"Just Because He Says You're Beautiful - Five Things Every Head-Smart/Heart-Dumb Girl Should Know"

"Just Because He Says You're Beautiful - Five Things Every Head-Smart/Heart-Dumb Girl Should Know"

On my recent trip to the SWPCA conference in Albuquerque, several publishers had tables groaning with books for sale. Then off by herself at a little table there was just one woman on her own personal, national book tour, selling just one little book (plus giving away little bags of Valentine's candy). Stephanie Rochelle Redd boiled down her fumbling romantic history into just five observations ("At first I thought there were ten, but there are just five"), imploring the attention of posterity with "please learn from me."

I was struck by her example. You mean anyone could have signed up for a table to sell books at? Her answer was: "Yes!" Wow! It had never, ever occurred to me to do that! I could have reserved a table and sold my Governor's book!

More importantly, though, she was doing everything herself. Daunting, but to a well-organized person, doable.

Such faith in the power of words! A real inspiration with her drive! And a very charming woman too:

Here is her romance blog.

Eva Yerbabuena's Ballet Flamenco Performed "Lluvia" Tuesday Evening At The Mondavi Center

Tonight, Eva Yerbabuena and Ballet Flamenco performed "Lluvia" at the Mondavi Center in Davis, CA. Fortunately, there are several videos on YouTube of portions of this 90-minute dance, showing what a strange and compelling art Flamenco really is:

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One interesting thing about the portion of the dance shown in the second video was seeing how important illumination is in the presentation. Side lighting, with a dark background and a black dress highlighted her hands, which seemed to flutter like birds, and her face. The dress itself with the peacock-like long train, also seemed to suggest a bird.

Tread Lightly

Tread Lightly by Lauren Taylor in Kansas City, MO (from the Heisenberg Chronicles).

Peace With The Comanche Greatly Influenced Relations With The Navajo

For me, Pekka Hämäläinen's book, "The Comanche Empire" (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008), opened a new window to view what had become of interest: how the Diné ‘Ana’í of the Navajo came to ally themselves, first with the Spaniards, and then with the Mexicans and Americans, against the rest of the Navajo. All of this composes the "Miasma" (classic Greek term) that prefigures the opening and conclusion of the television series "Breaking Bad" at To'hajiilee.

Here are some extended quotes from Hämäläinen's book:

[p. 107] On February 25, 1786, Juan Bautista de Anza, lieutenant colonel in the Spanish Army and the governor of New Mexico, stood in front of his palace, preparing himself for the ceremony. He had waited for this moment too long, ever since the glorious day on the llanos seven years ago when he held the green-horned headdress in his hands [headdress trophy from his defeat of Comanche chief Cuerno Verde in 1779]. The memory of his triumph was already growing faint, making his gubernatorial tenure seem like a failure, but now there was hope again. He examined his subjects - hispanos, indios, genízaros, men, women, children - who swarmed in the dirt plaza, filling it with nervous expectation. Then the crowd shivered, erupting into shrieks and yells, and Anza saw him. Ecueracapa, the capitan general of the western Comanches, emerged at the end of a corridor of shouting people. The Indian rode slowly toward him, flanked by three adjutants and escorted by a column of Spanish soldiers and Santa Fe's most prominent citizens. He calmly crossed the square, dismounted in front of Anza, and gently embraced him. It was there, in the arms of the man he could think of only as a savage, that Anza knew there would be peace.

The Comanches were desirous of peace because they faced renewed hostilities with other tribes, and they had been suddenly weakened by epidemics. Ecueracapa made the peace overtures, starting in December 1785. Having captured Chiquíto, an Indian member of a plains-bound Spanish hunting party who also spoke Comanche, Ecueracapa:

[pp. 118-119] called together four consecutive councils to discuss details of peace talks and, having reached an agreement with the other chiefs, sent Chiquíto and two Comanche envoys to inform Anza that he would be arriving shortly in Santa Fe.

The announcement electrified the Southwest, where news traveled quickly....

