Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

A Comanchero was a tradesman who acted as the middleman between the Spanish (and later the Americans) and the Indigenous tribes. The term is derived from the Spanish word for those tradesmen who dealt with the Comanche. It first came into use after the peace treaty made by de Anza and the Spanish authorities after de Anza defeated Cuerno Verde. Often they were of mixed descent from Indigenous Mexicans and Spanish, but this was not a requirement.

This a Spanish term meaning “staked plain,” which referred to the geography of a region in eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas. It was the central region, the heartland of Comancheria. The first European to “discover” the area was Francisco Coronado. The land belonged to the Apache before the Comanche invaded and took it from them in the 18th century.

Manifest Destiny was the belief held by many Americans that it was their right to settle and cultivate all the frontier land west of the Mississippi to the Pacific. This, of course, meant that in order to do so, the Indigenous population would have to be removed, assimilated, or destroyed. The idea first dawned after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and then heightened after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which forced the defeated Mexicans to surrender much of their territory.