As is so often the case with long-standing clashes, it is difficult to 
establish the initial casus belli. Yet it is far more important to 
understand the underlying social and economic contradictions that made 
armed conflict inevitable. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency in 
Comanche-related scholarship to practically reduce them to having 
warfare in their genes, thus rendering historical context superfluous. 
According to Barcley Owens (2000), the primary resource for Blood 
Meridian was T. R. Fehrenbach’s Comanches: the Destruction of a People. 
Despite the ostensibly pro-indigenous title, the study inspired the 
novel’s Walpurgisnacht scene. The chapter titled “The Blood Trail” 
begins with an epigraph by the famous anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber: 
“War was a state of mind among the Indians, and therefore never 
terminated.” This connects to Fehrenbach’s observation: “The first drive 
of the Amerindians was a biological imperative, the hunt for food in the 
struggle to survive. Their one great social imperative, however, was 
war.” He adds, “…it is reasonably certain that warfare and killing 
between men is as old as the symbolic story of Cain and Abel, and that 
the Amerindian war ethic, like the scalp pole, came with the race from 
the Old War.”

full: 
http://louisproyect.org/2013/08/29/the-political-economy-of-comanche-violence/
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