Word of the forthcoming Comanche-Spanish negotiations also reached the Utes, who were outraged by the new Spanish policy. Having nurtured a stable and mutually beneficial alliance with New Mexico since mid-century - an alliance that had been sustained by common dread of the Comanches - they now feared that Comanche-Spanish rapprochement would leave them marginalized and exposed to Comanche violence. They met with Anza and "heatedly declared against the attempted peace, advancing the most vindictive and even insulting and barbarous arguments against it, even stating to the chief, Anza, that he preferred frequent, unfaithful rebels to friends always obedient and faithful."

Anza took quick advantage of the new arrangement:

[pp. 123-124] The Comanche treaty was a momentous coup for Anza and it gave him leverage to enter into negotiations with the powerful Navajos who dominated a vast territory west of New Mexico. In March 1786, only weeks after the conclusion of the Comanche talks, Anza invited Navajo leaders to a peace conference. His objective was to pacify the Navajos by forcing them to resign their alliance with the Gileño Apaches, and he had laid the ground for this move a year before when he banned all trade between the Navajos and the inhabitants of New Mexico. Now eighty Navajos came to meet him in Santa Fe, where, significantly, a small Comanche delegation was also present. When the talks between Anza and Navajo leaders began in the Governor's Palace, two Comanches, at Anza's request, made a surprise entrance "so that the Navajos, having seen them, might be moved by fear and respect they have for this warlike nation." According to Garrido's report, one of the Comanches demanded that the Navajos become Spain's allies, lest "the forces of the Comanches as good allies and friends of the Spaniards would come and exterminate them. He menaced and terrorized them so much that with the same submission which the governor [received] they replied to the Comanches that they would fail in nothing agreed upon." The Navajos agreed to a treaty in which they pledged to sever ties with the Gileños, form a military alliance with Spain, and enter a nonaggression pact with the Comanches. The resulting borderlands détente, midwifed by Comanches, served Comanche interests as much as it served Spanish ones: if Comanches were to develop closer commercial interests with New Mexico, they needed the colony to be safe and prosperous.

The Spanish appointment of Don Carlos of the Cebolleta branch of the Navajo as "chief of the Navajos" was in 1786 - likely at this very meeting. Despite his rank, the other Navajo leaders did not submit to Don Carlos as their leader. The Navajos were more-atomized and politically not as well-organized as the Comanches. Ecueracapa, through incessant travel and diplomatic activities all across Comanchería, had achieved a first-among-equals sort of rank among Comanches, and could speak broadly for most of them. Don Carlos couldn't, but the 1786 meeting was the start of a process whereby the Diné ‘Ana’í slowly came to identify their interests more-closely with the Spanish than with their fellow Navajo, which culminated with Joaquín's separation of the Cebolleta band from the rest of the Navajo in order to negotiate a separate peace, in about 1818. One can imagine that hastening trade with the Americans, eastward, across what would become the Santa Fe Trail, made good relations with the Spaniards more important than ever to sustain. And the vulnerable Cebolleta band was located on the eastern flanks of what was to become Mt. Taylor, squarely between the Spanish and the rest of the Navajo.

And so, what was the Spanish method to induce compliance? Hämäläinen continues:

[p. 132] Rather than trying to incorporate or contain indigenous societies, the new objective was to transform them into an entity that Spanish agents could understand, manage, and control. ... Bourbon officials had initially thought that more authoritative Comanche leaders were needed to unite unruly Indians behind peace treaties, but once the treaties were formalized, the officials reconceived political centralization as a means to subdue their new allies. Inspired by pragmatic visions of a consolidated New Spain, the Bourbon officials had concluded that they never could bring the empire to Comanchería. Instead, they resolved to bring the Comanches into the empire.

