Ecological relations between population size, numbers of horses, bison migration, aggregation, and other variables have long been invoked to explain the Comanches. The unnamed Frenchman who lived with Comanches in the 1730s reported fifty or sixty villages "scattered about, caring for the many horses which they get from New Mexico" (Hackett 1931-46; 3:348). Similarly, the three Frenchmen who arrived in New Mexico in 1749 reported that the Comanche rancherias were "dispersed, with their large droves of horses, for which reason they could not live together, having to seek sufficient pasturage and water for their horses" (Hackett 1931-46; 3:317). In 1786, Texas governor Domingo Cabello reported that "because of the necessities of the buffalo hunt on which they maintain themselves, their whole force lives separately" (Cabello 1786).

Those two factors--buffalo and horses--have also been invoked as a resolution of the so-called "Comanche anomaly," the apparent disparity between the so-called "typical" or "True Plains Tribes" and the ethnographically reported Comanches. From an early position that the "superabundance of bison on the Southern Plains made formal police sanction functionally unnecessary for the Comanches" (Ralph Linton, quoted by Wallace and Hoebel [1952]) or that conditions on the Southern Plains were not as severe as in the North (Colson 1954), although neither Linton nor Colson offered data for their conclusions the ecological arguments about Comanche organization have become increasingly sophisticated and quantitative.

One of the first papers to apply a critical ecological perspective to the Southern Plains was Jerrold Levy's Ecology of the South Plains (1961). His discussion of Comanche population was brief and impressionistic:

It is here suggested that the Comanche population was grossly overestimated for political and emotional reasons. As none of the reservation censuses in the 1870s and 80s reduced the population estimates for [the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, or Kiowas] by more than 25 per cent of the earlier figures, it is assumed that a Comanche population of between two and three thousand is more reasonable than ones ranging from five to twenty thousand between 1785 and 1866. [Levy 1961:22] [Note 1]

In 1986, William R. Brown, Jr. applied a formula developed by H. Paul Thompson (1966) to estimate population based on an equilibrium between human needs and animal reproduction, between hunter and hunted in the early 1830s. That time period was chosen

because it represents a long enough period after the Comanche and Kiowa alliance of 1806 for their populations to stabilize and because it falls just before the rapid decline of the bison brought on by Euro-American migration west. [Brown 1986: ]

 NE + NB - NDNH -(NDHX/X) K =NE

where

NE is the yearly equilibrium.

NB is the average number born

NDNH is the number of animals dying from non-human causes

NDH is the number of animals dying from human causes. NDH has two components:

animal products as both food and as leather goods. Therefore, NDH F is the number of animals needed for food while NDHH is the number of animals needed for hides.

X is the size of the population in consumer units, usually households.

NDH X/X is the rate of utilization per unit (household) of human population

K is the proportion of dependence upon that animal. A total K would be estimated by a summation of all resources used.

There are two parts to the model: (1) estimating the number of animals; and from that, (2) estimating the human population dependant on that total. Brown's basic argument for the number of animals was that, based on the figures in the 1956 Range Conservation Handbook for Texas, the 240,000 square miles of Comancheria could support, at 25 "animal units" per acre, 7,000,000 animals, with an annual increase of 567,000 new animals "if ... half the herd was female and ninety percent of these females produced calves" and there was an annual loss to non-human causes of 7 1/2 percent of the total (525,000 animals), giving a surplus of 42,000 animals above equilibrium.

For the estimates of human population, Brown began with an estimate of eight persons per lodge, compromising between observations, which he does not cite, of "between four and twelve people."(1986:8). Moreover, although acknowledging that Comanches ate a variety of foodstuffs, "the limiting variable was the bison"; therefore, "K" the proportion of dependence upon that resource was 1 (1986:9). [Note 2] From that Brown argued that the human needs of a single lodge would have included fifteen hides for a tipi cover, a number of winter robes and other blankets Brown guestimates four new robes and fifteen new blankets per lodge each near and six other hides for rawhide articles, parfleches and shelds. That is, the hides of forty bison would have been needed each year by each household. Based on Thompson's sub-arctic data that each adult needed 4,000 calories per day and that five pounds of meat had 11,000 calories Brown argued that each lodge of eight persons needed fifteen pounds of meat per day, or the meat of seven bison per year. Therefore, NDH is 40 + 7, or 47 bison per year per household. Putting all those variables together, Brown calculated that for the herd to stay at equilibrium, those 42,000 surplus animals could have supported 894 lodges, which, at 8 persons per lodge, would have totalled 7,152 people.

