The Full Moon
The full moon, or the Comanche Moon as it is still known in Texas, makes it easy to see at night. Accordingly, on moonlit nights the Comanche warriors would make their way toward their targets and attack. These surprise attacks, often undetected until it was too late, made the full moon something to be feared and dreaded.
Horses
The scrubby, small, versatile little mustangs ridden by the Comanche were one of the keys to their success. A hunter-gatherer society, the Comanche made no permanent camps and were nomadic. They followed the buffalo, which they killed for food and for their valuable hides, which they subsequently sold to traders in exchange for tools and luxuries. This would have been physically impossible without the ability to hunt from horseback. To most Plains Indians, horses were a symbol of wealth and in fact a way to measure wealth. The more horses a person had, the richer he or she was.
Horses were vital for survival on the Plains: a person without a mount often died of thirst or exposure. Indeed, one of the ways in which Indian braves showed their dominance was by stealing other people's horses. For those living on a reservation, there is no need to hunt from horseback. So the Comanche people eventually learned to farm and to live as the white people did. The horses gradually faded from prominence.
Long Hair
Among the Plains Indians, long hair was considered manly and appropriate. Quanah Parker, for example, wore hair extensions made from his wives' hair in order to display fat, sleek, well-kept braids even late in life. Although he and many others adopted American styles of dress and speech, long hair was one of the last of the Indian traditions to be discarded.
Buffalo
Roaming almost randomly over the plains, the buffalo were a source of nourishment and profit for the Comanche for hundreds of years. But as the westward expansion of settlers cut into the buffalo range and hunters from the east shot prodigious numbers of buffalo with heavy guns, the Comanche found it increasingly difficult to hunt for food. The reduction of the buffalo range and habitat parallels the reduction in Comanche territory.
