Group

Comanche (Amerind tribe)

Nation Active 1648 CE – 2215 CE

The Comanche are a Native American nation from the Great Plains whose historic territory consisted of most of present-day northwestern Texas and adjacent areas in eastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, western Oklahoma, and northern Chihuahua.

The Comanches are hunter-gatherers, with a typical Plains Indian culture, including the horse.

The Comanche are the dominant tribe on the southern Great Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

They are often characterized as "Lords of the Plains" and, reflecting their prominence, they preside over a large area called Comancheria which a modern historian has characterized as the "Comanche Empire."

There may be as many as forty-five thousand Comanches in the late eighteenth century.

Comanche power is based on bison, horses, trading, and raiding.

They hunte the bison of the Great Plains for food and skins; their adoption of the horse from Spanish colonists in New Mexico makes them more mobile; they trade with the Spanish, French, Americans and neighboring Native American peoples; and (most famously) they wage war on and raid European settlements as well as other Native Americans.

They take captives from weaker tribes during warfare, using them as slaves or selling them to the Spanish and later Mexican settlers.

They also take thousands of captives from the Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers and incorporate them into Comanche society.

Decimated by European diseases, warfare, and encroachment by Americans on Comancheria, the Comanche are defeated by the United States Army in 1875 and confined to a reservation in Oklahoma.

Today, the Comanche Nation consists of fourteen thousand seven hundred members (2010 enrollment figures), about half of whom live in Oklahoma.

The remainder are concentrated in Texas, California, and New Mexico.

The tribe is headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma.

The Comanche speak the Comanche language, a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, sometimes classified as a Shoshoni dialect.

Only about one percent of Comanches speak their language today.

The name "Comanche" is from the Ute name for them, kɨmantsi (enemy), but known to the French as Padoucas, an adaption of their Sioux name, and among themselves as Nʉmʉnʉ (people)

Member Cities

Moran, J. (n.d.). Comanche (Amerind tribe). History Atlas. Retrieved 17 September 2026, from https://www.historyatlas.com/groups/comanche-amerind-tribe/

Menu

Related events