Comancheria: Season 1

Rise of Comancheria

Mar 03, 2024

[I]n this decade the Anglo-American colony cleared more timber, broke more soil, built more towns, and raised more crops and children than the Hispanic culture had in two hundred years.

— T.R Fehrenbach

What is Comancheria?

I haven’t yet heard from Mel Gibson or anyone else. But on the upside, I’ve begun to watch Shōgun and it’s one of the best show on TV. Smarter and more beautiful than Vikings (it may be the most beautiful show ever?), it sets another precedent for Comancheria.

I sketch out three seasons of Comanceria, stitched together with bullet point summaries and extracts from T.R Fehrenbach’s superb and underrated Comanches: The History of a People. Each episode is a self-contained vignette, following a broadly chronological arc. Fehrenbach’s mesmerising prose brings to life one of the last great frontiers of history.

Season 1: Rise of Comancheria

Episode 1: Chaos
Episode 2: Comanches and Apaches
Episode 3: New Spain and Villasur — 1720
Episode 4: The Massacre of San Saba — 1757
Episode 5: Don Juan Bautista de Anza and Truce — 1786
Episode 6: New Spain Terror and Decline
Episode 7: Mexico and Hell

Season 2: Comanchería y el Tejano Diablo

Episode 1: Parker’s Fort — 1834
Episode 2: Rise of the Texan Ranger — el Tejano Diablo
Episode 3: Lies and Destruction of the Cherokees — 1839
Episode 4: Council House Fight — 1840
Episode 5: The Battle of Plum Creek — 1840
Episode 6: The 2nd Cavalry — 1855
Episode 7: Lieutenant Hood - 1857
Episode 8: John S. Ford — 1858
Episode 9: Robert Neighbors — 1859

Season 3: Comancheria’s Last Stand

Episode 1: The Chivington Massacre — 1864
Episode 2: Civil War Respite — A Close Call — 1864
Episode 3: Little Buffalo and Britt Johnson — 1864
Episode 4: Colonel Pfeiffer — 1864
Episode 5: Mackenzie and his Buffalo Soldiers — 1872
Episode 6: Empire Out West
Episode 7: Eeshatai, Quanah and the Last Stand — 1874

Season 1: Rise of Comancheria

Episode 1. Chaos

Spread of horse technology from the southwest and introduction of firearms and iron weapons by French traders
Havoc among Amerindians as new technologies result in some tribes slaughtering and driving out others
Rise of the Comanche — greatest riders and horse bowmen on the Great Plains

In waves beginning at each end of the midcontinent, the horse and the new weapons began to tear the old Amerindian structures and relationships apart. The people who mastered the horse at one end, and those who got iron and muskets at the other, carried their ancient wars to newer, bloodier plateaus. There was a newer, greater collision of mobile and armed peoples exploiting horses and steel.
The French armed the semisedentary peoples around the Great Lakes and along the Missouri drainage, and these tribes, powerful and exultant with steel and firearms, wreaked a fearful punishment on the weaker, purely predatory bands of Indians.
The warrior who rode best shot best, and if the Comanches were acknowledged as the superior horsemen on the plains, it followed that they became the deadliest bowmen. Training in hunting sharpened these skills. Every Comanche boy learned to gallop beside a fleeing bison, holding his seat with his knees on a charging, swerving pony, loosing his shafts with pinpoint accuracy. Although the musket had a greater killing range than the short Comanche bois d’arc bow, the Comanche arrow was infinitely more accurate, even from horseback. The disparity was greater in the rate of fire. A Comanche warrior could loose twenty shafts at the gallop, closing in on the prey, while a musket-armed man could get off one shot and reload.

Episode 2. Comanches and Apaches

Comanche tribal and family life
War with the Apache, resulting in Apache driven out of the Plains and refugees to New Spain

