Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850

Abstract

In bright spring light on the Great Plains of two centuries ago, governorJuan Bautista de Anza failed in the last of the three crucial tasks that his superiors had set him as part of their effort to reform New Mexico's Comanche policy. Over half a decade, Anza had followed one success with another. He had brilliantly defeated the formidable Comanche nomnekaht (war leader) Cuerno Verde in 1779, and as a consequence in 1786, he had personally fashioned the long-sought peace between New Mexico and the swelling Comanche population of the Southern Plains. His third task was to persuade the Comanches to settle in permanent villages and to farm.' But the New Mexico governor found the third undertaking impossible. Observers of Plains Indian life for 250 years and committed to encouraging agriculture over hunting, the Spaniards were certain that the culture of the horse Indians was ephemeral, that the bison on which they depended were an exhaustible resource. Thus Anza pleaded with the tribes to give up the chase. The Comanches thought him unconvincing. Recently liberated by horse culture and by the teeming wildlife of the High Plains, their bands found the Arkansas River pueblo the governor built for them unendurable. They returned to the hunt with the evident expectation that their life as buffalo hunters was an endless cycle. And yet Anza proved to be a prophet. Within little more than half a century, the Comanches and other tribes of the Southern Plains were routinely suffering from starvation and complaining of shortages of bison. What had happened?2 Environmental historians and ethnohistorians whose interests have been environmental topics have in the two past decades been responsible for many of our most valuable recent insights into the history of native Americans since their contact with