Lakota vs. Comanche

[ephriam]

Is anyone aware of any direct interaction -- either through warfare, trading or diplomacy -- between the southern Lakota and the northern Comanche? Or did the buffer zone between them, consisting of Ute -- Kiowa -- Pawnee, prevent any direct interaction during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries? If not Lakota, then perhaps through Cheyenne or Arapaho intermediaries?

ephriam

[nicolas (carlo)]

Hi Ephriam,

It could certainly be possible, but I do not recall having seen evidence that direct interaction took place on a continued or significant scale. They would however have encountered eachother at Bent's Fort, as Lakotas as well as Comanches were known to travel there sometimes during the 1830s and 40s to trade. Given the relationship between the southern Lakotas and southern Cheyennes, it also seems likely Lakotas did on occasion come into contact with the Comanches. So speculation for now.  I will do some digging in my intertribal warfare notes to see if I can find something more.

Carlo

[kingsleybray]

Tantalizing, Ephriam! The Kiowa winter counts record the presence of Lakota visitors at the Kiowa Sun Dance in 1844. That was s. of the Arkansas r., and there must have been Comanches present too. Have you an earlier clue?

[cinemo]

Hello, Ephriam ,

during the second half of the 18th century, some Comanches lived near the Black Hills region.
Probably, these were Yamparikas . Around 1775 occurred some hostile encounters between Comanches and Lakotas in that region.

As late as 1794, the Comanches were reported at locations within easy reach of the Black Hills. In the same time period, Francois
Marie Perrin du Lac wrote about battles taking place between the Comanches and the Cheyennes at locations east of the Black Hills.

www.nps.gov/wica/historyculture/upload/-7c-3-Chapter-Three-The-Arrival-of-Horses-Pp-26-57.pdf

Please, see Chapter A. The Comanches, Shoshones, and Ute,

cinemo

[tkavanagh]

In my forthcoming edited book, "The Life of Ten Bears," Numunuu author Joe Attocknie claims that his ancestor, Ten Bears, was orphaned when his family group on a tipi-pole cutting trip was ambushed by "Sioux." There were two survivors, the "walking but not yet weaned" Ten Bears and his older brother. The brother was taken captive, the infant was left to die but was found by searchers. Ten Bears was “upwards of eighty years old” when he died at Ft. Sill in 1872; thus he would have been born about 1790" (Battey, Kiowa School teacher).

Ten Bears "... grew up and became familiar with the story of the fate of his father, mother, and brother. Thus, although the Comanches had other enemies, the enemies that stood foremost in his mind were the Sioux who had killed his family. Ten Bears haunted and harassed the Sioux camps with mounted war parties, sometimes alone. His most successful method was to wait just out of sight of the Sioux camp and to attack the first Sioux that left camp at early morning. He would chase the surprised early riser and lance him off of his horse almost within the camp. The other Sioux, who by then had mounted and gave chase to this early-morning killer, were led into a Comanche war party’s ambuscade."

[ephriam]

Thank you, everyone, for the comments and thoughts. I have been thinking about the borderlands or buffer zone between the Lakota and the Comanche, the two most powerful geopolitical groups on the Great Plains. Just trying to work out the chronology of when the Kiyuksa (southern Oglala) and Brule expanded into the Republic River area to hunt buffalo, their southern most expansion. How did this push south by the Lakota impact the tribes caught in between, in particular the Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho? And to a certain extent the Pawnee?

I do not know how accurate Pekka Hamalainen's chronology is (The Comanche Empire), but he implies that during the 1750s-1770s period, the Cheyenne, Kiowa and Pawnee enjoyed a period of relative peace with the Comanche with active trading but that this borderland between the two expanding "empires" became enflamed during the 1770s-80s as the Kiowa pushed south into the Arkansas valley. This would correlate very roughly to Lakota's expansion west of the Missouri River, displacing Arapaho, Cheyenne and Kiowa to the south.

Hamalainen then suggests that some equilibrium was reached, with peace and trading again reestablished across this buffer zone in the 1790s and continued to the late 1820s when the Cheyenne and Arapahoe pushed into the Arkansas River valley. The 1820s were apparently another period of bitter fighting in this area. Could this correlate to the southern Oglala/Brule expansion into the Republican River country? While Lakota oral histories talk of the Kiyuksa push south in the 1840s after the death of Bull Bear, I wonder if in fact this southern expansion was already well underway by that time.

