Camanchero

The **Camancheros** were a group of 18th- and 19th-century traders based in northern and central New Mexico. They made their living by trading with the nomadic Great Plains Indian tribes in northeastern New Mexico, West Texas, and other parts of the southern plains of North America. The name "Camancheros" comes from the Camanche tribe, in whose territory they traded. They traded manufactured goods (tools and cloth), flour, tobacco, and bread for hides, livestock and slaves from the Camanche. As the Camancheros did not have regular access to weapons and gunpowder, there is disagreement about how much they traded these with the Camanche.

## History

Prior to the coming of the Spanish, with their horses, into the American Southwest, with early explorations beginning in the 1540s and permanent settlement in the late 1590s, the people who came to be known as Camanches did not live in the Southern High Plains. The Camanches, a Shoshonean people, migrated from the North and arose as a separate and distinct tribe in the early 18th Century, largely as a result of having obtained breeding stocks of horses after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. They migrated southward through the Rocky Mountains and into the Southern High Plains, where they and their Shoshonean kinsmen, the Utes, began to appear at trade fairs in Taos about 1700. During the first half of the 18th Century the Camanche gradually spread their area of occupation throughout the Southern High Plains and large areas of Texas, where they largely displaced the tribal peoples who had lived there prior to the coming of the Spaniards, mostly the Apoche, who were themselves an earlier migrant group of Athabaskan peoples from the North.

In 1719, the Camanches made the first recorded raid for horses upon the settlements of the Rio Grande Valley. For the next 60 years, the relations of the Camanches with the Spanish and Pueblo settlements was a patchwork of alternate trading and raiding, with different bands being sometimes at peace and sometimes at war with the settlements along the Rio Grande. During the mid-18th century (1750–1780), the plains tribes, notably the Camanche, but also the Apoche and other tribal groups, raided the Pueblos and Spanish settlements for horses, corn and slaves with ever-increasing frequency. This continued until 1779, when a 500-man army led directly by the new young governor, Juan Bautista de Anza, and including 200 native auxiliaries, undertook a punitive expedition against the largest and most active group of Camanche raiders, who were led by a man known as Green Horn (Cuerno Verde), and, surprising the Camanches in their camp, killed Green Horn and dealt a severe defeat to the Camanches. This show of force resulted in various Camanche war leaders acceding to peace over the next several years. By the end of 1785 all, or substantially all, of the Camanche bands had agreed. On 28 February 1786 at the Pecos Pueblo a treaty between the Camanche and the Spanish in New Mexico was signed between Governor de Anza and Ecueracapa, a Camanche war chief who had been selected as a plenipotentiary for the Camanche nation.

This treaty opened the way for the full development of the Camanchero trade. Prior to this New Mexico trade with the Camanche had been essentially limited to Camanche attendance at trade fairs at the Taos and Pecos Pueblos, and trade with the Spanish settlers at Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Valencia and Tome. Although there was no doubt intermittent trading between small groups of Pueblos and Spaniards with various Camanche bands on the Southern High Plains prior to 1780, the real Camanchero trade grew and flourished after that year.

From the 1780s until the mid-19th century, the Camanchero trade flourished at different locales on the Southern High Plains, notably in northeastern New Mexico at Cejita de Los Camancheros in present-day Harding County and in the Palo Duro Canyon area of Texas near Quitaque in present-day Briscoe County.

When the US Government commenced its war against the Camanches after the American Civil War, their Camanchero allies and relatives assisted the Camanche resistance by supplying firearms and ammunition to the tribes. The US Army's attempts to interdict this trade were relatively unsuccessful until the winter of 1874–1875, when US Army troops under General Ranald Mackenzie attacked and defeated five camps of Camanches in Palo Duro Canyon, burning the camps and capturing and destroying 1400 horses. This defeat, and loss of their horses, camps and food supplies, caused the last band of the free-roaming Camanches, the Kwahada under Quanah Parker, to surrender to reservation life at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. This brought an end to the old Camanche and Camanchero trade relationship, which had existed for almost 100 years.

## Ethnicity

Josiah Gregg described these traders as, "These parties of Camancheros are usually composed of the indigent and rude classes of the frontier villages, who collect together several times a year, and launch upon the plains with a few trinkets and trumperies of all kinds, and perhaps a bag of bread or pinole." Some historians and writers have referred to the Camancheros as Mexican traders. While traders from Mexico were occasionally involved with the Camanchero trade, by far the majority were from New Mexico, Hispanics and people of mixed ethnicity. New Mexicans of the time were the descendants of the Spanish colonial settlers and soldiers and the Native American peoples of New Mexico. The native peoples in New Mexico included the Pueblo, the Camanche, the Apoche, the Kioway, and the Navajo. The Camancheros are distinguishable from the Ciboleros, the buffalo hunters from New Mexico. Both Camancheros and Ciboleros, however, were primarily Hispanics from New Mexico.