Comanche history

Comanche history /kəˈmæntʃi/ In the 18th and 19th centuries the Comanche became the dominant tribe on the southern Great Plains. The Comanche are often characterized as "Lords of the Plains." They presided over a large area called Comancheria which they shared with allied tribes, the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache (Plains Apache), Wichita, and after 1840 the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Comanche power and their substantial wealth depended on horses, trading, and raiding. Adroit diplomacy was also a factor in maintaining their dominance and fending off enemies for more than a century. They subsisted on the bison herds of the Plains which they hunted for food and skins.

Their extensive area of suzerainty has been called an empire, but the Comanche were never united under a single government or leader. They consisted of several bands with a common language which operated independently of each other. Estimates of the Comanche's total population in 1780, when they were most numerous, are usually around 20,000, although one estimate numbers them at 40,000.^[1]

The Comanche bands regularly waged war on neighboring tribes and European settlers encroaching on Comancheria. Although infamous for their unrelenting warfare and raiding into Mexico, they also took thousands of captives from raids on other Native tribes as well as Anglo settlers on the American frontier. Many of these captives were kept as slaves or traded to the Spanish in New Mexico, but captives taken by the Comanche at a young age were usually assimilated into Comanche society as members of the tribe. By 1875, decimated by European diseases, warfare, a tide of Anglo settlement, and the near-extinction of the bison, the Comanche had been defeated by the U.S. army and were forced to live on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma.

In 1920 the United States Census listed fewer than 1,500 Comanche. Tribal enrollment in the 21st century numbered 15,191, with 7,763 members residing in the Lawton-Fort Sill and surrounding areas of southwest Oklahoma. Of the three million acres (12,000 km²) promised the Comanche, Kiowa and Kiowa Apache by treaty in 1867, only 235,000 acres (951 km²) have remained in native hands. Of this, 4,400 acres (18 km²) are owned by the tribe itself.