The Comanche Empire

Abstract

The trend in the field of Native American history has been to discard Euro-American biases of past scholarship and to place Indian agency at the center of the historical process. Typically, these new histories illuminate how indigenous peoples accommodated to outside pressures in order to survive as coherent cultural entities. In this lengthy study, Pekka Hämäläinen goes one step further by showing how the Comanche people 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. The author traces the development of what he terms the Comanche Empire from its embryonic beginnings on the southern Plains at the outset of the eighteenth century to the height of its expansion and power in the first half of the nineteenth century. During this period of Plains hegemony, argues the author, the Comanche Empire was nothing short of an international powerhouse. The Comanches — rather than Spain, Mexico, the United States, or some other Indian polity — called the shots.Drawing from a variety of written sources, mostly generated by Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. administrators, Hämäläinen clarifies the major periods of Comanche expansion and its dynamics. He employs the analytical methods of both the humanities and the social sciences and remains attentive to “Comanche motives and meanings” (p. 13). Central to Comanche life were two particularly valuable commodities, the bison and the horse. The exploitation and management of livestock led to periodic modifications in Comanche political organization that, in turn, enabled manipulation of a vast trade network. At its height, the Comanche Empire incorporated peripheral economies well beyond its territorial base. Comanches traded for or raided livestock from Hispanic settlements in New Mexico, Texas, and ultimately as far south as Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luís Potosí. They complemented their limited diet with foodstuffs procured from indigenous groups on their eastern border, augmented their weaponry with guns and ammunition acquired from French and Anglo traders along the corridors of the Mississippi-Missouri waterway, and provided the livestock that revolutionized indigenous culture in the northern Plains. The empire’s sudden and precipitous decline after the U.S. Civil War was brought on not so much because of Euro-American solutions to the “Comanche problem,” but rather because climatic conditions severely affected the fragile ecosystem of Comanchería and undermined the horse-bison economic foundation of Comanche clout.There is much to commend in this formidable study, and those interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century borderlands, Mexican, and U.S. history will want to read and consider the work. Specialists may quibble with Hämäläinen’s characterization of Comanche political organization as an “empire”; they may doubt that Spain’s long-standing imperial aim was one of continual expansion, as the author claims, or that Indian policy in New Spain’s far north was so neatly “top-down” and imperial in scope; and they may feel that the struggles of the young Mexican nation are given short shrift. Even nonspecialists may find some of the author’s assertions to be a bit overblown — a product, perhaps, of his Comanche-centeredness. The Comanche arrival on the southern Plains, for example, is deemed “one of the key turning points in early American history” (p. 18). Comanche expansion past the Llano Estacado to the Balcones Escarpment in Texas is touted as “one of the most explosive territorial conquests in North American history” (p. 55); and the racial complexity and ambiguity resulting from Comanche slavery is regarded as the “crucible which forged Anglo-American understandings of Mexicans as a mixed, stigmatized, and subordinate class” (p. 359). In a similar vein, Hämäläinen tends to portray Comanchería as the primary focal point of imperial and national administra tors, largely ignoring other, greater concerns that may have occupied their attention. The Spanish monarchy faced uprisings on the peninsula and in the colonies (including a full-blown Andean rebellion), Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, and colonial wars of emancipation. The fledgling Mexican nation had to deal with the delicate matters of state building and economic resuscitation after independence. And in the United States, slavery, immigration, and the looming sectional crisis were serious issues. Efforts to control Comanchería from the outside may have failed, but if looked at from a variety of other “centers,” Indian policy in what ultimately became the American Southwest, while important, was not the only thing to worry about.These points aside, Pekka Hämäläinen succeeds admirably in explaining the internal logic and coherence of Comanche power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, in doing so, provides a new way to understand the historical development of the greater Southwest. Rubbing against the grain of traditional scholarship, this Comanche-centered interpretation of events is bound to shake things up. The greater Southwest will never quite look the same.