This paper is focused on one group, the Comanches. From the time of their first recorded mention in Euroamerican documents in 1706 until their settlement on the reservation in 1875, Comanches were the dominant political and military force on the southern Plains, and estimates of their numbers were of significant importance to Euroamerican political and military policy-makers. During that century-and-three-quarters, soldiers, travelers, and bureaucrats offered estimates of their numbers. Those numbers were based on a variety of methods; a few were actual counts, but most were based on estimates or ratios such as the estimated number of persons per lodge, or the number of men per lodge, or men to population and were based on a certain degree--usually minimal--of personal knowledge of and contact with Comanches. In later years, anthropologists and historians made comment on the general question of how many Indians there were in all, and the specific question of how many Comanches there may have been.
Many of those later comments cited the earlier reports, and while they were sometimes critiqued, the basic historiographic question was seldom, or should we say, never, asked: did the author have first-hand knowledge of the "facts" he was reporting? Similarly, while many of those reports were based upon ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic facts, such as per-lodge-populations, or males-per-lodge, their validity was seldom questioned.
This web-essay has four parts. This first part will address the basic published accounts of historical Comanche population size. It will begin, in this page, with an examination of the two threads of that story. The first is John Swanton's (Swanton 1928) editing of James Mooney's unpublished notes on native populations, followed by Douglas Ubelaker's (Ubelaker 1992) retracing of Mooney's notes to their sources. The second thread concerns the population estimates given in Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel's (Wallace and Hoebel 1952) popular ethnography, the citation of preference for many later commentators. Although they used different primary sources, the point of criticism for both the Mooney/Swanton/Ubelaker and the Wallace and Hoebel threads is the same: did the author of the primary source have first hand knowledge of the "facts" he was reporting.
At the same time, needless to say, there are other primary sources not mentioned by either Mooney or Wallace and Hoebel. Thus the second part of this paper will address those other sources. Ultimately these documentary sources lead to the Indian Bureau census lists from 1879 through the early twentieth century. But they, too, are subject to the critique: who is/was a Comanche?
The third part of this essay addresses a recurring trope in estimates of Comanche numbers: the effect of European diseases on Indian populations. Since many of those discussions reference contemporary reports of population loss, it is necessary to examine those reports from that basic historiographic perspective: did the author know what he was talking about?
The fourth and final part of this essay addresses a more recent theme, the attempt to arrive at an aboriginal Comanche population figure through ecological carrying-capacity analyses. While such efforts are becoming increasingly sophisticated, there are still a number of problems. On the one hand, they fail to take into account both Comanche ethnography (how many people per lodge), Comanche political economy (the various sources of Comanche subsistence), Comanche history (the historical reported dynamics of that political economy). At the same time, since they strive to derive a homeostatic relation a carrying capacity they fail to detect the implications of an potentially unbalanced ecosystem.
There is no "summary and conclusions" to this essay. These four sections point out problems with the existing approaches to Comanche population size, but can offer no immediate solution to that question. But one conclusion does seems simple: in trying to arrive at a firm numerical basis to Comanche--and other Plains populations--we are all playing a numbers game.
James Mooney was a prodigious note-taker; indeed, the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, the famous Bulletin 30 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, grew, in part, out of Mooney's amateur notes made in an effort to make sense out of the myriad of tribal names mentioned in original texts (Hodge 1907-10; 1:vi). That synonomy was a continuing concern for the Bureau of Ethnology from the year Mooney was hired, until it was finally published as the Handbook some thirty years later. One of Mooney's continuing interests was the size of the populations to which those names were attached, and he often took note of those population estimates. An initial effort to synthesize those materials was made in the Handbook (Hodge 1970-10; 2:286), and Mooney had hopes of a monograph on the subject. That was not to be, but after his death, John R. Swanton, arranged and published his notes (Mooney 1928)
Those results soon became the accepted baseline for discussions of aboriginal population. In 1931, A. L. Kroeber (1939) used them, with but minor modification for California, in the calculations in his Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, noting, " All in all, . . . Mooney's estimates and calculations have clearly been made on the basis of wide reading, conscientiousness, and experienced judgement" (1939:134). In 1971, Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Insititution went back to Mooney's notes to uncover the source for what he felt was an underestimate of the aboriginal population of Maryland; in the process, he realized that Mooney's notes contained the sources and calculations for most of his other population estimates as well (1992:248). Ubelaker's resulting essay published the relevant notes, along with a commentary. But while that essay reaffirmed Kroeber's assessment of Mooney as a conscientious researcher, it did not critique Mooney's sources.
