Over the past 6 months I have been involved in an intensive research
project to understand three American Indian peoples that are part of the
narrative of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”. In each instance, the
Quechans, the Apaches and the Comanches, who were all important and
distinct ethnic groups in the Southwest, are depicted by McCarthy as
fiends you might find in a horror movie. Of course, the whites are not
much better but that is not what prompted me to do this research. I
wanted to better understand American Indians of the Southwest in order
to round out a picture that already included the Lakota and the
Blackfoot of the Northern Plains that I knew from past studies.
Within the next few weeks I plan to write at some length about Cormac
McCarthy’s truly despicable novel but right now want to refer you to the
opening paragraphs of the final chapter of Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Comanche
Empire”. This is one of the outstanding works of American Indian
scholarship that I have had the privilege to read. While it should be
obvious from both the title of his book and the excerpt below that
Hämäläinen is not interested in romanticizing the Comanches, his account
goes along way to correct the image found in westward-ho histories,
movies such as “The Comancheros”, and finally McCarthy’s pretentious
attempt to out-Faulkner Faulkner.
----
Pekka Hämäläinen
The icehouse at the Fort Sill agency was not a burial place of a people—
the Comanche nation would endure and, in time, flourish again —but it
was a burial place of an era. Past and present fell abruptly apart as
new peoples, new economic regimes, and new ways of life descended onto
the Great Plains, now eerily devoid of any material or geopolitical
marks of Comanche presence. Comanches had ruled the Southwest for well
over a century, but they left behind no marks of their dominance. There
were no deserted fortresses or decaying monuments to remind the
newcomers of the complex imperial history they were displacing.
Envisioning a new kind of empire, one of cities, railroads, agricultural
hinterlands, and real estate, Americans set out to tame, commodify, and
carve up the land. Buffalo runners all but eradicated the southern
plains bison in the space of a few years, and Texas ranchers laid down a
maze of cattle trails that crisscrossed the region. Settlers turned the
open steppes into irrigated fields and fenced farms, and boosters
conjured towns, highways, and railroad tracks on old Comanche camping
sites. With each new layer of American progress, the memory of the
Comanches and their former power grew dimmer.
For Americans in the East, the Comanche nation faded even more quickly.
In summer 1875, as the last Comanche bands drifted to Fort Sill to
surrender, the United States was preparing elaborate centennial
celebrations to display its industrial might, continental reach, and
hard-won national unity. But a few days before the July Fourth grand
finale, disquieting news arrived from the northern Great Plains: the
Lakotas and their Cheyenne and Arapahoe allies had annihilated Custer's
Seventh Cavalry, more than two hundred soldiers, in the Little Bighorn
valley in Montana. From then on, America's attention was absorbed by the
campaigns against the Lakotas, which did not end until 1890 at the
horror of Wounded Knee. By that time, Lakotas were fixed in the national
consciousness as the "noble and doomed savages" of Buffalo Bill's hugely
successful Wild West Show. They became multipurpose icons, immensely
useful and marketable as the sounding board of America's shifting
feelings of awe, terror, and remorse toward Native Americans and their
fate. Fictionalized beyond recognition, Sitting Bull's ever-malleable
stage Lakotas came to symbolize all Indians of the Great Plains, then of
the West, and then of all North America, while the other Indian nations
were pushed to the margins of collective memory. Already deprived of
their traditional lands and lifestyle, Comanches were now deprived of
their place in history.
The waning popular interest stifled potential scholarly interest. During
the sixty years that followed their confinement to reservation, the
Comanches drew little scholarly attention and inspired few academic
studies. Scholars did not rediscover them until the 1930s, when two
prominent Texas historians, Walter Prescott Webb and Rupert Norval
Richardson, gave them a key role in their renowned studies of the Great
Plains. The Comanches presented by Webb and Richardson were, however,
startlingly different from the Comanches European colonists had known in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Where the Spaniards and
French had viewed Comanches variously as diplomats, raiders, allies,
foes, traders, spouses, and kinspeople, Webb and Richardson, drawing
heavily on the records of mid-nineteenth-century American settlers and
soldiers, portrayed them simply as warriors. And whereas Spanish and
Mexican sources spoke of the overwhelming economic, political, and
cultural power of Comanches, Webb and Richardson depicted them as a
military obstacle to America's preordained expansion across the continent.2
Thus emerged the idea of the Comanche barrier to the westward-expanding
American frontier, a metaphor that recast Comanches as savages who
resisted conquest with raw military prowess but were devoid of other
qualities that make human societies strong and resilient. Reconceived in
the minds of early twentieth-century Americans, Comanches were equated
with other natural obstacles—aridity, deserts, and distance —that
encumbered the colonization of the American West. Aggressive and
impulsive, powerful yet passive, they blended into the natural
environment to form a potent, essentially nonhuman impediment to the
U.S. empire.
