economic construction, rooted in an extensive commercial network that facilitated long-distance trade. Dealing with subordinate Indians, the Comanche spread their language and culture across the region. By the early 1830s, the Comanche began to run out of resources in Comancheria. At this time, they had been conducting raids deep into Mexico and would take what they got back to Comancheria. In the mid 1830s, the Comanche formed a colony in Mexico called the Bolson colony. Conditions in this colony were similar to how they were in Comancheria when it was winter in the north. Eventually, there was a drought, and Comancheria and the Bolson colony struggled. Along with this, the Comanche empire collapsed after their villages were repeatedly decimated by epidemics of smallpox and cholera in the late 1840s; causing their population to plunge from 20,000 to just a few thousand by the 1870s. The Comanche resolved most of the challenges facing them in the 1830s with adroit diplomacy. Their strategy was flexible. With New Mexico, a Mexican province to their west, they enjoyed friendly trading relations. New Mexico was more of an asset than a threat to the Comanches, and the New Mexicans avoided war with the Indians. In 1841, Governor Manuel Armijo was ordered by the Mexican central government to join a military campaign against the Comanche, but Armijo declined. "To declare war on the Comanches would bring complete ruin to the Department of New Mexico." In 1844, New Mexican officials learned of but did nothing to prevent a Comanche raid on Chihuahua. With their western flank secured by an unthreatening New Mexico, the Comanche dealt with rivals on their northern and eastern borders. In 1835, they met with a delegation of U.S. soldiers and eastern Indians in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma and concluded a peace agreement. The agreement permitted eastern Indians and the U.S. to hunt on Comanche lands and did not restrain the Comanche and their Kiowa and Wichita allies from making war on Mexico. With their eastern flank secured by the treaty with the U.S., the Comanches next concluded a peace agreement in 1840 with the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho pressing on them from the north. It was highly favorable to the Cheyenne and Arapaho. They were permitted to reside and hunt on the buffalo and horse-rich Comanche lands and, in addition, the affluent Comanches gave them gifts, including as many as six horses