In their expansion attempts, the Comanches had to fight a number of long wars against their neighbors, the Apache, Ute, Pawnee, Osage, Tonkawa, and even the Navaho far to the west across the Rockies. Later they added two new tribes to the listthe Cheyenne and Arapahoe, who moved in from the north. The Comanches seemed to enjoy fighting, and never ceased their attacks until the last of the tribe was penned in on a small reservation by the U.S. Army in 1875.
The Comanches were cruel and relentless toward their enemies, even by Indian standards, and were mean to one another in petty ways. Although they gloried in war and valued war honors above all else, their older men, even the great fighters of former years, were insulted and abused by the young people, with the tacit approval of the whole camp.
The Comanche hated restraint of any kind. He refused to tolerate the camp police customary in other Plains tribes. The only exception was in the communal buffalo hunts, when one man was chosen as leader, for the duration of that hunt only, with the authority to line up the men near the herd and give the signal to charge at the moment he chose. Aside from this one bowing to temporary authority, the tribe relied entirely on social disapproval to restrain its members' social lapses.
These fierce, cruel, headstrong men made up a great fighting force that in many ways was reminiscent of the Mongol horde of Ghengis Khan. They were at their best when fighting on horseback on terrain that permitted them to dash about at full speed, but when they had to dismount to attack the Apaches in the mountains of New Mexico, the Comanches were sometimes badly beaten.
When LaSalle established his short-lived colony on the Texas coast in 1684, the Spanish authorities in Mexico became alarmed. They responded in time by putting in a colony of their own at San Antonio in 1715. Soon the Spanish in the new colony were having trouble with the Apaches who were moving south under the pressure of Comanche attacks. At the same time Jicarilla Apaches, who were being forced westward into New Mexico, petitioned the Spanish at Santa Fe to help them against the Comanches. The Spanish decided they should help, for some of the Jicarillas were baptized Christians.
In 1717, while some of the Comanches were still living part of each year in little farming villages on the upper Arkansas, the Spanish governor amassed a large force of men, disguised them as Indians, and staged a surprise attack on these villages, capturing about 700 men, women, and children. The captives were first taken to Spain, then sent as slaves to Cuba, where they soon died. This was the only real success the Spanish soldiers had against the Comanches in a century of trouble, and it led to a peace agreement between the two sides.
The Apaches in Texas also decided to make peace with the Spanish and to ask them for help. The Spanish agreed to take the Apaches in and settle them at a new mission to be built expressly for them at San Saba, about a hundred miles north of the Spanish settlements. The Apaches were a little slow in becoming Christians, and the mission soon was under heavy attack by the Comanches who had followed the Apaches south. In 1758 the Comanches killed all the mission workers. When the Spanish retaliated by sending an army against them the next summer, the Comanches defeated the soldiers at the Red River and forced them to retreat.
Emboldened by their success, the Comanches visited the San Antonio colony each year to pick up some horses and other plunder. Sometimes they even paraded up and down the streets of the little settlements. Spanish defense against the Indian raids was ineffective, and the Comanche problem still had not been solved when the Spanish finally surrendered the colony in 1821.
During this period, beginning in 1717, the Comanches carried on a war with their kinsmen, the Utes, who lived in the mountains on the northwestern Comanche border. This constant hostility led the Utes to bestow the name Comanche on the aggressors, translating it as ''the people who fight us all the time." While the Comanches were never able to mount an effective attack against the Utes in the mountains, they were able to prevent that tribe from moving out into the buffalo country and becoming nomadic hunters. The Utes managed to hunt some buffalo each year, but they were always in danger of an attack, so they killed their meat as quickly as possible and dashed back to safety in the mountains.
The Apache tribes that had retreated to New Mexico under the pressure of Comanche hostility had become fierce mountain people after half a century of hardship. They raided the farms along the Rio Grande each year, and were considered a serious problem by the authorities. In 1786 a new viceroy decided the Spanish should make a new treaty with the Comanches and enlist their help against the Apaches.
The Comanches were pleased, for they wanted to trade with the New Mexico people, especially for guns and ammunition. As part of the treaty the Spanish built them a village on the Arkansas River, but the Comanches never settled there. They did remain on rather friendly terms with the New Mexicans, and turned their attacks against Texas.
By the use of horses, the Comanches, in the course of a century, changed from a weak aggregation of small, scattered bands on a subsistence level in the Colorado foothills to a powerful nomadic people living off the buffalo herds in the plains. This was a voluntary movement on their part, and they never expressed any regret at leaving their old home. By 1800 they claimed a domain that reached from the Arkansas River on the north to central Texas on the south, and from the Rockies eastward about 300 miles. Other tribes composed of small hunting bands existing at subsistence level followed much the same pattern as the Comanches. Among these were the Crow, Wind River Shoshoni, Arapahoe, Assiniboin, and Blackfeet. They too became true nomads, pausing in their travels only to take shelter during the winter months.
George Catlin, visiting a Crow village on the Yellowstone River in the 1830's, observed the difficulties of spending a winter in even the large, improved tipis:
These lodges are taken down in a few minutes by the squaws… and easily transported over the plains… to procure and dress their skins… and also for the purpose of killing and drying meat; making pemican and preserving the marrow-fat for their winter quarters; which are generally taken up in some heavy-timbered bottom, deeply imbedded within the surrounding bluffs, which break the winds and make their long winter months tolerable. They sometimes erect their skin lodges within the timber and dwell within them during the winter months; but more frequently cut logs and make rude cabins, in which they can live much warmer and better protected from the assaults of their enemies.
Intelligent, able horses were trained especially for the chase. A wounded buffalo might swerve and try to gore the horse, so he was taught to turn away at the twang of a bowstring or when a lance was withdrawn. (Painting by A. J. Miller, The Walters Art Gallery)
Lasting only a short breathless period, the buffalo chase was dangerous but efficient. Hunters preferred short bows or slender lances, which handled well on horseback and were deadly at close range. (Oil on canvas by George Catlin, Smithsonian Institution)
7. Tribes of the Woodland Fringe: Osage and Sioux
The osages were a powerful tribe of Siouan stock, living along the edge of the forest from the Arkansas River north to the Missouri, and claiming buffalo hunting grounds to the west in the open plains. They were essentially a farming people, settled in several large, permanent villages, their lodges framed with heavy poles and covered with mats of woven grass and reeds. In later years they sometimes used tanned, smoked hides to patch a lodge covering. A few of the Osage bands had two villages, one for summer use near the cornfields, the other for winter back in the forest where fuel was plentiful.