THE UNHERALDED ARRIVAL of mounted Comanche warriors in Spanish New Mexico in 1706 marked the beginning of their first long war against white men. The fight took place entirely on the Indians’ terms. The Comanches did not defeat a Spanish army on a broad field of battle in a single, final combat, or see its imperial ranks reeling in inglorious retreat across the Rio Grande. Massed armies in ceremonial formations fighting pitched battles on open ground were not the way of the American West. Instead there were raids and counterraids and a sort of bedouin warfare people would later call guerrilla, conducted by small, mobile forces in a gigantic landscape that swallowed human beings as though they had never existed. What happened to the Spanish at the hands of the Comanches was not conventional military defeat but a century and a half of brutal, grinding aggression that soaked their northern frontier in blood and left them, ultimately, with an empire emptied of meaning. They had arrived in the New World as conquistadors, powerful beyond measure, triumphantly secure in their own peculiar style of militarized Catholicism. In the north they ended up as virtual prisoners in their own missions and presidios, trapped inside a failed system that neither attracted colonists nor succeeded in converting Indians, and in any case could not protect either group from the horse tribes. The Comanches did not beat the Spanish so much as render them irrelevant—onlookers in an immense struggle for control of the center of the North American continent in which they no longer played a decisive role.
This shift in the balance of power changed the history of the American West and the fate of the North American continent. The Spanish conquest of the Americas had begun in the early sixteenth century with sweeping, and startlingly easy, victories over the powerful Aztecs (Mexico) and Incas (modern-day Peru). Much of the aboriginal population of Latin America had been subsequently defeated by arms, or disease, or both. The price, in Native American terms, was ghastly. In Central Mexico the Indian population in 1520, the year after Hernán Cortés arrived in his galleons, was eleven million; by 1650 that number had plummeted to one million. The Indians who survived were enslaved under an economic system known as encomienda in which the conquistadors were authorized to occupy Indian lands, tax the inhabitants, and force them to perform labor. In return, the encomenderos provided the teaching and ministrations of Catholicism, instruction in the Spanish language, food, and defense. It was, in short, imported feudalism, in which the indios played the role of serfs. The same pattern had been followed in the vast Spanish holdings in South America. As a premise for colonization, subjugation, and forced assimilation, this system had worked with cruel precision.
But as the Spanish pushed their frontier northward from Mexico City, toward what they believed would be the conquest of all of North America, their carefully calibrated system began to break down. Their style of colonialism worked best on sophisticated, centrally ruled tribes like the Aztecs and Incas. It did not work at all on the low-barbarian, precivilized, and nonagrarian tribes of northern Mexico. Long, bloody wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the Chichimec and Tarahumare tribes proved the somewhat distasteful point that in order to fully assimilate such Indians they had to virtually exterminate them. In the late sixteenth century, after fifty years of intermittent warfare, the Chichimecs disappeared from the face of the earth.¹ Other less violent tribes proved uninterested in and ill adapted to what the brown-robed padres promised, which was food and shelter in exchange for labor in the fields and a strict adherence to Catholic morality.
The latter included what the Indians saw as bizarre and inexplicable changes in their sexual habits. (Monogamy was generally not an Indian notion.) The poor indios would often run away. They would be caught and punished, sometimes by a priest wielding a lash, and this in turn sometimes led to revolt. The days of easy conquest were over, and even harder days lay ahead. As savagely tough as the Chichimecs were, they were nothing compared to what the Spanish would come up against north of the Rio Grande. The Indians there were also low-barbarian, precivilized, mostly nonagrarian, and similarly uninterested in bowing submissively to the Most Catholic King. But these indios had a lethal new technology. None of the conquistadors had ever fought mounted Indians.
When that small band of Comanches showed up in Taos in July of 1706, New Mexico was the seat of the Spanish empire in the north. Its biggest town and territorial capital was Santa Fe, established in 1610 when the Spanish had, in effect, leapfrogged over several thousand miles of unconquered terrain to plant their flag in the far north. (It took a long time for the actual frontier to catch up with it.) The rest of the population—a few thousand white Spaniards, mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood), and the Pueblo Indians they had subjugated—lived in settlements that were strung like beads along various streams and the narrow valleys of the Rio Grande. The Spanish had learned a few things from their unpleasant conquest of northern Mexico: The forts now would be built with high, palisaded walls; the encomienda was abandoned. Their imperial system here consisted of presidios packed with well-armed soldiers, missions tended by Catholic priests bent on the conversion of heathen Indians, and ranchos tended by the colonists who came north—mostly mestizos. Its success depended ultimately upon its ability to make Indian converts and attract colonists; forts in the middle of nowhere staffed by demoralized soldiers meant nothing at all.
