Comanchero

thumb|right | Painting of a Comanchero or Comanche Indian by George Catlin, in 1835 The Comancheros were a group of 18th- and 19th-century traders based in northern and central New Mexico. They made their living by trading with the nomadic Great Plains Indian tribes in northeastern New Mexico, West Texas, and other parts of the southern plains of North America. The name "Comancheros" comes from the Comanche tribe, in whose territory they traded. They traded manufactured goods (tools and cloth), flour, tobacco, and bread for hides, livestock, and slaves from the Comanche. As the Comancheros did not have regular access to weapons and gunpowder, disagreement exists about how much they traded these with the Comanche.

== History == Prior to the coming of the Spanish, with their horses, into the American Southwest, with early explorations beginning in the 1540s and permanent settlement in the late 1590s, the people who came to be known as Comanches did not live in the Southern High Plains. The Comanches, a Shoshonean people, migrated from the north and arose as a separate and distinct tribe in the early 18th century, largely as a result of having obtained breeding stocks of horses after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. They migrated southward, through the Rocky Mountains and into the Southern High Plains, where their Shoshonean kinsmen, the Utes, and they began to appear at trade fairs in Taos, around 1700. During the first half of the 18th century, the Comanche gradually spread their area of occupation throughout the Southern High Plains and large areas of Texas, where they largely displaced the tribal peoples who had lived there prior to the coming of the Spaniards, mostly the Apache, who were themselves an earlier migrant group of Athabaskan peoples from the north.