Comanchero

Prior to the coming of the Spanish, with their horses, into the American Southwest, with early explorations beginning in the 1540s and permanent settlement in the late 1590s, the people who came to be known as Comanches did not live in the Southern High Plains.

The Comanches, a Shoshonean people, migrated from the North and arose as a separate and distinct tribe in the early 18th century, largely as a result of having obtained breeding stocks of horses after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

They migrated southward, through the Rocky Mountains and into the Southern High Plains, where they and their Shoshonean kinsmen, the Utes, began to appear at trade fairs in Taos, at about 1700.

During the mid-18th century (1750–1780), the plains tribes, notably the Comanche, but also the Apache and other tribal groups, raided the Pueblos and Spanish settlements for horses, corn and slaves with ever-increasing frequency.

This defeat, and loss of their horses, camps and food supplies, caused the last band of the free-roaming Comanches, the Kwahada under Quanah Parker, to surrender to reservation life at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.

Josiah Gregg described these traders as, "These parties of Comancheros are usually composed of the indigent and rude classes of the frontier villages, who collect together several times a year, and launch upon the plains with a few trinkets and trumperies of all kinds, and perhaps a bag of bread or pinole.