Comanche history
They presided over a large area called Comancheria which they shared with allied tribes, the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache (Plains Apache), Wichita, and after 1840 the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.
By 1875, decimated by European diseases, warfare, a tide of Anglo settlement, and the near-eradication of the bison, the Comanche had been defeated by the U.S. army and were forced to live on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma.
In late spring the Comanche and Ute crossed the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and moved eastward onto the Great Plains where they hunted bison during the summer months.
[7] In the early 18th century the Ute and Comanche (who were probably the junior partners of the alliance at this time) established their primacy on the northern frontier of Spanish New Mexico, although their depredations consisted mostly of stealing livestock.
In 1716, the governor of New Mexico launched an attack against a peaceful Ute/Comanche camp near San Antonio Mountain, 140 km (87 miles) north of the capital of Santa Fe, killing and capturing many and enslaving the captives.
The Spanish governor organized an expedition to punish the Indians and an army of more than 700, mostly Pueblos and Apache, marched north to the Arkansas River valley and searched for two months without finding a single Ute or Comanche.
[8] In the 1720s, the Comanche completed the conquest of the Arkansas River valley of Colorado, and in the 1730s they became the first fully-mounted, bison-hunting nomads of the Great Plains—the first American Indians to make the cultural shift to an equestrian economy.
[12] The 1762 peace agreement broke down after 1767 and the Comanche embarked on an intense campaign which over several years killed hundreds of Spanish and Puebloans and left the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico in ruins.
With 800 men, including 200 Ute and Apache auxiliaries, he marched north and killed Cuerno Verde ("Green Horn") the most important Comanche war leader and many of his followers in the Greenhorn Valley south of Pueblo, Colorado.
A class of traders, called Comancheros, transported Spanish goods into the Comanche heartland in the Texas panhandle and traded for buffalo robes, meat, and horses.
[22] Initially, the Comanche in Texas traded meat and buffalo pelts to the Taovayas and other Wichita sub-tribes, who were farmers, for agricultural products, especially maize.
Meanwhile, the Spanish in Texas were also menaced by the powerful Osage tribe on its northeastern frontier and Apache raids south of the Rio Grande River in Mexico and began seeking peace with the Comanche.
An agreement with the southern branches of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes ended a wasting war on the Comanche's northern frontier and gained about 2,000 new allies.
[42] In response the Comanche under a surviving chief, Buffalo Hump, launched the Great Raid of 1840, sacking the towns of Victoria and Linville (near the Gulf of Mexico), killing several people, and capturing a huge amount of goods.
In 1826, responding to the increased threat, the government of Nuevo Leon forbade its citizens in the northern portions of the state to travel in the countryside except in groups of at least 30 armed and mounted men.
The Comanche delegation went east shortly afterwards and met President James K. Polk, but with the Mexican War just beginning, Congress had more important concerns, and the Senate adjourned without ratifying the treaty.
Army commanders felt they had no authority to enforce state laws, and meanwhile, Texas continued to operate its ranger companies, which were not under federal control, as military units.
Besides Caddo, Delaware, Wichita, and Tonkawa, the United States Indian agent, Robert Neighbors, convinced some Penateka Comanche to move to these locations.
Albert Pike, the newly appointed Indian Agent for the Confederate States of America, signed two treaties with Comanches in August, 1861; one with the Penateka, and a second with the Nokoni, Yamparika, Tenawa, and Kotsoteka.
For the same reasons, Texas had to send most of its men and soldiers east to fight against the Union, as a result, most of the federal forts and outposts that had held the Comanche at bay for a generation could no longer be manned and were abandoned.
While the rest of the nation was bleeding itself to death on eastern battlefields, the ranks of the Union army on the frontier were filled with men who were unemployed, did not wish to fight in the war, and hated Indians.
In the autumn of 1864, Colonel Kit Carson was sent at the head of a column from Fort Bascom, New Mexico into the Staked Plains to chastise the Comanches and Kiowa.
The Little Arkansas Treaty of 1865 gave the Comanches and Kiowa western Oklahoma, the entire Texas Panhandle, and promised annuities of $15 per person for forty years.
The Comanches had expected guns, ammunition, and quality goods; what they got were rotten civil war rations and cheap blankets that fell apart in the rain.
It was a bitter struggle, and General William Sherman finally ordered the army not to pay ransom for white captives held by Indians to avoid giving them incentive for further kidnappings.
"Great Warrior" Sherman was conducting an inspection tour of western posts, when a Kiowa war party noticed his lone ambulance and small escort.
At the request of the Secretary of the Interior, Texas Governor Edmund J. Davis paroled the Kiowa chiefs in October after they had served only two years on the condition that the raiding stop.
In June, 1874 a large Comanche-Cheyenne war party attacked twenty-three buffalo hunters camped in the Texas Panhandle at the site of Carson's 1864 battle at Adobe Walls.
For the Comanches, Cheyenne, and Kiowa, the major blow occurred when Mackenzie located a mixed camp hidden in Palo Duro Canyon (September 26–27).
He collected tolls on cattle herds that used the Chisholm Trail to cross the reservation and sold grazing rights to nearby Texas ranchers.