This plan may have looked good on paper, even more so since Spain had no real rivals in the continent’s yawningly empty midsection. But in the plains and mesalands of the American West it failed miserably. The trouble started around 1650. That was when various bands of the Apache tribe, newly mounted on Spanish horses and bristling with hostility, began raiding the New Mexican settlements. Nothing the Spanish had seen or experienced in Mexico prepared them for these attacks. That was not because they were defenseless. Their soldiery consisted of heavily mounted dragoons equipped with steel-plated armor; large-caliber, muzzle-loading harquebuses and miquelets, pikes, and gleaming sabers. Though to our modern eyes they may have looked a bit comical, they were in fact perfectly equipped to fight European wars against similarly equipped European combatants. In pitched battle, they could be quite deadly.
But the Indians did not fight that way—not by choice, anyway. They did not advance in regimental ranks across open fields. They never took a direct charge, scattering and disappearing whenever one was made. They never attacked an armed fort. They relished surprise, insisted on tactical advantage. They would attack whole villages and burn them, raping, torturing, and killing their inhabitants, leaving young women with their entrails carved out, men burned alive; they skewered infants and took young boys and girls as captives. Then they used the speed of their Spanish mustangs to get away, leaving the elaborately equipped dragoons to rumble ponderously after them. It was a style of fighting later perfected by even more aggressive plains tribes, who were far better horsemen. For fifty years the raiding continued, and while the Spanish had certainly killed their share of Apaches, nothing really changed. The settlements were as vulnerable as ever to Indian attack.
Then something remarkable happened. Starting around 1706, the Spanish authorities in Santa Fe began to notice a striking change in the behavior of their hated adversaries.² They were, it seemed, disappearing, or at least moving off, generally to the south and west. Raiding had virtually stopped. It was as though a treaty of peace had been signed, but nothing of the sort had happened. The Spanish civil and military establishments began to realize that some sort of catastrophe had befallen the Apaches, though the extent of it would not be clear for years to come. In 1719 a military expedition to the northeast of Santa Fe had found several populous and formerly dangerous bands of the Apaches—the Jicarillas, Carlanes, and Cuartelejo—in what appeared to be full retreat from their old grounds.³
What was happening? The Spanish were not entirely unaware of geopolitical realities. They understood that the Comanches and Apaches were at war. But they had difficulty enough telling one Indian from another, let alone figuring out the status of a war between tribes that fought unseen battles with unknown outcomes over hundreds of square miles of land. All they were sure of was that their enemies were vanishing.
What they were sensing from afar, however, amounted to the wholesale destruction of the Apache nation. This was no small undertaking. Apacheria was, in the human and geographical terms of the era, a vast entity. It consisted of perhaps half a dozen major bands and stretched from the mountains of New Mexico to the plains of present-day Kansas and Oklahoma, and clear down to the Nueces River in southern Texas.⁴ It was the product of another sweeping southward migration—this one by Athapaskan tribes starting in the 1400s, who moved from Canada down the front range of the Rockies, destroying or assimilating other hunter-gatherer tribes.⁵ While this was most likely not an attempt to kill off the entire tribe, neither was it a simple question of moving the Apaches off their hunting grounds. The Comanches had a deep and abiding hatred of Apaches, and what they did to them also had a good deal to do with blood vengeance. Either way, the Comanches were in the middle of a relentless southward migration, and the Apaches were in their way.
Almost all of this violence is lost to history. It generally took the form of raids on the villages of the Athapaskans, whose fondness for agriculture—ironically a higher form of civilization than the Comanches ever attained—doomed them. Crops meant fixed locations and semipermanent villages, which meant that the Apache bands could be hunted down and slaughtered. The fully nomadic Comanches had no such weakness. The details of these raids must have been horrific. The Apaches, who fought on foot, became easy marks for the mounted, thundering Comanches in their breechclouts and black war paint. (They wore black because it was the color of death and because it was in keeping with their minimalist wardrobe. Later they would adopt feathered headdresses, colorful war paint, and tattoos from others, especially the northern plains tribes; in these years they were unadorned and elemental; a stripped-down war machine.)⁶ Prisoners were rarely taken. Whole villages were routinely burned. Children were taken captive. Torture of survivors was the norm, as it was all across the plains.
The Spanish saw this only in flashes. In 1723 they recorded a bloody attack against an Apache rancheria. In 1724 the Comanches made a raid so brutally effective against the Jicarilla band that they ended up carrying off half of the women and killed all but sixty-nine members of the band.⁷ The Jicarillas were soon begging for, and received, Spanish protection. Other Apaches, including the Mescaleros, were similarly retreating westward from the Comanche onslaught. In 1724, according to Texas governor Domingo Cabello, the Lipan Apaches were completely vanquished from the southern plains in a bloody nine-day battle at a place the Spanish called El Gran Cierro de La Ferro (“Great Mountain of Iron”), thought to be on the Wichita River in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.⁸ By the end of the 1720s, the savagery of the attacks on the Apaches had become so pronounced, and so widespread, that some Apaches even sought the shelter of the Spanish pueblo at Pecos, not far from Santa Fe. The Comanche response was to attack the pueblo.