Warfare between Apaches and Comanches was never organized on a tribal basis; it could not be, since neither formed extensive tribes. It was between band and band, enemies by a mutual cultural antipathy, institutionalized by ancient custom and new trauma. There was really no difference between a Comanche “village” and a war base camp. Wherever a Comanche rode and erected his tipi was home. Thousands of the Nermernuh spilled south through the southern plains, striking in every direction at the Apache rancherías. The result was near-extermination of the advanced eastern Apaches. The sum of a hundred raids was the same as the sum of a hundred pitched battles on the soil of Europe during the Völkerwanderung. Apache camps were destroyed one by one, and the whole people began to be displaced.
Shortly after 1700, the New Mexican authorities realized that something had happened to their old enemies, the Apaches, but they knew none of the details. In 1705, they made the first known contact with the Komántcia or Comanches, and by 1706, the Spanish governor was able to connect the appearance of this new tribe of indios with the disasters befalling the eastern Apaches.
In this same year, the men at Santa Fe knew that the Apaches had been decisively beaten to the north and east of New Mexico, because Apache refugees were fleeing into or across Spanish territory, moving from the edge of the eastern plains into the arid western mountains. To the delight of the authorities, the Jicarilla band agreed to embrace Christianity and begged for Spanish protection. The Jicarillas were allowed to migrate westward into New Mexico and settle under Spanish guns.

BY 1725, MOST OF THOSE LANDS EAST OF THE SOUTHERN ROCKIES THAT the Spaniards had called Apachería had become Comanchería, the domain of the Comanches. The terrible, buffalo-horned warriors on horseback had seized an enormous new empire… Its core covered six hundred miles from north to south, four hundred miles from east to west, lying entirely on the southern portions of the Great Plains from the ninety-eighth meridian to the foothills of the Rockies. It was an empire to make any people proud, and the influence and the fear inspired by the invading Nermernuh extended far beyond the lands the war bands patrolled. All camps and settlements within a thousand miles of Comanchería were within the riding range of the horse barbarians.
During the spring rains the entire southern plains blazed with an ephemeral beauty, a riot of wild flowers gleaming in deep, green grass. In this season even the treeless mesa of the Llano Estacado was dotted with shallow, brimming playa lakes. Then, as the rains ceased and the southern midcontinental sun sucked the earth, the ponds dried into sand and mud, and the lush buffalo, bunchflower, needle, and other native grasses yellowed and withered. By late summer the plains did appear desertlike; but this “desert” was almost as ephemeral as the lush spring, for the grass and flowers only awaited a random rain to come again in glory. The earth was matted with the accumulation of generations of resurrected vegetation and seeds. While some sections burned dry, and might stay arid for months and even years, there was always rain and grass somewhere on the prairie, and the native life, unchecked by boundaries or fences, moved to find it. Even the winters, despite their icy blizzards, were relatively mild. The earth never froze beneath the snows, and somewhere, always, there were water and grass for nomadic wildlife.

Episode 3. New Spain and Villasur — 1720

Seeing the great barbarity of our enemies …
and that they were not to be frightened
and would not turn their backs,
the men were ordered to retreat.

—Report of the Adelantado Don Juan de Oñate
to King Philip III of Spain, 1601

The great Puebloan rebellion of 1680 and Spanish reconquest
Spanish forts and cavalry against Apache raids
Endless stalemate with the Apache horse raiders
Truce with the Comanches to create barrier against Apache and prevent French and Anglos from setting up
Slaughter of the Spaniards

