Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War

Abstract

IN THE SUMMER OF 1845, amid mounting concern that the United States and Mexico would go to war over Texas, the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin reported that a Comanche Indian force of “extraordinary magnitude” was preparing to descend upon the “weakened population” of northern Mexico. According to the editors, the whole of the Mexican north would soon be “engulfed in a terrible Indian war.” This fact would “powerfully influence political relations” and “would have to be considered as a new element in diplomatic calculations.” The translated article soon appeared in Mexican newspapers, including Durango’s Registro Oficial. The paper’s editors admitted that Comanches posed a tremendous threat, but blamed their “philanthropic” American neighbors for that. From Durango’s perspective, Americans were “impelling” and “inviting” Indians across the frontier, encouraging “the evils that always attend the depredations of the savage,” all with an eye to acquiring lands that excited the “insatiable greed” of the United States.1 This cross-border conversation had a broad and tragic context. In the early 1830s, following what for most had been nearly two generations of imperfect peace, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, and several different tribes of Apaches dramatically increased their attacks upon northern Mexican settlements. While contexts and motivations varied widely, most of the escalating violence reflected Mexico’s declining military and diplomatic capabilities, as well as burgeoning markets for stolen livestock and captives. Indian men raided Mexican ranches, haciendas, and towns, killing or capturing the people they found there, and stealing or destroying animals and other property. When able, Mexicans responded by attacking their enemies with comparable cruelty and avarice. Raids expanded, breeding reprisals and deepening enmities, until the searing violence touched all or parts of nine states. These events had powerful but virtually forgotten consequences for the course and outcome of the U.S.-Mexican War. In pursuing their own material, strategic, and cultural goals, indigenous polities in the Mexican north remade the ground upon which Mexico and the United States would compete in the mid-1840s. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined critical sectors of northern Mexico’s