User:Smallchief/Medicine Creek

The United States annexed Texas in 1845. A Comanche delegation visited Washington, D.C. and negotiated and signed a treaty with the U.S., but the treaty was never ratified by the U.S. A major issue was the establishment of a border between Comancheria and the rapidly increasing number of Anglo settlers in Texas. The Comanche wanted a border; the U.S. resisted a formal agreement about a border, but a chain of frontier military and trading posts established a de facto border from 1849-1852. The U.S. allowed the German settlers near San Antonio to negotiate a separate agreement with the Comanche which allowed Germans to live beyond the informal border in exchange for gifts. The Comanche felt betrayed when the U.S. and the Germans did not adhere to the negotiated agreements.

Author Hämäläinen said that in the late 1840s the Comanche "were both at the peak of their power and on the verge of collapse." Epidemics of smallpox in 1848 and cholera in 1849 reduced the Comanche population to about 12,000 in 1850. (Hämäläinen says 20,000, down from 40,000 at its peak in 1780.) Moreover, the population of the bison on the southern plains decreased in the early 1850s, causing hunger among the Comanches and their allies. Factors of the decrease were the Comanche horse herds, estimated at more than 100,000, reducing the pasturage for the bison population, drought, and market hunting by the ciboleros of New Mexico, other tribes, especially the emigrant tribes in eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, and Anglos.