The Comanche are believed to have been an offshoot of the Shoshone, who broke away around 1700, when the Dakota Sioux pushed the Shoshone back into the mountains; the offshoot Comanche were driven toward the south. The horses that were to prove such an essential part of their lives were acquired from the Pueblo after their successful resistance to the Spanish, which resulted in the Spanish leaving their horses behind in Pueblo territory. Indeed, it was the Comanche who supplied horses to traders from both France and America, and also to the hopeful gold prospectors who traveled through Comanche territory on their way to California. The tribe also had access to the thousands of feral horses that ranged through their territory.
The Shoshone, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes were all also known as “Snakes” by explorers such as George Catlin. The Comanches themselves were subdivided into many different “bands,” of approximately 100 members each. These bands were part of larger divisions, of which there had been three prior to 1750: the Jupes, the Kotsotakas, and the Yamparikas. In the decade after 1750 many of the Kotsotakas split away from the others and moved to the southeast, a move that caused friction between them and the original Comanches.
The Comanche did not have one single chief who controlled the whole tribe; instead, they had a number of leaders who counseled the group according to its needs at any one time. For example, different styles of leadership would be necessary during times of peace than were appropriate during war.
War was a way of life for the Comanche, and the longest battle they waged was that against the Mexicans. This particular fight ran on for nearly 40 years. Traditionally, the Comanche would lead their raids into Mexican territories at the time of the full moon, so that they had the element of surprise combined with the visibility that the full moon gave them. This strategy gave rise to the term “Comanche Moon.”
Initially the Comanche were hunter-gatherers; women as well as men would hunt. Subsequently, though, when the tribes moved from the Rocky Mountains to the Plains, hunting became the job of the men. Deer, wild mustang, bear, elk, and buffalo were all captured and eaten; the fur, bones, and teeth were all made good use of. The Comanche were also not averse to raiding Texas in search of cattle. The Comanche would eat birds and fish only when there was nothing else. This meaty diet was supplemented by berries, fruits, and nuts; gathering these was the task of the women. The Comanche did not cultivate the staple crops of the Native Americans, such as corn, maize, and tobacco, but instead acquired them through trading or raiding.
When they wanted to cook meat or vegetables the Comanche women would dig a hole, which they then lined with skins or the stomach of a buffalo to make it waterproof. Hot stones made the water boil, and enabled the food to be cooked. The metal pots of the Spanish and other European settlers would make this domestic task much easier. A delicacy for the Comanche hunters was the curdled milk from the stomachs of buffalo calves that were still suckling.
In common with other Plains Indians, the Comanche were very hospitable, and prepared something to eat whenever a visitor arrived. This meant that people not used to such a custom took it as read that the Comanche ate at all hours of day or night.
Like other Plains Indians, the Comanche lived in tipis, the portable home made of skins draped around a cone-shaped construction of loose poles. Their clothing was simple: for the men, a breechcloth, deerskin leggings, and moccasins; in winter the upper torso was covered in buffalo-hide robes. Small boys went naked except in very cold weather. Women traditionally wore deerskin dresses, with beautiful fringing along the hems and sleeves. These dresses were often beaded, or had metalwork inserts that were similar to the mirrorwork done in India, in which small pieces of mirror are stitched into the pattern of the fabric. The women also wore moccasins and buffalo-hide robes. Young girls, unlike their brothers, did wear clothes: breechcloths from the time they were babies until they were old enough to wear smaller replicas of the clothes worn by the women.
Comanche men were proud of their earrings; the womenfolk pierced the men’s ears with as many as eight holes, which would be ornamented with shells or loops of wire. The men also had facial tattoos as well as markings on their chests and arms. These took the form of geometric designs; both design and color were the choice of the individual, although black was universally used in the case of war paint. Comanche women liked to paint the very insides of their ears a brilliant red.
When a Comanche died, the corpse was wrapped in a blanket and placed on a horse, with a rider. The rider would then carry the body until he found a place that was right for the burial of the body. The burial place was marked by stones and boulders, then the rider returned, his task completed. The possessions that had belonged to the dead person were burned, and the mourning began. As in other tribes, the chief mourner would slash his or her arms as a demonstration of grief. The Christian missionaries, however, persuaded the Comanche that the “proper” way to respect their dead was to bury them in wooden coffins in the ground.
Because the Comanche were on the move much of the time, unlike the “settled” Native peoples, it made no sense for them to have possessions or utensils that were in any way breakable. This means that fragile clay pottery was of no use to them. What they had in abundance as available material was the buffalo, and, as well as eating the animal, the Comanche made use of the horn, bones and hides for almost all of their household goods. The lining of the buffalo’s stomach made a water bag; it could also make a vessel which, when stretched and hung between a framework of sticks, made a sort of waterproof cooking “pot,” as described previously. Even the dung of the buffalo, fibrous and dry, was used as a fuel for fires.
For the Europeans, the Comanche were something of a double-edged sword. Well able to adapt any new circumstances to their own favor, they made good traders. However, their fearlessness and predilection for raids was unnerving. The Comanche were also involved in a seemingly endless series of wars with any and all of the other Great Plains tribes; this meant that the tribe were prey to political maneuvering and exploitation by the U.S. Government, as well as by the Spanish and French colonial settlers. There was very nearly a peace pact between the Comanche and the white men, but this was stymied when the Government refused to describe a boundary between the Comanche lands and the territory of Texas.
Despite all this seeming chaos, the Comanche were able to stay independent, and unlike other Indians, even managed to increase the scope of their territory. Tragically, it was not the politics of the white man that caused the most injury to the Comanche, but his diseases. The worst of these—smallpox—ravaged the tribe in 1817 and again in 1848. Measles and cholera also took their toll. The population of the tribe, it is estimated, would have dropped from approximately 20,000 to 5,000 by the 1870s.
It must have seemed a much easier prospect, faced with a weakened Comanche nation, for the U.S. Government to start forcing the tribe onto designated reservations toward the end of the 1860s. They offered a standard of living that included schools for the children, Christian churches, and money, in return for Comanche lands ranging to 62,000 square miles. In return for this, the Government suggested that the Comanche should squeeze themselves into fewer than 5,000 square miles—along with Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kiowa peoples. Part of this agreement was that the Government would put a stop to the white buffalo hunters who were slaughtering the animals on a grand scale. But the Government could not, or would not, stop the buffalo hunters, despite the agreement. Buffalo were a fundamentally important part of the Comanche way of life; therefore the tribe, under the leadership of White Eagle, retaliated by launching an attack on a group of white hunters in 1874. The Comanche were decimated; the survivors rounded up and forced onto the reservation. Fewer than ten years later, the buffalo were just about extinct, forcing an end to the traditional way of life of the Comanche. The last of the free members of the tribe moved onto the reservation in 1875, at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