The Spanish actually tried to save what was left of the Apaches—a policy not entirely out of keeping with their self-interest. In 1726 they gave the tribe lands near Taos, hoping that this would amount to a barrier against the Comanches. In 1733 a mission for the Jicarilla Apaches was founded on the Rio Trampas. None of these strategies really worked. The action was all rearguard. By 1748 the sweep was complete. The Jicarillas had been driven from their native lands, as had the other bands who had occupied the buffalo grounds in West Texas, and the present-day western Kansas, western Oklahoma, and eastern Colorado; they had even fled from the protection of the mission at Taos. Almost all the Apache bands had by then been cleared from the southern plains, and all of the bands that the Spanish kept records of moved southwest into what would become their new homeland: the deserts and mesas of Arizona and New Mexico and the Mexican borderlands. (These included the Chiricahua, the bands of Geronimo and Cochise; the two chiefs would become famous fighting in these marginal lands in the latter nineteenth century.) Those bands who were not driven westward, including the Lipans, ended up in the bone-dry scrublands of the Texas Trans-Pecos. Many Apache bands simply vanished from history, including the plains-dwelling Faraones, Carlanes, and Palomas.⁹ By the 1760s the Comanches were driving the Apaches before them across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
The Apaches were not their only victims. As the Comanches streamed south across the Arkansas River, flush with their astonishing mastery of the horse and their rapidly evolving understanding of mounted warfare, they discovered something else about themselves: Their war parties could navigate enormous distances using only natural landmarks. They could also do it at night. They were better at this, too, than anyone else. Before leaving, a war party would assemble and receive navigational instruction from elders, which included drawing maps in the sand showing hills, valleys, water holes, rivers. Each day of the journey was planned, and the novices would commit this to memory. Dodge reported that one such group of raiders, none older than nineteen, and none of whom had ever been to Mexico, was able to travel from Brady’s Creek, Texas, near modern San Angelo, to Monterrey, Mexico—three hundred fifty–plus miles—without making a wrong turn and with nothing more than the instructions they had received.¹⁰
Thus the various Comanche bands could launch strikes in any direction, at any time, anywhere on the plains or their hinterlands. They attacked the Pawnees in Kansas, the Utes in eastern Colorado and eastern New Mexico, the Osages in Oklahoma, the Blackfeet in Wyoming, the Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches in Kansas and Colorado, the Tonkawas in Texas. By 1750 few tribes dared to set foot on the southern plains unless the Comanches permitted them to. The powerful northern tribes, including the Cheyenne, stayed north of the Arkansas. (This boundary would be fiercely contested again in the late 1830s.) As always with the Comanches, diplomacy was mixed with war: A key peace treaty was made in 1790 with the Kiowas that gave the Comanches a powerful ally with whom they shared their hunting grounds. Peace with the Wichitas opened huge trading opportunities linked to the French in Louisiana. There were some tribes, such as the Wacos and Tawakonis from central Texas, who simply managed to exist in harmony with the Comanches, and in any case did not make war on them. And then, of course, some enmities—like those with the Tonkawas, Apaches, and Utes—never seemed to die. Such muscular migrations had happened before in North America—one thinks of the powerful Iroquois league moving inexorably west in the seventeenth century, destroying the Huron and Erie tribes, and driving the Algonquian peoples before them as they occupied the Ohio River valley.¹¹
It was not at all clear to anyone in the middle and later eighteenth century that these important shifts in military power were taking place. (Nor was it completely clear a century later.) The Spanish, virtually the only chroniclers of the Comanche nation prior to the nineteenth century, usually saw only its effects,¹² and in any case could not then have pieced together a coherent military map of their northern provinces. But by 1750 the Comanches had in fact carved out a militarily and diplomatically unified nation with remarkably precise boundaries that were patrolled and ruthlessly enforced. They had done it with extreme violence, and that violence had changed their culture forever. In the decades that followed, the Comanches would never again be satisfied with hunting buffalo. They had quickly evolved, like the ancient Spartans, into a society entirely organized around war, in which tribal status would be conveyed exclusively by prowess in battle, which in turn was invariably measured in scalps, captives, and captured horses. The Comanche character, as perceived by the Spanish, was neatly summarized in the following report from Brigadier Pedro de Rivera y Villalón’s 1726 inspection tour of the northern provinces of New Spain.
Each year at a certain time, there comes to this province a nation of Indians very barbarous and warlike. Their name is Comanche. They never number less than 1,500. Their origin is unknown, because they are always wandering in battle formation, for they make war on all the Nations. . . . After they finish the commerce which brought them here, which consists of tanned skins, buffalo hides, and those young Indians which they capture (because they kill the older ones), they retire, continuing their wandering until another time.¹³
Thus did Comancheria—a land long known to the Spanish only as Apacheria—announce itself. And thus did the Comanches, in the scope of a few decades, become the new chief enemies of the Spanish regimes in New Mexico and Texas. (Apaches continued to prove a nuisance in the borderlands, but were never again a major threat.) It proved to be a far more complex relationship than the one with the Apaches. For one thing, the Spanish authorities were the first to recognize both the existence of the “Comanche barrier” and its usefulness to them. The Spanish still had large territorial ambitions and greatly feared French expansion west from Louisiana as well as the unremitting westward flow of the English settlements.
