Whenever the wild tribes sensed a crisis between Mexico and the Anglo-American republics, they stepped up their raiding. Never before had the Mexican nation faced war with the marauders and with a major foreign power simultaneously. These savage invasions of the Mexican settlements had gone on over the same routes for a century or more the new aspect about them was their intensification.
#Warlike indian tribes professional#
A third stimulant, particularly to revenge raids, was the resolve of border states to hire professional scalp hunters to scalp hostile natives. Persistent squabbling between civil and military authorities also added to the domestic weakness. Mexico’s swing to dictatorship in 1835 produced another encouragement for Indian raids,-namely, the government’s policy of disarming the people except for bows, arrows, knives, lances, lariats, 1 and a few old guns. Americans who entered Arizona and New Mexico joined Mexicans in buying similar staples from Apache raiders and in moving them into the same broad channels of western commerce.
These agreements raised the market for Mexican livestock, plunder, and captives,-a market already strong in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, and at Bent’s Fort, Santa Fe, and Taos. Notable were the trade and amity treaties which United States and Texas commissioners celebrated with Comanches and Kiowas. The chief offending mountain tribes were Apache, Navajo, and Ute and the most troublesome plains Indians were Comanche and Kiowa.ĭevelopments on both sides of the Rio Grande in the middle 1830’s encouraged these natives to make their incursions. Consequently, the country’s capacity for defense declined at a time when centralism, clericalism, militarism, and American imperialism were debilitating the nation. They upset her agricultural, commercial, mineral, and ranch life over hundreds of thousands of square miles. I ndian raids multiplied Mexico’s problems, in the generation before her war with the United States, to a degree not generally realized today.
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