Both groups underwent significant population growth in the late eighteenth century, probably reaching as high as forty thousand people in the early 1780s. The Eastern Comanches came to dominate the Texas Plains and the Western Comanches controlled much of what is now eastern New Mexico, from Taos to Albuquerque. Facing new ecological restrictions, Comanches divided into two larger political units: the Eastern and Western Comanches. Interestingly, the shifting nature of Comanche diplomacy often brought them into conflict with previous allies, such as the Utes and New Mexico in the mid eighteenth century.īetween 17, the Comanches created a new order on the southern Plains. Moreover, the expansion forced the Comanches into political alliances and conflict with their various neighbors on the southern Plains, including the Utes, Apaches, Pawnees, French, and Spanish. Comanches demanded access to grazing lands for horses, bison hunting territories, and slaves to fulfill important labor roles. These phases of Comanche expansion relied on crucial economic and political choices. By the 1770s, the Comanches had come to occupy the Plains of Texas. Between 17, the Comanches expanded into New Mexico and the southern Plains. The lucrative trade in horses and human captives lured these two tribal nations to the Plains, and they took advantage of the ecological advantages of the southern Plains. Between 17, the Comanches, in tandem with the Utes, ventured onto the southern Plains. The initial Comanche conquest of the southern Plains occurred in three distinct phases. Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, environmental factors and the expansion of the United States ended the Comanche empire. The Comanches expanded and conquered these territories and then harnessed indigenous and European people living in these areas to their empire through trade and commerce. Beginning in 1700, with their migration to the southern Plains, the Comanches used diplomatic ties and economic change to create an extensive empire, which encompassed parts of present-day Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Rather than examining equestrianism or economy on their own rights, as he did in previous articles, Hämäläinen uses both themes to make a case for something that many scholars will find unexpected: an indigenous people creating an empire alongside that of European nation-states. In his new book, The Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen continues to impressively write about and conceive of Plains Indian and indigenous history. In recent years, historian Pekka Hämäläinen has treated the readers of the Journal of American History and the Western Historical Quarterly to innovative studies of the Plains Indian equestrianism and the significance of the Comanche trade center on the southern Plains.
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