Mooney gave a total of 7,000 for the Comanches in 1690, with a 1907 population of 1,430. On this, Ubelaker commented:
87. Comanche-7,000. The exact source of this estimate is not given; however, Mooney's earliest reference is from Lewis and Clark: In the year 1724, they resided in several villages on the heads of the Kansas river, and could, at that time, bring upwards of two thousand men into the field, (see Monsr. Dupratz History of Louisiana, page 71 and the map attached to that work). This would imply a population of about 8,000, using Mooney s usual factor of 4 as the ratio between men and total population.
Mooney also relied upon estimates in 1835-36 of 7,000 by Porter, of 7,000 by the Indian agent Gibson, and the same by Agent Harris. However, he discounted an estimate of 19,200 made in 1837 by the Office of Indian Affairs; the comment by Farnham that "The Cumanches are supposed to be twenty thousand strong"; and an estimate of 30,000 souls by Morse. [1992:280]
Upon investigation, several problems with those citations become apparent.
To begin, the Lewis and Clark reference was not, strictly speaking, a Lewis and Clark document. Rather it is to the unsigned, but penned by Meriwether Lewis alone, attachment entitled Statistical View of the Indian nations inhabiting the territory of Louisiana, and the countries adjacent to its Northern and Western boundaries, published with an extract of a letter from Meriwether Lewis to Thomas Jefferson (1806) in Jefferson's Message to Congress of February 19, 1806. Moreover, the reference was not to Comanches, per se, but was to "Paducas". While Mooney was well within a line of observers and scholars who equated Paduca with Comanche, later researchers, such as George B. Grinnell (1920) and Frank R. Secoy (1951), have pointed out that there is a temporal dimension in the application of the term Paduca: before about 1750, it referred to Plains Apaches; after that time--that is, after Comanches had driven the Apaches off the Plains--it was applied to Comanches. Moreover, it should be noted that the term only appears in documents from the east, it does not appear at all in New Mexican or Texan documents. Therefore the 1724 Du Pratz citation, from the east, is to Apaches, not to Comanches. [Note 1]
The Thomas J. Porter (1836) reference is slightly perplexing. On August 1, 1836, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Nashville, TN, National Banner, apparently in reference to the then-incipient Texas Revolution and the potential response to Mexican aggression:
As the public mind has been and is somewhat excited with regard to the situation on the Western frontier, and the state being now under a requisition of Gen. Gaines for a regiment of mounted gunmen to maintain its defence, I have thought it would not be uninteresting to the public to know the names and numbers of the Indian tribes of that frontier. The statement is taken from an estimate accompanying a map of survey shewing the geographical and relative position of the different tribes which was prepared at the Topographical Bureau during the present year, which I have not seen published.
Porter then presented a table of tribal names and population numbers, including 7,000 for the Comanches. However, nothing else seems to be known about him. Moreover, the specific map he mentioned is unknown, and it is unclear how the Topographical Bureau obtained its numbers.
Mooney's next three sources are, curiously, all related, in one way or another, to the immigration (i. e., the Removal) of the eastern Indians to the west. More importantly, none of the authors had personal contact with Comanches.
George Gibson's 1835 number is in a "Table of Native Tribes and the numbers resident west of the Mississippi." Similarly, Carey A. Harris's 1836 number is in a table showing "Number of the Indigenous Tribes within Striking Distance of the Western Frontier." But Ubelaker's (Mooney's?) titling both Gibson and Harris as "agent" is misleading. Indeed, there was as yet no United States agent to the Comanches. Rather, Gibson was the Army's Commissary General of Subsistence acting as the Superintendent of Indian Immigration, while Harris was Commissioner of Indian Affairs! Nevertheless, Gibson's and Harris's sources of information on the Comanches are unknown.
The proximate source for the citation 19,200 made in 1837 by the Office of Indian Affairs is, like Harris's 1836 number, to an otherwise unreferenced table giving the "Number of Indigenous tribes within Striking Distance of the Western Frontier"; its ultimate source is unknown.
Mooney was probably wise to be skeptical of Farnham (1973). Although Farnham's description of his journey to Santa Fe is full of rumors of Comanche threats, the party never actually met any. Moreover, the chapter which that estimate occurs is replete with many other otherwise unsubstantiated comments on western tribes.