Bourbon officials applied the centralizing pressure most systematically on the western Comanches, whose continued loyalty they considered critical for the survival of New Mexico and, by extension, the silver provinces of northern New Spain. The policy was first articulated by Anza in 1786 when he argued that by elevating Ecueracapa "above the rest of his class" Spaniards could reduce the entire Comanche nation to vassalage. The idea was to create a well-defined hierarchical structure extending from the principal chiefs to the bottom of Comanche society through strategic distribution of political gifts. Accordingly, Spanish officials in New Mexico and Texas funneled vast amounts of gifts among the Comanches through Ecueracapa and other head chiefs, hoping to originate a downward flow of presents from Spanish authorities to principal chiefs, local band leaders, and commoners and, conversely, an upward-converging dependency network on top of which stood the king of Spain. The institution of principal chieftainship, as Pedro Garrido explained was "the most appropriate instrument that we could desire for the new arrangement of peace, not only to assure the continuance of the peace of the peace celebrated, but also to subject the warlike Comanche nation to the dominion of the king."

In the end, the Spanish were mostly-happy with their compact with the Comanche, and how well they controlled the Comanche. On the part, the Comanche were also happy with the compact, and with how well they controlled the Spanish. Nevertheless, the Spanish policy was never successful in reducing the Comanches to actual dependency. The Spanish simply needed the Comanche more than the Comanche needed the Spanish. Most of the Navajos were also resistant to dependency. It was only the portions of the Navajo nation that were physically closest to the Spaniards that eventually did succumb.

Fun Historical Photos

Recording the Lion's Roar for MGM Studios.

"The Diving Lady" Updated

Deborah reports:

The Diving Lady sign is the only neon sign I fell in love with. When she crashed after a microburst in 2010 I thought she was lost after seeing all those shards of glass and broken rusted metal. But a small miracle in the form of the Mesa Preservation Foundation managed to reach the right artisans and supporters of the Lady and she now dives at night again. I have done over 10 paintings of her but the original depicting a crash is still my emotional favorite. 3 years later mg
Lady it needed a little help. Sketchbook Pro has become so sophisticated a painting program that I was able to straighten lines, work a more sophisticated dress pattern, etc. Here is my Diving Lady, again, all repainted and glowing.

President Obama On "Between Two Ferns"

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama from President Barack Obama

The Mexican Government Is On A Roll

Over the last month, with the capture of "El Chapo", Luis Alfredo Aguilera Esquivel, and "El 69", and the killing of Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, and "El Pantera", the Mexican government has finally put the cartels on the defensive. Finally, a run of good news. It's a hard and bloody road, and the best to them:

MEXICO CITY — If nothing else, the slaying of cartel boss Nazario Moreno Gonzalez by Mexican soldiers may have burst the bubble of mysticism that had made him one of the stranger figures to emerge in the country's drug war.

...Moreno fancied himself a protector of his people and an enforcer of rules. Among other things, he forbade the use or sale of methamphetamine on his home turf, insisting that it only be shipped to the U.S. As cracked as that moral code was, it could feel like something to cling to in an often lawless land, and it made Moreno a kind of legend.

...Last year, "self-defense" militias sprang up in the rural state and threatened to confront Moreno's Knights Templar directly, given the lack of government action. Outside the village of Buenavista Tomatlan, the vigilantes trashed a shrine to Moreno.

In January, Peña Nieto sent a massive deployment of troops and federal police to avert a conflagration between the two groups. Since then, those troops and police have been rounding up suspected cartel members, often acting on tips from cooperating vigilantes.

...At the same time, the federal government said it has recently reestablished its control over the port of Lazaro Cardenas, on Michoacan's Pacific coast. The Templars long exerted a strong influence at the port, controlling the importation of drugs and methamphetamine precursors and shipping out minerals the cartel extracted from illegal mines — all major sources of income. On March 3, the government announced that it had seized 119,000 tons of illegally mined iron at the port that the cartel had been hoping to ship to China.

...Late last month, troops killed a local cartel leader named Francisco Galeana, also known as "El Pantera." A few days later, the government announced the capture of Luis Alfredo Aguilera Esquivel, a cartel member and son of Servando Gomez Martinez, a.k.a. "La Tuta," the man presumed to be the leader of the cartel's day-to-day operations.

