In the early 18th Century, the Comanche Indians first began to enter the plains and desert regions of what would later become the southeastern United States and northern Mexico. These indigenous peoples quickly adapted to their new home, transforming themselves in a matter of decades into one of the most dominant groups in the region. By the 1800s, the Comanches had become successful traders, exchanging goods and raiding their neighbors for profit as part of the period's international capitalist system. They had also been able to subjugate first Spanish colonists as well as later Mexican and US settlers. By the later 1800s this extension of indigenous power had precipitously declined, but for a period lasting generations the Comanches had successfully wielded enormous power over the area.
This is not the standard story of Native American decimation at the hands of various imperial powers, a story much engrained in US popular historical consciousness. Even those quite sympathetic to the plights of indigenous peoples have often followed an account of their supposed irredeemable march towards socio-cultural doom, what more recent historians of the period have termed “declensionist” narratives (for a classic example of such a declensionist framework see Frederick Jackson Turner's
The Significance of the Frontier in American History). Beginning with the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, historians began to complicate earlier ideas of inevitable indigenous dissolution, even in some cases quite refuting declensionist conclusions. The three works here under review represent very impressive recent contributions to this continuing revisionist project.
Historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s 2008
The Comanche Empire demonstrates the kind of surprising conclusions provided by such different historical frameworks. Hämäläinen’s exciting argument is that the Comanche Indians not only resisted outside pressures, but that they actually were able to implement a “reverse” or “indigenous” imperialism. He begins by portraying the Spanish colonial settlements of southwestern North America as being so harried by Comanche raids as to be willing to submit to a tributary system. While these Bourbon Spanish settlers believed that their “gifts” might have a “civilizing” effect on their Indian advisories, the Comanches successfully maintained a great deal of power over their supposed overlords. In fact, Spanish sources of the period often testify to the superior armaments and political organization which the Comanches wielded over them. And, when the tributary system broke down, the Comanches began to use these Spanish settlements as a source of horses, food, goods, etc. to be raided at will. Indeed, the Spanish were effectively allowed to remain by the Comanches, according the Hämäläinen, merely to serve as a source of trade-able commodities like horses and cloth.
The Comanche Empire holds similarly shocking material regarding the 19th century, as well. After Mexico had gained its independence, government officials in Mexico City proved unable and unwilling to maintain the earlier tributary system. The Comanches proceeded to use their superior strength to take what had formerly been given, leading to decades of serious fighting and the semi-depopluation of northern Mexico. So great was this prolonged crisis that several Mexican territories, most notably New Mexico and Texas, began to work actively against the central government’s policies. Indeed, these state governments often worked against one another so great was their desperation. And into this breach marched first US nationals looking to trade, and later the US government itself. Thus, the US-Mexican War in many ways was prefigured by the Comanche form of “indigenous” imperialism.
What factors impelled the Comanche subjugation of first the Spanish and later the Mexicans? Hämäläinen provides several possible motivations, from raids as an outlet for ambitious young men to prove themselves, to environmental factors pushing the Comanches to locate ever larger sources of fodder for their huge herds of horses, to the economic incentives of trading stolen goods for foreign manufactured materials. Most importantly, though, was the Comanche conception of goods; if one had a surplus of goods needed by another party, and if that surplus was denied a good faith request, then simply appropriating the products in question held no social stigma. Thus, Comanche raids were not seen as thievery, but rather as a kind of socially sanctified leveling.
Brian Delay’s 2008
War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican Border treats with similar material and themes as Hämäläinen’s work, but highlights other rationales behind Comanche raiding. The period upon which Delay most focuses is that following Mexican Independence after peace between the Comanches and the colonists had broken down. The resulting depopulated settlements became a "thousand deserts." Delay highlights feelings of betrayal, and the cyclical and every increasing need for vengeance against the supposed betrayers, as one important source of Comanche violence. While raids produced economic surplus, outlets for social pressure, etc., this historian sees the outsized violence as mainly a cultural byproduct of Comanche rage.
Most helpfully, though, Delay makes the case that raids and warfare should be explained as political events with a history. Rather than simply follow generalized sociological, economic, or ecological theories to explain Comanche and anti-Comanche violence,
War of a Thousand Deserts attempts to explain the people and events behind systemic forces. Seemingly an obvious historiographical tactic, but one not often enough employed when discussing indigenous peoples. As difficult as it sometimes is, given the paucity of traditional historical source material, it is nonetheless important to rediscover the political figures behind Indian violence to truley understand the period.
The
War of a Thousand Deserts also makes an interesting argument regarding the differing reactions of US and Mexican citizenry to native deprivations. Mexicans living in regions not directly in contact with the border regions often saw Comanches and other indigenous peoples almost as Mexicans that did not know that they were Mexican. Theoretically, and contra contemporaneous US notions of who was "American", all those who were born within "Mexico" were officially "Mexicans." While those who had experienced Indian violence often denigrated the notion, this theory of citizenship did much to limit Mexican counteroffensives. Those from the US, however, held no such compunction and were therefore more amendable to ideas of violent "extermination." Indeed, Delay demonstrates that the "thousand deserts" which northern Mexico had become served to reinforce US racist feelings both of superiority to Mexican inabilities to properly use the land and notions of Indian barbarity.
Finally, Karl Jacoby's 2008
Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History serves to demonstrate some of the reasons why conclusions like those reached by Delay and Hämäläinen seem so surprising to contemporary readers. Jacoby takes as his subject an 1871 massacre of Apache Indians perpetrated by O'odham Indians, Mexicans, and Americans at a US military installation named Camp Grant. Rather than create a single narrative,
Shadows at Dawn presents the same story from four separate viewpoints; those of the perpetrators and the Apaches. This is intended to reinforce the difficulty, or perhaps injustice, traditionally linear history can present in relation to mutually distinct conceptions of the same event. The piece further highlights this theoretical concern with a quite nuanced use of language; the glossary at the back of the book is quite helpful, as Delay attempts to use his informants' languages as much as possible.
Tracing the Camp Grant massacre to the present helps Delay show how the American viewpoint eventually triumphed, and from where later declensionist narratives partially originated. This is of course much to do with power, as the US members of the raiding party successfully shaped the later depictions of this violence through a historical society, newspapers, etc.
Shadows at Dawn does depict the continued existence of dissident viewpoints, however, and perhaps even their proliferation in more recent times. Lamentably, however, Delay does not focus more upon the trial of the perpetrators of the Camp Grant massacre. The one point in which at least three viewpoints came together, and perhaps the initial mainstreaming of the US conception of the event, is given but a few pages. Nonetheless, Delay has crafted an outstanding and very original piece.
Taken together, these three works represent an exciting extension of work done in the past few decades upon the southwestern US and northern Mexico in 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries. This is an almost fractal period of confusion and socio-political reformulation, and one which holds great potential for new historical conceptualizations. As such, a great many interesting works have been coming out of research into this time and place, beginning with works like David Weber's 1982
The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico right up to more modern works in the
"Borderlands" tradition.. The pieces here under review represent an extension of that work into representations of a more forceful, "imperialist" indigenous population; a population yet poorly understood.
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