Thank you gentlemen, just the sort of input I was hoping for
Before continuing I would like to make an observation if I ain't already. Used to be before I got older I woulda thought 1830 was way-early on the Plains Frontier, heck even the 1850's seemed early.
See, the fundamental nature of America hasn't changed all that much in the forty odd years I've been living here. Cities and suburbs then, more suburbs and more minorities now, but the basic nature of our society aint changed all that much, not yet. Might be still be about the same situation twenty years from now should I live to my seventies.
But consider, Josiah Gregg was born in 1808 in Tennessee, at a time maybe half of the country north of the Ohio was still Indian Country in the time of Tecumseh.
By the time Gregg was twenty, and heading out to Santa Fe, that was all done with, the tide of settlement having moved across the Mississippi.
Lets take a Comanche of the same age in that same era and give him a 75 year life span: When he was born, the Comanches were at their zenith, in control of maybe two-thirds of Texas, fabulous wealth in horses and buffalo.
In his twenties, a sudden pouring of traders across their country down the Santa Fe trail, and the establishment of Bent's Fort. Immigrating White folks like the Bents greatly changing Comanche society, even as the Indians welcomed those changes at the time. By the time he was 30 that Comanche could be attending huge trade fairs at Bent's Fort, said fairs fed by tons of Euro trade goods carried on steamboats ascending into Missouri.
Two years later he could have been on the Linnville Raid and seen a huge swath of East Central Texas lost to White settlement.
By his thirties he could have been raiding into Mexico after enormous quantities of slaves and livestock. Said livestock traded north and east. All this time Comanche numbers would be steadily whittled by conflict and disease.
Around his 40th birthday the great cholera epidemic of '49 would have arrived, carrying off as many as 10,000 Comanches within a single year, half the tribe.
In his fortiestoo major drought and accompanying famine, pushing whole bands to accept handouts, the White settlement line now encompassing perhaps the whole Eastern Third of the Comancheria he had known as a teenager. Most people he had known from his teenage years would likely be long dead. A steady stream of immigrants now crossing Comancheria.
In his fifties, if he weren't already on a reservation, a reprieve of sorts, the War Between the States. And a shift in economy too, raiding the Texas Frontier for livestock to be traded to those OTHER Whites now running New Mexico.
In his sixties the end of independence. I would say the end of a way of life but that way of life had already changed radically in his lifetime.
Also in his sixties, the utter transformation of what had been Comancheria: The final extermination of the remnant buffalo herds, the arrival of the cattle ranchers even on the Llano Estacado, and the crossing of the continent by the railroads.
By the time he was 75? 1883, Prob'ly wouldn't hardly recognize the place, the conditions of his raising like a figment of his imagination.
Reminds me of that legendary Chinese curse... "May you live in interesting times."
Birdwatcher
