For most of the eighteenth century the Comanche and Spanish New Mexico were at war, Comanche raiders striking the settlements and pueblos of the Rio Grande. In 1779 Governor Juan Bautista de Anza led an army north and defeated a Comanche force in what is now Colorado. In February 1786, at Pecos Pueblo, Anza and Ecueracapa, chosen to speak for the Comanche, made a peace that held for generations.
The Comancheros
The treaty opened the plains to New Mexico's traders. Most were Hispano villagers and people of mixed descent, and they went out onto the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, with carts and pack animals loaded with bread, flour, cornmeal, sugar, tobacco, cloth, knives and beads, and later guns, ammunition and whiskey. Hard-baked corn bread was a Comanche favorite. They came home with horses, mules, hides, dried meat and tallow. Rendezvous sites dotted the plains, from Cejita de los Comancheros in what is now Harding County to the canyons near Quitaque in the Texas Panhandle, and one well-worn route ran east from Las Vegas down the Canadian River to the edge of the Caprock.
People as goods
The trade also dealt in people. Captives taken in Comanche raids on Texas settlements and the haciendas of northern Mexico were traded or ransomed through the Comancheros. Some were returned to their families; others were kept.
Cattle and an army
After the American conquest, officials tightened licenses and condemned the ransoming of captives. From the 1850s the Comancheros were buying cattle that Comanche raiders drove off Texas ranches and moving them west for sale in New Mexico, and the trade boomed during the Civil War. Attempts to stop it failed for years, in part, the historian Pekka Hämäläinen has written, because some army officers had quietly invested in it. The end came in 1874, when troops guided by Comancheros they had arrested found and destroyed the last Kwahada Comanche strongholds on the Llano Estacado. With the southern buffalo herds nearly gone, the trade died with them.
East of Santa Rosa, I-40 runs along the northern edge of the Staked Plain, and south of the highway near San Jon the long rim of the Caprock marks where the high plains begin.