Presumably such an expansion brought the Lakota into direct conflict with the Comanche. Tom: Does the Comanche oral history record where the Ten Bear's family were attacked by Lakota, presumably some time in the early 1790s?

Thanks!

[kingsleybray]

The Ten Bears story does sound like the 1790s. There are a number of winter count events from that decade focussing on warfare with the Cheyenne and possibly other groups in the region south/southwest of the Black Hills. The incident recorded by Joe Attocknie could fit easily into that context.

There is a Spanish report from 1785, printed in Nasatir's BEFORE LEWIS AND CLARK, which details the various horticultural tribes in the Missouri valley from the Osage up to the Mandan. It remarks in passing that the great tribal powers were the Comanches ("laytanes") to the west of the Missouri, and the Sioux, to the east of the Missouri. Although Tetons were moving out onto the high plains by the time of this report, the main Sioux presence was still considered east of the Missouri.

Having said that, I found interesting Pekka Hamalainen's observation that Comanche hostility against new Mexico spiked significantly in the late 1760s, continuing through the 70s, and that huge numbers of horses were stolen in that timeframe. In my ms on early Lakota history I suggest that the presence of much larger herds of horses, via trade and raid networks, travelling north through the plains, may have been a significant factor in encouraging first Oglala, then (post-1780) other Tetons out onto the high plains.

[tkavanagh]

First: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, attempt to make any sense out of anything in _The Comanche Empire_, neither the "historical" chronologies, nor the "ethnography." Except for those parts lifted bodily from my work, they will be bogus.

As for where the above interaction may have taken place, we have to say, again first, that this part of the 'oral history' is not widespread among the Numunuu, as are the general outlines of Ten bears' history, but are specific to Joe A. Having said that, No, Joe A was silent as to those geographic details. But since TB was Yamparika, the northernmost of the proto-Comanche Plains Shoshoneans and who maintained ties with the Nuwenuu at Wind River the longest (up to the 1830s), there is the strong likelihood that it was in the Wyoming area. [It may be noted that Joe A's *paternal* great-great-grandmother was Crow.]

tk
Esimotso

[tkavanagh]

Please excuse this long post. This in re: PH's claim the "Comanche hostility against new Mexico spiked significantly in the late 1760s, continuing through the 70s,..."

This is an extract of a long paper I did for the New Mexico Historical Review on the historical context of the folk-play "Los Comanches."

Adolph F. Bandelier was a Swiss-born historian and anthropologist, but without institutional affiliation he subsisted on contracts. In the late 1880s, he was employed by the Hemenway Expedition to the Southwest, sponsored by Mary Hemenway of Boston, to gather documentary materials on the history of the Spanish southwest. In contrast to other such collectors, Bandelier generally did not gather the original paper, but made careful manuscript and typewritten transcripts, often giving the dates of his transcriptions which can be matched with entries in his diaries. The manuscripts and typescripts were bound into volumes and exhibited at the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Madrid as the “Bandelier Collection of copies of Manuscripts relative to the History of New Mexico and Arizona.” A calendar listing of those transcripts was published in 1895 in the Report of the United States Commission to the Columbian Exposition at Madrid, 1892-93. The bound original transcripts were placed in the Special Collections of the Tozzer Library, Harvard University.
Because “it is important to ascertain the cluster of years when the Apaches, the Comanches, the Navajos and the Yutes harassed certain villages most and the numbers of their victims,” Bandelier made extracts from the Libros de Entierros, the surviving burial ledgers of several pueblos, including Pojoaque, Nambe, San Juan, Santa Clara, Galisteo, and Isleta, as well as from San Felipe Neri of Albuquerque -- it is not clear why he did not also include neither Taos, nor the Villas of Santa Cruz and Santa Fe -- for years covering most of the eighteenth century.
Of immediate interest here {i.e., my NMHR article}is a transcript of the Libro de Entierros de Albuquerque, Año de 1777, Fojas 7 y 8, the ‘Book of Burials in Albuquerque, 1777’, titled by Bandelier, Fe de Sepultura de las Victimas de la Matanza de Tomé, ‘Certificate of the Burial of the victims of the Tomé Massacre,’ prepared by Fray Andrés García of Albuquerque. The entry began, “In this Book of Deaths of the Parish of San Felipe Neri of Albuquerque, on the twenty-sixth of May, in the year 1777.” There followed a list of twenty-one individuals, eighteen adult men, two teenaged boys, and one teenaged girl.
This entry seems to verify, at least in general terms, the veracity of the story of a massacre at Tomé, and gives a specific date, May 26, 1777, the feast day of San Felipe Neri, patron of the Albuquerque church of which Tomé was a chapel. However, the list included only two Pinos, a José Miguel Pino and a Alexandro Pino, neither of whom apparently was related to Pedro Baptista Pino.
Bandelier’s extracts from other burial registers offer some additional contextual information about "muertes hecha por las Indios Gentiles." Most of those were committed by Comanches, although Bandelier also included Utes, Apaches, and Navajos. The total number of Comanche attributed deaths for the decade prior to 1779 is 26. To this total one should add the twenty-one from Tomé from May, 1777 and another thirty-four reported in the Albuquerque Libro de entierros for 1776-1778.
The importance of this latter data is that the total does not begin to approach Anza’s reported “hundreds of deaths” attributed to Cuerno Verde, nor does it confirm Prince’s claim that Comanches were rampaging through the entire Rio Arriba before the attack on Tomé.
A similar discrepancy between claims of massacres and church burial records occurred in 1750 when governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín reported that “During the five-year term of my predecessor, . . . as many as 150 of the Pecos perished at their hands” Charles W. Hackett (ed.), Picardo’s Treatise on the Limits of Texas and Louisiana. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1931–46), 3:328. However, as John Kessell pointed out Kiva, Cross, and Crown, 546, n 24, the Pecos burial book for that period records only fifteen deaths attributed to Comanches, plus another twelve from an attack in 1746.

