Comanche History - 1800-1850

1800-1850

With the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Americans acquired territory that included a portion of Comancheria, but during the next twenty years, American penetration of the Great Plains focused on the fur trade of the Missouri River. On the southern plains, French traders, now American citizens, continued their contacts with Wichita and Comanches. They were soon joined by an increasing number of Americans. Since much of the trade was conducted through the Wichita, Comanches remained distant and mysterious. American Indian agents in Louisiana were urged to make contacts with the "Hietans."

Several incidents in Texas, including the killing of the son of a Yamparika chief in 1803, almost led to war, but the intervention of the western Comanches maintained peace. In both Texas and New Mexico, Comanches joined with the Spanish army to fight Apaches. The most noteworthy success was when they helped General Ugaldi crush the Lipan in southern Texas (1789–90). The Lipan were badly mauled, and retreated across the Rio Grande into northern Mexico, but this was not beyond the reach of Comanches who continued to attack them for many years.

During the last years of Spanish rule, Texas was in chaos. The Hidalgo Revolt (1810) was followed by an attempt by American and Mexican adventurers to seize Texas (1812–13). American traders along the Red and Arkansas rivers were trading guns to Comanches for horses, and this new market increased the tempo of Comanche raids in Texas. A Comanche chief, El Sordo, split from his own people in 1810 and gathered a combination of Comanches and Wichita to raid Texas and Mexico for horses. He was arrested during a visit to Béxar in 1811 and imprisoned in Coahuila. A large Comanche war party went to Béxar to demand an explanation, only to be confronted by 600 Spanish soldiers. There was no battle, but relations between Texas and the Comanches were never the same.

Spanish rule was replaced by that of the Mexican Republic in 1821. The following year Francisco Ruiz arranged a truce with the Texas Comanche followed by a treaty of friendship signed in Mexico City in December. However, Mexico did not have the means to provide the gifts it had promised, and raiding resumed within two years. The Comanche peace with New Mexico disintegrated, and by 1825 there was war along the entire length of the Rio Grande. Chihuahua was hit particularly hard. Treaties signed at Chihuahua and El Paso (1826 and 1834) with the Comanches did not halt the raids. In 1831, New Mexico temporarily suspended Comanchero trading and stopped the cibolero (New Mexico buffalo hunters), but this also had little effect.

After the end of Spanish rule of Mexico in 1821, Anglo-Americans began to settle in Texas, increasing contact with the Comanches and other tribes. The Santa Fe Trail opened that year, between Missouri and Santa Fe. Contact between the anglos and Comanches was almost always friendly. There were exceptions, and as the most powerful tribe in the area, the Comanche were sometimes blamed for the actions of other tribes, such as the Wichitas, Pawnee and Osage.

During the 1830s, the major trading center on the southern plains was Bent's Fort, an American trading post on the Arkansas River in southeast Colorado. Although married to a Cheyenne woman, William Bent also traded with Kiowa and Yamparika, and became tired of the aggravation of keeping them apart when they came to trade. At his suggestion, the Cheyenne and Arapaho decided to meet with their adversaries, and a lasting peace was arranged between them. The "Great Peace of 1840", a landmark of southern plains diplomacy, was cemented by the gift of large numbers of Yamparika and Kiowa horses to the Cheyenne and Arapaho.

In 1835 Sonora re-established its bounties for scalps. Chihuahua and Durango followed, but by the 1840s, Comanche war parties were ranging all over northern Mexico, some staying for as long as three months. Comanche war parties usually found easy victims in Texas, and when Americans began to settle there after 1821, Comanches did not distinguish between Anglo and Hispanic settlers. In 1833 Sam Houston arrived in Texas as a United States representative to arrange a treaty with the Texas Comanches. There were some meetings, but Mexican officials began to wonder what he was doing in their country arranging a treaty with their Comanches, and he was asked to leave. Soon after Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, Houston became president of the new republic.

In May 1838, a treaty of peace and friendship was signed with the Texas Comanches, but it did not address the Comanches' main concern, a line between Comancheria and the white settlements. In the absence of an agreement on this, the whites steadily encroached, and the Comanches continued to raid. Houston wanted to set a line but was replaced in December by Mirabeau B. Lamar, a man determined to deal with problems with Indians by war.

