William Fisher, the same guy who had presided over the Council House Fight, was removed from his post in early August (coincidentally concurrent with the Comanche Raid), when it was learned that he has raised a force of 200 Texan adventurers and entered into the service of Mexico on the Federalist side. This absence of an established chain of command perhaps accounting for the fact that few San Antonians appear to have been present at Plum Creek, where the invading Comanche raiders and their allies would be scattered.

Birdwatcher

Steve thanks for posting those
norm

Your people went back to Missouri during the war? My gosh, the Comanch couldn't have been worse than the Redlegs. Most people went from Missouri to Texas. The state capitol was relocated to Marshall, Texas. Lots of them never went back to Missouri either.

Indeed an interesting thread. We live smack in the middle of the area of the Comanche "Empire". Camp Auger was just up the river a couple of miles which was where a detachment of Buffalo Soldiers were at to help with the Comanche problem. A small running skirmish or two was reported right where I write this and a neighbor found an old Sharps carbine while digging around doing some construction. This is the area known as "The Big Pasture" and was where Quannah Parker hunted with Roosevelt along with Jack Abernathy who demonstrated how to catch wolves alive by hand.

You can still go to the Comanche Casino just up the road and leave with you ass full of arrows if not careful...

In popular Texas lore, the Great Comanche Raid of 1840 was a unique event, the Southern Comanche Nation mustering all their forces to strike the Texans a mighty revenge blow.

I suppose there was a lot of that in it, but raids on that scale certainly weren't unprecedented elsewhere, and a number of major raids involving hundreds of Comanches and Kiowas were launched in those years, all those OTHER big raids targeting Mexico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche%E2%80%93Mexico_Wars

Though we view them primarily as sadistic raiders, as the wiki link above and Hamaleinen ("Comanche Empire") point out, there was a strong commercial aspect to these raids, This from Hamaleinen...

Early nineteenth-century Comancheria was a dense and dynamic marketplace, the center of a far-flung trading empire that covered much of North America's heartland... The Comanche trade pump sent massive amounts of horses and mules to the north and east, enough to support the numerous equestian societies elsewhere on the Great Plains and enough to contribute to the western expansion of the American settlement frontier.

In return for their extensive commercial services Comanches imported enough horticultural produce to sustain a population of twenty to thirty thousand and enough guns, lead and powder to defend a vast territory against Native enemies as well as the growing, expansionist Texas Republic.

But that thriving exchange system was rapidly approaching the limits of its productive foundation... By the 1820's, the traditional raiding domains [to acquire livestock for trade] had become either exausted or unavailable... Comanches continued sporadic raiding in Texas... but the returns failed to meet their expansive livestock demands, which skyrocketed in the late 1830's and early 1840's when the opened trade with the populous nations recently arrived in the Indian Territory.

To keep their commercial system running, Comanches needed new, unexausted raiding fields, and they found them in Northern Mexico... Comanche raiding thus generated a massive northward flow of property from Mexico, a development promoted by many interest groups in North America... By the late 1830s it had become a common belief that "enterprising American capitalists' had established trading posts on the Comanche-Texas border in order to tap the "immense booty" that the Comanches, "the most wealthy as well as the most powerful of the most savage nations of North America", were hauling from northern Mexico.

Texas officials provided Comanche war parties free access through their state, hoping to direct the raids into Mexico, and even supplied southbound war bands with beef and other provisions.

Probly relevant that one of the early Jack Hays stories has him and his Rangers meeting with and providing beef cows to a Comanche raiding party going south, in that version "attempting to dissuade them from raiding"..

Many internet sources have it that the Great Comanche Raid of 1840 killed "hundreds of Texans". All of the authors we have been quoting here, even Fehrenbach, agree that the actual death toll was low; about twenty people all told. What the raid DID target however was horses, about two thousand rounded up and taken along during the five-day raid before Plum Creek. Horses, and as it turned out, large quantities of trade goods looted from Linnville.