Douglas Bamforth was not specifically concerned with calculating population totals per se, but rather with the implicitions for social complexity of those totals (Bamforth 1988). [Note 3] However, he did make some comments on and extrapolations from the nineteenth century reports. He noted that the

maximum estimates of Comanche population in the first half of the 1800s range as high as 20,000, with none less than 12,000. Authors who present these high estimates offer no explanation for the apparent decrease of as much as 80 percent in Comanche population during the mid-nineteenth century with no parallel decrease in the intensity of Comanche raids on neighboring white settlements. In addition, contemporary observers discussing Comanche population as late as the 1850s explicitly placed little confidence in their estimates (Schoolcraft 1852:125; 1853:635). [Bamforth 1988:114]

With these reservations, he compromised with an estimate of 4,500 as the "midpoint between a government population estimate for 1866 and Levy's minimum of 2,000" (1988:114)

That is, like Levy, he questioned the "maximum estimates" from the early nineteenth century, although as has been shown above, there were some which were indeed less than 12,000. However, he did not give a reference for the "government population estimate for 1866"; the only such estimate I have been able to locate for that year is Bogy and Irwin's estimate of 4,700. Based on that number, it would seem that a closer "midpoint " between 4,700 and 2,000 would be around 3,350.

While Brown wished to establish a baseline population, and Bamforth wished to examine the sociological implications of population size, historian Dan Flores was more interested in dynamic interelations. Flores (1991) asked a number of questions, of which the most relevant here was:

Apposite to all these questions is a central issue: How successful were the horse Indians in creating a dynamic ecological equilibrium between themselves and the vast bison herds that grazed the Plains? [1991: ]

For the size of the human population, Flores first rejected Levy's calculation of 10,500 for all of Comancheria as "demonstrably too low," arguing--in contrast to both Levy and Bamforth--

although observers' population estimates for the Comanches go as high as 30,000, six of the seven population figures for the Comanches estimated between 1786 and 1854 fall into a narrow range between 19,200 and 21,600 . . . If the historical Southern Plains hunting population reached 30,000, then human hunters would have accounted for only 195,000 bison per year if we use the estimate of 6.5 animals per person.[1991:479]

But there are problems. The comment, "six of the seven population figures" refers to the figures cited by Wallace and Hoebel discussed above, all of which are problematic, and there are the other estimates which do not fall in that range.

More serious is the realization that Flores's number of 1.4 million is not the number of annual calves in a herd of 8.2 million animals whose females are reproducing at a rate of 18 percent. Rather, that figure is, based on Flores's version of the equation borrowed from Brown, the number of reproducing females in a herd of 8.2 million (35 percent of 49 percent), not the number of their offspring. That is, either Flores took Brown's reproductive rate of 18 percent to be a percentage of the total population although Brown specifically stated "eighteen percent per year of the total female aggregate" or Flores left out the last calculation in his formula. [Note 5] Assuming the latter, finishing the equation gives only 252,630 calves, just under half the figure arrived at by Brown:

     # of      %    #   %     # of     Rate of   # of       Rate of         # of non- surpl   
     Animals                 Repro     Repro     Repro     Offspring  non-human    human depred

                                              depredation        

                                              on total      


Brown     7,000,000 50%  3.50 M    90%  3.150 M  18%   567,000    7.5%             525,000    
42,000

Flores    8,200,000 49%  4.01 M    35%  1.40  M   18%  252,630    7.5%             615,000    
-362,000

*Flores   8,200,000 49%  4.01 M    90%  3.6 M     18%  650,000    7.5%             615,000    
45,000              

The Cultural Variables

At the same time, there are problems in the estimations of the cultural variables used by both Brown and Flores. These include the estimates of household size, the K proportion, the number of hides needed for a tipi, the amount of meat eaten, and therefore the total number of animals (NDH ) killed by humans.

