The Comanche Nation is headquartered in Lawton in Comanche County. The Comanche became the dominant tribe on the southern Great Plains in the 18th and 19th centuries.
They are often characterized as “Lords of the Plains” and they presided over a large area called Comancheria, which came to include large portions of present-day Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas.
Comanche power depended on bison, horses, trading, and raiding. The Comanche hunted the bison of the Great Plains for food and skins. Their adoption of the horse from Spanish colonists in New Mexico made them more mobile. They traded with the Spanish, French, Americans and neighboring Native-American peoples.
The Spanish and the French found the Comanche, as a tribe, was without equal in military skills as “Lords of the Plains” and therefore unconquerable. Finally, the French gave up on owning the plains. In 1803 the French sold its stake in Mid-America in a sale called the Louisiana Purchase.
In return for fifteen million dollars, or approximately eighteen dollars per square mile (less than 3 cents per acre), the United States acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi or 530,000,000 acres. This purchase included the “preemptive” right to obtain Indian lands by treaty or by conquest.