The Comancheros were an ethnically mixed group of New Mexican traders who made their living by trading with the Comanche, Kiowa, and other Plains tribes in the late 18th and 19th centuries mostly in northeastern New Mexico and West Texas. They gained their name because they traded primarily with the fierce Comanche tribe.
Years before the Comancheros began to trade with the Plains tribes, the Comanche had a long history of raiding Spanish and Pueblo settlements, primarily for horses. By the mid-18th century, the raids became more frequent. In 1779, Juan Bautista de Anza the governor of Nuevo Mexico, which included most of present-day New Mexico and parts of West Texas, southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and the Oklahoma panhandle, made plans to stop the raids.
In August 1779, de Anza led a mixed force of 500 to 800 Spanish troops and Ute, Apache, and Pueblo allies on an expedition against the largest and most active group of Comanche raiders, who were situated in southern Colorado. The Comanche and Spanish forces met in a series of running battles between August 31 and September 3, 1779, which culminated at the Battle of the Greenhorn south of present-day Pueblo, Colorado, in which the Comanche were defeated.
This show of force led to peace between the Spanish and Commanche over the next several years and opened the area to trade. It was made official in February 1786 when the Comanche made a peace treaty with the Spanish at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico.
From the 1780s until the mid-19th century, the Comanchero trade flourished with the New Mexican traders providing manufactured goods such as tools, knives, beads, and cloth; flour, sugar, tobacco, and bread in exchange for hides, horses, livestock, and captives from the Comanche.
In the beginning, trade with the Indians was fairly unorganized. Each fall, after the harvest, the Comancheros loaded their burros and oxcarts with their trade supplies and relied on chance meetings with the Indians, and subsequently, the volume of their business was low.
Native Americans were only able to win the right to vote by fighting for it state by state. In fact, efforts to disenfranchise Native Americans, particularly those who lived on reservations, continued through the early 1960s.
In 1957, after a challenge by an Indigenous voter, Utah repealed a law that had denied Native Americans living on reservations the right to vote. And in 1962, the Supreme Court of New Mexico struck down a challenge that claimed Navajos living on a reservation in the state should not have been allowed to vote in a 1960 election.
Despite these victories, Native people were still prevented from voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation—the same tactics used against Black voters. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped strengthen the voting rights that Native people had won in every state. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder eliminated the Justice Department’s authority to block changes to voting laws in states with histories of discrimination. In 2019, a federal commission found that at least 23 states had enacted "newly restrictive statewide voter laws."
The Comancheros sometimes took their trade as far north as the Platte River in present-day Nebraska, ranged east to the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma, and as far south as the Davis Mountains in Texas. However, they most often traded on the Llano Estacado or the “Staked Plains” of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas.
After the Mexican-American War, most of the Comanche lands came under the jurisdiction of the United States. This resulted in stricter licensing policies and other restrictions on the Comancheros. The Americans particularly abhorred the ransoming of captives.
Comanchero commerce reached its peak during the Civil War with the relaxation of frontier defenses in Texas. But, after the Civil War, the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers were determined to put an end to the illicit trade and drive the Comanche onto reservations. Those who resisted were aided by their Comanchero allies and relatives, who supplied them with firearms and ammunition.
The US Army’s attempts to stop the trade between the Comanchero and Comanche Indians were relatively unsuccessful until the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, September 1874. Afterward, the Comanche surrendered and were sent to a reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, bringing an end to the Comanche and Comanchero trade relationship, which lasted for almost 100 years.
