![]() ![]() When the US Government commenced its war against the Comanches after the American Civil War, their Comanchero allies and relatives assisted the Comanche resistance by supplying firearms and ammunition to the tribes. Although there was no doubt intermittent trading between small groups of Pueblos and Spaniards with various Comanche bands on the Southern High Plains prior to 1780, the real Comanchero trade grew and flourished after that year.įrom the 1780s until the mid-19th century, the Comanchero trade flourished at different locales on the Southern High Plains, notably in northeastern New Mexico at Cejita de Los Comancheros in present-day Harding County and in the Palo Duro Canyon area of Texas near Quitaque in present-day Briscoe County. Prior to this New Mexico trade with the Comanche had been essentially limited to Comanche attendance at trade fairs at the Taos and Pecos Pueblos, and trade with the Spanish settlers at Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Valencia and Tome. This treaty opened the way for the full development of the Comanchero trade. On 28 February 1786 at the Pecos Pueblo a treaty between the Comanche and the Spanish in New Mexico was signed between Governor de Anza and Ecueracapa, a Comanche war chief who had been selected as a plenipotentiary for the Comanche nation. By the end of 1785 all, or substantially all, of the Comanche bands had agreed. This show of force resulted in various Comanche war leaders acceding to peace over the next several years. This continued until 1779, when a 500-man army led directly by the new young governor, Juan Bautista de Anza, and including 200 native auxiliaries, undertook a punitive expedition against the largest and most active group of Comanche raiders, who were led by a man known as Green Horn ( Cuerno Verde), and, surprising the Comanches in their camp, killed Green Horn and dealt a severe defeat to the Comanches. During the mid-18th century (1750–1780), the plains tribes, notably the Comanche, but also the Apache and other tribal groups, raided the Pueblos and Spanish settlements for horses, corn and slaves with ever-increasing frequency. For the next 60 years, the relations of the Comanches with the Spanish and Pueblo settlements was a patchwork of alternate trading and raiding, with different bands being sometimes at peace and sometimes at war with the settlements along the Rio Grande. In 1719, the Comanches made the first recorded raid for horses upon the settlements of the Rio Grande Valley. During the first half of the 18th Century the Comanche gradually spread their area of occupation throughout the Southern High Plains and large areas of Texas, where they largely displaced the tribal peoples who had lived there prior to the coming of the Spaniards, mostly the Apache, who were themselves an earlier migrant group of Athabaskan peoples from the North. They migrated southward through the Rocky Mountains and into the Southern High Plains, where they and their Shoshonean kinsmen, the Utes, began to appear at trade fairs in Taos about 1700. The Comanches, a Shoshonean people, migrated from the North and arose as a separate and distinct tribe in the early 18th Century, largely as a result of having obtained breeding stocks of horses after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Prior to the coming of the Spanish, with their horses, into the American Southwest, with early explorations beginning in the 1540s and permanent settlement in the late 1590s, the people who came to be known as Comanches did not live in the Southern High Plains. As the Comancheros did not have regular access to weapons and gunpowder, there is disagreement about how much they traded these with the Comanche. They traded manufactured goods (tools and cloth), flour, tobacco, and bread for hides, livestock and slaves from the Comanche. The name "Comancheros" comes from the Comanche tribe, in whose territory they traded. They made their living by trading with the nomadic Great Plains Indian tribes in northeastern New Mexico, West Texas, and other parts of the southern plains of North America. The Comancheros were a group of 18th- and 19th-century traders based in northern and central New Mexico. ![]() For other uses, see Comanchero (disambiguation). ![]()
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