The Comanche campaign is a general term for military operations by the United States government against the Comanche tribe in the newly settled west. Between 1867 and 1875, military units fought against the Comanche people in a series of expeditions and campaigns until the Comanche surrendered and relocated to a reservation.
Western settlement brought the Spanish, French, English, and American settlers into regular contact with the native tribes of the region. Many of these Indians were friendly, and received the new settlers gladly, offering to trade and coexist peacefully, while other tribes resisted the newcomers. The idea of Manifest Destiny as well as the Homestead Act pushed American and immigrant settlers further west, thereby creating more competition for a finite amount of land. This competition for land created tension between the Anglo settlers and the Natives of the region. In an effort to prevent conflicts in the area, many treaties were signed promising land and peace between the two parties, but such treaties were rarely honored. The Comanche tribe was one of the main sources of native resistance in the region that became Oklahoma and Texas, and often came into conflict with both other tribes and the newer settlers.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, some Indian tribes attempted to align themselves with what they believed would be the winning side. In the case of the Comanche, the tribe signed a treaty with the Confederacy, and when the war ended they were forced to swear loyalty to the United States government at Fort Smith. This did little to end the cycle of raiding which had come to typify this region. Spreading over a large expanse of the southern plains, the Comanche fought hard diplomatically to maintain power in the region they controlled. In the Treaty of Little Arkansas in 1865, the Comanche tribe was awarded a large piece of land spanning parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Some parts of this region, called the Comancheria, soon became part of the Indian reservation. This treaty was later followed by the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867, which helped to solidify the reservation system for the Plains Indians. These policies eventually became part of President Ulysses S. Grant's Peace Policy, which prioritized missionary work and education over fighting. President Grant's Peace Policy became an important part of the white-Indian relations for a number of years.
A faction of the Comanche tribe, the Quahadi, was arguably the most resistant towards the Anglo settlers. Skeptical of what they would bring, the Quahadi avoided contact with these men. Goods were never exchanged between the groups, and because of this seclusion they were largely unaffected by the cholera plagues in 1816 and 1849. The Quahadi were noted for their fierce nature; so much so that other Comanche feared them. They were the wealthiest of the Comanche in terms of horses and cattle, and they had never signed a peace treaty. It was this faction of the Comanche that gave the American troops the most trouble during this period.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
This page covers Concho River Comanche Raid (1873). A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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