So I’ve just returned from a week in Santa Fe and a quick side trip to Palo Duro Canyon in north Texas, site of the infamous Battle of Palo Duro Canyon in September 1874. I grew up in the Hill Country of Central Texas, which was Comanche territory until the collapse of Comanche hegemony over the Texas plains that resulted from this battle. Hamalainen’s Indigenous Continent (2023) is an impressive book, long and detailed.
At times it suffers from its rhetoric that Native Americans were resourceful and intelligent traders and warriors. I of course don’t argue with that idea, but he harps on it more than necessary. I was skeptical of a Finnish historian’s take on North American history, and, for the most part, came away convinced. The best aspect of the book is its comprehensive Native-American angle, showing how the many and various tribes interacted with each other and thrived in pre-Columbian North America, until they didn’t. Disease brought to the Americas by Europeans was the greatest cause of population depletion that set the stage for conquest. I’ve read several Comanche histories, including S.C. Gwynne’s best-selling Empire of the Summer Moon (2016).
He argues that one of the fundamental problems of Comanche history was their warrior culture, which relied on raiding both white settler and Mexican farming communities in northern Mexico, which doomed them to forever conflict with the encroaching Texans during the period of expansion in the 1830s-1880s. Hamalainan tends to rationalize the terror and depredations of the Comanche raids in Texas and Mexico as part of an “economic policy”—a policy based on murder, rape, and kidnapping. That Europeans from 1492 on committed similar atrocities is undeniable. It was a bloody period of history. We camped a couple nights at Palo Duro Canyon and can see why it was so iconic to the Native tribes: On the flat plains of the Texas Panhandle it’s an oasis of sorts, with dramatic cliffs, creeks and rivers, woods and canyons that allowed Native peoples to thrive in a harsh landscape.