The reference to the estimate of "30,000 souls by Morse" is to an unusually incomprehensible table accompanying Jedediah Morse's 1822 Report on Indian Affairs. The specific page cited by Mooney (374), lists tribes "Between the Red River, and the Rio del Norte"-- that is, in what was still Mexico--including the "Comauch, Jelan, and Yamperack." The ethnonyms are clear: "Comauch" is 'Comanche' , "Yamperack" is the divisional ethnonym yamparika 'root eater' [note 2], and "Jelan " is a variant of the Wichita ethnonym na taa snake .
While the table is, more or less, organized by geographical region, its sources are otherwise unidentified. However, the source of the Comanche data in that table can be determined from a note on page 256 accompanying the reprinting of a report written by William A. Trimble, commander of the western section of the 8th Military Department, to the Secretary of War giving a short account of the "Indians residing between Red and Rio del Norte rivers" also published in Morse (1822:256-60). However, while the title of Morse's table "Between the Red River, and the Rio del Norte" parallels the title of Trimble's report, Trimble's report gave no population totals, and it does not include the ethnonyms "Yamperack " or "Jelan." Trimble's original report has not been located in the National Archives.
In sum, of Mooney's six sources identified by Ubelaker, all, not just the three Ubelaker specifically mentioned (Indian Office, Farnham and Morse/Trimble) are problematic.
Wallace and Hoebel's Numbers
The standard ethnography of the Comanches is Wallace and Hoebel's The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (1952). In it they stated:
How many people all these bands added up to is hard to say. At best the Comanche tribe was never very large. Mooney estimated its population to be 7,000 in 1690. Governor Anza of New Mexico reported that Comanches visiting Santa Fe and Pecos Pueblo in the first half of the year 1786 included twenty-three chiefs representing 593 lodges or around 6,000 persons. In the same year Anza s emmissary, Francisco Xavier Ortiz, reported . . . in and area north and east of the Pecos River where he found eight villages of "Kotsoteka" [note 3], containing a population of 6,000 to 7,000 [note4]. The figure given by Ortiz is quite likely an exaggeration, but if it is approximately correct, then the tribe at that time could have numbered as many as 20,000 to 30,000.It was several years after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory that government agents learned much about the Comanches. One of the first reliable estimates of their military strength was by P. L. Chouteau, agent for the Osages. He wrote in 1836, The numerical military forces of the Comanches (which includes all males old enough, and not too old to bear arms) is estimated, and always has been, by the Mexican Government at 8,000, but from my personal observation, I have been induced to calculate the number of Comanche warriors at 4,500. In the following year United States military authorities estimated the number of warriors at about 5,400.
Based upon the figures given by Chouteau and Bonville, the population of the entire tribe must have been between 15,000 and 20,000 in the 1830s. This would be in accordance with Mooney s estimate of 19,200 for the period 1841-45 and Neighbors' Report of 1849 which placed the population at 20,000 with 4,000 warriors as a careful estimate. A more conservative estimate made by Charles Bent, who was well informed, placed the number of lodges at 2,500, or 12,000 people, in 1846. This would approximate W. B. Parker s 1854 calculation of 20,000 for both the Comanches and Kiowas. . . . In 1866 the Comanches were estimated at 4,700. By 1884 the population had dwindled to a pitiful 1,389 and in 1910 there were only 1,171 survivors.[Wallace and Hoebel 1952:31-32]
However, there are problems with most of these citations. The reference to the visitors to Santa Fe and Pecos is to a table compiled by either New Mexico governor Juan Bautista de Anza or by Pedro Garrido y Duran, secretary to the comandante general of the Provincias Internas in Chihuahua and based on Anza's notes and correspondence. But the given total of 593 lodges is slightly misleading, since several of the chiefs were listed twice, once with and once without associated lodges, and it is not clear how those citations should be interpreted.
As translated by Thomas (1932:322-25), Ortiz stated:
the rancheria of Captain Canaguaipe . . . with one hundred and fifty-five tipis. . . . that of Malla [Ecueracapa] consisted of one hundred and fifty-seven tipis . . . There were eight rancher¡as where I was, the smallest of thirty tipis . . . The number of lodges, more or less, of the eight rancher¡as in which I was reached seven hundred with not a few others of small number separated from the large rancher¡as. The number of men of arms . . . is three or four in each, and of women and children seven and eight.
