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The Comancheria (Comanche: Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ, 'Comanche land'; Spanish: Comanchería), also known as the Comancherian Empire, was a historic region covering modern New Mexico, West Texas, and nearby areas that was occupied by the Comanche before the 1860s. The historian Pekka Hämäläinen has argued that the Comancheria formed an empire at its peak, and that view has been echoed by other historians.
By the early 1830s, the Comanche began to run out of resources in Comancheria. At this time, they had been conducting raids deep into Mexico and would take what they got back to Comancheria. In the mid-1830s, the Comanche formed a colony in Mexico, called the Bolson colony. Conditions in the colony were similar to those in Comancheria when it was winter in the north. Eventually, there was a drought, and Comancheria, and the Bolson colony struggled. Also, the empire collapsed after their villages were repeatedly decimated by epidemics of smallpox and cholera in the late 1840s, which caused their population to plunge from 20,000 to just a few thousand by the 1870s.Hämäläinen (2008), p. 2.
The Comanche resolved most of the challenges facing them in the 1830s with adroit diplomacy. Their strategy was flexible. With New Mexico, a Mexican province to their west, they enjoyed friendly trading relations. New Mexico was more of an asset than a threat to the Comanches, and the New Mexicans avoided war with the Indians. In 1841, Governor Manuel Armijo was ordered by the Mexican central government to join a military campaign against the Comanche, but he declined: "To declare war on the Comanches would bring complete ruin to the Department of New Mexico." In 1844, New Mexican officials learned of but did nothing to prevent a Comanche raid on Chihuahua.Weber, p. 114–115
With their western flank secured by an unthreatening New Mexico, the Comanche dealt with rivals on their northern and eastern borders. In 1835, they met with a delegation of American soldiers and eastern Indians in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma and concluded a peace agreement. The agreement permitted eastern Indians and the Americans to hunt on Comanche lands and did not restrain the Comanche and their Kiowa and Wichita allies from making war on Mexico.Hoig, Stan, Beyond the Frontier: Exploring the Indian Country. Norman: U of OK Press,1998, p. 185 With their eastern flank secured by the treaty with the Americans, the Comanches next concluded a peace agreement in 1840 with the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, who were pressing on them from the north. The agreement was highly favorable to the Cheyenne and Arapaho since they were permitted to reside and hunt on the buffalo and horse-rich Comanche lands. In addition, the affluent Comanche gave them gifts, including as many as six horses to every Cheyenne and Arapaho man.DeLay, 80 The Comanche's welcome to both tribes, their southern bands numbering perhaps 4,000, was both an acknowledgment that they were formidable rivals and also that the Comanche were short on men and resources to maintain their control over Comancheria.
South and southeast of Comancheria were the fast-growing Anglo-American communities in the Mexican territory of Texas. In the 1820s and 1830s most Comanche raids were in the southern parts of Texas and affected the largely-Hispanic population around San Antonio, Laredo and Goliad.Hamalainen, 198-199 After the Texas Revolution asserted independence from Mexico in 1836, the Comanche had to deal with the Republic of Texas. Texas's first president, Sam Houston, was knowledgeable about Indians and favored a policy of accommodation with the Comanche.
Continued Comanche raids led to the election in 1838 of Mirabeau B. Lamar, who favored a more aggressive approach. The massacre of 12 Comanche chiefs attending a peace conference in San Antonio in March 1840 set off a series of bloody reprisals and battles. Hundreds of Comanches descended upon and destroyed the towns of Victoria and Linnville in 1840. Although the Texans demonstrated they could defeat the Comanche at the Battle of Plum Creek, military campaigns emptied their treasury in what became the Texas–Indian Wars, and Texas became more accommodating. In 1844, the Texans and the Comanches came to an agreement, which recognized Comanche lands and left Comancheria intact.Hamalainen, 228
The agreements with the United States and neighboring tribes, as well as the hiatus in the struggle with Texas, freed up the Comanche to make unrestrained war on the Mexican provinces south of the Rio Grande. The 1830s demonstrated that the Texans, the United States, and neighboring tribes all had the ability to invade Comancheria and attack the Comanche homeland. Mexico, in contrast, was rich in horses and unable to counterattack because of distance and the fact that after 1836, any Mexican military expedition against Comanches would have had to pass through Texas, a republic whose independence Mexico did not recognize. In attacking Mexico, the Comanche seemed motivated by opportunity, economics, and revenge, and their animosity toward non-Comanches was sharpened by decades of war and reprisals. Thus, their raids on Mexico became increasingly bloody and destructive.
In the southeast, the Comanche's former allies, the Tonkawa, settled; they became rivals after the expulsion of the Apache of the Plains, however. In the north, the Southern Cheyenne Arapaho, forced the Comanche to acknowledge the Arkansas River as their northern border. Moreover, the Comanche undertook extensive commercial enterprises to the Puebloans in New Mexico and to the Spanish settlements around San Antonio. In the trade of guns, horses, captives, and other goods, the Comanchero (Pueblo and New Mexico traders) acted as intermediaries. The Ciboleros also competed with the Comanche in the context of bison hunting. The Comanche language became the lingua franca of the Southern Plains.
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