In March 1840, a meeting between Texan officials and Comanche chiefs was held in San Antonio, under a flag of truce, to negotiate the release of thirteen known kidnap victims, mainly women and children, taken by Comanches during the previous ten years of Mexican rule. The chiefs met with the commissioners in the council house, while the accompanying Comanches waited under guard in the Court House yard. The Comanches brought a single captive to the meeting, claiming that the others had been sold on to other tribes. This was disputed by the captive, Matilda Lockhart, who said that other prisoners were being held for later ransoms. The commissioners were outraged, and the negotiations collapsed. Soldiers surrounded the council house to take the Comanche leaders hostage for exchange with the white captives still held. The Comanche chiefs tried to escape, and the Texans killed them. Fierce fighting between the Texans and the Comanches outside soon spread, leading to the deaths of thirty-three Comanches and six Texans.

The Comanches were outraged by the killing of their chiefs under a flag of truce. Hundreds of warriors approached San Antonio screaming their rage, but remained just beyond rifle-range. Then, suddenly, they were gone, and the Texans thought the crisis had passed. The Comanches had left to plan retaliation. When they got back to their camps, they killed many of the white prisoners they were planning to exchange.

Thirty-two Comanches, mostly women, had been taken prisoner. Negotiations led to the release of five white children in exchange for five Comanches. The remaining prisoners were strictly guarded for a time, but the guard was later relaxed, and all eventually escaped.

In August, several hundred Comanche warriors raided the heart of eastern Texas. Homes were burned, hundreds were killed, and before they stopped, the Comanches had reached the Gulf of Mexico near Victoria. Then, loaded with loot, the war party began an atypical slow retreat to the north. Perhaps because of their numbers, the Comanches were overconfident, but this gave the Texans time to organize. With the help of Tonkawa scouts, Texas militia ambushed the main body in the Battle of Plum Creek at Lockhart, Texas. Abandoning most of their spoils, the surviving Comanches escaped north. Afterwards, they would never again give the Texans such an easy target.

The Anglos in Texas were Americans, and the only reasons they had not been annexed by the United States in 1836 were northern Congressional resistance to another slave state and a dispute with Mexico over the southern boundary of Texas. While waiting for admission, the Texans in 1839 expelled the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Delaware that the Mexican government had encouraged to settle in eastern Texas to keep Americans out in the first place. Houston was re-elected president and set about repairing the damage done by Lamar's administration. He not only had to deal with Comanches, but a second war with Mexico (1841–42).

Without resources for a standing army, Texas created small ranger companies mounted on fast horses to pursue and fight Comanches on their own terms. Eventually armed with the first Colt revolvers, the Texas Rangers enjoyed considerable success against Comanches during the 1840s. However, Houston wanted peace, not war, and he was trusted by Comanches.

A treaty between the Republic of Texas and Texas Comanches was signed October, 1845 and ratified in December. It established a line of trading houses which would later function as the line between Texas and Comancheria, but this deliberately vague definition would be the source of future troubles. Spain had been an ally of the Americans for much of the Revolutionary War, but after the rebel triumph in 1783, had become concerned about the territorial ambitions of the new United States. Its fears proved justified as American settlement swept across the Appalachians into the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. To supply horses and mules for these immigrants, American traders were soon looking to the southern plains and were dealing with Comanches and Wichita.

Dr. John Sibley had the first official meeting with a Comanche "principal chief" in 1807 at Natchitoches. He gave presents, and later licensed an American trader for them. Other licenses followed. One of his successors, John Jamison, had other visits from Comanche chiefs in 1816 and 1817. These contacts and trading licenses were viewed with alarm in Spanish Texas. The traders not only sold firearms to Comanches and Wichitas, but provided a ready market for stolen horses and mules.

American problems with Comanches began during the 1820s with the relocation of tribes from east of the Mississippi River to Kansas and Oklahoma. The problem at first was not much with Comanches, but with the Osage, whose territory was directly affected. To defend themselves against the Osage, the Delaware, Fox, Sauk, Cherokee and others began to consider alliances with Comanches and other plains tribes. However, when the newcomers began hunting west of their new homes, they came into conflict with Comanches. To preclude the possibility widespread warfare, Colonel Henry Dodge led a large force of dragoons from Fort Gibson to western Oklahoma during the summer of 1835 as a show of force and to meet the Comanches. In August, the Hois (with the Wichita) signed the Camp Holmes Treaty with American representatives pledging peace and friendship with the Osage, Quapaw, Seneca, Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek. The treaty also reflected another American concern and guaranteed safe passage on the Santa Fé trail.