In that sense the Comanche country, already a huge expanse of the American plains, became more valuable to Spain than all of her troops north of the Rio Grande.¹⁴ If the Comanches stood as a seemingly impenetrable obstacle to Spanish expansion, they also offered a guarantee that the French and English would not pass, either. The French had pursued an entirely different colonial policy, eschewing outright conquest in favor of influence-peddling, alliance-making, and a sort of mercantile diplomacy—most importantly involving weapons but other commodities, too—by state-sponsored traders, often with great effect. The French were behind the 1720 massacre of an entire Spanish expedition at the hands of the Pawnees, even though no Frenchman fired a weapon.¹⁵ Now they longed to open markets up to Louisiana trading companies, and their traders had pushed westward along the Red River as early as 1718. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of arming the enemies of the Comanches, the Apaches and the Jumanos, in effect betting on the wrong horses.¹⁶ They thus soon became unwelcome in Comanche lands. That meant the virtual cessation of French intrigue in Texas. English settlements would not arrive in Texas until 1820 or so; yet even then it would take them half a century to break the Comanche barrier. The other component of the new Comanche relationship was trade. In addition to their prowess in war, the Comanches were great merchants and traders. They had more raw wealth in the form of horses, skins, meats, and captives than any tribe on the plains. Bartering and selling went on for years unofficially; so strong was this current that in 1748 the tribe was officially admitted to the Taos trade fair.
But trade relationships did not mean that the fighting stopped. In the 1720s, Spain’s Comanche wars were just beginning. The pattern was always the same: constant raiding would lead the Spanish to launch punitive expeditions. These soldiers often got lost, especially when they wandered too far to the East, too far into Comancheria itself, and thus into the trackless, treeless high plains. Some never returned. On a number of occasions the Comanches simply ran off their horses, leaving the men to die of thirst or starvation. More often the soldiers would ride out of the presidio, kill the first Indians they found, and return home. Many could not tell one Indian tribe from another, and often did not care to. They recorded many such attacks, including a 1720 raid in which Comanches stole fifteen hundred horses. In 1746 there was a major attack on the Taos pueblo, and another against Abiquiu in 1747; at the relatively large Pecos pueblo in 1748 they killed 150 people.¹⁷ Large counterraids were mounted in 1716,¹⁸1717, 1719, 1723, 1726, and 1742.¹⁹
Not all were failures. In 1751, after three hundred mounted Comanches attacked the New Mexican pueblo of Galisteo, provincial governor Vélez Cachupin dispatched soldiers that pursued the Indians down the Arkansas River, possibly into modern-day Kansas. They caught up with them in a wood, set the wood on fire, killed one hundred of them, and took the rest prisoners. The Spanish province of Texas, which was subjected to Comanche raids beginning in the 1750s, followed a similar pattern, though with even rarer success. Indian raids continued. Expeditions were launched. Comanches became ever more powerful. One measure of their growing power was the route Spanish expeditions took from Santa Fe to San Antonio in the eighteenth century. It crossed the Texas border and dived deep into Mexico before turning northward again. The point: The Spanish did not dare cross Comancheria, even with soldiers. To travel was to circumnavigate Comanche lands, as though they were sovereign. This never changed. By the time Spain finally ceded its New World possessions to Mexico in 1821, the Comanches were firmly in possession of the field. Their empire had grown, their Indian foes had been driven deep into Spanish territories. Most Texas missions and many in New Mexico had been shuttered; the once-vaunted Spanish soldiery rattled its sabers and stayed close to home.²⁰
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The Spanish made many mistakes in their northern provinces. They made them with metronomic consistency and they made them over a colonial period that spanned two centuries. Though they were not always cruel and incompetent, they were cruel and incompetent enough of the time to cause great problems for themselves, and they were inevitably hamstrung by European-style military and civilian bureaucracies attempting to operate in a savage land of barren mesas and infinite horizons. The entire premise of their northern expansion—essentially a headlong and blindly optimistic dive into lands dominated by culturally primitive, mounted, and irremediably hostile Indians—was fatally flawed. But in an era of grave misjudgments the greatest miscalculation of all took place in the year 1758. It happened on a lovely bend of a limestone river, amid fields of wildflowers in the hill country of Texas, about one hundred twenty miles northwest of San Antonio, and resulted in a grisly, era-defining event that became known as the San Saba Massacre. The massacre, in turn, would draw Spain into its greatest military defeat in the New World. Both came at the hands of the Comanches. There were many reasons for what took place, and many Spanish officials played a part. But the man to whom history assigns responsibility was an officer named Don Diego Ortiz de Parrilla. That he was ill-fated, unlucky, and undeserving of much of the blame for what happened did not make it any easier for him. Parrilla’s story offers one of history’s clearest windows into what it was like in embattled, Comanche-tormented New Spain in the middle of the eighteenth century.