The Spanish-Comanche truce was uneasy and left much to be desired by the New Mexicans. The Comanches did not help the Spanish with the Apache problem, since the raiders now came from the western mountains beyond Comanche range. The peace did not end Comanche raiding, either, for individuals and whole bands were never party to the agreement. The Spanish had to learn slowly and painfully the true nature of Comanche society. And, frequently, there was little to choose between Comanche trading parleys and Comanche horse raids. Warriors rode up to Spanish settlements in great force and soon discovered that the white men had little stomach for hard bargaining. On every sweep the Comanches drove away large horse herds, on one occasion netting at least fifteen hundred. It was after 1720 that the Comanches built up the fabulous store of horseflesh that was the envy of all Plains Amerindians.
The other aim of Spanish policy, to interpose the Plains Indians as a barrier to the French traders, came closer to accomplishment. The Spanish did not achieve this, for they were never very good at winning friends among the Indians. The French themselves alienated the Comanches. Before the French were really aware that the Comanches had emerged on the plains as a dominant people, they had already supplied guns and steel to Pawnees, Wichitas, and Apaches. All the Shoshone stock, punished by French-armed Crows and Blackfeet, were inclined to distrust the white men who had armed their enemies.
In the summer of 1720, Santa Fe sent a well-armed and splendidly mounted expedition north through Colorado to the Kansas-Nebraska territory. There were 120 men, Spaniards and Amerindian allies, under the command of Don Pedro de Villasur, lieutenant-general of New Mexico. The party also carried along a large quantity of trade goods, to win the goodwill of the Pawnees, since its mission included either peace or war. A priest accompanied the expedition—the Spanish were always hopeful of a breakthrough to Christian conversion, and at every opportunity built chapels among the Indians.
Villasur was a political appointee, arrogant and contemptuous of advice. He was the sort of European who made no concessions to the frontier: he carried along his personal servants and private silver plate, campaigning as a Spanish gentleman. His plan was to make contact with the Pawnees through a Pawnee slave who had been stolen as a child by the Apaches and sold to the Spanish. Completely confident of his ability to overawe Indians, Villasur blundered badly in the wilderness.
Coming at last upon a great Pawnee mound-village on the plains, the Spanish tried to open communications through the slave. First, the messenger was rebuffed because he wore European clothing; then the man discarded these and deserted, presumably taking up his old life among his people. Finally, the Spanish party went through a ridiculous charade of sending written messages, some in French, to the Pawnees. Villasur was certain that Frenchmen were among the Pawnees, and that the Europeans would be in command… The Spanish expedition made no headway. Over the protests of Serna and Olguin, Villasur camped in an exposed position surrounded by tall grass on the open prairie. Security was lax, entrusted to Amerindian auxiliaries. The Pawnees enveloped the Spanish camp during darkness, then at dawn some five hundred warriors charged in among the startled soldiers.
The horse herd was stampeded, the soldiers cut down by clouds of arrows. The musket fire was also heavy, for the Pawnees were either assisted by Frenchmen, or else had many French guns. The Spanish party was slaughtered in the grass. Villasur, Olguin, Serna, and the priest were killed, along with fifty-odd others. Most of the Amerindian allies deserted, and only fourteen Spaniards escaped the battle to make it back to Santa Fe.

Episode 4. The Massacre of San Saba — 1757

In the year 1730, a large Apache war party attacked the garrison, which had not yet built its presidio, killed or wounded fifteen soldiers, and drove the rest to cover in the town. The Apaches then drove off sixty head of cattle and butchered them, like buffalo.
The commandant, Bustillo y Cevallos, marched west of San Antonio to the San Saba. Here, he surprised an Indian encampment, which may or may not have consisted of Lipans, and claimed to have killed two hundred Apaches of all ages and sexes. The Franciscan padres at San Antonio disparaged this victory as exaggerated, and also deplored the action of the soldiers.
[O]ne day a party of Lipans entered the settlement boldly, asking to speak to the “brown robes,” the friars. The Lipans expressed a desire for peace. They asked to be allowed to buy back the women and children who had been captured and placed in the missions for reduction, with the priests’ good services. And they also asked that a mission be located in the Lipan country, which they said was beside the San Saba.
The Franciscan fathers became excited and hopeful. No religious order had ever planted a mission among Apaches; this seemed to be a breakthrough of the first order.
It seems quite certain that the Lipan Apaches played a devious, cunning game. In this year, 1757, they had lured the Spanish far beyond the actual limits of the Lipan Apache range. The Apaches, driven from this country by the Comanche enemy, obviously hoped to engage the enemies between whom they were caught in a mutually destructive war.
In the summer of 1757, a friendly indio warned the Spanish in San Antonio to expect a great calamity; there was war talk beyond the frontier.
The priests on the San Saba still had not gathered in any Apaches when the spring grass began to come up. But they were cheered by the March rains and impressed with the ephemeral loveliness of the surrounding plains. The moon grew full, rising bright over a riot of wild flowers on the prairie, and they had high hopes for success in the summer of 1758. Had they known they were near Comanche country, or known anything at all about Comanches, they would have been terrified. They were saying their evening prayers by the light of what soon all the Spaniards in Texas would know as a “Comanche moon.”
The grass was thick and green, and under a full moon the Comanches could ride a hundred leagues.
One morning, the priests noted that all the Apaches in the vicinity of the fort and mission had vanished. They were startled by a screaming clamor beyond their gates. Several indios on horseback swooped down on the mission horse herd, which grazed between the mission and the log presidio. All the horses were lost.
As priest in charge, Padre Terreros insisted that routine be followed. The next morning, March 16, Mass was said as usual. But in the middle of the ceremony, the priests gathered in the chapel heard deep, booming yells from beyond the palisades.
The soldiers ran to the walls and cocked their miquelets. Terreros, with Padre Molina, climbed the parapet. Molina, who was to live beyond this morning, was made speechless by what he saw. Two thousand Indians, all mounted warriors, were slowly riding around the walls.
Padre Molina at last found his tongue and told Terreros he feared for their lives. His superior, although stammering, replied that these people must be friendly. The noncommissioned officer in charge of the soldiers, who had been put under Terreros’ orders, asked permission to open fire. Terreros refused to give the order. As Molina wrote later, the padre presidente was not calm, but seemingly hypnotized.
The savages were a breathtaking, barbaric spectacle—Plains Amerindians in the full panoply of war. The long lines of riders wore fantastic headdresses of plumes, deer antlers, and bison horns. Their faces were painted red and black—the color of death, had Molina known it. Every warrior carried a bow and lance or spear. The soldiers noticed that at least a hundred had new muskets.
…
Then the Comanches who had ridden for the fort returned, shrieking and waving bloody scalps. The milling warriors immediately turned on the huddled Spaniards. The soldiers were filled with arrows before they could raise their muskets. A priest was stabbed by a lance; another Comanche decapitated him. Several warriors seized Terreros alive. He was probably saved from torture when a Comanche, eager with blood lust, shot him dead.