Then, on Friday, authorities arrested 15 people on suspicion of extortion and kidnapping, including cartel leader Abraham Zamora Zamudio, also known as "El 69." The self-defense groups have applauded these law enforcement victories, which could serve to break up the cartel and lead the vigilantes to return to their homes and farms.

Sacramento/Black Art Of Dance 2014

Getting ready for showtime! Went to see Tyehimba Kokayi, Richard Jackson, Osayande Kokayi, and the crew, with Linda Goodrich and Lorelei Bayne, over at Sac State on Saturday night.


Interesting stuff. Liked Tyehimba's opening contribution. Didn't like Nicole Manker's piece - the absence of costume coherence, or much coherence at all, undermined the piece - but Earth Wind and Fire is infectious, so liked it in the end. Philip Flickinger and Tony Nguyen presented a variation of Lindy Hop. Liked Lorelei's Maya Angelou piece. Liked the others, in varying amounts.

Tyehimba, Richard, et al. greeting fans afterwards.

Sandia Crest

In the distance, the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, most prominently, Santa Fe Baldy.

My Sister Makes A Colorful Breakfast

Tase The Intern

That is pretty cool. Tasing the intern with a drone.

Of course, all depends on the particular application of the technology: who is doing what to whom.

Woo-hoo! Took The Stage Tonight Flanking Pepper

Folsom Fred and I flanked Pepper tonight in Zumba class. Lots of positive support as we hammed it up!

I Thought It Was Your Turn To Watch The Malaysian Airliner

No clue where it is.

I'm reminded of the novel "The President's Plane Is Missing". In that story, the President wasn't on the plane, because he was on a secret diplomatic venture in Europe. The plane crashed into a narrow slot canyon in Arizona, and appeared to vanish from the Earth.

I don't think they have slot canyons in that part of Southeast Asia....

Patrick Swayze, With Hans And Franz

The girl at Subway said she's the only one in her family who isn't a body-builder. She gets lots of pressure about her weight, her diet, her tone.

Sounds like she needs to listen to Hans and Franz.

Yellow Tape

E.: MMMMMAAAAAAARRRRCCCCCC! I forgot to say! There is yellow tape all around the house across the street. That means it's a crime scene. I haven't seen that old man across the street for a long time. I think he got murdered.

M.: But you don't know for sure.

E.: No.

M.: It would be nice to know if the neighbor across the street got murdered.

E.: Take a look at the tape!


Sure enough, there was yellow caution tape around the hedge across the street, but the reason seemed obvious: something had badly ravaged the hedge. What was it? Did an automobile plow into it, or was there some kind of disease? I don't know, but I doubt the neighbor was murdered.

"South Pacific" - DMTC - Final Dress Rehearsal - Part III

"Ritz and Triscuit" Just Want To Be Taken Seriously

The Sacramento comedy duo at Step One dance studio, with Hip-Hop instructor Krystle Morales, and some of the gang (including me).

Spelling Be

Gotta love FOX News!

I remember how excited I was for the 8th-grade spelling bee in our school. I had placed third the year before, and was certain I was going to win. My first word was "weird". That whole "i before e, except after c" business? Doesn't work. I was the third person eliminated.

"The Comanche Empire" by Pekka Hämäläinen

I started reading Pekka Hämäläinen's book, "The Comanche Empire" to gain some insight on the Comanche's interactions with the Pueblos and the Apache. The Pueblos of Gran Quivira had been annihilated by the Apache in the 1660's, but in the 1760's, a century later, the valleys in the same highlands southeast of Albuquerque were thronged with Apache refugees trying desperately to escape the Comanche. Hämäläinen's book had little to say about this turn of events. Nevertheless, I got sucked into this revisionist Western history that maintains the rise of the Comanche should be understood in imperial terms. The Comanche dominion was a Native American empire that reduced its neighbors into dependency, including Spanish New Mexico (which came perilously close to annihilation in the 1760's, and was eventually saved by the diplomatic overtures of Governor Tomás Vélez de Cachupín (1762-1767; who emerges in Hämäläinen's telling as a real statesman, but severely overmatched by inadequate resources) and Governor Juan Bautista de Anza (1778-1788), who established a very productive détente with the Comanche in 1786. (Spanish Governor link).

