The Comanche Indians

“No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.” – S.C Gwynne

The Comanche Indians are a tribe of Native Americans with a reputation for being not only the most violent Indian tribe ever known but also of being one of the most violent groups of people in history. They were more specifically a North American Indian tribe of equestrian nomads whose 18th and 19th century territory comprised the southern Great Plains including modern day Texas. Almost without question the first thought that comes to your mind’s eye when you read the name Comanche or indeed Indian is that of a ruthless, uncivilized, lawless subset of people. Usually our depictions of Indians are garnered from what we have seen on television, a generic spaghetti western of possibly a memory of watching the ‘Lone Ranger’ or ‘The last of the Mohicans’ from childhood.

As with anything else, there are many aspects to the Comanche background. Are the depictions of them as savages wrong? In short no. Have they been unjustly portrayed as barbaric killers. Also, no. In fact, the depictions of the Comanche that we are most familiar with have in truth, have been softened up, extensively. The true brutality and the lengths they went to in order to torture and kill their enemy, other Indian tribes or more specifically the white settlers, is almost indescribably horrific. In this article, I will touch on some of those aspects with discretion. However, what is not portrayed is that they were also a gentle, respectful and unquestionably loyal people. Admittedly that sounds paradoxical. But, let me explain.

The Comanche were a hunter gatherer people, even though they were at the peak of their strength and power as late as the late 1800s, they hunted Buffalo and ate berries from bushes. In essence their life was as simple as that. There was no outside influences or complications. They hunted, gathered and ate. Their life source was the Buffalo, it provided them with everything, food, drink(blood) clothing, and they made tools from the Buffalo’s bones. They repeated this for hundreds of years. Until, the white settlers began to roam out west onto the Great plains in order to claim land. The American government had approved this and essentially if you could make it far enough west, you could claim a piece of land as your own, for free. This became known as the ‘The Great Frontier’ and in its most basic form, this is how the fighting began. This resulted in the Comanche Indians garnering a reputation for being the single most terrifying group of people in American history and here is why.

The Comanche’s were kind of like the Spartans. Because of their incredible military mastery, which derived from the horse. They were the prototype horse tribe, the tribe that could do more with the horse than any other tribe could. Because of that, it was a military community and their old way of life was supplanted by the new way of life which mainly had to do with war. So they pretty much hunted buffalo and started war. They were amazingly stripped down in that they didn't have social organization or religious organization. They didn't weave baskets. They had a very stripped-down culture. So within that culture the boys learned to hunt and ride at a very early age and they would become a warrior by the time they were teenagers. However, it’s important to note that the Comanche killed other Indian tribes, not just the white settler. There is a common misconception that they only attacked the ‘outsider’ this is untrue.

Like most other tribes of Plains Indians, the Comanche were organized into autonomous bands, local groups formed on the basis of kinship and other social relationships. Buffalo products formed the core of the Comanche economy and included robes, tepee covers, sinew thread, water carriers made of the animal’s stomach, and a wide variety of other goods. The Comanche were one of the first tribes to acquire horses from the Spanish and one of the few to breed them to any extent. They were, however, the first tribe to master them and this is what gave them their edge against all tribes and enemies. They also fought battles on horseback, a skill unknown among other Indian peoples. Highly skilled Comanche horsemen set the pattern of nomadic equestrian life that became characteristic of the Plains tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries. Comanche raids for material goods, horses, and captives carried them as far south as Durango in present-day Mexico.

The Comanche had no written history, therefore the accounts that we have of their ability on horseback come from what was written down buy the settlers or other invaders, every single account without any discrepancy highlights the magnitude of their ability on a horse. All the accounts mention being blown away entirely by their ability to hang from the side of the horse at full gallop and shot arrows from underneath the animal’s neck. Something that no one had ever seen before in history. When it came to riding a horse and using a horse as a weapon, no one was there peer.

Their mastery of the horse coupled with the fact they could now travel huge distances on horseback to attack or simply trade or travel became a remarkable milestone in the development of the Comanche and allowed them to grow into what they would eventually become. As a rule, when the Comanche attacked, the did so without mercy, it was their belief that no mercy would be shown to them if the attack was reciprocated. Therefore, the violence they unleashed on an enemy is in some cases almost unreadable.

The first task in an attack on a village or in a battle was that all the adult males would be killed. That was automatic. That was one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. The white men were astonished by it but they were assumed that they would be killed. Small children were killed as the Comanche had no time to raise a baby. They were invariably fleeing from someone or fleeing their previous attack and a baby would have been a burden. A lot of the children in say, the 3-10-year-old range were often taken as captives. The reason for this was that the Comanche often had problems keeping their numbers up due to losing members in battle. They would then take this age group as a captive to replace a brother or a sister that had been lost, and they would then teach this child the Comanche ways, therefore indoctrinating them into their system and way of life. Which encompassed everything, hunting, killing, cooking and speaking their language. The women were often raped and often killed. And all of the people in those settlements back in those years knew what a Comanche raid was and they knew what a Comanche raid meant. One of the Comanche signature torture techniques was to take a prisoner captive and tie him or her to a pole facing the sun. The would then remove the prisoner’s eyelids with a blade and allow the sun’s rays to burn them to blindness before leaving them for dead. As a historian and reading about the Plains Indians you have to come to terms with this, with torture, which they practiced all across the West and these kind of grisly practices that scared white people to death. So, where is the gentle, respectful and honorable side? Cynthia Ann Parker was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl abducted by the Comanche when she was 10 years old in 1836, her story explains this in detail. Learn more about her story and this relatively unknown side to the Comanche in next month’s column.