Episode 5. Don Juan Bautista de Anza and the 1786 Truce

A new Spanish officer, Don Juan Bautista de Anza, posted to New Mexico in 1779, probably saved the Spanish presence in that province during the years when Cabello’s Texas was sinking to degradation and destruction. De Anza was a rarity among Spanish officialdom: a leader who understood the Amerindians, who saw clearly to the root of problems, and who dared to act upon his own convictions and authority. He believed that the Comanche problem could not be solved unless the Spanish first gained the Amerindians’ respect.
Ordered to seek peace, he was convinced that the surest route to an understanding lay through war. He resolved to fight the horse indios with their own methods. In the fall of 1779, he gathered a great force of lancers and armed civilians, an army of six hundred men, including 259 Amerindian auxiliaries. Moving cautiously behind a screen of Amerindian scouts, taking devious routes, and making every effort to avoid detection, de Anza marched north onto the eastern Colorado plateau, deep in Comanche country. Here he came across the camp of a great Kuhtsoo-ehkuh war chief, known to the Spaniards as Cuerno Verde, or Green Horn.
The chief and most of the warriors were absent; they were off raiding Taos at that very time. De Anza attacked the camp and destroyed the lodges and the Comanche women and children. Then, leading his blooded force south of the Arkansas, he laid an ambush for the returning Cuerno Verde.
The battle, near the site still known as Greenhorn Peak, was a massacre of Comanches. Cuerno Verde and his close relatives were cut down; only a few warriors escaped, fleeing for their lives. The reverberations of this expedition rocked Comanchería, while de Anza and his army rode back to Santa Fe in triumph.
De Anza was in no sense a bloody militarist or hater of Amerindians; he used the only methods he believed would be successful against Comanches. He had no intention or hope of destroying the Nermernuh, because his own inflated estimate was that there were thirty thousand Comanches on the southern plains. His aim was to teach the raiders bitter lessons, hammer out a form of coexistence, and, eventually, turn them into friends and allies of Spain. After his first successes, however, all operations were delayed because Spain went to war with Great Britain, and de Anza was not able to campaign again until 1783.
During 1783–84, he and his lancers worked minor miracles. They rode the warpath like Amerindians, striking deep into Comanche country, surprising and killing isolated bands wherever they found them. Drawing upon the lessons learned from Serna and earlier frontiersmen, ruthlessness was mixed with tact and restraint—the Comanches were informed through released captives that they could have both peace and trade whenever they proved that they wanted them. These campaigns were of extreme significance. They showed that a European force, operating with native allies, could use the Indians’ own tactics against them, and that the horse Indians deep in their own country were terribly vulnerable to sustained military operations. Evidence is clear that the surrounding Comanche bands soon grew weary of this game and acquired vast respect for de Anza. In July 1785, warriors appeared in New Mexico under a flag of truce, offering to make peace.
Now, de Anza revealed the true depth of his understanding of the Comanche situation. He refused to talk peace until all the bands that impinged on New Mexico had entered into the councils. He stated that there would be no peace with any Comanche until all Comanches agreed to it. He insisted that he, as the great chief of all the Spaniards, would meet only with a Comanche chief who was empowered to speak for all the Comanches. Unable to use European diplomacy successfully against a fragmented tribe, de Anza hit upon nothing less than a scheme to create a tribal government among the Comanches.
How much the Comanches understood of this, or what crises it caused, can only be surmised. It is known that virtually all the Yampahreekuh and Kuhtsoo-ehkuh Comanches sent representatives to a great council held at Taos. Here the assembled chiefs chose a leader, called Cuera (Leather Jacket), or sometimes Cota de Malla (Coat of Mail), to be their paramount spokesman. This was done only over violent protest among the Comanches themselves; in one altercation a chief known as Toro Blanco (White Bull) opposed Cuera and was killed.
There is little evidence that the Comanche motivation was fear of being destroyed. De Anza carefully refrained from threatening their hunting grounds, or trying to declare sovereignty over them. He simply offered the bands a choice between attractive trading terms and the bloody lance in war. These were terms all Comanches could understand and accept without humiliation. De Anza had won respect, impressing the Comanches as no white man had done in a hundred years. He behaved in ways they understood: with great dignity and confidence and with murderous ability in the field, yet with tact and intelligence, treating Comanche warriors as equals in council. De Anza was wrapped in impervious medicine, too powerful to fight. The Spanish accounts reported that six hundred, separate Comanche rancherías or “hordes” came to the Taos council.
De Anza welcomed Cuera with impressive ceremony, presenting him with a sword and banner as symbols of Spanish recognition of his dignity. They agreed to assist the Spanish against the hated Apaches. In return, de Anza swore that the trade fairs of New Mexico would be open to the bands, and that they could buy goods and horses for meat, tallow, and hides.
These were promises that the Comanches did not make lightly in council, and that they would honor without hypocrisy. Thus Juan de Anza, who was worth a regiment to Spain on the frontier, won lasting peace from the Comanche danger for New Mexico. The peace became part of Comanche custom, a conventional wisdom that even the Kwerhar-rehnuh, who were not party to it, respected and maintained.
The 1786 truce was the beginning of a special relationship between the Spanish-Mexicans of New Mexico and the adjacent Comanche bands. The Comanches could now ride openly into Spanish settlements, dickering for horses; New Mexican traders could move safely on the Comanche plains. These traders and ranchers were the only civilized men who were allowed in Comanche camps with their goods and wagons, and they became known as Comancheros.
The peace saved New Mexico.

