Pekka Hamalainen’s
The Comanche Empire serves as a
well-written account that embodies the trend in Native American history to
discard Euro-American biases of past scholarship and to place Indian agency at
the center of the historical process.
Hamalainen demonstrates how the Comanche accommodated to outside
pressures in order to survive as coherent cultural entities, but goes further
by showing how they not only adapted to new political and economic realities
wrought by various imperial projects but also competed with and bested European
and Euro-American powers in controlling the heartland of the North American
Continent. In doing so. Hamalainen
tells the story of expansion with a reversal of usual historical roles, in
which Indians expand, dictate and prosper, and European colonists resist,
retreat and struggle to survive.[i] This ambition leads Hamalainen to
reveal that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Comanche turned the
Southwest into a boundless resistant indigenous empire. This paper is intended to portray how
the Comanche’s ecological base, monopoly of trade, ability to adapt to Western
technologies and flexible social structure allowed them to invert projected
colonial trajectory and bring much of the colonial Southwest under their sway
and at the same time explain the failures of Spanish and Mexican colonialism
and the nature and course of United States conquest.
The
power of the Comanche cannot be understood without first playing on the
importance of their ecological system of the horse, grass and bison
complex. The abundant grasslands
present in the environment they lived in made Comanche monopoly on horses and
bison hunting possible. The horses’ ability to convert plant life into muscle
power tapped into the seemingly inexhaustible pool of thermodynamic energy
stored in the grasses. This in
turn, led the Comanche to use
horses as hunting tools to harness the enormous biomass stored in the bison
herds.[ii] The horse served to both simplify and
expand Comanche economy. The
effectiveness of mounted hunting allowed the Comanche’s to dismiss their
gathering system and switch to specialized bison hunting and horse herding. This resulted in a dual economy of
hunting and pastoralism. Using this new economic system, the Comanche reared
horses for part of the year, while following the bison herds the rest of the
year. The semi-nomadic way they
lived made it possible to control and exploit the environment of the Great
Plains. The effective hunting of
bison also insured both an adequate food supply consisting of protein and
materials to make clothing and other essential needs. Through horses serving as both vehicles for travel and as commodities
to be traded, the Comanche’s dominated long-distance trade networks and
extended their raiding spheres far beyond their core area. This enabled Comanche’s to eliminate
Spain’s edge on colonial expansion.
By controlling trade, the Comanche’s dictated where resources were
allocated, thus in effect brought Spanish colonialism under their control. It is also important to
note that frequent raids deep into Spanish territory weakened the Spanish
military that were ineffective in protecting Spanish settlements and Indian
encroachment. The thinly colonized
Hispanic lands had no way of halting Indian raiding parties that extracted
their horses, and thus the Spanish submitted to becoming tributary subjects of
the Comanche. The Hispanic peoples
gave the Comanche gifts in return for leaving their herds alone. This tributary gift giving weakened the
treasury of Spain and Mexico and forced them as subjects of the Comanche
Empire.
As
eluded to earlier, the Comanche ecological system enabled them to effectively
form a monopoly on trade in the Southwest, which greatly expanded their
power. Their horse economy also
supported a thriving exchange economy.
This exchange economy gave access to vegetables and grains as well as
guns, gunpowder and metals.[iii]. Vegetables and cereals were collected
through massive trade networks, which linked tribes of the east within the
network of the Comanche empire. By
allying with neighboring native groups, the Comanche’s ensured a system of
trade and at the same time created a buffer between them and the expansionist Euro-American
forces of the East. Comanche power
in horse trade also enabled them to become strong trade partners with the
expanding United States. In return
for horses, the Comanche amassed expansive quantities of both guns and
gunpowder. In a sense, it can be
understood that United States trade with the Comanche played a major role in
weakening Spanish power. Through
the guns and firepower supplied by the United States, the Comanche successfully
kept the Spanish at their will.
Another major component in Comanche trade was their monopoly on the
slave trade. While they raided
Spanish lands for cattle, they did also for human capital. The Comanche used their slaves as trade
collateral and also used them to work in their growing dualist economy. Slaves mainly worked in horse rearing
and domestic chores and were sometimes adopted into the family. The taking of slaves both frightened
and terrified Spanish settlers. The
constant fear and ineffective way in dealing with them prompted many Spanish
settlers to give up their lands and return to areas away from Comanche
aggression.
Another
way the Comanche’s maintained power in the interior of the United States, was
the way the adapted to Western technologies, especially weapons, diplomacy and
disease. With the use of the horse
and adapting to western guns and firepower the Comanche were able to exert
control over the Southwest.
Western weaponry allowed the Comanche to not only mount a strong
military force, but it also allowed for the efficiency of bison hunting. The horse and gun allowed efficient
killing, reducing both time and effort.
