In 1840, after the Texas border had erupted into more fighting, the Comanches met with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes near Bent's Fort on the Arkansas and negotiated a lasting treaty with them, with the Arkansas marking the boundary line between the hunting grounds of the two groups. Then in 1843 they even agreed on a treaty with the Osages, and a brisk trade sprang up between the two tribes. The Comanches brought in large herds of horses stolen on the Texas frontier, more horses and some mules from the Mexicans, and a few captives from both groups. In return the Osages gave them guns, ammunition, and trade goods, all at a very high price. The Indian agent for the Osages reported in 1847 that his tribe had bought 1,500 mules from the Comanches that summer.
When the United States acquired Texas in 1845, the Comanche problem came as part of the package. The army built a string of posts along the Texas frontier to restrict the movements of the tribe, especially to keep them from raiding the farms. This caused some hardship for one band that had customarily hunted buffalo along the Colorado Valley during those seasons when the herds wandered so far south. This band was promised that it could still hunt in the area around San Saba but must first receive permission from the commander of the nearest army post. This permission was always refused.
In the summer of 1848 smallpox again took a heavy toll in the Comanche villages. Then in 1849 cholera spread from the gold seekers along the Platte until it reached the tribes along the Oregon Trail. They in turn took it south to a large summer encampment on the Arkansas, where bands from many tribes had gathered to erect a large medicine lodge, among them a number of Comanches, who took the cholera back to their villages. With these two killers attacking in successive years, the Comanches lost about half their total population. In their weakened condition they were more amenable to proposals from the Indian Bureau officials.
In 1853 officials came to Fort Atkinson, Kansas, to propose a treaty along the same lines as that signed by the northern tribes at Fort Laramie in 1851. In return for a yearly annuity of $18,000 in trade goods for ten years, the chiefs agreed to stay within the boundaries of the tribal lands and to allow free passage of travelers along the Santa Fe Trail. But the Indians considered the treaty goods as presents from their friends, the officials, and still expected presents of sugar and coffee from the wagon trains. Also, they considered the treaty a strictly local one, for the northern border only, and not including either the Texans or Mexicans and their territories.
The Comanches felt rich with all their free treaty goods. They would no longer pay the Osages excessive prices, especially after those sharp traders tried to convince the Comanches that the free goods were injurious. Trade relations were broken off, and the two tribes drifted back into sporadic warfare.
To make up for the loss of the Comanche horses they had been buying each year, the Osages turned to border raids on the Texans, taking along their allies, the Wichitas. Then some enterprising Texans who lived along the border entered the game, rustling horses from their neighbors and trading them off in Indian Territory to the north. The Comanches were often given all the credit for these raids.
The Comanches earned their greatest notoriety in their fierce, largescale raids against the settlements of northern Mexico. As early as 1830 they were considered a serious problem there, taking scalps and captives, looting and burning small settlements, and running off large herds of horses and mules. The depredations continued for about forty years.
Although raiding parties were in style almost any month from February through October, the Comanches chose August as their favorite month for large forays. When the "Comanche moon" shone full and bright over the Mexican mountains in late summer, the frightened villagers huddled in their little huts while the marauders swept the unhappy countryside from Saltillo on the east to the Sierra Madre on the west, and south to the outskirts of Durango and Zacatecas. The Comanches delighted in senseless killings and the destruction of property before riding away to their home range with their captured prisoners and herds. They took only women and children, who might in a few years become Comanches if they lived through the hard times. Over the years such captives and their offspring were used to replace Comanche losses in battle and to disease, until they made up about half the entire Comanche population. Possibly half the captives each year were sold to traders in New Mexico or along the Arkansas.
One brief report by a traveler in Mexico described the Comanche terror visited upon the region each summer:
They are now overrunning the whole department of Durango and Chihuahua, and have cut off all communications, and defeated in two pitched battles the regular troops sent against them. Upward of ten thousand horses and mules have already been carried off, and scarcely has a hacienda or ranch on the frontier been unvisited, and the people have been killed or captured. The roads are impassable, all traffic is stopped, the ranchos barricaded, and the inhabitants afraid to venture out of their doors. The posts and express travel at night, avoiding the roads, and intelligence is brought in daily of massacres and harrowings.
A broad belt across the land, strewn with the whitened bones of slaughtered men and animals, marked the area of Comanche raids, a region that for many years was known as the "Desert of the Frontier."
When the United States Army finally set up posts to block the main trails to Mexico, the Comanches turned more and more to raiding the Texas frontier, gathering horses for their trading operations and taking a few captives to be turned over to northern army posts for $100 each. The problem of the Comanche raids was finally solved by wiping out the buffalo herds in the 1870's and penning all the warriors on a reservation.
18. The Diminishing Herds
About 1600 the buffalo herds reached their widest distribution. They spread over all the pasture lands and through some of the open woodland from the Great Basin to the Virginia tidewater. Then the first colonists settled in Virginia and began ridding the land of buffalo, either driving them out or killing them off. This operation was necessary in farming areas to protect the fields and the cattle. By 1800 all the land east of the Mississippi had been cleared as the farming frontier advanced, but to the west the herds shrank rapidly too, for no apparent reason, retreating toward the center of the Great Plains from the entire perimeter of the former range.
In half a century, 181060, the grazing land occupied by the herds decreased by about one-half and the total number of buffalo decreased by about three-fourths, yet the yearly kill by hunters during this period was but a small fraction of the annual calf crop. Where did these millions of buffalo go? How much of the grasslands was left vacant because of smaller herds, and how much was abandoned because of increased pressure from hunters? It is worthy of note that as the buffalo crowded more and more into the central plains there was no mention by contemporary observers of any shortage of forage from the more intensive grazing.
One place where the retreat of the herds can be followed rather accurately from contemporary accounts is the broad strip of pasture land extending northward from Great Salt Lake through Bear Valley, the upper Snake Valley, and the upper Missouri Basin. The buffalo had come to this country in rather recent times, probably no earlier than 1600. The herds had been crowded up the Yellowstone Valley across Bozeman Pass and into the Missouri headwaters. Once this region was well stocked, the animals moved south across the continental divide through easy passes into the upper Snake country. Even slight pressure from the north against the herds would be sufficient to account for this movement.