Comanchero

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The Comancheros were a group of 18th- and 19th-century traders based in northern and central New Mexico. They made their living by trading with the nomadic Great Plains Indian tribes in northeastern New Mexico, West Texas, and other parts of the southern plains of North America. [1] The name "Comancheros" comes from the Comanche tribe, in whose territory they traded. They traded manufactured goods (tools and cloth), flour, tobacco, and bread for hides, livestock and slaves from the Comanche. As the Comancheros did not have regular access to weapons and gunpowder, there is disagreement about how much they traded these with the Comanche.

Contents

History

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 about 1700. During the first half of the 18th century the Comanche gradually spread their area of occupation throughout the Southern High Plains and large areas of Texas, where they largely displaced the tribal peoples who had lived there prior to the coming of the Spaniards, mostly the Apache, who were themselves an earlier migrant group of Athabaskan peoples from the North.

In 1719, the Comanches made the first recorded raid for horses upon the settlements of the Rio Grande Valley. For the next 60 years, the relations of the Comanches with the Spanish and Pueblo settlements was a patchwork of alternate trading and raiding, with different bands being sometimes at peace and sometimes at war with the settlements along the Rio Grande. 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 continued until 1779, when a 500-man army led directly [2] by the new young governor, Juan Bautista de Anza, and including 200 native auxiliaries, undertook a punitive expedition against the largest and most active group of Comanche raiders, who were led by a man known as Green Horn (Cuerno Verde), and, surprising the Comanches in their camp, killed Green Horn and dealt a severe defeat to the Comanches. [2] This show of force resulted in various Comanche war leaders acceding to peace over the next several years. [3] By the end of 1785 all, or substantially all, of the Comanche bands had agreed. On 28 February 1786 at the Pecos Pueblo a treaty between the Comanche and the Spanish in New Mexico was signed between Governor de Anza and Ecueracapa, a Comanche war chief who had been selected as a plenipotentiary for the Comanche nation. [4]

This treaty opened the way for the full development of the Comanchero trade. Prior to this New Mexico trade with the Comanche had been essentially limited to Comanche attendance at trade fairs at the Taos and Pecos Pueblos, and trade with the Spanish settlers at Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Valencia and Tome. Although there was no doubt intermittent trading between small groups of Pueblos and Spaniards with various Comanche bands on the Southern High Plains prior to 1780, the real Comanchero trade grew and flourished after that year.

From the 1780s until the mid-19th century, the Comanchero trade flourished at different locales on the Southern High Plains, notably in northeastern New Mexico at Cejita de Los Comancheros in present-day Harding County and in the Palo Duro Canyon area of Texas near Quitaque in present-day Briscoe County.

When the U.S. government commenced its war against the Comanches after the American Civil War, their Comanchero allies and relatives assisted the Comanche resistance by supplying firearms and ammunition to the tribes. The US Army's attempts to interdict this trade were relatively unsuccessful until the winter of 1874–1875, when US Army troops under General Ranald Mackenzie attacked and defeated five camps of Comanches in Palo Duro Canyon, burning the camps and capturing and destroying 1400 horses. 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. This brought an end to the old Comanche and Comanchero trade relationship, which had existed for almost 100 years.

Ethnicity

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." [5] Some historians and writers have referred to the Comancheros as Mexican traders. While traders from Mexico were occasionally involved with the Comanchero trade, by far the majority were from New Mexico, Hispanics and people of mixed ethnicity. New Mexicans of the time were the descendants of the Spanish colonial settlers and soldiers and the Native American peoples of New Mexico. The native peoples in New Mexico included the Pueblo, the Comanche, the Apache, the Kiowa, and the Navajo. The Comancheros are distinguishable from the Ciboleros, the buffalo hunters from New Mexico. Both Comancheros and Ciboleros, however, were primarily Hispanics from New Mexico.

Film and television roles

Comancheros feature as villains and outlaws in many classic western films and television shows.

See also

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The Great Plains Indian trading networks encountered by the first Europeans on the Great Plains were built on a number of trading centers acting as hubs in an advanced system of exchange over great distances. The primary centers were found at the villages of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, with a surplus of agricultural produce that could be exchanged. Secondary centers were found at the villages of the Pawnee, Kansa, and Osage on the central great plains, and at the Caddo villages on the southern plains. The Dakota rendezvous was an important annual trading fair among the Sioux. European demand for fur changed the relations of the plains, increased the occurrence of war, and displaced several Indian nations that were forced away by the Sioux coming from the east. On the northern plains, European trade lay in the hands of the Hudson's Bay Company, although most of the territory belonged to France, and later Spain. European trade on the central plains was controlled by French merchants, first from New Orleans, later from St. Louis. From the mid-1700s', the Comanche became an increasingly important military and commercial factor on the southern plains, forcing the Apaches into the mountains, and exchanging goods and spoils with the Southwestern trading networks hubs in New Mexico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish peace treaties with the Comanche</span>

Spanish peace treaties with the Comanche in 1785 and 1786 resulted in a permanent peace between the Comanche and the Spanish colony in New Mexico and a lengthy, albeit interrupted, peace between the Comanche and the Spanish in Texas. Since their first contacts with the Spanish in 1706, the Comanches had raided the colonies and been a threat to their continued existence. In the 1780s several factors combined to give both sides the incentive to negotiate peace treaties which resulted in expanded trade between the Spanish and the Comanche and a combined effort to defeat their mutual enemy, the Apache.

References

  1. ↑ Wishart, David J. (ed.). "Comancheros". Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
  2. 1 2 Thomas, Alfred Barnaby (ed.) (1932) "Governor Anza's Expedition against the Comanche 1779" Forgotten Frontiers: A Study of the Spanish Indian Policy of Don Juan Bautista de Anza, Governor of New Mexico, 1777-1787 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, pp. 66-71 OCLC   68116825
  3. ↑ Thomas, Alfred Barnaby (ed.) (1932) "Governor Anza Dictates Comanche Peace 1786" Forgotten Frontiers: A Study of the Spanish Indian Policy of Don Juan Bautista de Anza, Governor of New Mexico, 1777-1787 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, pp. 71-83 OCLC   68116825
  4. ↑ A full translation of the treaty is set out at Thomas, Alfred Barnaby (ed.) (1932) "The Spanish-Comanche Peace Treaty of 1786" Forgotten Frontiers: A Study of the Spanish Indian Policy of Don Juan Bautista de Anza, Governor of New Mexico, 1777-1787 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, pp. 329-332 OCLC   68116825
  5. ↑ Gregg, Josiah (1847) Diary and letters of Josiah Gregg: southwestern enterprises, 1840-1847, published 1941 Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK;
  6. ↑ "The Last Comanchero: Cheyenne". Internet Movie Database. January 14, 1958. Retrieved August 31, 2014.

Bibliography

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