In regards to
diplomacy, the Comanche effectively exploited it to meet their needs. The
Comanche were adept at drawing native nations into its sphere of
commercialization. The movement
west of native tribes because of encroaching American settlement and pressures
of Indian groups caused an influx of people upon Comancheria territory. While a clash was inevitable and
immediate, the Comanche soon invited the removed Indians to become middlemen
who facilitated the movement of goods among the centers of wealth around
them. By adapting other native
tribes into their commercial realm, the Comanche refigured trade to distant
markets but also surrounded Comancheria with important buffer zones against
white setllement. These Indian
alignments halted the encroachment of United States and Texas settlers who
feared a massive joint tribal retaliation. Another aspect of the alliances with native tribes is that
it opened Comancheria to open commercial trade with American markets. Thus, in abstract, the thriving trade
zone of eastern Comancheria meant the removal of indigenous nations from the
east Indian territory to the west could continue. Another way the Comanche used diplomacy in their favor
was the fact that they did not recognize national boundary lines and legal
obligations. Even though the
Spanish and later Americans established boundaries denoting their territory. Comanche’s did not follow them. In their eyes, all land was free and
available to whoever had the ability to use it. Thus they raided deep into Spanish territory. Likewise, even though the Comanche’s
agreed to formal trade relations with the Spanish, the Comanche did not see the
trade partnership in the same way.
Comanche’s traded and dealt with whoever they could gain the most from
and make the most profit. Trade
agreements meant nothing to them and the Comanche a lot of the time doubled
dealt with both the Spanish and Americans.
The
Comanche also successfully adapted to diseases brought by western
settlers. While the humid
temperatures of the coast brought the indigenous there terrific population loss
from western diseases, the dry air of the Southwest and Great Plains halted the
spread of disease to an effect not as dramatic as other parts of North
America. Another, more
exploitative way the Comanche dealt with diseases was the practice of marrying
and fornicating with western women.
By fornicating with western women, the Comanche successfully produced
offspring who were tolerant to western diseases. And while disease decimated the Comanche at first, over time
they became tolerant of western diseases due to the increased numbers of
racially mixed offspring.
One
more basis of Comanche power can be understood through their flexible and
adaptive social structure.
Comanche society was very hierarchical. While the men hunted bison, went on raiding missions and
controlled the household, the women and children reared horses and did domestic
work. However, not just Comanche
men enjoyed power. Slave men, also
had the ability to rise up in the ranks
and become warriors and hunters.
Most male slaves taken by the Comanche were young boys, who could be
raised and nurtured in Comanche ideals.
Older men proved too much of a risk as they would likely never repel
western ways which they have learned.
As a society, the Comanche were also very mobile. Their hunting and pastoralist economy
was unfit to foster large permanent settlements and thus they lived in a semi-nomadic
way migrating in different times of the year to follow the bison herds and the
fresh grasses to raise their horses.
The lack of permanent settlement proved it difficult for another power
to launch an attack on the Comanche that would cripple them. Because members of Comanche society
were always separated and never cloistered, it was only possible to attack a
portion of the empire and never inflict massive losses. The semi-nomadic structure of the
Comanche thus made it difficult for the Spanish and United States to amount
successful control over the Comanche Empire.
Politically,
the Comanche Empire was distant but unified. All Comanche units or households lived distantly from each
other. The semi-nomadic ways and
need to raise horses allowed the Comanche unit to live fairly independently,
with each unit or family containing a male that held power. Usually the most powerful male was the
one that had multiple wives and could produce the most goods. While the Comanche were so distant from
each other, in times of toil they could easily unite. All the heads of family would join together in a great joint
meeting and discuss the problem at hand.
All the males had equal power in the assemblies, and thus made decisions
as a single polity or unified empire.
This ability of the Comanche to unify and amass great forces greatly
halted American and Spanish expansion, as they feared conflict with a massive
Comanche force.
Lastly,
while the systems, which constituted Comanche power made them, a superpower in
the Great Plain and Southwest, they also led to the collapse of the Comanche
Empire in the 1870’s-1880’s. The
center of Comanche power caved in with the sharp declines of bison herds. The Comanche had exploited the land
beyond its sef-sustaining ecological stability. There had simply been too many Comanches and their allies
raising too many horses and hunting too many bison on too small a land
base. The Comanche could not move
to other lands because there whole economy relied on the grasslands. The Comanche ability to adapt and
incorporate other groups into their empire eventually led to their demise. The incorporation of removed Indian
groups, facilitated American expansion and led to increased competition over
bison on which they ultimately were being killed faster than they could
reproduce. When the bison fell, so
did the Comanche Empire. The
Comanche trade networks collapsed because they had no bison meat to trade and
their whole lifestyle became unglued.
Powerless with the collapse of trade, Comanche’s were placed in
reservations by the fast encroaching Americans. There, the Comanche were forced to live permanently and
could not continue to live the way they had for much of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The
Comanche’s rapid decline, tells a great deal about the nature of their power
system. They were not a tightly
structured, self-sustaining entity but rather a system based on networks of
power.[iv] The lack of centrality in Comanche
Empire therefore allowed the decline to move rapidly and forcefully.
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