"Indians in American-Mexican Relations Before ..." Topic

…the War of 1846

"Indian raids multiplied Mexico's problems, in the generation before her war with the United States, to a degree not generally realized today. They upset her agricultural, commercial, mineral, and ranch life over hundreds of thousands of square miles. Consequently, the country's capacity for defense declined at a time when centralism, clericalism, militarism, and American imperialism were debilitating the nation. The chief offending mountain tribes were Apache, Navajo, and Ute; and the most troublesome plains Indians were Comanche and Kiowa.

Developments on both sides of the Rio Grande in the middle 1830's encouraged these natives to make their incursions. Notable were the trade and amity treaties which United States and Texas commissioners celebrated with Comanches and Kiowas. These agreements raised the market for Mexican livestock, plunder, and captives,—a market already strong in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, and at Bent's Fort, Santa Fe, and Taos. Americans who entered Arizona and New Mexico joined Mexicans in buying similar staples from Apache raiders and in moving them into the same broad channels of western commerce. Mexico's swing to dictatorship in 1835 produced another encouragement for Indian raids,—namely, the government's policy of disarming the people except for bows, arrows, knives, lances, lariats,1 and a few old guns. Persistent squabbling between civil and military authorities also added to the domestic weakness. A third stimulant, particularly to revenge raids, was the resolve of border states to hire professional scalp hunters to scalp hostile natives.

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Armand

I did an articles back in the 1990-2000 called Our Place in the Sun. It covered warfare Amazon NG First Nations prior to the Europeans.one article covered the South-west North America.