But even though Ortiz was explicit in the numbers that he used, 10 to 12 people per lodge, giving a range of between 7,000 and 8,400, Wallace and Hoebel, on the basis of Ortiz's three to four warriors to the tent compute the total as "6,000 to 7,000 " (1952:27, 31). It is not clear how they calculated their comment, "but if it is approximately correct, then the tribe at that time could have numbered as many as 20,000 to 30,000" (1952:31).
The major uncertainties with Wallace and Hoebel's sources begin with the reference to P. L. Chouteau. Although Chouteau was indeed Osage agent, before 1836, he had had few, if any, direct contacts with Comanches. Indeed, his population comment was not based on personal observation, either of Comanches or of Mexican governmental documents. Rather, in the cited letter of April 25, 1836 to Secretary of War Lewis Cass, and published on July 19 in the Arkansas Gazette, immediately before the sentence quoted by Wallace and Hoebel, Chouteau wrote that he had "inadvertantly omitted mention of population. ... I have tried to gain all information. I have asked for Mr. LeGrand (who has been for several years acquainted with the Indian tribes west and southwest." That is, the estimate is not from Chouteau but from Alexander LeGrand. LeGrand was a peculiar character, but other than his own claims, there is no clear evidence that he had ever resided with any Comanches or knew their numbers.[note 5]
The plural United States military authorities who estimated the number of warriors at about 5,400 was the singular [pun intended] Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville--given by Wallace and Hoebel as Bonville--recently reinstated into the army after an unauthorized extended exploring expedition through the Rocky Mountains. He thought of himself as an expert on Indians, and, in an offer to negotiate a peace with the western Indians, argued that the Comanches were divided into two groups, the "Comanches of the Woods" and the "Comanches of the Prairies or Yamparicoes," each numbering about 2,700 warriors, for the total of 5,400 warriors (Bonneville 1837). But there is no evidence that he had ever met any Comanches.
Wallace and Hoebel s reference to Mooney's estimate of "19,200 for the period 1841-54" is inexplicable. Wallace and Hoebel gave no publication or page citation, and the number does not appear in any of Mooney's publications. Strangely enough, however, based on Ubelaker s research noted above, Mooney had known of the estimate, but had "discounted it."
The reference to Neighbors's "Report of 1849" is not to an annual report, per se. Although published in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for 1849, the figure is from a letter sent to Major General William J. Worth, responding to a request from the general apparently for population figures. In that letter, Neighbors noted
In accordance with your request of the 25th February, I submit the following table, showing the supposed number of Indians residing on our immediate borders. This estimate is made from the best information that could be obtained from the Indians by frequent enquiry on the subject. Viz:No. of souls No.of warriors
Comanches 20,000 4,000
However, the phrase quoted by Wallace and Hoebel, "careful estimate," does not occur as such in Neighbors's letter. Moreover, Neighbors noted that at that time, his own contact with Comanches was limited, "particularly the case with the Kiowa, the Apache and [with] the . . . upper bands of Comanche."
The reference to Charles Bent's 1846 estimate --"2,500 lodges or 12,000 souls"-- is correct; but the degree to which Bent was "well informed" about Comanches is unclear. While he had been in the western trade since the late 1820s, and in 1846 was governor of the recently seized New Mexico territory, in contrast to Neighbors, most of his Comanche trade, such as it was, was with Yamparikas and other northern Comanches. He was not "well informed" about southern Comanches
William B. Parker was a geologist who accompanied Captain Randolph B. Marcy and Robert Neighbors on their 1855 survey of the proposed Texas Indian reservations (Parker 1856). They apparently met only one group of Comanches and no Kiowas and Parker apparently had no other contacts with Indians. Thus Parker's number was probably derived from Neighbors.
The 1866 reference is to the report of special agents Charles Bogy and W. R. Irwin. In November and December 1866, at Fort Zarah on the Arkansas River, they spoke to a number of Comanche chiefs who told them that this tribe at present embraces seven bands, there were formerly nine but two have merged with others (Bogy and Irwin 1866a). Specifically, they reported
3 bands of Yamparikas (600 each) 1800for a total of 4,700 people (Bogy and Irwin 1866b). Unfortunately, the chiefs were not further identified, and so the report cannot be cross-checked with known chiefs.1 band of Cochetakers 700
1 band of Noconees 600
1 band of Penatekas 600
1 band of Quaradachokos 1000 [note 6]
Wallace and Hoebel's final note, By 1884 the population had dwindled to "a pitiful 1,389 and in 1910 there were only 1,171 survivors" is incorrect on all counts. The 1884 annual report of agent P. B. Hunt of the Kiowa Agency, noted a population of 1,392 (Hunt 1884), slightly above Wallace and Hoebel's number, but that did not include the 162 Penatekas still listed on the Wichita Agency rolls. Therefore the total tallied should be 1,554. However, that was still propbably incorrect (see below). The count in 1910 was 1,476; indeed, neither the annual report count nor the census count ever passed below 1,390.
