Borderlands of Brutality

This is a book about non-state actors shaping the outcome of a conflict between nation-states. Long before the U.S. declared war on Mexico, indigenous powers waged their own wars on Mexicans. Brian DeLay explains how native warriors—Navajos, Apaches, and especially Comanches and their Kiowa allies—unwittingly prepared northern Mexico for American conquest. By turning Mexican villages, farms, and ranches into a thousand man-made "deserts," Comanche raiders left the provinces below the Rio Grande depopulated, destitute, and divided. All but defeated by Indians, norteños lacked the means, or the inclination, to resist U.S. incursion. Mexican state officials failed to appreciate the magnitude of native power. Stateless peoples were "incomprehensible" to the "logic of national and international politics" (p. 30). Using a transnational approach, DeLay succeeds in making indigenous groups comprehensible as shapers of binational history. Yet his narrative success—a model of the new borderlands history—may discomfort some readers, for it requires a renewed emphasis on Indian violence.

DeLay restricts his purview to "independent Indians"—native groups in northernmost Mexico and the Louisiana Purchase who possessed autonomy as of the mid-nineteenth century. He excludes semi-autonomous groups such as the Yaqui, who repeatedly rebelled against the Mexican state. Rebellions are domestic affairs. DeLay is interested in foreign interventions, especially those that had lasting consequences. The interventions of Comanches, the dominant power on the southern plains, best match DeLay's interests, and he focuses his investigation there. He cannot ignore independent Navajos and Apaches, but he gives them less attention, for their conflicts with Mexicans had a less significant effect on the U.S.–Mexican War. In essence, his narrative contains three main players: Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Comanches.

War of a Thousand Deserts begins in the 1830s, the decade when the relationship between Mexico and Comanchería changed radically. Part one describes this change. Upon independence in 1821, Mexico inherited from Spain a shaky peace with the great indigenous power to the north. The maintenance of good relations required perennial gift giving. But Mexico City proved financially unable and politically incapable of maintaining this or any other coherent Indian policy. Nuevo México, a relatively prosperous department, ended up purchasing its own peace and following its own foreign policy, effectively becoming a semi-autonomous state. Thanks to Comanche influence, Nuevo México began to lean more toward the United States than Mexico. Commercial traffic on the Santa Fe Trail increased after 1834 when Comanches made peace with their eastern neighbors, the Osage, who controlled the gateway to St. Louis. American power expanded even as Comanche influence spread. Half of the Mexican province of Coahuila y Tejas became the breakaway Republic of Texas in 1836. After Sam Houston was elected to a second term as president in 1841, Comanches accepted a détente with the Texans. Only the year before, Comanches inaugurated the Great Peace with their northern neighbors, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho. As a result of these diplomatic developments to the west, east, and north, Comanchería became more peaceful than it had been in decades. But violence didn't vanish. It was displaced: Comanches shifted their raiding southward to the interior of Mexico.

Raiding south of the Rio Grande was hardly new for Comanches, but the scale and duration of their operations in the 1830s and 1840s was unprecedented and astonishing. In coordinated campaigns, hundreds of native men set out on horseback each fall. Over time, their realm of extraction extended beyond the border states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, as far as San Luis Potosí and southern Durango. Comanches and allied Kiowas took captives, animals, and miscellaneous valuables such as food, textiles, and metal. Interior Mexico became a "plunderer's bazaar" (p. 109). Comanche society, simultaneously hierarchical and flexible, provided strong incentives for raiding: high-ranking older men wanted to maintain their status through wealth redistribution while low-ranking younger men wanted opportunities for social and economic advancement. Upon...