[kingsleybray]

Thanks, Tom, for the detailed contemporary statistical records which may offer a corrective to the statements in THE COMANCHE EMPIRE.

Southeast Wyoming would have come into the Lakota raid sphere by the 1790s. Given the at least occasional Yamparika presence in the upper North Platte drainage into the 1780s-90s, this makes a plausible context for the raid in which Ten Bears family was killed.

[tkavanagh]

Let me also throw this out: mentions of Cheyennes in the the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, as extracted from _The Comanches: A History_:
In November 1805 several Yamparikas, unnamed, visited the new governor, Joachín del Real Alencaster ... In his report on the encounter, Alencaster noted that the Yamparikas, who had “formerly lived to the north,” were now to be found on the Rio Colorado “near . . . the Conchos.” ... The movement of those Yamparikas from the Arkansas River may have resulted from pressures exerted by the arrival of several new groups from the north, including Kiowas, whose advance the Yamparikas and Jupes had long resisted, Cheyennes—called by the Spaniards Flecha Rayada ‘striped arrows’, in Comanche the paka naboo ‘painted arrows’—and Cuampes.
... in May 1807 Flechas Rayadas—‘striped arrows’, that is Cheyennes—and Cuampes—probably Arapahos—camping on Almagre Creek sent word to Santa Fe that they wanted to trade “because they needed some things.” Governor Alencaster sent them a flag and 100 pesos worth of goods and told them that if they made a formal request for peace he would give each chief a certificate of chieftainship, canes of office, and medals (Loomis and Nasatir 1967:452). In September the Cuampes chief sent word to Santa Fe that he was seeking to open trade with New Mexico “on the same terms as with the Comanche” (N. Salcedo 1807); it is not known whether there was any further contact.

tk
Esimotso

[kingsleybray]

Fascinating details on the Cheyenne migration into the southern plains, thanks Tom. Do the Lakota show up at all in the Spanish Archives?

[tkavanagh]

Not as such, nor as any clearly identifiable NumutekwapU ethnonyms for "Sioux", e.g. /papi tatsukwerU/ 'head pounder.'

tk
Esimotso

[ephriam]

This weekend, I reread all of the primary sources for Col. Henry Dodge's 1835 expedition along the Platte River and then down to Bent's Fort. What struck me was the complete absence of Lakota presence in the region. There are a couple of mentions, suggesting that the Lakota were occasionally raiding into the area, but it suggests that they had not yet moved south to the Republican River by this time. So perhaps that really was an 1840s era advance by the southern Oglala and Brule.

Several mentions of Cheyenne fighting with Comanche and Ute.

[kingsleybray]

That would be my feeling too. The George Bent letters to George Hyde mention that some Sioux started visiting the Cheyennes soon after the Cheyennes moved down to the South Platte in the late 1820s. He says they were Oglalas, but the only named leader is actually One Horn (Miniconjou). They came down to the North Platte and traded with the Cheyennes for horses. This was before the establishment of Bent's Fort (1832-33) and Ft Laramie (1834).