This tendency to simultaneously naturalize and demonize the Comanches —
and, arguably, to rationalize their subjugation —is apparent in Webb's
1958 presidential address to the American Historical Association, in
which he nostalgically contemplated the forces that shaped his writing
in his Texas home. "In the hard-packed yard and on the encircling
red-stone hills was the geology, in the pasture the desert botany and
all the wild animals of the plains save the buffalo," he mused. "The
Indians, the fierce Comanches, had so recently departed, leaving
memories so vivid and tales so harrowing that their red ghosts, lurking
in every mott and hollow, drove me home all prickly with fear when I
ventured too far" A generation later, novelist Cormac McCarthy offered
in Blood Meridian what was perhaps the most troubling reenvisioning of
the Comanches. He describes the destruction of a crew of Anglo-American
filibusters at the hands of beastlike Comanches who, without provocation
or hesitation, abandon themselves on the other side of humanity,
"ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding
up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered
up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell
upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows."5
The unanthropocentric barrier metaphor trivialized the Comanches as a
society and, by extension, abridged their role as historical actors. By
reducing them to a primal warrior society, Webb, Richardson, and the
scores of historians and nonhistorians influenced by them created a
caricature of Comanches' culture and their place in history. The
Comanches who appeared in historical studies from the 1930s on
terrorized the Spanish and Mexican frontier with relentless raids, but
beyond that they merely occupied space. Weak in organization and warlike
by nature, they lacked the complex diplomatic, economic, and cultural
arrangements that fasten peoples to their environments and instead
relied on brutal, almost pathological raiding to defend their homelands.
The narratives that spoke of different kinds of Comanches were
marginalized. "Los Comanches," the New Mexican conquest romance that
captures Comanches' penetrating influence on the political, economic,
and cultural milieu of the early Southwest, was dismissed as local
folklore and ignored by mainstream historians.
Thus, bit by bit, the nature and scope of Comanche power became
distorted. Memories of Comanches stirred horror and awe in
twentieth-century Americans like Webb —not because they conjured up
impressions of imperial-scale power but because they evoked images of
nativistic resistance and mindless, primitive violence. In 1974, a
century after the battle of the Palo Duro Canyon, T. R. Fehrenbach,
another renowned Texas historian, depicted Comanches as "scattered bands
of wanderers, never a nation," and their system of power as a "barrier
[that] had stopped European penetration of these plains for almost two
centuries. It did not show on maps; it had no shape or form. The
Comanche barrier was a wisp of smoke on the horizon, riders appearing
suddenly on the ridges, shots and screams at sunset, horror under the
summer moons." Comanches, he concluded, "remained proud, savage, and
aloof, determined to deal with Europeans on their own terms. . . .
Whether the stance was conscious or distinctive, the People had become a
powerful barrier to all future movement across the plains."4
Fehrenbach's portrayal of a phantasmal Comanche barrier vas a product of
its time, and it represented how historians understood colonialism and
Indian-white relations into the closing years of the twentieth century:
European imperialism moves history; Native resistance is raw, violent
savagery; and frontiers, if indigenous peoples have a hand in their
making, are confusing, unsophisticated places.
The task in this book has been to recover Comanches as full-fledged
humans and undiminished historical actors underneath the distorting
layers of historical memory and, in doing so, to provide a new vision of
a key chapter of early American history. In these pages I have traced
the evolution of a Comanche power complex that was neither shapeless nor
formless, a Comanche foreign policy that involved much more than
plundering and killing, and Comanche people who were neither savage nor
nationless. Instead of merely defying white expansion through aggressive
resistance, I have argued, Comanches inverted the projected colonial
trajectory through multifaceted power politics that brought much of the
colonial Southwest under their political, economic, and cultural sway.
How did this happen? How did a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers that
numbered only a few thousand in the early eighteenth century manage to
challenge and eventually eclipse the ambitions of some of the world's
greatest empires? What gave Comanches their edge in the collision of
cultures? And conversely, why was it that only the Comanches—among the
hundreds of Native American nations —managed to build an empire that
eclipsed and subsumed Euro-American colonial realms? In the preceding
chapters I have emphasized various mental and cultural traits, ranging
from Comanches' strategic flexibility to their willingness to embrace
new ideas and innovations, but those are traits shared by most Native
American societies. What was it that made Comanches exceptional?
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