The story begins in 1749. That year several Apache bands, including the numerous Lipans, rode into San Antonio to sign a peace treaty. They also proclaimed, to the somewhat flabbergasted padres, their earnest desire to enter into mission life and become humble and duty-bound subjects of the king of Spain.²¹ This was marvelous, astonishing news. These men were the same remorseless killers who had been raiding the Texas settlements with a fury ever since San Antonio’s founding in 1718, finding ever more imaginative ways to torture, maim, and eviscerate Spanish subjects. They appeared to be sincere. Over the next few years they would continue to approach the “brown robes” with the same deeply compelling idea: They wanted peace; they wanted their own mission and presidio; and they wanted them to be built in their homeland, which they said was in the vicinity of the San Saba River, near the present-day town of Menard, Texas.
The idea took root. Even though soldiers and settlers in the area were suspicious of Apache motives, the priests, who were beside themselves with happiness at their good fortune, moved resolutely forward. Everyone agreed that peace with the Apaches was highly desirable. Their conversion to Catholicism, on the other hand, was a sort of mystical dream. No mission had ever been planted among the Apaches. A successful mission would represent a sort of imperial twin killing: a rare spiritual coup accompanied by hard, secular evidence of the soundness of Spanish colonial policy in the north. Though it was the subject of considerable debate, the idea moved slowly forward through the political and religious minefields of eighteenth-century New Spain. Expeditions were sent to scout locations in 1753 and 1755.²² Politics were played; skepticism was expressed concerning sullen and uncooperative Apaches who showed up only occasionally but always demanded gifts. The doubting civil authorities were slowly won over, in part because they had heard stories from prospectors of fabulous gold and silver lodes in the hill country.²³ These had gone unexploited because of the presence of hostile Indians. The priests also hammered hard at the idea that without the missions the cunning and insidious French would attempt to advance their own interests in Texas. The French ploy always worked. By 1756 the idea had even found a champion—a prodigiously rich philanthropist from Mexico named Don Pedro Romero de Terreros, who offered to pay for all costs of two missions for the Apaches for a period of three years. His conditions: The missions must be built in Apache country, and they had to be run by his cousin, the ingratiating and boundlessly optimistic Father Alonso Giraldo de Terreros.²⁴ With Terreros’s contracts in hand, and visions of gold mines and docile Apaches dancing in their heads, the viceregal office approved the project.
The man appointed to oversee it was Colonel Parrilla. As far as anyone could tell, he was perfect for the job: a soldier with far more experience and frontier savvy than most of the neophytes and perfumed noblemen sent over the years from Spain to track Indians. Parrilla was a man of considerable ability. He had been governor of the provinces of Sonora and Coahuila, and had led successful campaigns against Apache bands in the Gila country of western New Mexico. He understood frontier conditions and was under no illusions about the Indian style of warfare. It was a measure of the importance of these missions that a man like Parrilla was put in charge of them. An even greater sign was that Parrilla reported not to the governors of Texas or New Mexico but directly to the viceroy in Mexico City.²⁵ He proved himself immediately competent, supervising construction of a mission and presidio, arranging for the transport of fourteen hundred head of cattle and seven hundred head of sheep, planting of crops, and also the transport of a number of Tlascaltecan Indians from northern Mexico to help with the hoped-for Apache converts.
In spite of this, Parrilla was deeply skeptical of the entire enterprise. As time went by, his suspicions had only gotten worse. Even before he left for San Saba, he had written the viceroy that he believed the Apaches were as treacherous as ever, and that they had shown few signs of making good on their promises. He was not reassured when, every so often, a few Lipans would appear at San Antonio to reassert their desire to become loyal subjects of the king, always requiring generous gifts that included cattle, horses, beans, salt, sugar, tobacco, hats, blankets, knives, bridles, kettles, ribbons, and beads.²⁶ For the most part the Indians stayed away. On the eve of the move to the mission, when they should have been swooning in anticipation of simultaneously receiving Jesus and pledging allegiance to the Spanish king, none could be found. Parrilla had delayed the move as long as he could, finally bowing to pressure from the ebullient Father Terreros. He had then balked at actually building the mission, but again succumbed to political pressure. On April 18, 1757, four priests reported for duty at the mission on the south bank of the San Saba River. Across the river, several miles away, one hundred soldiers were garrisoned in a stockade-fence presidio.
All was finally in place, except for one problem: there were still no Apaches. One of the padres was sent out into the wilderness to recruit them, but once more there were none to be found. Then in June it seemed to the hopeful fathers that the miraculous moment had finally arrived. That month they discovered some three thousand Indians camped near the mission. This was more than they could have dreamed possible. But as the missionaries prepared to welcome their new charges, they learned the real reason for the gathering: the annual buffalo hunt. There was some talk of going north to fight other Indians, too, but no talk at all of coming into the mission. The Indians soon vanished.
