Spain's forgotten wars against the Comanche: Anza's march

Juan Bautista de Anza's punitive campaign against the Comanche in 1779

While the Mapuche resistance in Chile is relatively well known, Spain's wars against the Apache and Comanche in northern Mexico barely get a paragraph in textbooks. A 1779 expedition led by the governor of Nuevo México, Juan Bautista de Anza, covered 600 kilometers across desert terrain to surprise the antiestéticared Comanche leader Cuerno Verde.

Anza avoided the main route and crossed the Rockies through a mountain pass in what is now Poncha Pass (Colorado), descending through the Colorado River valley to strike by surprise. The goal: to punish the Comanche raids that devastated Spanish settlements. Yet the operation barely appears in Spanish historiography, and it does not even have a full page on Spanish-language Wikipedia.

War or extermination?

The debate over how to classify these confrontations divides opinion. Some analysts consider them mere skirmishes and punitive campaigns, while others speak of wars of extermination. A frequent point is that Spanish settlers were forbidden from carrying weapons, leaving them defenseless against the Comanche, unlike the Anglo-Saxon settlers, whose armed tradition would eventually lead to the Second Amendment. The Spanish troops were mostly made up of criollos and mestizos, with officers from mainland Spain.

A silence that is no accident

According to some schools of thought, the ignorance of these episodes is not coincidental. It has been argued that there is a deliberate historical forgetting, and that even the participation of Basques in the extermination campaigns has been silenced. What is certain is that the memory of the northern frontier of New Spain remains a pending chapter in popular history.

Given this background, one wonders whether the official narrative has preferred to bury an uncomfortable war, or whether the archives were simply lost over time.