Thread by @VanDiemen_

Thread on what made the Comanche the most brutal and feared American Indian horse warriors, how they halted European expansion for generations, and how the Anglo-Texans eventually learned to defeat them. 🧵

(Part 1)

If North America had a geographical "Womb of Nations", like Mongolia or Scandinavia in the Old World, it would be Wyoming. It was a cold, bitter, liminal place that forged peoples into the hardest forms of homo sapiens. The Comanche are a Shoshone speaking tribe from Wyoming.

Settled agriculturalists farmed in the valleys of the tributaries of the Missouri. The Shoshone were the outcasts who couldn't compete with these tribes because of calorie differences. They scratched life out of high deserts and mountains, living constantly on a knife's edge.

Every death in the band was a tragedy. Every birth a celebration. Destroying one enemy warrior under these tenuous conditions would also destroy the entire family group that depended on him for food, and hence the competition. Killing became a necessary part of survival.

So the Comanche, even more so than other Indian tribes, developed an extreme love of violence, torture, and war.

Scalping sacred hair was destroying the soul. Captives were taken back to camp so that the women could torture and wring every ounce of pain out of the body.

Somehow the Comanche learned of horses on the southern plains which had come from the Spanish in New Mexico. The Pueblo Indians adjacent to the Spanish were mostly using the horses for agricultural purposes. The Comanche were the first tribe to adopt and master the horse for war.

So the Comanche migrated southwards to be closer to horseflesh, which they stole and bred and learned to ride on the Great Plains. Pretty soon all the southern plains south of the Arkansas River and east of New Mexico became known as Comanchería by the Spanish.

The Comanche became expert horsemen and hunters of buffalo. Rather than relying on the old methods of stampeding the herds into traps on foot, the Comanche would gallop alongside the bison and shoot arrows straight into the sides, which would go clean through.

The Comanche multiplied and became the undisputed rulers of the American steppe, exactly like the Mongols or Huns or Yamnaya did with their koryos warrior brotherhoods. If given more time, they would have conquered the continent from Alberta to Oaxaca.

In a successful tribe or society there comes a time when prosperity and security is totally achieved. The Comanche reached it. Individuals warriors owned hundreds of horses. Chiefs - thousands. They had all the food they needed from the buffalo. But they still craved prestige.

And when ultra-violent bands of young men have prosperity and crave prestige, they look around and redirect their energy outwards to anyone they could find that would fight them. The Comanche soon became known for being the longest travelling raiders in North America.

The tribes around them were fair game, and they often fought with the Utes in the mountains of Colorado and the Cheyenne and Crow in the Northern Plains, but their favorite target was Mexicans. They would rampage for thousands of miles through Mexico, nearly reaching Mexico City.

One account speaks of a group of Comanche and Kiowa allies who went so deep into Central America that they brought back tales from the jungles of brightly colored birds and of little people in the trees (monkeys). Some speculate they may have reached as far as Guatemala.

The Spanish in New Spain sent out numerous expeditions into Comanchería to try to crush the Indians. One army that was sent had more soldiers and Indian allies than Cortez had when we conquered the Aztecs, and it was defeated out on the high plains.

The Spanish Empire reached its zenith against the Comanche in Texas, and they help turn it back. The Spanish in the long run never had the birthrates, money, organization, or competence to compete with the Comanche. Nor did the Mexican government after independence.

The plains tribes universally had a very different approach to war than the Europeans. Because they were extremely casualty averse, the concepts of standing and fighting pitched battles, glorious last stands, pressing an enemy who was retreating, were very foreign to them.

The Indian method of warfare was stealth, ambush, surprise, and massacre. They sought out soft spots, such as unprotected villages or lonely travellers, and massacre anyone they could find. If any resistance was encountered, they would usually retreat.

Indian battles amongst warriors were more like quiet, long-running skirmishes. Sneaking through undergrowth. Outflanking maneuvers. Arrows darting out from behind trees. Single combat. Sometimes melees would form around fallen bodies to prevent mutilation.

The Comanche brought this style to their cavalry. Rather than using heavy horses in a disciplined mass to charge infantry, they instinctively swirled and churned like a murmuration of sparrows on the battlefield, with no obvious rhyme or reason to their enemy.

They would stay out of range, pick off outliers, attempt penetrations and sneak attacks, feint flight then fire Parthian style at pursuers. It was all classic steppe horse tactics.

But the Comanche, like all Indians, preferred massacre to battle. A surprise early morning raid into an enemy camp was the best case scenario, with warriors galloping through the lodges lanceing and shooting anything that moved, setting fires, and stealing whatever they could.

There was no Comanche taboo against killing any human outside the tribe, in fact it was glorified. Infants were bashed on rocks. Women were gang-raped. Corpses were mutilated. Captives skinned alive and burned in sensitive places. Sometimes kids were kept in order to be adopted.

What the Comanche saw in war as a normal and vital part of life, the Anglo-Texan called "murder raids" and it enraged them. And initially they were completely at a loss about what to do about it. The Americans that moved into Texas were used to fighting Indians in the woods.

The Kentucky long rifle that was so famously employed in the vast forests of the east was deadly accurate, perfect for firing from cover, but slow to reload. A Comanche could launch 20 arrows in the time it took an American to shoot once with a long rifle.

Also, the Texans originally fought on foot. There wasn't a strong culture of military horsemanship that had developed yet in America, as it wasn't needed for clearing eastern Indians. Something would need to change to defeat the Comanche.

End of Part 1.

Part 2 coming tomorrow.

Part 2 here 👇