Comanchería: The Empire on the Plains

By the mid-eighteen hundreds, the land you are crossing was the heart of Comanchería, the domain of the Comanche Nation. Historians including Pekka Hämäläinen have argued that at its peak Comanchería functioned as an empire, a regional power that for more than a century controlled trade, raiding, and territorial access across an area stretching from eastern New Mexico through West Texas and into present-day Oklahoma.

The Kwahadi band of the Comanche, perhaps the most independent of the Comanche divisions, made the Llano Estacado their stronghold. The mesa's flat surface was hostile to outsiders who did not know it, but the Kwahadi knew every spring, every draw, every place where the caprock broke and shelter could be found. They had lived here long enough to map the land in intimate detail.

In the summer of eighteen seventy-four, the United States Army launched the Red River War, a coordinated campaign to force the remaining free-ranging Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne bands onto reservations in Indian Territory. Multiple columns converged across the Texas Panhandle and the South Plains. On September twenty-eighth of that year, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry located a large encampment of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne in Palo Duro Canyon, some ninety miles north of present-day Lubbock. Mackenzie's troops descended into the canyon, burned the winter food stores, and slaughtered roughly fourteen hundred horses the bands could not take with them in the flight. Without mounts or supplies, the people could not survive the winter on the plains.

By the following spring, the last Kwahadi had surrendered at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The Comanche leader Quanah Parker, son of Kwahadi chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo-American taken captive as a child, led his people to the reservation and spent the next decades navigating the contested terrain between two worlds.

The land the Comanche had held for generations was opened to ranching and farming within a decade of their removal.