The Comanche turned horses into the backbone of a Plains power
As late as 1725, Comanche families were still loading their bison-hide tents onto large dogs. Within a few generations they had become the most celebrated horsemen of the southern Plains, supplying horses and mules to anyone who would trade and dominating a territory some historians call an empire.
The Comanche call themselves Numunuu, the people. The name Comanche comes via the Spanish from a Ute word meaning enemy, first recorded in 1706 when officials in Santa Fe heard that Utes and Comanches were preparing to strike outlying Pueblo settlements. Their language, part of the Uto-Aztecan family, began as a dialect of Shoshoni, reflecting their origins among Shoshone peoples who spread out of the Great Basin. The Kotsoteka, or Bison Eaters, were probably the first group to break away and head onto the Plains.
Horses spread across the Plains after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and they transformed Comanche life so thoroughly that some scholars think the search for more horses, not bison, drew the people south toward New Spain. The Comanche have the longest documented history of any mounted Plains people; they were riding while the Cheyenne still lived in earth lodges. By 1795 they were selling horses to Anglo-American traders, and in the 19th century Comanche stock reached St. Louis through other tribes acting as middlemen. Their language became the common tongue of trade on the southern Plains.
Comancheria stretched from the Arkansas River into central Texas, and the Apache were pushed off the Plains during the Comanche advance. Warfare was central to life. Raids into Mexico came at the full moon, giving rise to the term Comanche Moon, and in the 1840s they reached hundreds of miles south to seize livestock and captives, thousands of whom were absorbed into Comanche society. Politically there was no single nation: independent divisions such as the Yamparika, the Root Eaters, pursued their own goals, and any man leading a war party counted as a war chief.
Disease, the slaughter of the bison and defeat by the US Army forced them onto reservations in the mid-1870s. Today the Comanche Nation, based in Lawton, Oklahoma, has about 17,000 enrolled citizens.
Source: Comanche
