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.
Though a work of fiction, Blood Meridian is meticulously rooted in real geography and accurate history.
I've put together a list of a few of the real life places that you can visit today if you'd like to follow in the footsteps of the Glanton Gang: 🧵
Nacogdoches, Texas
Where the kid met the judge and burned down the tavern. Nacogdoches was the frontier gateway into Texas. A short rebellion against the Mexican government occured there in 1825, with some locals declaring the Republic of Fredonia.
San Antonio de Bexar
Where the kid smashed out the eye of the Mexican barman with a broken glass. Just called Bexar in the book, this is actually the modern day city of San Antonio. It was the center of Spanish/Mexican influence in Texas.
It's 1875 and Mexican warlords have overrun South Texas with their personal armies, stealing cattle with impunity and driving them back to Mexico.
One man named Leander McNelly and his Texas Rangers decide to do what the US Government refuses to do and stop it themselves. 🧵
The Nueces Strip is the part of Texas between The Rio Grande and the Nueces River. After the Civil War Anglo-Texans had moved into the area to take advantage one history's great arbitrage opportunities - local longhorn worth $2 could be sold up north for $40.
One of these warlords was a wealthy Mexican named Juan Cortina who had up to 2,000 gunmen at his command. His family had lost land north of the Rio Grande when the Nueces Strip was ceded to the US and he had no qualms about stealing as many cattle as he could from Anglo-Texans.
Blood Meridian is based on a first hand account of scalp-hunters found in a book called My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain.
Reading through it highlights for me how little of Blood Meridian was dramatized by McCarthy.
Here are a few excerpts I thought were interesting:
Samuel Chamberlain was a young man from Boston who ended up riding with the Glanton Gang. Some think that the Kid in Blood Meridian is loosely based on him. Here he is meeting Glanton for the first time.
John Glanton was a real person who shows up in the historical record in several places.
Apparently the reason he hates Indians so much is because they massacred his fiancee after he built her a cabin by a river so they could build a life together in Texas.
Part 2 of a thread on the Comanche, their reign as the horse lords of the Southern Plains, and how they were eventually defeated by the Anglo-Texans. 🧵
The southern edge of Comanchería was the Balcones Escarpment, or what Texans today generally call the Hill Country, which ran in an arc from roughly Dallas to Austin to San Antonio, and is the point at which the Great Plains fall down into the more fertile Coastal Plains.
As settlers moved into this area in the 1830s, it would become the frontline in the Comanche wars.
As we discussed in Part 1, the Comanche for cultural reasons couldn't help but raid the isolated farmsteads that began popping up.
In order to understand the history of North America, it's good to review the three very different approaches each of the major colonial powers took with regard to the Indians:
1. French - Trade 2. Spanish - Assimilation 3. English - Land Ownership
Let's go over each:
1. French
The French were the greatest traders with the natives. Obviously they envisioned the fleur-de-lis flying over all of North America, but this was to support their primary interest which was mercantile. French trappers and traders wandered the furthest as a result.
French weapons dealing caused ceaseless consternation to the English and Spanish, who more tightly regulated trade and had to deal with the result of heavily armed tribes. Many conflicts between the French and their neighbors in the New World could be traced back to this.
A lot of people don't know that it's entirely legal to general contract the construction of your own home. It used to be very common, but doesn't happen as much anymore.
Here's a step-by-step guide for how to save 20% of the cost of your new home by building it yourself. (🧵)
This is totally possible without any construction experience. You shouldn't have to self-perform any of the work yourself. You won't need to swing a hammer. All you're going to do is put together the team and hire the subcontractors yourself.
1. Find the lot/land. You need to check with the city or county that building a single family home is an approved use in that zone.
Check for utility connections. Having all utilities stubbed to the lot up front is one of the best ways to save costs.