I'm now very curious to the extent the détente with the Comanche affected relations with the Navajo. Did the Diné ‘Ana’í want to adopt the same kind of enviable relations the Comanche had with the Spanish?

It's an important to remember that the Comanche rarely numbered more than 40,000 people over a vast region. Population density was vapor thin, even considering other tribes and the European colonists. In addition, the Comanche never developed a bureaucracy. Is it reasonable to assert that an assertive Empire exists when there are hardly any people there? I think in this case, there is. Comanche adoption of horse culture allowed them to remain in surprisingly-close contact over their huge dominion. Unlike the more-atomistic Navajo, the Comanche had few internal subdivisions. In the early years, there were only three major subdivisions in the tribe: Yamparikas, Kotsotekas, and Jupes. The Comanche had come exploding out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains onto the Plains in the early years of the 18th-Century, and all had a common memory and inheritance. And they discussed important matters frequently and adopted common policies and practices.

The Comanche enslaved many Mexicans and adopted them into the tribe. What surprised me was learning the extent to which the Genízaro communities of New Mexico started defecting away from the Spanish and began adopting Comanche ways, particularly the Genízaros from the communities of the Pecos River south of Las Vegas (precisely where my branch of the Valdez family originated). Genízaros in time became Chicanos. The town of San Miguel del Vado apparently started as a ghetto in the vicinity of San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, from where they were cleaned out and resettled on the frontier in 1793.

According to Wikipedia:

Genízaro is a Spanish word that evolved from the English word janissary, which was adapted from the Ottoman Turkish word yeniçeri. This referred to slaves who were trained as soldiers for the Ottoman Empire. In New Mexico, the term Genízaro was used to describe Native American slaves and servants. It also was used to describe many Pueblo Indians who were living in the Spanish settlements such as Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Belen.

Beginning in 1692 Young Indian captives were sold into slavery in New Mexico. Many of the captives complained of mistreatment and were settled in land grants on the periphery of Spanish settlements according to a policy established by the Governors. These settlements became buffer communities for larger Spanish towns in the event of attack by enemy tribes surrounding the province.

...The settlements of Tomé and Belén, just south of Albuquerque, were described by Juan Agustin Morfi as follows in 1778:

"In all the Spanish towns of New Mexico there exists a class of Indians called genizaros. These are made up of captive Comanches, Apaches, etc. who were taken as youngsters and raised among us, and who have married in the province…They are forced to live among the Spaniards, without lands or other means to subsist except the bow and arrow which serves them when they go into the back country to hunt deer for food… They are fine soldiers, very warlike… Expecting the genizaros to work for daily wages is a folly because of the abuses they have experienced, especially from the alcaldes mayores in the past… In two places, Belen and Tome, some sixty families of genizaros have congregated."

Most Genízaros were Navajo, Pawnee, Apache, Kiowa Apache, Ute, Comanche, and Paiute who had been purchased at a young age and worked as domestic servants and sheepherders. Throughout the Spanish and Mexican period, Genízaros settled in several New Mexican villages such as Belén, Tomé, Valencia, Carnué, Los Lentes, Socorro, and San Miguel del Vado. Genízaros also lived in Albuquerque, Atrisco, Santa Fe, Chimayó, Taos, Abiquiú and Las Vegas.

By the mid-18th century, the Comanche dominated the weaker tribes in the eastern plains and sold kidnapped captives from these tribes to Spanish villagers. By the Mexican and early American period (1821–1880), almost all of the Genízaros were of Navajo ancestry. During negotiations with the United States military, Navajo spokesmen raised the issue of Navajos being held as servants in Spanish/Mexican households. When asked how many Navajos were among the Mexicans, they responded: "over half the tribe." Most of the captives never returned to the Navajo nation but remained as the lower classes in the Hispanic villages. Members of different tribes intermarried in these communities.

