"a crown with an ear on each end"

     "It was out of desperation, therefore, when Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango passed bills offering bounty prices for Indian scalps. The bills provided scaled bounty payments with prices ranging between twenty-five and one hundred pesos, depending on the victim’s sex and age, and stated that the booty from slain Indians would be awarded to the vanquishers. State officials contracted foreigners residing in Mexican territory to kill Indian raiders with such frequency that by the late 1830s virtual bounty wars raged across northern Mexico. Mexico City condemned the scalp bounties as an excessive, unsavory measure but was powerless—or perhaps unwilling—to the stop the practice. The scalp wars devastated the Apaches who, unlike the Comanches, could not evade mercenary scalping squads by escaping [into Comancheria] far to the north. James Kirker, the most notorious of the soldiers of fortune, focused his business-style operations almost solely on Apaches, delivering almost five hundred Apache scalps to Chihuahuan authorities by 1847, but he largely avoided the more mobile and better-armed Comanches. In fact, as scalp payments became an established practice in Chihuahua in the late 1830s, Comanches, too, began to hunt Apaches for the standard bounty prize, a crown with an ear on each end."

     Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, Lamar Series in Western History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 228.
     Mexican "desperation," it should be noted, was born of the impunity with which the Comanches had been with such sovereignty pillaging northern Mexico.  Thus, the Comanches were here capitalizing further upon the mayhem that they had themselves been causing!  Clever!
     But of course this conflict with the Apaches was nothing new.  It was rooted in the "more than half a century"-long conquest (from the West beyond the Rockies and then from the North; map on p. 56) of Apachería, in full swing "By the late 1710s" (32).  This "all-out war" resulted in the displacement of the Apaches to the West and South (map of the 1760s on p. 63), where they remained subject to ongoing raiding (map of the 1770s and 1780s on p. 79) well into the 19th century (as above).  "The Comanche invasion of the southern plains was, quite simply, the longest and bloodiest conquering campaign the American West had witnessed—or would witness until the encroachment of the United States a century and a half later" (18).