Parrilla, now certain that he had been duped, wrote the viceroy: “Your Excellency will understand what a difficult undertaking is the formation of missions for the heathen Apache nation, and will see that the favorable reports that were sent in to that Captaincy General concerning the matter were direct results of the unreliability that has always characterized the missionaries and inhabitants of the province of Texas in every occurrence that has concerned them.”²⁷ Meanwhile, three of the four priests had also lost confidence in the venture, leaving Father Terreros as its sole supporter. “We find no reason,” wrote the dissenting padres, “why we should remain with this enterprise, which we consider ill-conceived and without foundation from the beginning. . . . Having fully learned the wishes of the Indians, we find no other motive [for friendship] than the hope of receiving gifts.”²⁸ Parrilla tried to abandon the mission project altogether, proposing that the presidio alone be moved north to protect the mines, with no success. Though he was bitterly frustrated, and not a little nervous about manning an outpost so far beyond the frontier, he had his viceregal orders.
In any event, it was already too late. That fall a few passing Apache bands told the padres that a great invading army of norteños was on the way to do battle with them, a force so great that the Apaches could not even trust the Spanish to protect them. (“Northerners” was what the Apaches called the Comanches, because they invariably came at them from the north.) While this must have seemed to Parrilla as far-fetched as everything else the Apaches had said and promised, this time they were telling the truth. It was a truth that would soon reveal the real reason for the Apaches’ odd behavior.
The San Saba Mission proposal was indeed, as Parrilla had suspected, a sham. The Lipans and other bands never had any intention of converting to Christianity. But what neither Parrilla nor any Spanish official had understood was the reason for the deception, and thus they had no idea of the extent of the treachery that had been perpetrated upon them. What had in fact happened, while the padres were busy shining up their sacramental vessels, was that the Comanche empire—an area far, far larger than any Spaniard suspected in those years—had arrived precisely on their doorstep.²⁹ The Spanish had been cleverly lured well beyond the actual boundaries of the Apache lands. The San Saba country was not their homeland at all: It was Comancheria proper, and a Spanish fort there amounted to a declaration of war on the Comanches. This was exactly what the Apaches wanted: They wanted their dire enemy destroyed. Or at least stopped in its relentless southward sweep.
It was, in most ways, an excellent plan. But it did not work. Spring of 1758 brought cool rains and abundant wildflowers to the San Saba country. As the Apaches expected, it also brought Comanches, riding hard under a full moon. (So many raids were made by moonlight that in Texas a full, bright spring or summer moon is still known as a Comanche Moon.) On the morning of March 2, the priests in the mission noticed that the Apaches had disappeared. Then came yells from beyond the mission walls. A group of Indians on horseback had stolen all sixty-two of their horses. Suspecting that he was dealing only with horse thieves, Parrilla dispatched fifteen soldiers to pursue them. The soldiers quickly realized that the trouble was much bigger than they had thought, and returned fearfully to the fort. They reported that the hills were alive with enemies.
Parrilla now rode to the mission, where three priests and a handful of Indians and servants were protected by five soldiers, to beg Father Terreros to leave for the far greater security of the fort. Terreros refused, insisting that the Indians would never harm him. He was wrong. On the morning of March 16, 1758, mass was interrupted by the noise of whooping Indians. When the padres ran to the parapets, they saw a jaw-dropping sight: On all sides of the mission were gathered some two thousand warriors, many painted black and crimson, Plains Indians in the full regalia of war. They were mostly Comanches. As with many Comanche raids, there were also outriders, in this case Wichitas, with whom the Comanches had recently made peace. (In later years, the outriders tended to be Kiowas; in both cases they usually rode under Comanche leadership.) They were armed with bows, lances, and muskets. For a short time, they pretended to be friendly, insisting they had come to offer their allegiance to the Spaniards; the tall, stolid Comanche chief even accepted gifts, though he did so disdainfully, as though the givers were not worth his consideration. Then the looting and killing started.
The first to die was Father Terreros, shot with a musket. He was followed by a soldier who was guarding him. Others were shot or hacked to death. The Indians set fire to the buildings of the mission. The dead priests were stripped, their bodies mutilated. One of them, Padre Santiesteban, was decapitated. Meanwhile, the attackers busied themselves plundering the rich storerooms, killing cattle, and creating mayhem. When Parrilla heard of the attack, two miles away in the fort, he sent out a squad of nine soldiers to reinforce the mission. With more than three hundred people at the presidio, mostly women and children (families of the soldiers), he dared not send more. But his soldiers never reached the mission. They were almost immediately attacked, and all were shot or lanced. Two were killed outright, and the rest dragged themselves, wounded and terrified, back to the fort. That was the last rescue attempt Parrilla would make. The padres, who had chosen to stay in the mission against his orders, were on their own. Of the mission’s inhabitants, only a handful survived, taking shelter inside one of the buildings that was not burned. The Indians, meanwhile, carried on a three-day orgy fueled by the provisions of the mission, while Parrilla and his soldiers remained timidly and powerlessly inside the presidio’s high timber walls, which the Indians never attacked. On the fourth day, Parrilla finally judged it safe to investigate the damage. It was a scene of total desolation. Almost the entire mission was destroyed. Ten people, including three priests, had been killed.
