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Nobody knows for sure when the command chief first got a hold to horses, but the transformation

that followed was nothing short of epic. A once nondescript people living in the foothills of the Rockies,

horses allowed the Comanche to push their way onto the Great Plains, dominating smaller tribes in the process and claiming the prime Buffalo territory as their own.

Wasn't long before Comanchearia included a vast empire of nearly a quarter of a million square miles,

stretching throughout the present-day states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado.

And that's just where they called home. If you want to take into account the raiding capabilities

of the Comanchee, you're looking as far north as Nebraska and Wyoming, and south hundreds of miles deep

into the heart of Mexico. As S. C. Gwynne so eloquently put it in the Empire of the Summer Moon,

a Spanish soldier in San Antonio was in grave and immediate danger from a Comanchee brave sitting

before a fire in the equivalent of modern-day Oklahoma City. Hell so feared were these lords of the Southern Plains that they were one of the main reasons

the Mexican government encouraged American settlement in Texas, figured the Gringos would offer up some type of a buffer.

Sure enough, just like the Spanish and the Mexicans before them,

these newly arrived migrants from the East soon found themselves clashed in with the Comanche,

especially as more and more settlers began pushing into their territory trying to scratch a living

out the dirt. And in those early years, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot that anyone could do

about it. The Texans may have won independence from Mexico, but their newly acquired republic

...