They began arriving as planned, there along the Arkansas River, up in what is now Colorado: the warriors, the horses, the wives, the horses, the children, the horses. Whole populations came: Cheyennes; and a major northern band of the Comanches; and Kiowas; and Plains Apaches. This was not a few "chiefs" wandering in. It was everybody. They were there for diplomacy. What they agreed would be binding. It was the summer of 1840.
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Paths toward the PlainsTo get to that country, these peoples had come over long routes, since many years. Some bands, moving out of the upper Mississippi valley a century earlier, had joined up with small groups splitting off from the Lakotas, and built themselves into a nation: the Cheyennes. Other peoples, the Comanches, anciently out of the northern Rockies, were now spread out in some half-dozen separate bands, from the Arkansas south into Texas, toward the great sluggish river that flowed from New Mexico down into the Gulf. The Comanches had long been involved in exchanges with other indigenous groups, and with Mexicans, and recently with Anglo-Americans coming in across Texas. They traded Texas horses to New Mexico, and Mexican horses to indigenous nations farther north. They traded buffalo meat to New Mexico, and buffalo hides to U.S. merchants on the Santa Fe trail. They were sometimes at peace with any one of these groups, and as often at war. Trade was something they carried on in the midst of raiding, or by means of raiding: military force was a useful way to dictate the terms of a bargain. It took a particular kind of religious morale for anyone to keep going at this kind of trade-through-war, just as it took a particular kind of religious morale for Yankee merchants to keep focussed on their kind of bargain-hunting. There were sacramental objects to defend, the deaths of friends to avenge, and valor to prove. During the few years before the peace gathering on the Arkansas, these motives wound some young men from one band of the Cheyennes, to the north of what is now Texas, into a pattern of raiding against the Kiowas and Comanches.