What happened next amounted to a sort of wholesale panic on the northern frontier of New Spain, set off by the previously unthinkable notion that Spanish presidios and missions were now vulnerable to Comanche attack. This was especially true of the people in San Antonio, who believed that Indians were now headed to the provincial capital and who quickly barricaded themselves even though they had only a week’s provisions. So terrified were they that they abandoned all of the cattle the residents owned—some two thousand head in all—because they could find no one brave enough to guard them. It was the same or worse in other settlements. After the massacre, Parrilla requested immediate relief from other forts. None came. He protested to the viceroy, who sent orders to Spanish forts in Mexico to send help. Still, nothing happened. Fully three sets of viceregal orders had little or no effect. The most Parrilla ever got was a few soldiers. By that time the invaders were far away.
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News of the attack on San Saba Mission and the killing and mutilation of the priests spread rapidly through the Spanish settlements. If the first reaction was largely blind fear, it was quickly replaced with cold fury, and a desire for bloody revenge. This was especially true in the viceroy’s office in Mexico City. The garrisons in Texas that had refused to send troops to relieve San Saba were now summarily ordered to supply men and arms to a punitive expedition that would be headed by Parrilla himself. A force of 600 men was soon raised, consisting of Spanish regulars plus a host of Indian auxiliaries, including Coahuiltecans and 134 Apaches. It was, quite deliberately, the greatest expedition that Spanish money and might could buy. Never had such a large number of men been dispatched to punish Indians. It marched north in August 1759 in search of Comanches. Like most Spanish officers before him, especially those who knew what they were doing, Parrilla refused to venture out into the heart of the Comanche lands on the Great Plains, though his Indian scouts assured him that this is where the Comanches were. Instead he hung to the east, in the timbered country on the fringes of the plains. He marched for many days, and finally found an Indian encampment.
They were Tonkawas. Even though Parrilla almost certainly knew this—from his Indian scouts—he did what so many of his predecessors had done. He attacked anyway. Vengeance was vengeance, and Indians, to some extent, were Indians. So he surrounded the Tonkawa village and attacked with his six hundred soldiers and killed seventy-five of them and took one hundred fifty women and children prisoners, to be taken back to San Antonio for “reduction”—conversion to Christianity and forced assimilation. He may or may not have understood that the Tonkawas were bitter enemies of the Comanches. (In the nineteenth century they would be used with lethal effect by white soldiers against Comanches, especially as trackers.) The army continued north.
In October 1759, Parrilla’s force found itself about eighty miles northwest of present Fort Worth, near the Red River, which marked the northern boundary of Texas. There, near the present town of Ringgold, he encountered yet another prodigious assemblage of Indians. Though the typically paranoid Spanish had suspected French collusion in the attack on the San Saba Mission, there is no evidence to support it. But this fearsome group, consisting of an ad hoc alliance of several thousand Comanches, Wichitas, Osages, Red River Caddoans, and other tribes, and dug into breastworks in the enemy’s path, almost certainly had some assistance from French intrigue. That the Comanches were the dominant power in this part of the world did not mean they did not make alliances of convenience, especially where Apaches and Spanish were concerned. They were at war with the Osages, but happy to ride with them against Parrilla.
What happened next might have been one of the greatest slaughters in the history of the American West, except for the fact that Parrilla’s forces almost immediately turned tail and ran. Though his Spanish regulars had charged on his command, the rest of the army proved utterly feckless. Most of it melted away. Retreat turned into panic, and panic turned into headlong flight. For some reason—perhaps because they were so pleased to capture all of the provision wagons of a large Spanish army—the Indians did not pursue Parrilla’s terrified, fleeing army. Because of this, his forces suffered few casualties, an inconvenient fact that he was hard-pressed to explain to his skeptical superiors back in San Antonio and later in Mexico City.
It was a stunning defeat, the worst inflicted on the Spanish in the New World. The Spanish had thrown everything they had at the Comanches and their allies and had been humiliated. No expeditions would ever again be sent against the Comanches in Texas; no missions were ever again established in hostile country. More important, both the Indians and Spanish of the day were interested in what happened in the same way. In the fog of war, it was a clear consensus. The fight at Spanish Fort was evidence of a major swing in the balance of power, one that heralded the beginning of a long period of violence against both Texas and northern Mexico. Within a few years Comanche power in Texas would become almost absolute. Though Spain maintained some of its missions and presidio for another sixty years, they were powerless to do anything except defend themselves. Parrilla himself was sent to Mexico to face court-martial. He lied. He said he had faced six thousand Indians under the command of French officers flying French flags. The court found no evidence of Frenchmen under arms or in positions of command. Parrilla was disgraced.
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New Spain’s leaders were not always incompetent in their handling of the Comanche problem. There were several governors and several generals who showed themselves to be shrewd and resourceful leaders, and Spain produced at least one governor of real genius who managed to do what two centuries of such governors and scores of later politicians, Indian agents, and American armies could not: make a genuine peace with the Comanches. His name was Don Juan Bautista de Anza. He was governor of the province of New Mexico from 1777 to 1787, and he was perhaps the most brilliant of all the men who ever faced the problem of hostile Indians. If the postrevolution Texans or the post–Mexican War federal Indian authorities had studied Anza, the history of the opening of the American West might have been quite different, indeed.