The number of hides needed for a tipi
Closely related to the number of people in a lodge is its physical size: the larger the tipi, the larger its potential population. Two measures of a tipi's size are its diameter and the number of poles needed to support it: the larger the tipi, the more poles are needed. Wallace and Hoebel state that the "average tipi was twelve to fifteen feet in diameter across the floor" (1952:88); they do not reference their source and there is no comparable statement in the Field Party notes.

Will Soule's photographs of the Comanche village on Medicine Creek in the winter of 1872-73 show a range of lodge sizes (Kavanagh 1991). [Note 6]. Of the nine that can be closely examined, one has only eleven poles, seven have seventeen, and one has twenty-one. Based on camparison with tipis of known diameter, and estimating the sitting height of the individuals leaning against it (and the known length of a Spencer carbine, thirty-eight inches) the large Tipi 2, with twenty-one poles, was at least seventeen feet in diameter, if not closer to twenty. In contrast, most of the seventeen-pole tipis appear to be only around fifteen feet in diameter. One other factor can limit lodge size: pole length. The "tie-point" on a tipi frame, the apex of the semi-cone, is approximately the same as the diameter of the tipi; moreover, there is always some length exposed above the tie point; aestetically, the more the better. [Note 7]

A tipi of fifteen feet inside diameter has an area of 176 square feet. Assuming a fire pit of between fifteen and twenty-four inches (Wallace and Hoebel 1952:89) and each bed taking up three feet by five feet (fifteen square feet), three beds could be easily accomodated in a fifteen-foot diameter tipi. But four beds would have literally filled the circumference, leaving but little space for baggage, fire wood, etc. Moreover, because of the angle of the poles, not all of that outer area would be usable for daily activities. It may be noted that Soule's photographs, as do Bodmer's and Catlin's paintings, show a variety of storage racks outside the tipis to accomodate extra baggage.

Brown used the figure of fifteen hides per lodge, compromising between Wallace and Hoebel's unreferenced figure of "from ten to seventeen" (1952:86). The Field Party notes contain only one reference to the number of hides in a cover: on August 8, 1933, Nemaruibetsi commented that "The bottom row of hides in a tipi cover are rectangular. The others narrow to form a wedge. There are about twelve hides per tipi." Indeed, examination of Soule's photographs suggest that twelve hides could have made a lodge cover of about fifteen feet in diamater. Other hides may have been used as an inside lining. So the figure of fifteen hides for the cover and lining of a fifteen foot tipi is probably valid.

Household size

Brown began with an estimate of eight persons per lodge, compromising between uncited observations of "between four and twelve people." This is, in part, understandable. From the earliest reports, estimates of Plains Indian lodge populations have averaged around eight persons per lodge, with a few in the four, five or six range (Taylor 1989), a few higher, and at least one, significantly higher: in one of the earliest lodge counts in English, in 1805, John Sibley reported

They have tents made of neatly dressed skins, fashioned in form of a cone,. suffienciently roomy for a family of ten or twelve persons; those of the chiefs will contain, occasionally, fifty or sixty persons. [Sibley 1805]

But at the time, Sibley had yet to meet any Comanches, and his comments are thus problematical.

Brown accepts multiple males per lodge, commenting, "That the residential unit of the extended family was widely practiced among Native American groups also lends credibility to the rate of occupancy" (1986:8). But in contrast to the Chippewa example used by Thompson, although Comanches normally resided in extended family units, nemenahkahni ' the people who live together in a household', the individual stem families in those units lived in separate tipis rather than a single communal house. Indeed, most tipis had only one adult male, thus validating Fitzpatrick's comment from 1847. Moreover, at adolescence, males were given separate living quarters, perhaps not full size tipis Similarly, there were functional differences between tipis, some were 'kitchens', teka kahni, literally 'eating tipis'. Thus, it is indeed possible that some tipis might have no residents at all

There is only one detailed contemporary description of the makeup of a pre-reservation Comanche household: in 1836, Sarah Ann Horn, a ransomed captive, wrote:

There were three branches of the family in which I lived residing in separate tents. One branch consisted of an old woman and her 2 daughters, one of whom was also a widow. The next was a son of the old woman who claimed me as his property and the third was a son-in-law of the old woman. In the family to which I belonged there were 5 sons and no daughters. [Rister 1955:157]

While the details are not clear, it does seem that that household exhibited at least three lodge populations: in the first lodge were three women; the second, Sarah's lodge, there were as many as seven, if not eight, inhabitants (e.g. Sarah, the "son of the old woman," the "5 sons," and possibly a wife); the third lodge had at least the "son-in-law" and his wife, who would have been another daughter of the "old woman."