In sum, of Wallace and Hoebel's eleven population figures, several miscite or misinterpret the original source, while the other original sources are themselves of questionable validity.
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Notes to this section
1) It may be noted that Lewis's discussion of the Padouca comes within a larger discussion of the 'Aliatans', which he translated as 'snake', and includes the 'Snake Indians', 'Aliatans of the West', 'La Playes', and 'Pania Pique', as well as aforesaid 'Padouca'. The ethnonym Aliatan is one of the pan-Plains forms based on the Caddoan/Wichita ethnonym na tan 'snake' (Mooney 1896: 1043). Other forms include Naytane, and the degraded homophones Lalitane, Halitane, Ayutan, Ietan, Jetan, Jetam, and the typographical error Tetau. Like Padouca, they were only used by commentators from the east; none occur in New Mexican or Texan documents. In this regard, it is interesting that Lewis s heading includes Pania Pique: that ethnonym is a referent to the Wichitas. The Le Playes Indians are one of the mysteries of Plains ethnohistory.
2) It was common in Spanish and Mexican Texas to distinguish between the nearby Comanches and the Yamparikas farther away, but it is not always clear whether the term Comanche was being used as a generic or specific.
3) It is unclear why Wallace and Hoebel put Kotsoteka in quotation marks. A. B.Thomas (Forgotten Frontiers, (Norman, 1932) used the Spanish spelling Cuchantica. R. N. Richardson (The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement, (Glendale, 1933), used Kotsoteka and Nye Carbine and Lance (Norman 1969) used Kochateka. Hoebel s field notes from a July 5, 1933 conversation with Kwasia have "Kuhtsu?eka?" while his notes from an undated conversation with Teneverka use "Kutsuteka". But Hoebel's Political Organization and Law-ways of the Comanche Indians (Menasha, 1940) used "Kotsueka," and Wallace and Hoebel generally used "Kotsoeka." But the t has phonemic value; while kotsoteka is 'buffalo eater' , as given, *kutsu eka is an ungrammatical form of kutso ekavit 'red buffalo.' The notes from the 1933 Laboratory of Anthropology Comanche Field Party are in two locations. Those of E. Adamson Hoebel are in the Library of the American Philosophiocal Society in Philadelphia. Those of Waldo R. Wedel and Gustav G. Carson are in the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution. Since they were all present at most of the same interviews, their notes are a corrective on each other. I have correlated the individual notes and am preparing an edited text for publication.
4) In another place, Wallace and Hoebel follow Thomas (1932:73) in stating that that the villages were between the Pecos River and the Red River. But Ortiz was specific: "The terrain which these rancherias occupied when I was in them is from the mesa of Charco as far as the Saline of the Rio Colorado and from the Canyon of Los Cimmarrones as far as near the river of Pecos." Thomas (1932:323-24). In the 1780s, the name Colorado was applied by New Mexicans to today's Canadian River.
5) LeGrand had been elected captain of the 1824 Santa Fe caravan, one of the first on that trail (Franklin, Missouri Intelligencer, April 3, 1824). In the early 1830s, he was in and out of trouble with local officials in Santa Fe (Sena 1832). He was later to claim that in the summer of 1833, while surveying a tract of land in west Texas he met a Comanche chief named Cordero (Kennedy 1841). However, his published notes do not match the area and thus cast doubt upon both his survey and his claim of having met Comanches; indeed other records suggest that the Kotsoteka Comanche chief Cordero had died sometime soon after the fall of 1826 (Kavanagh 1996: 203). In September 1836, David Burnet--who had himself spent some time with Comanches, ca. 1817 (see below)-- now the first president of the Republic of Texas, appointed LeGrand to visit the Comanches and if possible to negotiate a treaty with them (Jenkins 1973; 7:427). Details of LeGrand's journey are unclear, and he later claimed that Sam Houston suppressed his original report (Estep 1950: 169-189).
6) The name kwaradachoko is literally 'antelope skinner'. It was first used ca. 1861; by 1867 it had become shortened to simply Kwahada.