Comanchero
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The Comancheros were primarily New Mexican hispanic traders in northern and central New Mexico who made their living by trading with the nomadic plains tribes, in northeastern New Mexico and west Texas. Comancheros were so named because the Comanches, in whose territory they traded, were considered their best customers. They traded manufactured goods (tools and cloth), flour, tobacco, and bread for hides, livestock and slaves from the Comanche. As the Comancheros did not have sufficient access to weapons and gunpowder, there is disagreement about how much they traded these to the Comanche.
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[edit] History
Prior to the coming of the Spanish, with their horses, into the American Southwest, with early explorations beginning in the 1540s and permanent settlement in the late 1590s, the people who came to be known as Comanches did not live in the Southern High Plains. The Comanches, a Shoshonean peoples, migrated from the North and arose as a separate and distinct tribe in the early 18th Century (1700's), largely as a result of having obtained breeding stocks of horses after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. They migrated southward through the Rocky Mountains and into the Southern High Plains, where they and their Shoshonean kinsmen, the Utes, began to appear at trade fairs in Taos about 1700. During the first half of the 18th Century (1700-1750) the Comanche gradually spread their area of occupation throughout the Southern High Plains and large areas of Texas, where they largely displaced the tribal peoples who had lived there prior to the coming of the Spainards, mostly the Apaches, who were themselves an earlier migrant group of Athapaskan peoples from the North.
In 1719, the Comanches made the first recorded raid for horses upon the settlements of the Rio Grande Valley. For the next 60 years, the relations of the Comanches with the Spanish and Pueblo settlements was a patchwork or alternately trading and raiding, with different bands being sometimes at peace and sometimes at war with the settlements along the Rio Grande. During the mid-1700s (1750-1780), the plains tribes, notably the Comanche, but also the Apache and other tribal groups, raided the Pueblos and Spanish settlements for horses, corn and slaves with ever-increasing frequency. This continued until 1779, when a 500-man army lead by [a lieutenant serving under Governor [Juan Bautista de Anza]], and including 200 Utes [?? - or Pueblos??] and Apaches, undertook a punitive expedition against the largest and most active group of Comanche raiders, who were lead by a man known as Green Horn, and, surprising the Copmanches in their camp, killed Green Horn and dealt a severe defeat to the Comanches. [resulting in a treaty in 1786 [??.]
The [treaty??] defeat of Green Horn and his followers caused the remaining Comanche bands to seek peaceful relations with the Spaniards and Pueblos, and opened the way for the development of the Comanchero trade. Prior to this New Mexico trade with the Comanche had been essentially limited to Comanche attendance at trade fairs at the Taos and Pecos Pueblos, and trade with the Spanish settlers at Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Valencia and Tome. Although there was no doubt intermittent trading between small groups of Pueblos and Spaniards with various Comanche bands on the Southern High Plains prior to 1780, the real Comanchero trade grew and flourished after that year.
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From the 1780s until the mid-1800s, the Comanchero trade flourished at different locales on the Southern High Plains, notably in northeastern New Mexico (Cejita de Los Comancheros in present-day Harding County) and the Palo Duro Canyon area of Texas (near Quitaque in present-day Briscoe County).
When the US Government commenced its war against the Comanches in the 1850s [?? - 1860's after Civil War...], their Comanchero allies and relatives assisted the Comanche resistance primarily by supplying firearms and ammunition to the tribes, but also occasionally by joining in the armed resistance [??]. Having adequate supplies of firearms enabled the Comanche to wage successful [??] war against the population of white settlers. The US Army's attempts to interdict the trade were relatively unsuccessful until the winter of 1874-1875, when US Army troops under General Randall MacKenzie attacked and defeated five village camps of Comanches near Palo Duro Canyon, burning the villages and capturing and destroying 1400 horses. This defeat, and loss of their horses, camps and food supplies, caused the last groups of free-roaming Comanches, (Kwahada under Quanah Parker, who had refused to sign the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867, which other Comanche bands signed) to surrender to reservation life at Ft. Sill, OK (200 in April and 400 in June). This brought an end to the old Comanche and Comanchero trade relationship, which had existed for almost 100 years.
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[edit] Ethnicity
Josiah Gregg described these traders as, "These parties of Comancheros are usually composed of the indigent and rude classes of the frontier villages, who collect together several times a year, and launch upon the plains with a few trinkets and trumperies of all kinds, and perhaps a bag of bread or pinole."[1] Some historians and writers have referred to the Comancheros as Mexican traders. While traders from Mexico were occasionally involved with the Comanchero trade, by far the majority were from New Mexico, hispanics and mixed bloods. New Mexicans of the time were the descendants of the Spanish colonial settlers and soldiers and the Native American peoples of New Mexico. The Native American people in New Mexico included the Pueblo, the Comanche, the Apache, and the Navajo.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Gregg, Josiah (1847) Diary and letters of Josiah Gregg: southwestern enterprises, 1840-1847, published 1941 Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK;
[edit] References
- Kenner, Charles L. (1994) The Comanchero Frontier: A History of New Mexican-Plains Indian Relations University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, ISBN 0-8061-2670-1 ;
- Lamadrid, Enrique R. (2003) Hermanitos comanchitos : Indo-Hispano rituals of captivity and redemption University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, ISBN 0-8263-2877-6 ;
- Moncus, Herman H. (1970) The Comanchero’s neighbors Western Heritage Press, Fort Worth, TX; OCLC 206497
