The Coronado Expedition: From the Distance of 460 Years

11: The War for the South Plains, 1500‒1700

ELEVEN The War for the South Plains, ‒ NANCY P. HICKERSON SINCE THE BEGINNING OF RECORDED European history in North America, the South Plains, as the portion of the Llano Estacado lying south of the Texas Panhandle is known, have been a battleground in repeated conflicts involving Native Americans. In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadores witnessed the enmity between groups called “Querechos” (Apaches) and “Teyas” (Jumanos). Their narratives provide our earliest glimpse of a war that would continue for more than a century, affecting native peoples from New Mexico to the Texas coast. A second war began early in the eighteenth century when the Comanches entered the South Plains. They would displace the once dominant Apaches and hold sway, albeit briefly, as the premier native power in the region. Finally, in a third period of bloody war, the United States cavalry would defeat the Comanches and other tribes in a pan-regional conflict—the “Indian wars” of the nineteenth century—that opened the plains to Euro-American occupation. In each of these wars, an invading population extinguished, displaced, or incorporated its predecessors. In each case, sweeping demographic, economic, and social changes were put in motion, not only in the South Plains but also in adjacent areas. In this chapter I examine the first and most obscure of these wars, looking to the identities and strategies of the winners and losers in a struggle that predated Spanish entry into the region (but in which Spanish interests would be much involved) and to an understanding of the outcome.  “Old Amerinds” of the Greater South Plains In late prehistoric times, a vast expanse of arid to semiarid land, stretching from theSouthPlainstosouthernTexasandtheGulf coast,wasthinlyoccupiedbysmall groupsof hunter-gatherers.Asharedfood-gatheringadaptation,doubtlessof great antiquity, characterized this huge region. The majority of the tribes, Karankawans, Coahuiltecans,andothers,wereconstitutedof nomadicorseminomadicbandsthat subsisted on wild foods such as nuts, berries, deer, shellfish, mescal roots, and prickly pear fruit, harvested according to season. As depicted in the relación of Cabeza de Vaca, contacts at food-harvesting sites were important occasions for social and economic exchanges between groups. Feuds were common, but conventions maintained peace during harvest periods, and traders had neutral status. Unlike other arid regions of North America, this one lay between two disparate areas of more complex agricultural societies. In the west, the Rio Grande and its eastern tributaries marked the frontier of the Oasis culture area of the Southwest, which had cultural ties to Mexico. In the east, the lower courses of several major rivers, from the Arkansas to the Trinity, constituted the westernmost extension of Mississippian civilization. Trade routes, which for the most part followed watercourses, crisscrossed the plains and provided links between agricultural and nonagricultural areas. In the natural pastures of the South Plains, bison were a prime resource that attracted hunters from a wide radius. The Jumanos, a Tanoan people with ties of language and kinship to village populations in New Mexico and the Rio Grande valley, were widely known as bison hunters and were closely identified with this region. In the seventeenth century, the wide-ranging trade contacts of the Jumanos would become the basis for an informal alliance of indigenous tribes as they confronted and attempted to stem the tide of Apache expansion in the South Plains. Apache Genesis The time, circumstances, and consequences of the arrival of the Apachean peoples in the Southwest and South Plains have been subjects of a long and convoluted discussion. Most twentieth-century scholars have rejected or modified the views of pioneer researcher Adolph Bandelier, who evidently saw the Apaches as ubiquitous aggressors and instigators of warfare and other forms of violence. I would not, under any circumstances, wish to return outright to Bandelier’s position. However, I find it difficult to conceive of the entry of the Apacheans into their historical territories as anything other than an invasion, and this invasion did involve violence.  THE WAR FOR THE SOUTH PLAINS Apachean is the southernmost branch of the Athapaskan language family, usually considered to be part of a larger Na-Dene superfamily or phylum. Linguistic, cultural, and genetic clues all indicate the Athapaskans to be descendants of one of two relatively recent migrations from Asia into North America, the other being the Inuit, or Eskimo-Aleut family. Prior to these late migrations, an autochthonous Native American population, speakers of the hundreds of different languages that Joseph Greenberg lumps together as Amerind, had increased, dispersed, and...