Little Spaniard almost certainly led a much better life as a Comanche than he would have as a Mexican peon. OTOH in Josiah Gregg’s “Commerce of the Prairies”, (which like Noah Smithwick’s “Evolution of a State” is available entirely online)....
http://atlas.nmhum.org/pdfs/CommerceofthePrairies.pdfGregg at one point returns along the Santa Fe Trail with a Comanche in his party who had married a Mexican woman and lived in her village. At one point they were attacked by a party of Pawnees who, like the Tonkawas and the Omaha’s to name but two, raided deep into Comanche territory on foot with the intention of riding Comanche horses home.
Gregg’s guides on at least some trips were actually Mexicans from the New Mexico settlements who were also skilled with the bow and lance on horseback. Which brings up another significant presence on the plains almost completely overlooked in Pop History; Ciboleros, Mexican buffalo hunters from New Mexico and the El Paso settlements who drove their big ox-drawn two-wheeled carretas (carts) out onto onto the plains each fall to harvest buffalo on horseback with lances and bows.
When these same guys used those carts for trade we called em Comancheros. It was Mexican ox-cart guys who found Charles Goodnight’s delirious partner Oliver Loving wandering with his gangrenous arm wound up by the Pecos after that Comanche stand-off and who brung him in to Fort Sumner, this episode inspiring Mc Murty’s “Lonesome Dove”.
Even more written out of the Pop History script; San Antonio as the largest Mexican settlement in Texas also had its CIboleros, buffalo hides and meat being a major seasonal component of the household economy here.
For an insight into what made Comanches tick I highly recommend Pekka Hamalainen’s “Comanche Empire”
https://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History/dp/0300151179Hamalainen has it that the large numbers of Comanches and their even larger numbers of horses and mules comprised an unsustainable ecological burden in their own territories by the early 19th Century. Also the first market hunters on the High Plains were the Indians themselves, the Bent brothers locating Bent’s Fort where they did for that very reason. The buffalo herds were in steady decline from disease and over hunting decades before White hunters arrived to drive he nails into the buffalo herds’ coffin.
Also generally overlooked is the devastating Cholera epidemic of ‘49/‘50 which carried off an estimated 10,000 Comanches, fully half the tribe it was at that time.
Then followed the devastating dry years of the 1850’s which hammered the buffalo herds to the extent that, even with half the tribe gone, it was starvation that drove large numbers of Comanches onto their first reservation.
