Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (7 page)

But the Pueblos were not the only Indians in New Mexico. By giving shelter and aid to them, the Spanish had incurred the wrath of local Athapaskan bands—Apaches—who had conducted raids against settlements almost since they began. Now something quite interesting and, in the Spanish history of the Americas, unprecedented happened. The Apaches began to adapt themselves to the horse. No one knows exactly how this happened, or precisely how they came into possession of the elaborate Spanish understanding of horses. But it was an amazingly swift transfer of technology. The Indians
first stole the horses, then learned how to ride them. The horse culture was entirely copied from the Spanish. Indians mounted from the right, a practice the Spanish had taken from the Moors, and used crude replicas of Spanish bits, bridles, and saddles.
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The horse gave them astounding advantages as hunters. It also made them doubly effective as raiders, mainly because it afforded them an immediate and swift method of escape. According to Spanish records, mounted Apaches were conducting raids into New Mexican settlements as early as the 1650s. In spite of this auspicious start, the Apaches were never a great horse tribe: They did not fight on horseback, and never learned the art of breeding or particularly cared to learn it. They used their Spanish mustangs mainly for basic travel and had an inordinate fondness for cooked horseflesh, eating most of the ones they had and saving only the choicest for riding.
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They were also, always, a semiagricultural tribe, which meant that their applications of the horse would always be limited—in ways that would later accrue entirely to the benefit of their greatest foes, the Comanches. But for now they had what no other tribe in the Americas had.

And they managed to cause an enormous amount of trouble. They began a relentless and deadly series of raids against the peaceful Pueblos, who were scattered in settlements from Taos to Santa Fe and south along the Rio Grande. The Apaches would attack and then disappear quickly into the western landscape, and the Spanish could neither stop them nor track them down. With each raid, too, they became richer in horses. In one raid alone in 1659, they took three hundred.
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It became clear to the Pueblos, eventually, that the Spanish could not protect them. This was very likely the main reason for the great Pueblo revolt in 1680. There were other reasons, too, like the forced labor, the imposition of Catholicism, and the suppression of Pueblo culture and tradition. Whatever the cause, the Pueblos rose, and in a grisly, blood-soaked rebellion drove the Spanish out of New Mexico. For ten years. Their imperial nemesis gone, the Indians lapsed into their old ways, which included pottery-making and farming but not horses, for which they had no use. Abandoned by the Spanish, thousands of mustangs ran wild into the open plains that resembled so closely their ancestral Iberian lands. Because they were so perfectly adapted to the new land, they thrived and multiplied. They became the foundation stock for the great wild mustang herds of the Southwest. This event has become known as the Great Horse Dispersal. The dissemination of so many horses to a group of thirty plains tribes permanently altered the
power structure of the North American heartland. The Apaches had been the first North American Indians to understand what hunters and raiders could do with a horse; the other tribes would soon learn.

The horse and the knowledge of how to use it spread with astonishing speed through the midcontinent. In 1630, no tribes anywhere were mounted.
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By 1700, all Texas plains tribes had them; by 1750, tribes of the Canadian plains were hunting buffalo on horseback. The horse gave them what must have seemed to them an astonishing new mobility. It allowed them, for the first time, to fully master the buffalo. They could now migrate with the herds. They could now travel faster than a buffalo at full gallop, and they quickly learned to ride the huge creatures down on the open plains, thrusting their fourteen-foot lances between the animals’ ribs or shooting them on the run with arrows. Hunting skills quickly became martial skills, too. Tribes who learned to hunt on horseback gained an almost instant military dominance over nonhorse tribes, and for a time over everyone else who dared challenge them. It turned them into expansive traders, providing both the thing to be traded and the mobility to reach new markets.

