Comanche Wars

The Comanche Wars are a series of armed conflicts fought between Comanche peoples and Spanish, Mexican, and American militaries and civilians in the United States and Mexico from as early as 1706 until at least the mid-1870s.

The Comanche are the Native American inhabitants of a large area known as Comancheria, which stretches across much of the southern Great Plains from Colorado and Kansas in the north through Oklahoma, Texas, and eastern New Mexico and into the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the south.

For more than one hundred and fifty years, the Comanche are the dominant native tribe in the region, known as “the Lords of the Southern Plains”, though they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache and, after 1840, the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.

The value of the Comanche traditional homeland is recognized by European-American colonists seeking to settle the American frontier and quickly brings the two sides into conflict.

The Comanche Wars begin in 1706 with raids by Comanche warriors on the Spanish colonies of New Spain and continue until the last bands of Comanche surrender  to the United States Army in 1875, although a few Comanche continue to fight in later conflicts such as the Buffalo Hunters' War in 1876 and 1877.

The Comanche are noted as fierce combatants who practice an emphatic resistance to European-American influence and encroachment upon their lands.

Comanche power peaks in the 1840s when they conduct large-scale raids hundreds of miles into Mexico proper, while also warring against the Anglo-Americans and Tejanos who have settled in independent Texas.

Their power declines as epidemics of cholera and smallpox inflict severe casualties on their population, and as continuous pressure from the expanding population of the United States forces them to cede most of their tribal lands. 

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