Today their descendants comprise much of the population of Atrisco, Pajarito, and Los Padillas in the South Valley of Albuquerque, and significant portions of the population of Las Vegas in Eastern New Mexico.

It would not be surprising if my Valdez forebears had been Navajos enslaved by the Comanche, sold to the Spanish, and eventually resettled by the Spanish on the Comanche frontier. Alternatively, they could have been traders (comancheros) or buffalo hunters (ciboleros), or even have had Comanche blood.

Western writer Larry McMurtry is skeptical of Hämäläinen's argument, but liked all the new information.

In his view there was a Comanche empire, a point he presses in nearly four hundred pages. His (to me) startling introduction, called “Reversed Colonialism,” makes the largest claims I’ve ever seen made for Comanche power. As a son of the Comancheria myself, they took me aback, which of course doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.

Here are samples of these claims, accelerating as the professor warms to his subject:

In the Southwest, European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance, it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.

And then:

For a century, roughly from 1750 to 1850, the Comanches were the dominant people in the Southwest…. To cope with the opportunities and challenges of their rapid expansion, Comanches created a centralized multilevel political system, a flourishing market economy, and a graded social organization that was flexible enough to sustain and survive the burdens of their external ambitions.

Blink a time or two and the reader might forget that the book at hand is about Comanches, rather than Microsoft.

And there’s more:

Comanches achieved something quite exceptional: they built an imperial organization that subdued, marginalized, co-opted, and profoundly transformed near and distant colonial outposts, thereby reversing the conventional imperial trajectory in vast segments of North and Central America.

That was the slider, here’s the fastball:

Comanches, moreover, did that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the high tide of imperial contestation when colonial powers jostled for preeminence across North America. The colonial Southwest was a setting for several dynamic and diverging imperial projects that converged and clashed in unexpected ways. As Spanish, French, British, and US empires vied with one another over land, commerce, and raw materials, Comanches continued to expand their realm, profoundly frustrating European fantasies of superiority.

The result was a colonial history that defies conventional wisdom. A long-standing notion has it that the course and contours of early American history were determined by the shifts in Euro-American power dynamics and the reactions of metropolitan headquarters in Madrid, London, Versailles, Mexico City, and Washington to those shifts. The Southwest, however, is a striking exception. Metropolitan visions mattered there, but they often mattered less than the policies and designs of Comanches, whose dominance eventually reached hemispheric dimensions, extending from the heart of North America deep into Mexico.

Indeed, Comanche ascendancy is the missing component in the sweeping historical sequence that led to New Spain’s failure to colonize the interior of North America, the erosion of Spanish imperial authority in the Southwest, and the precipitous decay of Mexican power in the north. Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.

And yet Professor Hämäläinen immediately goes on to say that the Comanches

never attempted to build a European-style imperial system. A creation of itinerant nomadic bands, the Comanche empire was not a rigid structure held together by a single central authority, nor was it an entity that could be displayed on a map, a solid block with clear cut borders.

All these statements seem to me to represent conclusions, and I might have been less inclined to question them if I’d read them at the end of Professor Hämäläinen’s almost four hundred pages of text. As it is, questions pile up: How can the Comanche empire be centralized and multilevel on one page while lacking a central authority on the next? Where, by the way, is the heart of North America—I was thinking it was somewhere around Iowa City. Were there Comanches in Oaxaca, marking off “hemispheric dimensions”? And as a personal quirk, perhaps, I’d have to say that I hope for a little metropolitanism with my empires; at least some excellent architecture gets left behind, as in Mexico City, Cuzco, Tikal, and the Temple of the Sun, just to consider the New World. The Anasazi people didn’t have an empire, just a society, but they did leave us Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. The Comanches by contrast lived in disposable dwellings and left no architecture.

