Such small bands could have passed through the northern tribes by keeping in the wide open spaces between the scattered villages. There is no tradition among either the Apache or the northern tribes of any important fighting along their line of travel.
On the open plains the Apaches found game animals new to them, particularly the buffalo, and had to adjust their hunting practices to deal with these huge beasts. When they reached the Platte River and began to occupy the land, they could live in larger units, with buffalo supplying the food. Many of them settled in little villages in sheltered spots along streams, where they built warm earth-covered lodges, grew small garden patches of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, and made crude pottery. They copied these new skills from people just to the east, who had come across the Mississippi from the Ohio River a short time before.
Some of the Apache bands that continued south into the Texas Panhandle did not settle down, but roamed the high plains following the buffalo herds. They were the people described by the early Spanish travelers.
When Pueblo Indians in the Rio Grande Valley ran away from their Spanish masters, they went to the Apache villages for refuge, sometimes going as far as the Arkansas River to be safe from pursuit. There they found more settled Apaches and taught them improved methods of raising crops, building houses, and making pottery. Both Spanish records of the time and the presence of many distinctively Pueblo pottery pieces show that an appreciable number of Pueblos did join the Apaches and had a strong influence on their cultural development.
The Pueblos also brought along a few horses and taught the Apaches how to use them. The rapid cultural and economic progress of the Apaches during the latter half of the seventeenth century was cut short and the very existence of the tribe threatened by large-scale attacks from two powerful hostile tribes, one to the west, the other to the east. The Comanches began to move down from the Colorado foothills, while the Osages came across the plains from the Missouri woodlands. Each tribe seemed determined to wipe out the Apaches and take over their land.
The Osages were greatly feared, for they had just begun to secure guns from the French traders, while the Apaches, well to the west, had no chance to buy guns of their own. The Comanches came in large war parties, their raids made more effective once they had secured horses. As the Apaches began to weaken under these two attacks, the Pawnees descended on them from the north. The remnants of the tribe had no hope of escaping destruction except in flight to the south. They fled deep into Texas. The land they vacated was overrun quickly by the victors, with the Comanches claiming about two-thirds of it.
The Comanches were part of the large Uto-Aztecan migration that had come from Asia over a period of several hundred years. They passed through Alaska into Canada and south just to the east of the Rockies. The vanguard of this migration, the Aztecs, reached the Mexican plateau by 1300, while the stragglers, the Shoshoni, spread out from central Alberta southward across Montana, where they split into two prongs, one going across the mountains into southern Idaho, the other staying east of the Rockies and occupying eastern Wyoming. The latter group split again, part of them remaining in Wyoming to become the Wind River Shoshoni, the remainder proceeding southeastward into eastern Colorado and becoming the Comanches, who held the foothills of the Rockies from the northern Colorado line to the Arkansas River.
The Comanches were of average height compared to the Indian population as a whole, but they were much shorter than their neighboring tribes, the Crow, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Osage, and Kiowa, all of whom were slimmer and had longer legs. The Comanches had powerful bodies mounted on stubby legs, which were a handicap to them on the open plains when they were chased by their long-legged neighbors. They had a hard time holding their own on the plains until they secured horses. Then they found that short legs can be more of an asset than a liability to a rider.
The Comanches began their eastward movement into the plains by attacking the small permanent Apache villages along the streams in southwestern Nebraska and western Kansas. The Apaches were at a great disadvantage in this fighting, for the enemy always knew where to find them and could mount a surprise attack with superior forces against any one Apache village. The hit-and-run raider has always had this obvious advantage against a farming people. The Comanche attacks were more deadly than the usual Indian fights, for they were determined to wipe out each village, killing off all the men, taking captive the women and children, and burning the lodges. Even if the initial attack failed, some of the defenders would be killed and the village could be further weakened by successive raids until it was helpless. And while several Comanche bands could unite for a few days to mount a large-scale attack against a single Apache village, the Apaches could not prepare an adequate defense, for they could not organize and maintain a permanent army to hunt out the raiders and keep them out of the country. This fundamental vulnerability of small permanent settlements against fierce nomads has been demonstrated many times in many different countries.
Modern excavations at the sites of the destroyed Apache villages show that most of them were burned and plundered in the seventeenth century, just when the villagers were making good progress in farming and pottery making. This is also the period when both the Apaches and the Comanches began using horses.
The Comanches probably had secured some horses before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and had greatly increased their herds in the next decade from the confiscated Spanish herds. In 1705 Spanish reports from Santa Fe mentioned the Comanches as mounted raiders, and in 1706 they were reported to be stealing horses from the Apaches who lived in northeastern New Mexico, south of Raton Pass.
Once the stubby-legged Comanches had climbed on their horses and learned to ride, they were soon rated with the finest horsemen of the world, the Don Cossacks. Visitors to the Indian camps were struck by the great contrast between a Comanche on foot and the same man on horseback.
George Catlin, on his visit to the tribe in the 1830's, described the Comanches:
In their movements they are heavy and ungraceful; and on their feet one of the most unattractive and slovenly-looking races of Indians I have ever seen…. I am ready without hesitation to pronounce the Comanches as the most extraordinary horsemen that I have ever seen and I doubt very much whether any people in the world can surpass them. A Comanche on his feet is out of his element and comparatively almost awkward, but the moment they mount their horses, they seem at once metamorphosed, and surprise the spectator with the ease and grace of their movements.
After the Comanches secured horses to ride, they did almost no walking. A prominent man would order his wife or daughter to fetch his horse so he could ride over to a friend's tipi a hundred yards away. From lack of exercise, Comanche men became fat and lazy, a condition seldom found among hunting tribes.
This constant use of the horse by the Comanche and his great dependence on the animal indicate the profound changes this new servant made in his daily life, but these were changes of degree rather than of kind. The Comanche now lived better, with ample reserves of food and clothing. He had more leisure time and greater security from his enemies. From being a skulker in the foothills, he became a dashing mounted warrior of the plains.
After 1700 the mounted Comanches no longer feared their long-legged enemies of the plains unless they had guns. The tribe moved boldly out from their little foothill retreats, conquering and displacing the Apaches to the east. They strove constantly to enlarge their hunting grounds, partly from arrogance, partly to provide more room for their increased population. Their families were larger, and they were adding hundreds of captive women and children from enemy tribes.