Anza, a hardened Indian fighter who had met with success on the California and Sonora frontiers, inherited the same intractable Indian problem every other governor had faced. The Comanches were ascendant, the Apaches were skulking in the hinterlands but were still lethal, and the Navajos and Utes were restive in the west. All were troublesome but the most notorious Indian of all in those years was a Comanche chief known as Cuerno Verde (“Green Horn”), leader of the Kotsoteka band, whose father had been killed in battle with Spaniards and whose vengeance was legendary.³⁰ He was, as Anza wrote to the commander-general of the interior provinces of New Spain, “a scourge of the kingdom, who had exterminated many pueblos, killing hundreds and making as many prisoners whom he afterwards sacrificed in cold blood.”³¹ As soon as Anza became governor, he proposed a bold and previously unthinkable strategy to defeat the Comanches: Attack them in their own country at the same moment when they were coming to attack New Mexicans. The Spanish had always thought defensively, or at least in terms of punitive expeditions. Anza aimed aggressively for the root cause of the problem.
On August 15, 1779, the new governor gathered an army of six hundred men, including 259 Indians, and set off in search of Cuerno Verde. To avoid detection, he took a different and more mountainous route than the one used by all previous Spanish expeditions,³² crossing the front range of the Rockies near South Park. He went ultimately north and east, onto the elevated plains in present-day eastern Colorado, where he found the Indian camp. Though most of its warriors and the chief were absent, Anza attacked anyway; the Indians fled. It took the Spanish nine miles to ride them down, and another three miles to subdue them. They killed eighteen—presumably old men, boys, and women—and took thirty women and thirty-four children prisoner. They got all five hundred horses. From the prisoners, Anza learned that Cuerno Verde was off raiding in New Mexico but was returning soon for a grand feast and celebration.
Anza waited for him, surprised him on the trail in Colorado near a place that is still known as Greenhorn Peak, and in a piece of brilliant battlefield strategy, engineered one of the great Spanish victories in North America. He had ventured into the heart of Comancheria, to the very homeland of the Comanche, where countless others had perished, and where they had never been beaten in a major fight, and he had triumphed. Anza wrote later that he believed he owed his victory in part to Cuerno Verde’s arrogance. After Cuerno Verde attacked the six-hundred-strong Spanish battle line with his bodyguard of fifty warriors, Anza theorized that “his death was caused by his own intrepidity and the contempt he wished to show our people, being vaunted by the many successes that they have always obtained over us because of the irregularities with which they have always warred. . . . From this should be deduced the arrogance, presumption and pride which characterized this barbarian, and which he manifested until the last moment in various ways, disdaining even to load his own musket. . . .”³³ Only a handful of warriors escaped capture or death. The Spanish suffered only one casualty. Anza and his lancers launched other attacks into Comancheria, and though none was nearly as effective as the one against Cuerno Verde, he soon had their full attention.
What Anza did next was equally unconventional. Other governors, flush with such success, would likely have tried to destroy the rest of the Comanches, in spite of the fact that there were more than twenty thousand of them on the plains³⁴ (or, according to Anza’s own inflated estimate, thirty thousand). But Anza was not trying to beat the Comanches, just scare them enough so that a diplomatic accommodation could be made. Considering what had happened in New Mexico and what was even now happening in Texas, he had what sounded like a wildly implausible goal: He wanted to make friends and allies of them.
This he did. He gathered Comanche chiefs for peace talks, insisting that he speak with all of the bands that touched the western perimeter of the plains, and eventually insisting on appointing a single chief to speak for all the bands, something that had never happened before. Anza treated the Comanches as equals, did not threaten their hunting grounds, and refused to try to declare sovereignty over them. He offered them trade. They liked and respected him. In one of the more remarkable diplomatic pirouettes ever seen on the border, Anza then managed to concoct an overweening solution to all his problems. He somehow managed not only to get the Comanches to sign a peace treaty, but also to bind them with their enemies the Utes in an alliance with Spain against their bitterest foes, the Apaches. Then, for the coup de grâce, he took this combined force of Spanish, Ute, and Comanche and used it to force the Navajo into the compact.
Odder still, Anza’s treaty worked. In the entire history of the American West, few treaties between whites and Indians have ever held up more than a few years. Most were invalid the day they were signed. History is full of hundreds of Indian treaties concocted by governments who could not enforce them. This is the rare exception. It was only with the province of New Mexico, and it probably saved New Mexico from the long terror of Comanche raiding that was even then being unleashed on Texas and northern Mexico. The truce with the Utes was broken soon enough, but the treaty with New Mexico actually held up. It did so in part because it was in the Comanches’ own best interests. New Mexico was a mother lode of trade, a place where they could sell their horses and captives. The Anza peace gave rise to a new, and quite special form of mercantile relationship between the western Comanches and New Mexico. Instead of terror there was simply trade, conducted by an entirely new breed, hard-bitten mestizo middlemen who went by the name of Comancheros.