...I agree that Comanches were vigorous opportunists, who made the most of the weakness of colonial Spain, and France, and the fledgling Texans, when they came. But is this an empire? Or, conversely I suppose, why not call it an empire? The Comanches certainly did keep the Southwest boiling with conflict from the moment they appeared in the early eighteenth century to their defeat in the Texas panhandle in the 1870s. Certainly they vexed, fought with, defeated, or exploited virtually everyone they came in contact with. They early mastered the horse, which, both here and elsewhere, Professor Hämäläinen has argued was ultimately a mixed blessing, the fragility of the Plains ecosystem being what we now know it to be.

I supposed I just have a linearist’s preference for empires that can be displayed on a map, as they expand and shrink. The Comanches had many spheres of influence (that good old Paris Peace Conference term) and enjoyed supremacy in one place or another at given times. They were quick to exploit trade routes, exacting a kind of toll for traders along the Santa Fe Trail as soon as there was a Santa Fe Trail. And they invariably showed up at the big trade fairs in Taos and elsewhere—such fairs were the vivid predecessors of our own swap meets.

The Comanches spent fifty years successfully pushing the eastern Apaches west, but they didn’t eliminate the Apaches as a force to be reckoned with in the Southwest. Geronimo stayed out of US hands a decade longer than Quanah Parker and proved very aggravating to General George Crook, the American commander in many of the Indian wars.

Professor Hämäläinen is at his best when he traces the myriad Comanche trade patterns. The Comanches traded energetically with anyone who had anything they wanted, a practice particularly vexing to the Spanish:

The Americans, however, did not come as conquerors carrying guns, but as merchants carrying goods and gifts, and eastern Comanches eagerly embraced them as potential trading partners. The Comanches simply viewed the linkage between presents and politics differently from the Spanish. Gifts, Bourbon administrators argued, were contractual bonds that created a political bond, an exclusive bilateral union, whereas for Comanches the meaning of gifts was primarily of a social nature. Bourbon officials insisted that gifts should forbid Comanches from trading with foreign nations, but this was a narrow interpretation of loyalty and friendship that did not easily translate into the Comanches’ world view….

It certainly didn’t. One band of Comanches might be trading amicably in San Antonio while others were aggressively raiding in northern Mexico, taking slaves and horses that they would eventually trade.

The Comanches called themselves Nermernuh, or the People. T.H. Fehrenbach, whose Comanches: The Destruction of a People (1974) is still useful, mentions that one reason Comanche social organization has been little studied is because it was so loose as to barely make a Comanche society. They were patrilineal and saw that the incest taboo was strictly observed, but they lived short, hard lives and were so frequently on the move that they had no time to make pots or weave blankets. They lived in bands but were gregarious and felt free to change bands if they felt the urge. Decisions about where to trade or when to move camp were usually arrived at by consensus.

Professor Hämäläinen points out that once horse herds became a major source of capital, some tensions between Comanches as pastoralists and Comanches as hunter-gatherers developed, the two activities requiring somewhat different rhythms. Human history has taught us that no matter how abundant a natural resource—fish, grass, buffalo—may be, the human species is capable of rapidly laying it waste. Thousands of horses and millions of buffalo ate the rich grasses of the Great Plains near to depletion; the south Texas cattlemen who arrived with their herds in the 1870s were annoyed to find the plains already overgrazed.

...Although I mainly disagree with Professor Hämäläinen’s thesis, I nonetheless found his book to be immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century. Also I discovered that a whole new discipline in the aggressive empire of revisionist western studies had somehow slipped under my radar: frontier-and-borderland studies. Gary Clayton Anderson’s book The Conquest of Texas, which I mentioned earlier, may belong in this field. It has much to say about the Indians and the Mexicans being unimpressed by US claims that they must stay within borders. Invariably, they didn’t. The Comanches particularly must have found the notion of borders they were supposed to stay within weird at best.