Comanche Origins

The Shoshone split into what would become the Snake and Comanche sometime after they moved through Wyoming’s South Pass. Some went north where they ultimately settled in what is now Idaho. Others went south where they joined the Ute.

Comanche have several legends explaining what happened. In 1848 George Ruxton was told the chief from one band criticized the chief of another for bathing in a medicine spring where he drank. The first was already angry because he had failed to find any game and the other had a "fat deer." He drowned the man, and his band had to move away.

Post Oak Jim heard a different version, also rooted in conflict, in 1933. Several bands were camped together, when one boy accidentally kicked another during a game. After the injured boy died, his father, the chief of one band, challenged the warriors of the other band to battle. An older man intervened, saying it was an accident, asked why should one group be exterminated. They negotiated a separation, with the chief’s group going north and the other south. Before they left, smallpox broke out.

People in Oklahoma told Dick Banks, they were heading northwest over the timber line, when some became unhappy because there was no fire wood and they feared the climate would be colder. The leader called a council, but the dissidents left anyway. Robert Thomas heard the group was traveling south when they heard a wolf howl. One refused to continue, and returned north. The other continued south.

James Mooney and Ernest Wallace both believed the division actually was precipitated by pressures from other tribes to the east, but neither adequately identified the source. Douglas Bamforth has tried to reconstruct the location of linguistic groups in 1700. He thought the Kiowa were directly east of the Shoshone, with the Ute to the south.

The Kiowa migration was related to Iroquois battles for dominance in the fur trade. After the Huron were decimated by the Iroquois in 1649, the Ottawa took the Huron’s place as middlemen between the bands collecting furs and the French. The Iroquois forced them into eastern Wisconsin in 1651, where they joined the refugee Potawatomi. Population pressures motivated the Dakota, who were in western Wisconsin and Minnesota to begin moving into the Dakotas. That in turn dislodged the Arapaho and Cheyenne.

The trade in pelts, inevitably, would have reached the Kiowa: it required a constant supply of fur-bearing animals that were killed in large enough numbers to depopulate areas. During the winter of 1660, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers visited the Dakota west of Lake Superior and met with Cree. They were the ultimate suppliers to the Ottawa. From them, the two heard about Hudson Bay. When the coureurs de boise returned to Montréal with furs and a proposal for shorter shipping route, they were rebuked.

The brothers-in-law left for New England, hoping to interest the English or Dutch. In Boston, George Cartwright forwarded them to James, the younger brother of Charles II. The future king and his cousin, Rupert, formed the Hudson Bay Company to enter the fur trade with the Cree. The group built its firsts post in the far north in 1668.

The consequence was, that while the Iroquois were pushing bands west, the Cree were probably stopping them from moving into fur lands to the north. The combination of pressures made the south the safest sanctuary, especially in the years between 1680 and 1693 when the Spanish were far to the south.

A few years ago, Severin Fowles was directing an archaeological survey of the Río Grande gorge. They came across rock art that depicted "horses and ceremonial hide bags." They called together experts from interested tribes to help identify the artists. They all agreed it was done by Comanche.

The most interesting "showed a galloping horse and a comet in the sky, both heading toward the sun." The Great Comet of 1680 had an unusually long tail that was even visible in daylight. Eusebio Kino saw it in Cádiz late that year, and observed it again when he arrived in Mexico City. It was visible in Europe from 30 November to 19 March of 1681.

The date of the comet doesn’t mean the drawing was made that year, but it does suggest Comanche were hunting in the area while the visual memory of the brilliant light was still fresh.

Notes: Huron also are known as Wyandot.

Bamforth, Douglas B. Ecology and Human Organization on the Great Plains, 1988.
Bank, Dick. Collected by Bessie L. Thomas, 29 March 1938, for WPA.

Fowles, Severin. Interviewed by Eric A. Powell, "Searching for the Comanche Empire," Archaeology, 13 May 2014.

Grinnell, George B. "Who Were the Padouca?", American Anthropologist 22:248-260:1920.
Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, 1896.

Nute, Grace Lee. "Chouart des Groseilliers, Médard," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 1, 1966.

_____. "Radisson, Pierre-Esprit," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 2, 1969.

Post Oak Jim (Nayia). Collected for Santa Fé Laboratory of Anthropology, 1933, quoted by Wallace.

Ruxton, George Frederick. 　Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, 1848. Grinnell identified the location as Fountain Creek, north of Pueblo, Colorado.

Sultzman, Lee. "Ottawa History," Dick Shovel website.

Thompson, Robert F. Collected from self, 27 October 1937, for WPA.

United States, Works Progress Administration. Indian-Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, deposited with the University of Oklahoma, Western History Collections.

Wallace, Ernest and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches, 1986 edition. They include another version about two bands disagreeing over the distribution of bear meat that had been killed. He didn’t give a source for the legend.

Wikipedia. "Great Comet of 1680."

Graphics: Based on map in Bamforth.