By Keli Holt
When the Civil War ended in 1865, the federal government emerged stronger than ever. Gone were the arguments of Henry Clay’s day when politicians debated whether it was constitutional for the government to fund things like interstate canals and roads. At the height of the war, President Abraham Lincoln commanded a Union Army of over 2 million soldiers, a long cry from the citizen militias envisioned by many of the Founding Fathers and sustained by the nation’s first income tax. The government even subsidized westward migration by funding the first Transcontinental Railroad and passing laws like the Homestead, Morrill and Desert Land acts.
The optimism for U.S. economic growth and expansion seemed endless to the men who had led America through four years of a war that had finally settled the existential problem of slavery. When California gold and silver from Montana, Nevada and the Dakotas combined with the benefits of the Industrial Revolution (a dramatic increase in cheaper goods), the Reconstruction Era economy boomed.
However, the benefits from industrialization and mineral wealth were not distributed equally. The 11 states of the former Confederacy struggled to transition their economies from a slave-based to a wage-based model, and the hopes of millions of formerly enslaved were dashed when the Southern elite used intimidation and violence to ensnare African Americans in a system of sharecropping. Having won the war, the North lacked the willpower to coerce the former Confederate states to enforce equal civil rights. Amid this pessimism regarding the future of the American South, many politicians looked west to secure economic growth.
Powerful Native Nations, however, still controlled much of the West. What is now Oklahoma, known then as “Indian Territory,” was originally intended to mark a border between white settlers, mostly to the east of the Mississippi, and Native Nations to the western and more arid side. Indeed, many eastern Nations, like the Cherokee and Choctaw, had been forced to relocate during the Andrew Jackson presidency (The Trail of Tears), increasing competition for water, hunting grounds and buffalo on the Plains.
The Comanche, one of the most powerful Nations, ruled over a swath of territory called Comancheria, stretching from the Texas Panhandle through Eastern New Mexico and parts of Kansas, Colorado, Arizona and Oklahoma. After adopting the horse in the late 1600s, the Comanche remodeled their economy and society around hunting buffalo and raiding both Hispanic settlements and other Native Nations.
The Comanche trained boys from a young age to be adept horseman who functioned like a light cavalry. The U.S. Army Dragoons, created in 1833 to police the western borders, had to abandon their traditional heavy armor and weapons to try to match the Comanche’s speed and agility in battle.
When Texas became independent from Mexico in 1836, President Sam Houston tried to negotiate a treaty with the Comanche to end the raids and demarcate Comancheria’s boundaries. While the raids and encroachment continued, Houston tried again in 1845 and managed to establish a series of trading posts between Comancheria and Texas.
During the Civil War, the Comanche took advantage of America’s distraction to increase raids along the Santa Fe Trail, one of the main thoroughfares to California, and to attack the Navajo and Mescalero Apache at the Bosque Redondo reservation in New Mexico. In response, Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson was dispatched from his home in Taos to pacify the Comanche.
In 1864, Carson and 300 New Mexican troops destroyed a Comanche-allied Kiowa village deep in Comancheria. In response, thousands of warriors attacked an old, abandoned post called Adobe Walls. Only Carson’s artillery saved his force from annihilation.
Comanche raiding continued to defy both U.S. and Mexican authorities after the Civil War. In 1867, the Medicine Lodge Treaty set aside two reservations in Indian Territory, one of which was designated for the Comanche. They agreed to stop raiding in return for supplies and yearly allotments, which proved to be utterly inadequate.
By 1874, the Comanche attacked white hunters decimating the remaining buffalo herds that had dwindled due to migration and over hunting. The Red River War raged throughout 1874, as the Comanche and their allies tried to reclaim their lands and way of life from both the encroaching settlers and the changing environment.
However, the full weight of the U.S. military was brought to bear against the Comanche, and by 1875, they were forced to accept defeat and life on the reservation. The herds of buffalo were gone, much of Comancheria was divided into farms and ranches, and the U.S. Army reigned supreme with its advanced firepower and technology. The Comanche way of life had been eradicated.
Follow Keli at JustEnoughHistory.Substack.com or on X at @JustEnufHist, and sign up to receive free weekly articles on everything and anything history.