Within a year the Comanches regretted this agreement, and had destroyed their copy. When the United States annexed Texas in 1846, it inherited its problem with Comanche raiding and a boundary line between the settlements and Comancheria. An immediate step by the United States was to announce its authority and sign a treaty with the Comanches and other Texas tribes to replace the Texas treaty of the previous year. This was done in May 1846 on the upper Brazos River (Butler-Lewis Treaty). Signed by the Penateka/Hois Comanches (also Ioni, Anadarko, Caddo, Lipan Apache, Wichita, and Waco), the treaty promised, besides peace and friendship, trading posts, a visit by a Comanche delegation to Washington, D.C., and a one-time payment of $18,000 in goods. A boundary line was alluded to, but not defined.

The Comanche delegation went east shortly afterwards and met President James K. Polk, but with the Mexican War just beginning, congress had more important concerns, and the Senate adjourned without ratifying the treaty. By the time the treaty was amended and ratified in March 1847, the Comanches were certain they had been betrayed. War was averted only when traders and Indian agents advanced credit to send part of the promised gifts. When the amendments were read to the Comanches, the meeting almost ended, but eventually they agreed to the changes. Additional money was appropriated for more gifts, but once again, a boundary line was never established.

Meanwhile, there was a serious question over whose responsibility it was to deal with the Texas tribes, the federal or the state government. The problem was not settled until after the Civil War. In the interim, policy was set by both, and this was confusing, so the 1846 peace treaty brought very little peace to Texas.

In May 1847, Texas allowed the German settlers near Fredericksburg and New Braunfels to make their own treaty with the Texas Comanches. In exchange for land, the Germans promised a trading post and gifts. Unfortunately, the Germans not only encroached beyond the agreed boundary, but were slow to pay, and in response the Comanches made raids. A boundary line was eventually set by the Texas governor but was to be enforced by the American army which had taken over the line of Texas forts on the frontier. Army commanders felt they had no authority to enforce state laws, and meanwhile, Texas continued to operate its ranger companies, which were not under federal control, as military units. The Rangers did nothing to prevent encroachment of Comanche lands but would retaliate if the new settlements beyond the line were attacked. To make matters worse, only the Penateka had signed the 1846 treaty. The Nokoni, Tenawa, and other Comanches did not consider themselves bound by the agreement and continued to raid in Texas.

On the other side of Comancheria, many things had changed with the beginning of the Mexican War in 1846. An American army under General Stephan Watts Kearny seized Santa Fé and moved on to California. The Santa Fé Trail became a heavily-travelled military supply route, and forts were built to protect it. Five companies of Missouri volunteers were sent to garrison these posts during the summer of 1847 and quickly became engaged in fights with plains Indians. At least one of these at Fort Mann involved the Pawnee. In the other cases, the fights were probably with Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho, and the amount of Comanche involvement is uncertain.

The first part of 1848 was relatively calm, and during that year, Texas Comanches even provided guides for the survey of the route of the new Butterfield (California) trail across southern Texas to El Paso and California. The calm changed suddenly with the discovery of gold in California. As thousands of gold-seekers raced west, they needed horses, and the Comanches moved to meet this new demand. Horse raids increased in Texas, but the major target was northern Mexico. Comanche raids struck deep into Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora and Durango, reaching their peak during 1852 when they struck Tepic in Jalisco, 700 miles (1,100 km) south of the border at El Paso. To protect the immigrant routes across the plains, the United States called the "Peace on the Plains" conference at Fort Laramie (Wyoming) in 1851. This was an attempt to end, or at least limit, intertribal warfare by defining boundaries between tribal territories.

Almost every plains tribe attended and signed the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, and received gifts. The Comanches and Kiowa did not attend. A smallpox epidemic had broken out in their villages, and there was a deep distrust of the northern tribes. Since the Santa Fé Trail was a vital route, it was essential to reach an agreement with them. As the southern plains tribes gathered around Fort Atkinson for the distribution of the annuities from the Fort Laramie treaty, large groups of Kiowa and Comanches also came, and they were not in a good mood.

Eventually, 6,000 to 9,000 Indians were gathered in the vicinity, and the situation was becoming dangerous. The American agent took it upon himself to distribute $9,000 in gifts to the Comanches and Kiowa, and in 1853 the Kiowa and Yamparika signed their own treaty at Fort Atkinson. In return for safe passage and a promise to stop raiding in Mexico, the United States agreed to pay those tribes $18,000 per year for ten years.