What the horse did not do was change their fundamental natures. Before the arrival of the horse, they were peoples whose lives were based almost entirely on the buffalo. The horse did not change this. They merely became much better at what they had always done. No true plains tribes fished or practiced agriculture before the horse, and none did so after the horse. Even their limited use of berries and roots went unchanged.
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They remained relatively primitive, warlike hunters; the horse virtually guaranteed that they would not evolve into more civilized agrarian societies. Still, the enhancements were breathtaking to see. War could now be made across immense distances. Horses—the principal form of wealth on the plains—could now be gathered and held in large numbers. And there was the simple, fundamental, spiritual power of the animal itself, which had transformed these poor foot Indians into dazzling cavalrymen. And the new technology turned tribes who had lagged behind their peers in culture and social organization into newly dominant forces. These included names that would soon be famous throughout the country: Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Crow, and Comanche.

No one knows exactly how or when the Comanche bands in eastern Wyoming first encountered the horse, but that event probably happened somewhere near the midpoint of the seventeenth century. Since the Paw
nees, who lived in the area we now call Nebraska, were known to be mounted by 1680, the Comanches almost certainly had horses by that time. There were no witnesses to this great coming together of Stone Age hunters and horses, nothing to record what happened when they met, or what there was in the soul of the Comanche that understood the horse so much better than everyone else did. Whatever it was, whatever sort of accidental brilliance, whatever the particular, subliminal bond between warrior and horse, it must have thrilled these dark-skinned pariahs from the Wind River country. The Comanches adapted to the horse earlier and more completely than any other plains tribe. They are considered, without much debate, the prototype horse tribe in North America. No one could outride them or outshoot them from the back of a horse. Among other horse tribes, only the Kiowas fought entirely mounted, as the Comanches did. Pawnees, Crows, even the Dakotas used the horse primarily for transport. They would ride to the battle, then dismount and fight. (Only in the movies did the Apaches attack riding horses.)
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No tribe other than the Comanches ever learned to breed horses—an intensely demanding, knowledge-based skill that helped create enormous wealth for the tribe. They were always careful in the castration of the herd; almost all riding horses were geldings. Few other tribes bothered with this. It was not uncommon for a Comanche warrior to have one hundred to two hundred mounts, or for a chief to have fifteen hundred. (A Sioux chief might have forty horses, by comparison.)
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They were not only the richest of all tribes in sheer horseflesh, their horses were also the main medium through which the rest of the tribes became mounted.
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The first Europeans and Americans to see Comanche horsemanship did not fail to notice this. Athanase de Mézières, a Spanish Indian agent of French descent, described them thus:

They are a people so numerous and haughty that when asked their number they make no difficulty of comparing it to that of the stars. They are so skillful in horsemanship that they have no equal; so daring that they never ask for or grant truces; and in the possession of such a territory that, finding in it an abundance of pasturage for their horses and an incredible number of [buffalo] which furnish them all the raiment, food, and shelter, they only just fall short of possessing all the conveniences of the earth.
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Other observers saw the same thing. Colonel Richard Dodge, whose expedition made early contact with Comanches, believed them to be the finest light cavalry in the world, superior to any mounted soldiers in Europe or
America. Catlin also saw them as incomparable horsemen. As he described it, the American soldiers were dumbfounded at what they saw. “On their feet they are one of the most unattractive and slovenly looking races of Indians I have ever seen, but the moment they mount their horses, they seem at once metamorphosed,” wrote Catlin. “I am ready, without hesitation, to pronounce the Comanches the most extraordinary horsemen I have seen yet in all my travels.” He went on to write:

