The Comanche "War of Extermination" Against...the Apache

A forgotten chapter in American history

This video picks up where the last one about the Great Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish left off. From 1680 through 1692, the Spanish were out of New Mexico, and so were thousands of their horses, which migrated east and north of what is now New Mexico.

By 1650, the Apache had already learned to ride horses, probably by watching the Spanish. By 1700, horses had definitely found their way into what is now southeastern Colorado where another tribe would adapt to horses as least as well as the Mongols ever did. These were the Comanche, and this is what happened with them up until about 1750:

After the Pueblo Revolt was defeated, and the Pueblo reabsorbed into the Spanish Empire, on far better terms than they had originally been treated BTW, both Spanish and Pueblo were subjected to decades of Apache raids. Every attempt by the Spanish to quell the Apache failed.

Then, in 1706, the Apache raids suddenly stopped. The Apache began asking the Spanish for protection, and rumors spread of a fearsome invader from the North. The rumors were true. In another generation some Apache clans abandoned their old ranges on the Plains and moved into the mountains of New Mexico and what is now the Big Bend Country.

The Spanish authorities called what was happening to the Apache as a “guerra de extirminacion,” or war of extermination, and after what they themselves had done to dozens of First Nations they certainly should have known what they were talking about. The Comanche definitely were making the Apaches’ ancestral lands literally uninhabitable for them.

The Apache had to go elsewhere or die; the very definition of an ethnic cleansing campaign. Such campaigns were around long before anybody ever thought of the “white race” as a thing, much less created such an antiseptic term for it.

It wasn’t just the Apache who were driven by the Comanche. The Spanish, and after 1822, Mexicans, continued to be so hard-pressed that they invited Anglo-American settlers into Texas to serve as a buffer between them and the Comanche.

Isn’t that interesting? Had it not been for the Comanche, Anglo-Americans like Stephen F. Austin would never have been invited by Spain or Mexico to settle in Texas, and history would have been at least somewhat different.

Why were the Comanche so successful? The video points out that while the Apache and most other tribes of the Plains in the 17th and 18th centuries lived by a combination of agriculture an the buffalo hunt. The Comanche didn’t.

Like the Mongols, they shunned agriculture. They lived by the buffalo, the raid, and enforced their control over large parts of at least 5 states by the terror inspired by those raids. They were horse masters, as many of the original paintings in the video illustrate. Yes, the Comanche really did ride horses like that. If you’ve ever been to a rodeo, some of the moves you saw those cowboys use were created by the Comanche long ago.

They were a great people, and they directly impacted my own ancestors and helped shape my family and their stories—and attitudes—much later, but that is another story.

I hope you enjoy these stories from America’s past. Next time I’ll focus on some First Nations far to the northeast, where they were dealing with both my French and British ancestors, with a variety of results.

Thank you for reading and hopefully viewing, good day or night, and good luck.

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