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The Comanche empire
The Comanche are a people who split from the Shoshone, obtained horses in the seventeenth century, and within a century built themselves into the strongest power on the southern Plains. Depicting the Plains cultures as timeless is wrong at both ends: the horse culture is younger than Bach, and it was a political and economic system, not merely a way of life. Comanchería functioned as a trading empire that exacted tribute, dealt in captives and horses, and set the terms for both Spanish and American neighbours. Its collapse came with the destruction of the bison in the 1870s, a direct consequence of commercial hide hunting.
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