However, trading in goods that came from Spanish territories also exposed the Shoshone to diseases that were widespread across the massive, interconnected landmasses of Africa, Europe, and Asia… but that had never existed before in the Americas and which Native Americans thus had no immunities to.Īs Shoshones fell prey to the kind of contact-induced epidemics that killed millions of Native Americans, a large group splintered off and headed south along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains… following the flow of horses to its source in New Mexico. Bison hunting was at the center of Shoshone life, and horses made the hunt far easier. Within a decade, this indigenous horse trade reached the Shoshone peoples living where the Great Plains sweep through modern-day Wyoming and Montana. The introduction of horses was a revolutionary moment: tribes who gained access to horses gained immediate and profound advantages in their ability to travel great distances, engage in more extensive trade, hunt, and wage war. Because horses were not found in the Americas before European contact, the indigenous peoples living in the middle of what would later become the United States had not yet encountered the animals. The trade in horses moved north from New Mexico, following well-worn indigenous trading routes that moved along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains at the point where the mountain region gradually melted into the Great Plains. They forced the Spanish out of the region, took control of an enormous number of Spanish horses, and began a lucrative horse trade. In 1680, the Pueblo Indians living in the Spanish colony of New Mexico revolted.

Why, and how, did the Comanche unleash such devastation in Mexico… and by doing so unintentionally lay foundations for American conquest? The story begins a century and half before the U.S.-Mexico War, when the Comanche began to forge an indigenous empire based on dominating the trade in horses and bison hides across the Great Plains, and beyond. Army found the road to Mexico’s capital essentially wide open. Comanche warriors raided cities within a mere three-day ride of Mexico City itself. They forged war trails a thousand miles long that pushed through Mexico’s deserts, mountains and jungles. Shortly after Mexico liberated itself from Spain, Comanche war bands pushed deep into the interior of the newly independent, but war-weakened country.

The Comanche had not only prevented the Spanish Empire from pushing further into what would become the United States… they had turned the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas into virtual colonies of their own. The destruction of northern Mexico was the work of the indigenous masters of much of the Southwest: the Comanche.

invasion got underway.”Īnd indeed, it had. In the words of historian Pekka Hämäläinen, “It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished when the U.S. Army marched down abandoned roads, past burned-out villages and through deserted ghost towns littered with corpses rotting in the sun. When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846, the soldiers who marched through what are today Mexico’s northern states encountered desolation. Image: map showing the extent of Comanche raiding into Mexico during the 1830s and 1840s, from Brian Delay’s “ War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War.” The following article is primarily based on Delay’s work, as well as Pekka Hämäläinen’s “ The Comanche Empire.”

The comanche