The Other Slavery (35 page)

Any Comanche man could propose a raid, spread the word that a war party was about to leave, and invite all others to join in. Proven leaders had an easier time gaining a following. Less experienced or poorer males
typically fielded smaller parties. A council was often held to approve the raid—which necessarily would have political consequences—and to work out the details: where to go; what route to follow; how many warriors, horses, and weapons to take. These parties could target other Indians, American caravans, or particular communities. During the 1830s–1870s, most of the raids were directed against Mexicans. Coahuila, Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, and some other Mexican states were far enough from the Comanchería and possessed enough animals, textiles, tools, and potential captives to make them attractive targets. According to the recollections of Comanche elders interviewed decades later, the day before departure all members of the raiding party, decked out in their war costumes, paraded on horseback around the tepees so that everyone could see the strength and members of the group. Other men could join the party at this time. A dance, in which only those going on the raid could participate, followed. The members of the raiding party also sang and invited young women to sing with them. This was a propitious time for marriage proposals and elopements.
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Once they were on the trail, the first order of the day was to acquire sufficient animals. Ideally, each warrior had to have a riding horse and a pack animal to carry his clothes and other belongings. Additionally, each raiding party included a “cook” who was responsible for the supplies of the entire group. This person was “selected for industry, activity, alertness, and willingness to do what was needed” and was often, interestingly, a Mexican captive. To carry all the water and food the group needed, the cook required sufficient beasts of burden. Consequently, it was not unusual for raiding parties to spend a lot of time getting the necessary animals. The warriors descended on barns or corrals, killing wranglers and stampeding or leading away the animals. When it came time to divide the spoils, the cook frequently got to choose first because horses and mules were so necessary for his work.
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Comanche war parties undertook long-distance journeys of reconnaissance and discovery that lasted weeks or even months—comparable to the Spanish expeditions of the sixteenth century, but in the other direction. After all, Chihuahua City was 270 miles away from the Comanchería, Durango 660 miles, and Zacatecas nearly 800 miles. Just
getting there was a considerable feat. The raiders sometimes traveled at night and slept during the day to avoid detection. Surviving the desert of northern Mexico was no less challenging for Comanches than it was for other parched travelers. Because the terrain was unfamiliar, party members had to rely on intelligence culled from a variety of sources: Indian allies, trading partners, captives, and an assortment of unwilling informants. When the attackers at last neared their target, they hid in the woods or another protected area. They rested before striking and desisted from lighting a fire. Each man selected his best horse and prepared for the raid. The cook and some sentries usually stayed behind with the supplies and any captives they already had in their possession. Everyone had precise instructions about when and where to rendezvous and made contingency plans.
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Witnesses emphasized the stealth of these Indian attacks, which in an instant could turn a placid night into a surreal scene of mayhem, complete with screams of
“Los bárbaros!,”
gunshots, galloping horses, and flying arrows. Outlying ranches, isolated houses, and shepherds plying their trade in remote areas were easy pickings. But Comanche warriors sometimes targeted large Mexican towns as well. In December 1840 and January 1841, a group of Indian attackers spent two weeks raiding ranches in the vicinity of Saltillo, the capital of the state of Coahuila, moving from one ranch to the next, as if in complete defiance of any Mexican retribution. In a feat of “inconceivable audacity,” as the Mexican press labeled it, they appeared right on the outskirts of the city before being driven away by a hastily assembled Mexican force. Similarly, in August 1846, during one of the most daring and brazen raids of all, some five hundred Comanches cut a swath through Chihuahua and Durango. George F. Ruxton, an Englishman who was traveling through northern Mexico at the time, left us a bleak portrayal: abandoned ranches, impassable roads, and barricaded towns living in dread of Indian raids. When he reached the city of Durango in September, he was astonished to learn that the talk of this town of some eighteen thousand inhabitants was not about the ongoing U.S.-Mexican War, but about a possible Indian invasion by Comanches who had been ravaging haciendas to the northeast of the city.