Why a raid on that scale was never again attempted against the Texans may have had something to do with the heavy casualties the Indians suffered at Plum Creek (more than eighty dead, if you've been to Cabelas in Buda on I 35, the fleeing Comanches drove their stolen stock through that area). OTOH Comanches, right up until the end, were never noted for timidity.

Actual conditions at that time seem to agree with Hamalienen's account, by 1840 it may be that the Texan settlements at the edge of the plains were pretty much picked over. Small-scale livestock raids were incessant during those years. During the Great Raid, Ben McCullough, attempting to raise a body of men, sent word around the Gonzales TX area seeking for volunteers to assemble. One volunteer later recalled....

A larger number would have moved out, but for the very short notice of the intended expedition and the great difficulty of procuring horses the Indians having about a week before stolen a majority of the best in the neighborhood

Noah Smithwick, at that time living on Webber's Prairie over by Bastrop, expounds at length on the topic of the innumerable thefts of horses around the settlements at that time, and his exasperation when his own last two horses were taken "in the year of the Comet" (1843).

http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd18.htm

My stock of horses had been depleted till I had none left except a blind mare and a colt, the latter a fine little fellow, of which I was very proud. That being the year of a brilliant comet, I called my colt Comet. The mare being stone blind I had no apprehension of their being stolen, so I let them run loose, they seldom being out of sight of the house. But there came a morning when the blaze of the Comet failed to catch my eye when I sallied forth in search of it. Looking about I found moccasin tracks and at once divined that the horses were stolen.

When I found by the trail that there were only two Indians, I thought I could manage them, so I took my rifle and struck out on the trail, to which the colt's tracks gave me the clue. Crossing Coleman's creek I found where the mare had apparently stumbled in going up the bank and fallen. Coming to a clump of cedars a short distance beyond the creek and not daring to venture into it, I skirted around and picked up the trail on the further side, where the Indians, seemingly disgusted with the smallness of the haul, turned back toward the prairie. I kept right along the trail, and on gaining the top of the rise above "Half Acre," discovered the missing animals feeding.

I looked to the priming of my gun, and then scanning the vicinity without perceiving any sign of Indians, went to the mare, near by which on a tree I found a piece of dried bear meat, of which I took possession. It was then quite late in the afternoon and I had left home without eating any breakfast, but I had recovered my horses and felt in a good humor with the world. I went to the village, where I recounted the adventure, exhibiting the bear meat as a witness thereto. The boys swore that when the Indians found that the horses were mine they brought them back and left the meat as a gift of atonement.

The sequel, however, which came a few days later, developed the fact that they only abandoned the mare and colt to get a bigger haul, which they made in Well's prairie, and coming on back again, picked up the mare and colt, which they failed to return.

I was mad to recklessness. Taking my rifle on my shoulder and my saddle on my back, I walked four miles to Colonel Jones' to borrow a horse to pursue the marauders. With others who had suffered by the raid we followed on up to Hoover's bend on the Colorado, ten miles above Burnet, where upon breaking camp, they scattered in every direction; but here my Comanche lore came to direct the search.

Going to the ashes where the camp fire had been, I found a twig stuck in the ground with a small branch pointing northward, it having been so placed to guide stragglers. Taking the course indicated, we soon had the satisfaction of seeing the trail increasing, and presently some one called out: "Here's the Comets track." Guided by the Comet, we kept on to the Leon river, where were encamped the Lipan and Tonkawas, friendly tribes. They were in a state of commotion over the loss of their horses, the Keechis, who were the marauders in this instance, having taken them as they passed.

We followed them twenty days but never came up with them.

So it wasn't as if the Comanches were driven off in the aftermath of the Plum Creek fight, just that conditions on the Texan side of the plains probably weren't condusive to large raiding parties.

...and Noah Smithwick was a good man.

Birdwatcher