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.)
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