Episode 6: New Spain terror and decline

In 1800, Napoleon wrested the recession of the Louisiana territory from Spain, but with a proviso that it would never be ceded to the Anglo-Saxons. Napoleon betrayed this trust in 1803, by selling the entire region to the United States. This once again placed a vigorous, expanding power on the borders of Spain’s unpopulated northern territories, while doubling the size of the United States at the expense of Spain’s failing empire.

Three hundred republicans executed at San Antonio, the royalist terror setting the population back to the level of twenty years before.
The Amerindian terror ruins New Spain
Spain opens Texas to Anglo-Saxon settlement to create a buffer against Comanches

In these years, large stretches of the northern territories were becoming desolate. Settlement regressed to what it had been many years earlier. Missions and villages were reduced to smoking ruins, or abandoned by their terrified inhabitants. Travelers dared not take the roads in the Comanche season, for the horse Indians now rode boldly through the entire region, often driving their stolen horses and unfortunate captives away by broad daylight. Punitive expeditions were no longer mounted against them by an army that was primarily concerned with holding down the civilized population for the Crown.
The opening of Texas to Anglo-Saxon colonists was Spain’s last legacy to the southwestern frontier. A few weeks later, a military coup turned the viceregal armies against the Crown and toward Mexican independence. The consequent Mexican empire, and its rapidly succeeding republic, confirmed the grants… with the similar hope of creating a buffer against the Comanches. A few hundred North American settlers trickled into east Texas, a stream that soon swelled to thousands.
Meanwhile, with the lowering of the Spanish flag, virtually all of the professional garrison was withdrawn.
The Comanches, who had frustrated French ambitions on the southern plains, had thrown up an impassable barrier to Hispanic settlement. In the cultural conflict, the horse Amerindians had become the full aggressors and emerged as the complete victors. The Pehnahterkuh now rode arrogantly into San Antonio, which they claimed as “their” town, taking what they wanted from a frightened citizenry that barred its doors. Comanche chiefs boasted that they permitted the Spanish to live on the edges of Comanchería only so that they might raise horses for them.
The People, however, had also paid a price for this successful defense and expansion of their territory. They could not become sated, because Comanche warfare fed upon itself. The Yampahreekuh bands had no economic necessity for war—everything they needed came from the buffalo or from New Mexico. Yet the Yampahreekuh every year rode a thousand miles to wreak relentless havoc on the Mexican frontier, in search of scalps, horse herds, and captives to maintain their warriors’ social prestige. By 1820, the pattern had crystallized. The Comanches beyond the Red River had come to consider it as normal and as right to raid through Texas as to pursue the buffalo.