It is the details of that second lodge, Sarah's, which raise questions. That is, statements were made to the 1933 Comanche Field Party indicate that there was usually only one adult male per lodge: "At age 18, a boy was given a separate tipi for a sleeping place" or "Boys were given a tipi when they returned from their first raiding party" (Herman Asanap June 30). The only exception would be if there were several unmarried brothers, they might all live in one tipi, but as soon as one married, his brothers moved out. At the same time, there might be no men in a lodge:

Each wife had a separate tipi. There was a large tipi for sleeping, where the clothing, blankets, etc. were kept. The shield was close behind it. It was called the tibitsikahni real 'tipi.' There was also a smaller tipi for cooking, storing food, etc., called tekakahni 'eating tipi'.

If a man had 3 wives and liked them all, they might all live in the same tipi. If a man had 3 wives, but liked one less than the others, she might have a separate tipi alone. Wives with children might have separate tipis, but the paraibo ['chief wife'] stays in the husband's tipi. [Howard White Wolf, August 4]

What we are left with is the presumption that the household in which Sarah Horn resided was not particularly prosperous. While there were two males in the household, there was no senior adult male. The fact Sarah's lodge had five young males in the same lodge implies that they could not afford a second lodge.

Estimating a total population from the number of lodges also raises the question of what counted as a "lodge":

Young men got a separate tipi at about 20 years. It was wrong for a young man to sleep in the same tipi with his father and sister. Sometimes, a dome-shaped shelter was covered with canvas for the young man. Others put up a regular tipi. [Howard White Wolf, August 4]

Soule's photographs of the Comanche village on Medicine Creek show a number of small dome-shaped or conical structures which may be such bachelor lodges (Kavanagh 1991).

Another frame of reference can come from an examination of early reservation census lists. The hostiles counted by agent Haworth in December 1874, comprised 162 men, 448 women, 144 boys, and 143 girls, for a total of 897 people in 262 buffalo hide lodges and 41 cotton tents (total, 303 tents), an average of 2.96 persons per tent. Although distribution of that population in the various tents is unknown, the total number of lodges and tents is close to the number acheived (n=311) if each adult male (n=162) lived polygamously with at least two women (a total of 486 adults), while the remaining one-third of the women (n=149) lived singly. [Note 8] The 287 children distributed in 303 tents give an average of .9 children per tent.

The July 1876 Penateka census noted above records 166 people; while the male-female ratio is nearly 1 to 1, it cannot be assumed that that represented monogamous couples, and there are a number of male-less households. As a maximum, using the "hostile" ratio, if each adult male (n=52) had his own lodge, and one-third of the women (n=22) lived separately, then these 166 people may have lived in as many as seventy-four lodges, again slightly more than 2 adults per lodge; the 47 children in 74 tents gives .6 children per tent.

Thus the figure of eight persons per lodge is too high, while between three and five adults and children a more likely average.

Number of Robes

Brown stated, "it is possible that each adult owned two robes for winter clothing, and each child, one. A total of twelve robes per tent for winter clothing is conceiveable. If these robes were replaced every three years, this would equal four robes per year per tent" (1986:11) While Brown used the figure of eight persons per lodge, he did not break that number down into adults or children; to acheive the 12 robes per tent figure, it could range from two adults and eight children, to five adults and two children per lodge. Moreover, we have already seen that eight persons per tent is too high.

Comparison of a Brownian "per lodge" calculation with a "per person" calculation shows the problem. The 1874 "hostiles" were in 303 tents. At eight persons per tent, there should have been 2,424 persons in those tents. At 12 robes per eight-person lodge, they would have needed a base of 3,636 robes, with 1,212 new robes per year. But those same 610 adults and 287 children (a ratio of 2.1 to 1), at two robes per adult and one per child, they would have needed a base of only 1,507 robes, with 502 new robes per year (1.6 per tent), about 40 percent of the Brownian total. If the two 1876 Penateka bands were in 74 lodges (which, by a Brownian calculation, should have housed 592 people), with a ratio of 119 adults to 47 children (2.5 to 1), they would have needed 285 robes with an annual replacement of 95 robes (1.2 per tent) whereas the Brownian calculation gives a base of 888 robes with 296 replaced annually.

