COMING SOON: Comancheria

Kvetch & Mel Gibson bring you empires on the Great Plains like never before

"Failed empires somehow become romantic"

— T.R. Fehrenbach

To those who have seldom been too cold, hot, or wet, never really hungry, and confidently expect to see many tomorrows, a people who had none of these advantages come as something of a shock.… Yet, they survived, even thrived, and were happy with their ways.
To Europeans and Texans it was astonishing and insufferable that such a people should prefer their own gods, food, and customs to civilization’s blessings.
But they did, and they clung to these ancestral ways.
And for this they perished.
To persevere to such ultimate tragedy is a highway to continuing remembrance.

— W. W. Newcomb Jr

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

— Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Picture Hans Zimmer played across sweeping vistas of shimmering grass beneath brass moons. Wild flowers gleaming and broken beneath hooves of bands of armed men.

Civilisations writhing in violence over centuries, contesting vast lands in terrible tribulation.

Anglo babes smashed across trees by gleeful Comanches. Comanche children shot or bayonetted. White captives speared and staked and left to die under the burning sun. Tonkawa scouts feasting on Comanche limbs in victorious ritual. Apache Lipans defeated, seeking refuge in Texan lands. Cherokees and other lawfuls betrayed, ridden down and scattered. Other peoples forgotten to history.

The rise of the Comanches — bane of the Apaches and other Amerindians — formed a blood meridian against which New Spain’s northern aspirations broke. They were invincible — until the rise of the mounted Texan ranger, a product of hard Anglo men on horseback and the Colt revolver. They defeated Comanches with Comanche tactics, striking raids deep into Comancheria and slaughtering bands whole.

This tale has not been told much on screen. The rise and fall of a people with their own mythology, warrior ethos, vanities, magic, loves, violent grief. A people of maybe 30,000 at their empire’s peak, who found their apotheosis on horseback like their distant cousins the Mongols hundreds of years earlier a continent away. There are countless tales to tell over the centuries from when the Comanches — who called themselves the Nermernuh or ‘ The People’ — emerged indigent from the mountains and adopted the horse to forge a vast empire and the largest slaveholding in the Southwest, until their destruction by the United States of America. There are proud, terrible chiefs and their rivals. Other Amerindian peoples, defeated at their hands, or allied with them or newly rivalled as they seek refuge from the Anglo-settled east. There are diplomatic French, bloodthirsty Spaniards, mercenary Comancheros, brave padres and immiserated soldiers manning desolate outposts on the fringes of the known world. There are hard, grey-eyed Texan men who respect their warrior adversaries and brook no compromise. Scots-Irish settlers seeking solitude with their lonely wives and ragged children on the frontier in their dog runs.

Behind it all is the endless expansion of a new empire yearning to be born, punctuated by domestic and foreign convulsions: the Napoleonic wars, Mexican wars and revolutions, the Civil War. Streams of settlers and inventors and migrants and hunters. They forged the repeating Colt that finally defeated Comanche bows and cleared the way for barbed wire, railroads and ranching. They left behind endless plains of whitening bison bones and the memory of peoples extinguished.

T.R Fehrenbach in Comanches: The History of a People:

The United States never formally adopted the policy of massacre authorized by both the Republic and the State of Texas. Many commanders, however, came perilously close to authorizing it in field orders. In the great sweeps of the later 1850s, it had become permissible to kill all males twelve years and older; many attacks on Indians were indistinguishable from massacre.

[N]either the “cowboys” nor the farming pioneers won the West—for in every region where there were horse Amerindians, there had to be soldiers long before there were cowmen or agrarians. Neither cowboys nor settlers pushed forward the Texas frontier. The great majority of the thousands of whites who died on the plains frontier from Kansas to Texas were not, in fact, killed in “Indian country.” They were killed by Comanche and Kiowa raiders within, and sometimes far behind, the agrarian frontiers.

The Amerindians were killed in Indian country. They were killed most of all by disease, but those who died violently were killed by military operations. They were killed by soldiers, and by ranging companies and posses that were cavalry in everything but name. As the Texans discovered quickly, white farmers could not live in close proximity to a horse-Indian frontier without protection, and the only effective protection against Plains Indians was a form of Indian warfare: the counterraid, which civilized men called the punitive expedition. This was a lesson learned bitterly, one that had to be relearned again and again from the seventeenth century onward. The various Europeans who entered the western plains found no way of controlling the Plains Amerindians short of slaughtering them.

I’ve pulled together the outlines of the Comanche show I want to watch. I’ll even write it for you, if you want to fund it. Especially if you’re Mel Gibson or Clint Eastwood or the Game of Thrones guys (I’ll forgive you!). Mel — I’m a huge fan of Apocalypto and Pocahontas.

Vikings makes this feel possible. It’s probably the closest recent analogue to what I envisage — a historical epic spanning generations, uncowed by graphic violence and terror. In Vikings our protagonists are hardly paragons of virtue — often they are as brutal as the villains. We might understand the protagonists of the Indian Wars in a similar morally complex way, necessarily of their time. In Comancheria few leave with clean hands, and villains and heroes prefer no race. Although surprising men of virtue existed too, like Robert Neighbors, the remarkably honest and competent Indian agent.

Comancheria fits within the ideological frame of Hollywood. Westerns, obviously, are a thing. Strong frontier women and complex heroines like Cynthia Ann Parker. There are even black heroes — like the highly effective black cavalry the Apache called Buffalo Soldiers for their curls (not the inept all-black 92nd Infantry Division in WWII), and the heroics of Britt Johnson (Season 3 below).

The three seasons I sketch out over the next three weeks are made of bullet point summaries and extracts from T.R Fehrenbach’s superb and underrated Comanches: The History of a People. I’ve cut the extracts where I could. As usual what I intended to be a 1,000 — 2,000 word post turned into 15,000 words. I could cut no more. So I’ve staggered it. 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.

Mel — if you’re reading this — call me.

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