With them they became expert hunters of bison and suddenly prospered like never before. The Comanche bred, trained, and captured Mustang horses from both the wild and from other people. No other tribe or nation in North America would surpass them in horsemanship, with many experts even going as far as saying that they were the best light cavalry the world had ever seen. And this was possible all because of the horse. Very few nations in the world, let alone in North America, have had such a meteoric rise to power like the Comanche. Left behind by the Spanish settlers to the south, the Comanche came across the horse around 1680, and with it they engraved their name into the history books as legendary mounted warriors. However, what else they discovered on these plains would change their destiny forever. But they also had to compete with the already existing tribes for these resources. Contrary to the barren mountain valleys from which they came, the Great Plains offered them a chance to hunt the many bison and antelopes found in abundance. They were the typical, small hunter-gatherer tribe of people, with basic culture, almost no social organization, and weak military power as shown by their constant migration up until that point. But up until this point there wasn’t anything special or out of the ordinary about this particular tribe of Native Americans. These Eastern Shoshone turned into the Comanche by the late 17 th century. Coming into contact and conflict with other tribes like the Blackfoot, Crow, Lakota, and Cheyenne, they started moving further south, some as far as central Texas.
Around 1500 AD, some of them emerged from the Rocky Mountains and onto the Great Plains, in what are now Idaho and Wyoming. Belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language family, the Comanche were once part of the larger Shoshone Native American tribe which originated from the western Great Basin.
0 kommentar(er)