The amount of meat eaten

Brown and Flores use Thompson's estimate that an adult needs 4,000 calories per day and that five pounds of meat has 11,000 calories; thus each adult needed 2.75 pounds of fresh meat per day. A lodge of six adults needed ten pounds of meat per day the meat of five bison per year while a lodge of two adults and three children needed a little over six pounds per day, only two animals per year. [Note 9]

The number of bison (NDH ) needed per lodge

Brown's total of 47 animals per lodge per year for NDH is the additive NDHH + NDHF. But uses of bison are not exclusive: a skinned bison can provide both a hide and meat. Therefore, NDH is not NDHH + NDHF, but approximates NDHH - NDHF. That is, with 15 hides for a cover, one or two new robes, one or two for rawhide, a lodge of 3 people might need on average the hides of between 12 and 14 animals per lodge per year and the meat of two or three, with a potential wastage of the meat of upwards to 6 animals per year, [Note 10] while a lodge of two adults and three children replacing its entire outfit might need 15 hides for a cover, 4 robes for the adults, 3 more for the children, one or two for rawhide, and the meat of two or three for food, or on average 21 animals, with a meat wastage of over ten animals per year.

Using these revised requirements per lodge results in the following range:

 # of "surplus"  # of people # of animals # of lodges
Supportable 

          bison          per lodge      needed per lodge     supported     population

     

     Brown     42,000         8         47        894        7,150

     min  42,000         3         12        3,500          10,500

     max  42,000         5         21        2,000          10,000

Notice that by correcting the formula by which the number of animals needed per lodge is calculated by noting that the same animal can supply both meat and hides the number of lodges increases dramatically. Indeed, if the maximum number of lodges (2,000) were used with the commonly reported lodge population (8), the result (16,000) would approximate some of the mid-range estimates for the Southern Plains.

Note also that both the minimum and maximam figures are near Levy's "from ten to eleven thousand", and thus take into account his comment that since "none of the reservation censuses of the 1870's and 80's reduced the population estimates for [the Kiowas, Cheyennes, or Arapahoes] by more than 25 per cent of the earlier figures, it is assumed that a Comanche population between two and three thousand is more reasonable than ones ranging from five to twenty thousand" (Levy 1961:22).

Trade

But these figures do not take into account the trade in buffalo hides, robes, meat and tallow: every hide traded is one less for Plains consumption. In contrast to the Northern Plains, scholars have tended to downplay the role of trade on the Southern Plains. The sentiment can be epitomized by Joseph Jablow's comment, "they engaged with sporadic trade with other tribes and occasional traders" (Jablow 1950:70). Similarly, Flores commented

The New Mexican peoples [Pueblo and Hispanic] and the Caddoans of the Middle Red and Brazos rivers played major trade roles for hunters on the Southern Plains, and the Comanches in particular. Although Comanches engaged in the archetypical Plains exchange of bison products for horticultural produce and European trade goods and traded horses and mules with Anglo-American traders . . . they were not a high-volume trading people until relatively late in their history. Early experiences with American traders and disease led them to distrust trade with Euro-Americans, and only once or twice did they allow short-lived posts to be established in their country. Instead, peace with the prairie Caddoans by the 1730s and with New Mexico in 1786 sent Comanche trade both east and west, but often through Indian middlemen. [1991:472]

There are several problems with this characterization: it inexplicably leaves out the Hispanics of Texas, "high-volume" is not defined, "late in their history" is given no temporal context, which "early experiences with American traders" and how did they expand to include all "Euro-Americans", there were at over half a dozen Anglo-American posts in Comancher¡a after 1821 (Thomas James's two "forts", Chouteau's post at Camp Holmes, the several Bent's forts on the Arkansas, and the wood post and adobe post on the Canadian, Coffee's and Warren's post on the Red, and Torrey's post on the Brazos), and there is no mention of the peace with Texas in 1785.