Episode 7. Mexico and Hell

ALL THE EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT THE COMANCHE TERROR INTENSIFIED in the 1840s. The pattern had become standardized; the raiders had even established regular routes into Mexico. A few miles north of the Rio Grande, near the present city of Del Rio, many trails out of Comanchería converged into a broad roadway, beaten by the passage of thousands of unshod Amerindian ponies. This trail, called the Comanche Trace, was a distinct landmark. It ran for some miles south of the river, gradually disappearing as the war bands dispersed across northern Mexico. Another broad trace led across the Rio Grande farther west, through the Santa Elena canyon. The trails ran through barren, almost desert country, debouching into the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Chihuahua. They lay far west of the line of Anglo-American settlement, and the Comanches and Kiowas rode them boldly, driving back thousands of stolen horses.
The raiders went south in entire family groups, taking along their women and children. Loosely allied, they set up base camps, usually in the eastern cordillera. These camps became collecting points for loot and captives. They were located about halfway up the mountainsides, in rough country close to Mexican settlements. From them, small war parties ranged widely, and often ravaged one region for months or even years. It has been incredible to some historians that the presence of Comanches did not arouse the whole Mexican countryside. But, communications were very poor, and the isolated communities had no history of, nor capacity for, collective action. Many, if not most, of the small depredations and killings were not even reported; sometimes the Comanches ravaged for many days before the surrounding territory was even alerted.
The Comanches fought by their own codes, and this, as with almost all Amerindian warfare, makes any recounting seem a series of hideous atrocities by any civilized standard.
—
There was no standard practice in the taking or keeping of captives; as always, this depended upon individual whim or need, since custom-law did not extend to captives unless they had been formally inducted into the tribe. Some warriors gelded Mexican boys and kept them as slaves to manage their horse herds. One Comanche was known to crucify a captive who angered him, a practice he undoubtedly learned in Mexico, for in the eighteenth century the Spanish authorities crucified captured highwaymen. Some girls and women were sold to other Amerindians. The same warrior who might pin a squirming baby with a lance, laughing at its feeble agonies, could also treat a captive with kindness, or even set him free. One Mexican was released because his captor found it too troublesome to teach him the Comanche language and way of doing things.
The experience was often a terrible one for child captives. Comanches liked to test the courage of boys. Young male captives were sometimes made to fight each other, supposedly to the death, to see how they behaved in such ordeals. They were threatened with torture, tied to stakes, and menaced with fire or sharp knives. Captives who failed to live up to Comanche standards might be killed in disgust; cowardly boys were sometimes castrated.
—
By the 1830s, however, the northern communities had suffered so terribly from raiding that the Mexican leadership could no longer see the horse Indians in terms of Catholic theology. Along with the suffering communities, more and more local authorities complained about the “cowardly” policies that produced no progress and that left the frontier exposed to continual danger. The northern states could not expect the effective intervention of the Mexican army; therefore, in many localities the political chiefs adopted de facto policies of indio extermination.
The authorities placed bounties on dead Amerindians, paying out silver pesos for indio scalps. The straight, coarse, Asian-Amerindian hair was readily identifiable—but unfortunately, such hair did not reveal the age, sex, or tribe of the slain Indian. There were many peaceable, inoffensive Amerindians, and also many Mexicans whose ancestry was largely or wholly Indian. There is no question that unscrupulous bounty hunters slaughtered hundreds of innocent parties and passed off their locks as Apache or Comanche. The authorities redeemed many scalps, but they soon recognized that few wild indios were being killed for profit. The program proved a bloody failure.
Over a broad region, settlement and civilization were set back more than a hundred years.

Kvetch

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