“March of the Caravan” as found in Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies, Volume 1 (1844). Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 44, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 34–51. 34 Kansas History “Meat as a Matter of Form”: Food, Exchange, and Power on the Santa Fe Trail by David C. Beyreis veryone needs to eat. At the most basic level, food sustains daily life. But the significance of food extends far beyond personal sustenance. The acquisition, distribution, and consumption of foodstuffs are also actions closely associated with social, economic, and political power. Along the ESanta Fe Trail and in the region through which it passed, eatables shaped social relations and political alignments, stimulated peaceful exchange, and precipitated violent clashes. People fought over access to food. Men and women measured personal status by the ability to acquire it, be generous with it, and consume it in the proper social spaces. As it coursed through Kansas, the road between Missouri and New Mexico traversed one of the richest foodscapes in North America. Between 1821 and 1875, food fundamentally shaped the ways people interacted and clashed with each other in the southern plains and southwestern borderlands. The significance of food as a trade item in the regions adjoining the Santa Fe Trail predated Spanish colonization. Nomadic southern plains hunters exchanged bison meat and robes for the garden products of Rio Grande Valley pueblos. Under ideal circumstances, this was a symbiotic relationship. Each group provided food products that complemented the diets and nutritional needs of their trade partners. Protein flowed west, carbohydrates east. Nevertheless, drought cycles sometimes exacerbated shifting military and economic patterns that made the pueblos vulnerable to plains raiders who simply took what they wanted or needed. By the early eighteenth century, the arrival of a new power in the borderlands would reorient and expand this business system.1 The search for new food resources and trade opportunities drew the Comanche into the plains- borderlands region by the early 1700s. A Shoshonean people originally from the Great Basin, the Comanche split off from their relatives in the seventeenth century and migrated south along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, drawn by the allure of vast bison herds, horses, and the prospect of trade. The David C. Beyreis is the author of Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920, and articles on Great Plains and southwest borderlands history. His work has received commendations from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum and the Western Writers of America. His current book project examines intercultural diplomacy and foodways on the northern plains during the nineteenth century. He teaches history at Ursuline Academy of Dallas. 1. Charles L. Kenner, A History of New Mexican–Plains Indian Relations (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), 3, 8–9; and Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System,” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 488. “Meat as a Matter of Form” 35 Comanche formed an alliance with the Ute that young men in exchange for a portion of the war soon grew to dominate the northern periphery booty or bison products they might acquire, but of New Mexico. Well established in the region by the paraibo who kept the spoils to himself would the 1720s, the Comanche turned their attention not be a popular leader. Conspicuous generosity, eastward to the river valleys of the southern plains. especially in the distribution of robes and meat to Within fifty years, they had displaced the Plains his poorest neighbors, was essential to maintaining Apache, a semisedentary agricultural people with the unity of the band. Food thus had a political long ties to the New Mexico markets whose farm and social resonance that helped knit Comanche plots and villages were easy to find and destroy. people together.3 Having smashed these enemies, the Comanche Similar processes were at work among the appropriated and expanded the Apache trade Southern Cheyenne, another group whose fortunes network, funneling bison meat throughout the helped shape the destiny of the lands along the southern plains and acquiring corn, beans, squash, route of the Santa Fe Trail. Like the Comanche, the and sunflower seeds from pueblo and Wichita Southern Cheyenne came from the north. Migrating farmers in exchange. As the Comanche population out of Minnesota’s lake country around 1680, they expanded, so did the geographic scope of their reinvented themselves as equestrian nomads over trading and raiding. Although horses, captives, the course of the eighteenth century. They moved and manufactured goods displaced food products west as far as the Black Hills of South Dakota before as the main engine of regional commerce, the the lure of the Arkansas River Valley drew a portion importation of garden produce never ceased of the people south. By the 1820s, they had split, entirely. As long as food was plentiful, the people primarily into northern and southern divisions, thrived. When the situation began to deteriorate although a third group, the Dog Soldiers, emerged in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War, the stability by the mid-nineteenth century. The divisions were of Comanchería was undermined, and a time of not hard and fast, however, and families could starvation loomed.2 shift among them. Equestrian bison hunting and Just as the business of food helped shape their position as key middlemen in the vast Great Comanche economic decisions and export strategies, Plains trading network were the bases of growing the distribution of food helped structure the nation’s Southern Cheyenne power.4 internal sociopolitical dynamics. Authority within Spiritual forces closely connected to food Comanche bands was never completely stable. procurement also allowed the people to prosper. Leaders, known as paraibos, could not dictate policy The political, social, and spiritual formation of to their followers. Rather, they courted support the Cheyenne was closely tied to the experiences through the acquisition of spiritual power; a record of their culture hero, Sweet Medicine, who had as an effective war leader and hunter; and wealth brought them the four Sacred Arrows as gifts from in horses, bison robes, and foodstuffs. The most the nation’s holy people. Two of the arrows gave powerful Comanche men parlayed their status the Cheyenne power over their human enemies, into the acquisition of more horses and wives. while the others made them successful bison They might lend horses to poor but ambitious hunters. The arrows resided with their Keeper among the Southern Cheyenne. The Sacred Buffalo 2. For broad surveys of Comanche history in the 1700s and early Hat, another object imbued with great significance 1800s, see Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: and power, ensured the fecundity of the bison Yale University Press, 2008), 18–104; and Thomas W. Kavanagh, The Comanches: A History, 1706–1875 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 63–192. For food and trade, see Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics 3. Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 261–63; Kavanagh, The of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Comanches, 28–29, 35, 43, 57, 126; Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass,” 187. Power in the Southwest Borderlands,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, 4. Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains no. 2 (April 2010): 179, 181–82, 184–87. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 51–83. 36 Kansas History Indigenous women such as the Cheyenne woman shown in this undated photograph could gain status and influence through their labor in tribal foodways and sustenance activities. Here, she is working outdoors at fleshing a large hide with a small dog nearby. herds. A Northern Cheyenne priest was in charge their care for the people by providing wise counsel, of this holy object. Together, the arrows and the distributing material wealth, and forging trade and Sacred Buffalo Hat would help the people triumph political alliances with outside groups. Cheyenne over their enemies and live safely with full bellies, men of all ages led by example, and to be accused provided they lived uprightly.5 of selfishness was to lose face in the camp. Thus, The acquisition and distribution of food the imperative to make certain that all were well reinforced sociopolitical norms among the fed, clothed, and sheltered was ingrained in the Cheyenne people. The route to preeminence for Cheyenne social ethic. Without these values, the young Cheyenne men was through bravery in war people would fail.6 Cheyenne women could also and raiding and generosity at home. The older men, especially the peace chiefs, demonstrated 6. George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, 2 vols. (1923; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 5. John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty, Cheyenne Memories, 1:336; George Bent to George Hyde, August 9, 1904, box 1, folder 1, no. 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 14–44; and Peter 4, George Bent Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, John Powell, Sweet Medicine: The Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereafter GBP-Yale); and John H. Sun Dance, and Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History, 2 vols. Moore, The Cheyenne Nation: A Social and Demographic History (Lincoln: (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 1:xxiii, 2:443–45. University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 185–88. “Meat as a Matter of Form” 37 gain status and influence through tribal foodways. 1840, overlapping with the expansion of the Santa They were the ones who turned a carcass into Fe trade. The Southern Cheyenne were caught in sustenance and bloody hides into the tanned robes the middle of two separate conflicts.