Moreover it overlooks the political-economic history of trade on the Southern Plains. From the earliest accounts, Comanches were trading the animal products of the Plains, meat, tallow, and hides, with surrounding peoples. In 1725, brigadier Pedro de Rivera Villalon noted that

Each year at a certain time, there comes to this province [New Mexico] a nation of Indians very barbarous, and warlike ... the commerce which brought them there ... consists of tanned skins, buffalo hides. [Rivera 1946:78-79]

                           est.             est.             est.        est.         est.

                          annual        buffalos       elks        deer       bears

                          income        killed          killed      killed     killed 

  Comanche     $10,000        30,000         1000      2000      500

  Kiowa              7,000         20,000         600       1500       300

  Apache            1,000          2,000            50        500          25

  Cheyenne       15,000         40,000         3000      2500      2000

  Arapaho          5,000          20,000         1000      1500       500

Equilibrium?

And then there is the question of whether the Plains peoples were indeed in "equilibrium" with the bison populations.

Playing a Numbers Game

Clearly something is faulty with these calculations. Either the buffalo herds were larger, the human population was smaller, the calculations for figuring the "equilibrium" are incorrect, or as implied by Brown, there was a potential "disequilibrium between the population of the Comancher¡a and the utilization of the environment."(1986:12). [Note 11] In concluding his article, Brown noted that his figure was

only as accurate as the figures for the number of bison and for the number utilized by the Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa-Apaches . . . Of course, any population estimate is subject to debate, as either the numerical data is based on educated conjecture, or the historical evidence only substantiates a fragment of a population.[1986:12]

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Notes to this section 1) Levy's suggestion that there was an overestimation for "political and emotional reasons" parallels Burnet's "much is abstracted from their political importance." While intriguing, it is difficult to assess.There are no blatant political uses of the large population totals. That is, for instance, if Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, leading propogandist for the claims of western Indian depredations on the Santa Fe Trail,had made a claim for a large Comanche population, it would be easy to make the link to "political" motivations, but there is no such clear political component. On the other hand, it was often Comanches themselves who gave large totals; are these politically motivated, errors in translation, or did the Comanches indeed believe they were innumerable?

2) Brown does note that Stephen Long estimated 250 people in thirty-two lodges at the headwaters of the Canadian River in 1820" and cites an unpublished paper by E. A. Wallace which states that in 1807, New Mexicans estimated a series of Comanche camps at 1,020 lodges with 8,200 people , that is averages of 7.8 and 8.0 persons per lodge. However, the Long reference was to a mixed camp that may not have included Comanches. I have not been able to identify Wallace's source; there seems to be no such lodge or population counts in the documents from 1807 in the Spanish Archives of New Mexico.

3) Bamforth used the availability of water--specifically precipitation--as a variable in an effort to correlate ecology and social structural complexity. Bamforth combined mean annual precipitation, variation in that precipitation, and mean July temperature to produce a "climatic index"; that index was then correlated with "social categories" (number of social statuses), and population.

4) Because it will be important later in this discussion, the full text of Flores's calculation is:

In modern, protected herds on the Plains, bison are a prolific species whose numbers increase by an average of 18 percent a year, assuming a normal sex ratio (51 males to 49 females) with breeding cows amounting to 35 percent of the total. In other words, if the Southern Plains supported 8.2 million bison in years of median rainfall, the herds would have produced about 1.4 million calves a year. To maintain an ecological equilibrium with the grasses, the Plains bison's natural mortality rate also had to approach 18 percent. Today the several protected herds ... have a natural mortality rate without predation, ranging between 3 and 9 percent.

5) Ironically, through the vaguery of mathematics, 18 percent of the total population is nearly equal to 35 percent of 49 percent of the total.

6)Comanche tipis are a unique variation on the common three-pole base tipis of much of the rest of the plains. In the latter, three poles are tied together //\ to form a tripod. When raised and apread out, the single pole stands to the left (south) of where the door will be. The other poles are arranged in the crotches from by the crossing of the poles. A Comanche four-pole tipi doubles the door poles //\\ , so that there is one on each side of the door. The rest of the poles are laid in as in a three-pole tipi. As such, the Comanche four-pole frame is very different from the four-pole frames of the Blackfeet and Crow as described by the Laubin's (1957). Flores's comment on the Comanche's "mountain-adapted four-pole tipis" (1991:468) makes little sense either in terms of Comanche history or in the stability of the lodge.

