![]() They subsisted on the bison herds of the Plains which they hunted for food and skins.Īlthough their extensive area of suzerainty has been called an empire, the Comanche were never united under a single government or leader, but rather consisted of several bands with a common language but which operated independently of each other. Adroit diplomacy was also a factor in maintaining their dominance and fending off enemies for more than a century. Comanche power and their substantial wealth depended on horses, trading, and raiding. The Comanche are often characterized as "Lords of the Plains." They presided over a large area called Comancheria which they shared with allied tribes, the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Wichita, and after 1840 the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Comanche became the dominant tribe on the southern Great Plains. In the 17th century the Eastern Shoshone people who became known as the Comanche migrated southward from Wyoming. ![]() expansion in the Southwest - particularly through their devastating raids of northern Mexico that paved the way for a shockingly easy invasion during the Mexican-American War in 1846-1848.Comanche history / k ə ˈ m æ n tʃ i/ is the story of the Native American (Indian) tribe which lived on the Great Plains of the present-day United States. In particular, he argues that the Comanche and United States empire grew alongside one another, and that the Comanches effectively paved the way for U.S. He works to re-center the North American historical narrative of the period from the east coast to the center of the continent. Additionally, Hämäläinen builds an alternative spatial perspective. Although the Comanches exhibited many of the "traditional" traits of empire (geographic scale, core-periphery hierarchies, hinterlands of extraction and exploitation, incorporation of different ethnicities and multiculturalism, and cultural influence), they differed in other key ways, in particular: not subjugating people under direct political rule and not explicitly advocating for expansion as an ideology. ![]() One of Hämäläinen's main contributions is a discussion of empire. Weakened, the Comanches fell to an aggressive United States military attempting to solidify their rule on the Great Plains during the 1850s to 1870s. However, this system ultimately ended in collapse, as over-hunting of bison along with drought resulted in an ecological devastation of their economy. By the 1830s and 1840s, in fact, the Comanches had developed a veritable "raiding industry" of slaves and livestock in Northern Mexico, with a core of power serving as a hub system of trade, tribute, and extraction. Hämäläinen argues that their presence in part explains New Spain's inability to extend their empire northward, and Mexico's chronic weakness after independence. By the early 18th century, the Comanches dominated the region and had become the most populous Indian group, bolstered by an integral slave population closely tied to kinship relations. In addition to bison-hunting, the Comanches engaged in a dual system of trade and raiding (which Hämäläinen sees as two different activities on a continuum). Through their rapid turn to a pastoral lifestyle centered on bison-hunting, the Comanches began to build a mobile commercial network that extracted labor and resources from surrounding peoples. Hämäläinen describes how the Comanches first adopted the horse in the late 17th century, quickly and flexibly taking advantage of its power to harness energy on the grasslands of the plains.
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