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Welcome to Episode 67 of the Hidden History of Texas – I’ve been discussing the 1st peoples of Texas, those who were here when the Spanish arrived and today, I’m going to discuss The Comanche, Kiowas, Tonkawas.
Remember how I discussed some of the differences between the Hunter-gathers tribes (mostly nomadic lifestyle) and the farming tribes (mostly stationary lifestyle). I brought up some of the religious beliefs and how the majority of tribes embraced the idea of a supreme being or multiple gods, and they had creation stories. For agricultural tribes, various ceremonies accompanied the planting and harvesting of crops. Hunter-gatherers often sought the help of spirits before searching for game, which served as food for the tribe.

One of the major tribes of hunter-gatherers was the Comanche. The Comanches started out in the Great Plains and began to migrate south due to pressure from other tribes such as the Blackfeet and Crow. It’s important to remember that throughout human history, groups of people have consistently been replace by other groups who were more powerful. Eventually the Comanche ended up in Texas, where there was abundant game, a warm climate, and an animal that would eventually become almost synonymous with them, the wild mustang.
The Comanche inhabited most of the South Plains including much of North, Central, and West Texas, this part of Texas was known as Comanche country, or Comanchería. Once they arrived and settled on the Southern Plains the Utes called them Komántcia, which means “enemy,” or, literally, “anyone who wants to fight me all the time.” However, they called themselves Nermernuh, or “the People.”

We know of as many as 13 different Comanche groups and most likely there were others that were never identified. Several major bands played important roles in recorded Comanche and Texas history. The southernmost band was called Penateka, or “Honey Eaters” and their range extended from the Edwards Plateau to the headwaters of the Central Texas Rivers.

A band named Nokomi or “Those who Turn Back” lived in an area north of the Penateka, they roamed from the Cross Timbers region of North Texas to the mountains of New Mexico. Their range was shared by two smaller bands, the Tanima (“Liver-Eaters”) and the Tenawa (“Those Who Stay Downstream”) and are often referred to as the Middle Comanches. The Quahadis (“Antelopes”), roamed the high plains of the Llano Estacado. One interesting fact about the Llano Estacado is that the Southern end of the plateau lacks a distinct physical boundary; it blends into the Edwards Plateau, (in Central Texas, where this program is recorded) and the Johnson Creek branch of the Colorado River, east of Big Spring, which is most likely its boundary. The Llano Estacado comprises all or part of thirty-three Texas and four New Mexico counties and covers approximately 32,000 square miles, a larger area than all of New England.

It is part of what was known to early explorers and settlers as the Great American Desert, a semiarid region with average annual precipitation of eighteen to twenty inches. The Comanche weren’t the only tribe that lived in that area, the Kiowa also shared territory that was mostly in the Panhandle and Oklahoma.

The Kiowas originally came from the Montana area around the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. As they migrated southward, they quickly learned to adapt to the South Plains by acquiring and using horses, especially in their hunting of buffalo. They gained their horses from the Spanish who also supplied them with slaves and guns and over time they became almost a completely nomadic group, and eventually they became one of the most feared and disliked of the Plains tribes. They entered into peaceful co-existence with the Comanche and with help from the Wichitas and Taovaya received guns and ammunition from the French and British.

The Kiowa camps were designed to be broken down and moved quickly, often within 30 minutes. The men and women wore garments made of skin, moccasins, leggings, and fur robes. An interesting point of Kiowa life was they held a summer Sun Dance – to insure regeneration of the Buffalo.

The main Kiowa weapons were the bow and arrow, spear (lance), tomahawk (a metal type with a pipe at one end became a trade item), chipped flint and obsidian knives. Their tools consisted of various flint saws, scrapers punch or needle of flint or bone, hafted axes and a hafted wide scraper for cleaning hides, and eyed bone needles.

The men were warriors who protected the camp, and they stood guard to protect against sudden attack. The women tanned hides, dried strips of meat, cook, preparing pemmican, sewed clothes, foraged for roots and fruits and nuts, and took care of the dogs. The women also had to set up the tipi or dismantling it and packing bedding, directing slaves and young children. They herded the horses into the pasture and cared for infants in the cradleboards. When traveling, children, puppies, and the ill were put on the travois with the gentle horses that the women used.

As I mentioned in an earlier episode, when it came to religion, tribes were often polytheistic, and the Kiowa were that and also animistic. Their great tribal ceremonial was the Sun Dance or K’ado in early summer and the ceremony usually lasted for at least ten days. The Kiowa venerated several objects and the Sun Boy was a great supernatural and mythic hero and there were numerous legends related to his adventures. Sun Boy gave them the medicine in ten portions kept by the priests in priestly tipis and this medicine was called the Grandmother Bundles. Seni or peyote was the worship of a cactus (Lophophora williamsii); it involved a system of myth and ritual in which buds from the cactus were eaten. Its use was long practiced by tribes along the Rio Grande and coastal Texas and is now recognized by the United States as a valid and valuable religious ceremony.

The third tribe, in this hunter-gatherer group is the Tonkawas, which is a Waco Tribe term meaning, “they all stay together”, they lived in Central Texas. Their original territory was around Llano and Mason Texas and ranged between and to the west of what is now Austin and San Antonio. Once the Comanche arrived, they pushed the Tonkawas out of their traditional grounds and the tribe moved to the East. The Tonkawa also seem to have been hosts for many other tribes especially around the springs in San Marcos and New Braunfels where the Spanish found more than a dozen tribes from all over Texas. One tribe the Tonkawa were not friendly with initially were the Apache; and with the arrival of the Comanches and the Wichitas began to pressure the Apaches for territory, the Tonkawa allied themselves with the newcomers. This lasted until the late 1800s when the Tonkawas changed alliances and aligned themselves with the Apache against the Comanche.

Not much is known about the Tonkawa life cycle. Shortly after birth, a piece of wood was tied to the baby’s head to flatten it and the children learned the roles of their respective sexes as they grew. There doesn’t seem to have been much emphasis on the custom of the marriage ceremony, while death rites apparently received the greatest attention, at least in existing written records written by the Spanish who encountered the people. When a person neared death, his or her friends would gather and form concentric rings around the dying, chanting and swaying until the individual passed away. The deceased was then buried, along with many of his or her prized possessions. The band as a whole would mourn for three days, relatives more deeply than others, and then carried out a four-day smoking ceremony that was meant to purify anyone who had been contaminated by death. This ceremony also allowed the society to realign and reintegrate itself following the loss of a member.
As time passed, the tribe suffered defeats at the hands of the Apache, and other enemies and at the start of the Civil War, a band of Delaware, Shawnee, Wichita, Caddo, and members of other tribes attacked the tribe in the “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma) killing approximately 300. By 1937 there were only 51 members of the tribe left and in 1951 the Tonkawas had intermarried with Lipans and other Indians or whites to the extent that they were no longer distinguishable as a separate tribe.

These three tribes, the Comanches, the Kiowas, and the Tonkawas were all here and existing in a harsh climate and geography when the Spanish and French arrived. That they survived and in some cases thrived is a testimony to their resilience and their ability to live with nature and adapt to changing circumstances. The only circumstances that they were unable to resist where the diseases, sheer population pressure, territorial losses, and military defeats that eventually caused their presence to almost disappear from the continent.