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Along with horses and trade goods, Comanches made away with captives. The testimony of Abelino Fuentes is fairly typical. He was walking with three brothers and one sister along a path in the vicinity of Monclova sometime in 1838 when a group of thirty warriors descended on them. The attackers immediately killed the oldest brother, Pedro, put the other children on horses, and began retreating. Abelino was seven years old at the time. The following day, a Mexican force caught up with the Comanches, forcing them to shed all their captives except Abelino. The raiders then continued to travel north. Captives like Abelino sometimes tried to escape while they were still close to their home communities and in relative proximity to other Mexican towns. That is why Indians often bound captives with ropes before going to sleep or even while riding. After crossing the Rio Grande and especially after having reached the Comanchería, such precautions became unnecessary. Lacking horses, weapons, and provisions, it was extremely risky for captives to set out on their own in the immense southern plains.
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By the nineteenth century, the market for captives along the U.S.-Mexico border was well developed with suppliers, buyers, and widely known intermediaries. Although most Indian groups took captives, not all were involved to the same degree. Because of their geographic location and strength, some bands of Comanches, Apaches, and other Plains Indians did much of the actual enslaving of Mexicans. Captive Fernando González singled out the Yamparicas (a band of Comanches), the Kiowas (a group closely allied with the Comanches), some Apache bands (Lipanes, Mescaleros, and Gileños), and the Sarigtecas (or Sarit
u
hkas, a generic term for Plains Indians used by the Comanches) as the principal captive takers in northern Mexico. These bands often traded their prisoners away, but they also retained many captives who were incorporated into their respective bands and came to comprise significant proportions of their overall populations. According to the American ethnographer James Mooney, who spent five years doing fieldwork among the Kiowa Indians in the 1890s, “At least one fourth of the whole number have more or less of captive blood . . . chiefly Mexicans and Mexican Indians, with Indians of other tribes, and several whites taken from Texas when children.” In a census of Comanche families conducted in
Oklahoma Territory in 1902, fully forty-five percent turned out to be of Mexican descent.
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If the principal suppliers of captives are few and easy to identify, the customers are somewhat more scattered: New Mexican families in the market for servants, the Plains Indians themselves, and Anglo-American merchants and fort operators on the frontier. The Bent brothers, William and Charles, are an excellent case in point. They started trading with the Indians of Dakota in the early 1820s before moving their operation to the upper Arkansas River in what is now southeastern Colorado, where they built an imposing square structure out of adobe bricks in 1828–1829. Their sense of geography (and timing) could not have been better: right along the U.S.-Mexico border, on the edge of the Comanchería, and a necessary stopover point for the caravans traveling between Missouri and New Mexico. In its heyday in the 1830s and 1840s, Bent’s Fort employed more than a hundred individuals, including merchants, teamsters, hunters, herders, and laborers. Many of these employees were Mexicans whom Colonel William Bent had purchased from Comanche and Kiowa Indians. “I know of several instances of this kind, and there must have been many others,” recalled George Bent, William’s half-white, half-Cheyenne son. “One peon who was bought by my father from the Kiowas in [the] early days is now living down here at the Kiowa Agency . . . Another captive my father bought was a German who was carried off by the Kiowas from the German colony in Texas when he was a small boy.” Comanches and Kiowas regularly headed to Bent’s Fort to trade horses and other plunder, including captives. From these visits George Bent was able to ascertain that “among the Kiowas and Comanches nearly every family had one or two Mexican captives. The women captives married into the tribe, . . . the boys and men were employed by the Indians as herders, to guard the horses when out grazing; but after the men had lived with the Indians a number of years they became regular warriors, and the more intelligent and brave ones led war parties of Indians on raids into Mexico and Texas.”
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From published and unpublished sources, Rivaya-Martínez has identified 470 captives taken by Comanches from the 1820s to the 1860s. It is impossible to know how many cases went unrecorded. From this
sample, however, it is clear that most of the victims were Hispanics (seventy-five percent), followed far behind by other Indians (fourteen percent) and Anglo-Americans (ten percent). Traditionally, perceptions of Comanche captivity have been shaped by a handful of sensational accounts given by Americans who fell into their hands, as Rivaya-Martínez has noted. The treatment of Matilda Lockhart, for example, a thirteen-year-old girl abducted from her family’s homestead on the Guadalupe River in Texas, became well known through the writings of Mary A. Maverick. When Matilda “returned to civilization,” she had bruises and sores all over her body, and her nose had been cut off, her nostrils “wide open and denuded of flesh.” Maverick recounted how Matilda’s captors would wake her “by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose, and how they would shout and laugh like fiends when she cried.” Similarly, American readers learned of the ordeal of Rachael Plummer, who wrote
Narrative of Twenty One Months Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Commanchee Indians,
and became acquainted with the misfortunes of the Horn family after the publication of
A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn and Her Two Children with That of Mrs. Harris by the Comanche Indians.
