Southern plains contest

Two very different journeys converged on the same grass, Apache down from the subarctic and Comanche out of the Great Basin, and the Comanche won it decisively. They appear in Spanish records at Taos in 1706, entering plains that Jicarilla, Faraon, Lipan and Plains Apache had held for centuries. The Apache lost on structural mismatch: they were semi-sedentary, farming maize in river bottoms and living in rancherías with stored food, which means fixed targets at known times, while the Comanche were fully nomadic bison hunters with no settlements to defend, greater horse wealth, and the ability to concentrate force and vanish. Add the arms gradient and the outcome follows: French guns through the Wichita/Taovaya trade out of Louisiana, against Spain deliberately restricting firearms to its Apache partners.

Through the 1720s–50s the Apache were pushed off piece by piece; the Comanche-led coalition burned the San Sabá mission in 1758 and beat Parrilla's punitive expedition at the Taovaya villages in 1759, ending Spanish military support for the Apache, and in 1786 Anza's peace with Ecueracapa explicitly included joint Spanish-Comanche campaigns against them. Squeezed into the mountains and deserts of the Southwest and northern Mexico, the Apache made raiding the economic base, which is upstream of everything Americans later called the Apache Wars. Cochise and Geronimo were operating in country their ancestors had been pushed into by Comanche pressure a century earlier.