It wouldn't hurt us............................

..........................to remember that the history of America encompasses more than the thirteen original colonies:

     On August 15, 1779, the new governor gathered an army of six hundred men, including 259 Indians, and set off in search of Cuerno Verde.  To avoid detection, he took a different and more mountainous route then the one used by all previous Spanish expeditions, crossing the front range of the Rockies near South Park.  He went ultimately north and east, onto the elevated plains in present-day eastern Colorado, where he found the Indian camp.  Though most of its warriors and the chief were absent, Anza attacked anyway;  the Indians fled.  It took the Spanish nine miles to ride them down, and another three miles to subdue them.  They killed eighteen—presumably old men, boys, and women—and took thirty women and thirty-four children prisoner.  They got all five hundred horses.  From the prisoners, Anza learned that Cuerno Verde was off raiding in New Mexico but was returning soon for a grand feast and celebration.
      Anza waited for him, surprised him on the trail in Colorado near a place that is still known as Greenhorn Peak, and in a piece of brilliant battlefield strategy, engineered one of the great Spanish victories in North America.  He had ventured into the heart of Comancheria, to the very homeland of the Comanche, where countless others had perished, and where they had never been beaten in a major fight, and he had triumphed.  Anza wrote later that he believed he owed his victory in part to Cuerno Verde's arrogance.  After Cuerno Verde attacked the six-hundred-strong Spanish battle line with his bodyguard of fifty warriors, Anza theorized that "his death was caused by his own intrepidity and the contempt he wished to show our people, being vaunted by the many successes that they have always obtained over us because of the irregularities with which they have always warred. . . .From this should be deduced the arrogance, presumption and pride which characterized this barbarian, and which he manifested until the last moment in various ways, disdaining even to load his own musket. . . ."  Only a handful of warriors escaped capture or death.  The Spanish suffered only one casualty.  Anza and his lancers launche other attacks into Comancheria, and though none was nearly as effective as the one against Cuerno Verde, he soon had their full attention.
     What Anza did next was equally unconventional.  Other governors, flushed with such success, would likely have tried to destroy the rest of the Comanche, in spite of the fact that there were more than twenty thousand of them on the plains (or, according to Anza's own inflated estimate, thirty thousand).  But Anza was not trying to beat the Comanches, just scare them enough so that a diplomatic accommodation could be made.  Considering what had happened in New Mexico and what was even now happening in Texas, he had what sounded like a wildly implausible goal:  He wanted to make friends and allies of them.
      This he did.  He gathered Comanche chiefs for peace talks, insisting that he speak with all of the bands that touched the western perimeter of the plains, and eventually insisting on appointing a single chief to speak for all the bans, something that had never happened before.  Anza treated the Comanches as equals, did not threaten their hunting grounds, and refused to try to declare sovereignty over them.   He offered them trade.  They liked and respected him.  In  one of the more remarkable diplomatic pirouettes ever seen on the border, Anza then managed to concoct an overweening solution to all his problems.  He somehow managed not only to get the Comanches to sign a peace treaty, but also to bind them with their enemies the Utes in alliance with Spain against their bitterest foes, the Apaches.  Then, for the coup de grace, he took this combined force of Spanish, Ute, and Comanche and used it to force the Navajo into the compact.
      Odder still, Anza's treaty worked. . . .

-S. C. Gwynne,  Empire of the Summer Moon:  Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History