7) It may be noted that if Robert G. Carter (cited in Wallace and Hoebel 1952: 87), was correct in his observation that Kwahada tipi poles were approximately fourteen feet in length , the resulting tipi could not have been more than thirteen feet in diameter.

At the same time, there is a particular puzzle: where did Comanches get their tipi poles? Certainly there is no place in Comancher¡a to find lodgepole pine; the scrub post oaks of the Wichita Mountains won't work. Some of the pines of New Mexico might suffice, but there is no ethnographic or historical evidence for the source of Comanche tipi poles.

8) The high ratio of adult females to adult males, 448 to 162 (2.7 to 1 probably reflects the just closed hostilities. The ratio estimated by agent Whitfield in 1856 was 1.5 to 1. The ratio of the Penatekas, who had taken little part in the hostilities in 1876, was 67 to 52, nearly 1 to 1. In 1875, the ratio was 685 to 384 (1.7 to 1), and in 1879, it was 599 to 356 (1.6 to 1).

9) In calculating the product from the Olsen-Chubbock paleo-Indian event, with a figure based on Plains traveler accounts, Joe Ben Wheat (1972), used a figure of ten pounds of fresh meat per person per day. If the revised Thompson figures are applied to the Olsen-Chubbock event, that 62,000 pounds of meat could have supplied 22,545 adult-days of subsistence. 10)Of this latter wastage, Tahsuda's comment in 1933 is apposite: in giving a list of band names, he noted the Oteta'oo' burnt meat :

In the fall, they made a big buffalo hunt. The women dried the flesh, pounded it, and sewed it up in parfleches. As it was used, they would rip open the corners of the parfleche and dig it out. Chunks of fat were also packed. By spring, the meat would be dried out and tasted like it was burnt. They would dump the surplus when they went off for the spring hunt. Other Indians who saw these people s dumps called them by this meat.

11) In 1861, F. V. Hayden estimated that about one hundred thousand robes were annually being sold to traders on the Upper Missouri. Cited in Allen (1877). Swagerty (1988:367), citing Sunder, Fur Trade on the Upper MO.By the 1840s, over 90,000 buffalo robes poured into St. Louis, and this increased to an average of 100,000 robes annually for the 1850s.

12) Flores (1991: 483) notes the problem. Citing the Cheyenne figures from Whitfield, he noted that if valid, every Cheyenne warrior was killing 44 bison a year and every Cheyenne woman was processing robes at the rate of almost one a week, "twice the number the Cheyennes would have harvested through subsistence hunting alone."

But Flores's calculations are somewhat convoluted. Since he uses the "Warrior" figure (900), he gets 44 as the number killed by each. But if he had used the "Adult Men" figure (1,080), from which Whitfield derived the "Warrior" figure, the animals killed would be down to 37 each.

Then, if 40,000 robes were processed one a week (40,000ö52), there would need to be only about 770 Cheyenne women working on them. But Whitfield said there were 1,620 Cheyenne adult women; that number could process those 40,000 robes at 24.6 each, an average of about one every two weeks. However, that "average" figure ignores the temporal nature of the robe trade. Only winter hides were of value in the robe trade. Assuming a winter season of five months (November-March), or twenty weeks, less than half the year. If the robes were generally processed in the winter season, some 2,000 must be processed in each of the twenty weeks of the season. In turn, that means each of the 1,620 adult woman must process 1.23 robes each week, a figure slightly higher than Flores's "almost one a week."

Interestingly, for one interested in the total population of the southern Plains, Flores does not mention Whitfield's totals.

13) It was, of course, the causes of that disequilibrium which Flores investigated. Interestingly, Brown also commented, in a footnote citing an unpublished version of Flores's paper, regarding the impact of trade on these calculations, "the requirements of the Southern Plains Indians for susbistence would have remained unchanged regardless of the number of hides needed for trade, unless, of course, they depended upon trade for a substantial part of their diet" (Brown 17 n75).