Amongst their feats of riding there is one that has astonished me more than anything of the kind I have ever seen or expect to see, in my life:—a stratagem of war, learned and practiced by every young man in the tribe; by which he is able to drop his body on the side of his horse at the instant he is passing, effectively screened from his enemies’ weapons, as he lays in a horizontal position behind the body of his horse, with his heel hanging over the horses’s back. . . . in this wonderful condition, he will hang whilst his horse is at fullest speed, carrying with him his bow and shield and also his long lance 14 feet in length.
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Thus positioned, a Comanche warrior could loose twenty arrows in the time it took a soldier to load and fire one round from his musket; each of those arrows could kill a man at thirty yards. Other observers were amazed at the Comanche technique of breaking horses. A Comanche would lasso a wild horse, then tighten the noose, choking the horse and driving it to the ground. When it seemed as if the horse was nearly dead, the choking lariat was slacked. The horse finally rose, trembling and in a full lather. Its captor gently stroked its nose, ears, and forehead, then put his mouth over the horse’s nostrils and blew air into its nose. The Indian would then throw a thong around the now-gentled horse’s lower jaw, mount up, and ride away.
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The Comanches, as it turned out, were geniuses at anything to do with horses: breeding, breaking, selling, and riding. They even excelled at stealing horses. Colonel Dodge wrote that a Comanche could enter “a bivouac where a dozen men were sleeping, each with a horse tied to his wrist by the lariat, cut a rope within six feet of the sleeper, and get away with the horse without waking a soul.”
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No other tribe, except possibly the Kiowas, so completely lived on horseback. Children were given their own horses at four or five. Soon the boys were expected to learn tricks, which included picking up objects on the ground at a gallop. The young rider would start with light objects and move to progressively heavier objects until finally, without assistance and at a full gallop, he could pick up a man. Rescuing a fallen comrade was seen as one
of the most basic obligations of a Comanche warrior. They all learned the leather thong trick at a young age. Women could often ride as well as men. One observer watched two Comanche women set out at full speed with lassoes and each rope a bounding antelope on the first throw.
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Women had their own mounts, as well as mules and gentle horses for packing.

When they were not stealing horses, or breeding them, they were capturing them in the wild. General Thomas James told a story of how he had witnessed this in 1823, when he had visited the Comanches as a horse buyer. He watched as many riders headed bands of wild horses into a deep ravine where a hundred men waited on horseback with coiled lariats. When the “terrified wild horses reached the ambush” there was a good deal of dust and confusion as the riders lassoed them by the neck or forefeet. But every rider got an animal. Only one horse got away. The Comanches pursued him and in two hours he came back “tamed and gentle.” Within twenty-four hours one hundred or more wild horses had been captured “amid the wildest excitement” and appeared to be “as subject to their masters as farm horses.”
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They would chase a herd of mustangs for several days until the animals were exhausted, making them easy to capture. Comanches waited by water holes for parched horses to gorge themselves so they could barely run, then captured them. While the Comanches had a limited vocabulary to describe most things—a trait common to primitive peoples—their equine lexicon was large and minutely descriptive. For color alone, there were distinct Comanche words for brown, light bay, reddish brown, black, white, blue, dun, sorrel, roan, red, yellow, yellow-horse-with-a-black mane-and-tail; red, sorrel, and black pintos. There were even words to describe horses with red, yellow, and black ears.
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Comanche horsemanship also played a leading role in another Comanche pastime: gambling. Stories of Comanche horse hustles are legion. One of the more famous came from the Texas frontier. A small band of Comanches showed up at Fort Chadbourne, where the army officers challenged them to a race. The chief seemed indifferent to the idea, but the officers were so insistent that he agreed to it anyway. A race was arranged over a distance of four hundred yards. Soon a large, portly brave appeared on a long-haired “miserable sheep of a pony.” He carried a heavy club, with which he hit the horse. Unimpressed, the officers trotted out their third-best horse, and bet the Comanches flour, sugar, and coffee against buffalo robes. Swinging the club “ostentatiously,” the Indian won. For the next race, the soldiers brought
out their second-best horse. They lost this race, too. Now they insisted on a third race, and finally trotted out their number-one horse, a magnificent Kentucky mare. Bets were doubled, tripled. The Comanches took everything the soldiers would wager. At the starting signal, the Comanche warrior whooped, threw away his club, and “went away like the wind.” Fifty yards from the finish, the Comanche rider turned fully around in his saddle, and with “hideous grimaces” beckoned the other rider to catch up. The losers later learned that the same shaggy horse had just been used to take six hundred horses away from the Kickapoo Indians.
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