Undoubtedly, such experiences did occur among Comanche captives. But proportionally, the Comanches took few Anglo-American captives, and the ones they did take were often ransomed and released as soon as practicable. Far more abundant and typical were the experiences of humble Mexicans, whose lives were changed in an instant when they were captured, and who frequently remained with the Natives for several years, if not forever. Lacking the necessary means and connections, the families of these captives were unable to ransom their children and wives and were otherwise powerless to demand their return. Rash actions by aggrieved parents wishing to pursue Indian abductors could easily result in further injury.
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The fate of these captives varied according to ethnicity, social standing, and the vagaries of the slave traffic. Young Mexican captives from poor families who were unlikely to be ransomed were frequently traded back and forth among different clans and different bands. Twelve-year-old Jesús María Guzmán, for example, was abducted in May 1848 from a hacienda near Sabinas Hidalgo, in Nuevo León. The Comanche
abductors crossed the Rio Grande near Laredo and traveled through western Texas for a month. Before reaching their ranchería, they spent a few days at an encampment of Lipan Apaches, who attempted to buy Jesús María. On that occasion, the Comanche warrior who had captured the boy refused to sell him at the price that was offered. However, the Lipan Apaches remained interested. Eighteen days later, they paid a visit to the Comanche ranchería. Offering a higher price, they were able to complete the transaction. There are numerous instances of captive exchanges among Comanches and Apaches at this time. In the late 1840s, the Comanches and Lipan Apaches were allied, visited each other regularly, and traded captives as a matter of course. Jesús María actually met most of the captives living in both rancherías, and “during the three years that he lived with the Indians, he noticed how Lipanes and Comanches campaigned together and how Comanches often came to invite his Indians to go raiding together.”
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Anglo-Americans and well-off Mexicans stood a better chance of being ransomed. Their families often hired agents or worked with government officials to locate their abducted relatives and negotiate their release. Naturally, the Indians themselves must have been aware that some of their captives were eminently “ransomable” and were thus inclined to negotiate with intermediaries in a manner that could not have been too different from modern-day negotiations regarding abductions. Such negotiations were sometimes conducted by agents who remained in regular contact with Indian bands, knew about the captives held by each group, and either acted on behalf of the relatives of the abductees or participated in this human traffic on their own account and for their own benefit. Hispanic merchants who made a living by trading with the Plains Indians were the principal intermediaries. Given the strong ties linking New Mexico with these Indians, it is no wonder that most of these merchants, known as
comancheros,
were based in that territory. The celebrated American merchant Josiah Gregg described them as a class of “indigent and rude” individuals from the frontier villages “who collect together several times a year, and launch upon the plains with a few trinkets and trumperies of all kinds, and perhaps a bag of bread or pinole.” Comancheros made the purchase of Indian, Mexican, and
Anglo-American captives a regular part of their overall commercial activities. Sometimes they acted on behalf of the victims’ families. In late 1849, for example, a party of Apaches ambushed a wagon train of Americans on the Santa Fe Trail, taking a white woman (Mrs. White) and her small daughter with them. After news of this fateful event reached Santa Fe, James S. Calhoun, the Indian agent for New Mexico, tried to find a solution. He quickly concluded that a military effort would not succeed. Instead, Calhoun hired the services of a comanchero. “This man is well known to respectable people here, as a daring, fearless, and withal a discreet man,” he reported to Washington. “I promised to pay him one thousand dollars, and other gratuities, if he succeeds in bringing in to me Mrs. White and her daughter.” The Mexican merchant departed within an hour, “manifesting the greatest confidence in his ability to command success.” In spite of his speedy dispatch and confidence, the comanchero returned empty-handed. By the time he reached the Apaches, they had killed the woman and absolutely refused to sell the daughter.
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