t h e l a m a r s e r i e s i n w e s t e r n h i s t or y

The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general

public interest that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the Ameri-
can West and contribute to a wider understanding of the West’s significance
in the political, social, and cultural life of America. Comprising works of the
highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and vitality of Western
American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and ethnic
communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and
illustrated history of the American West.

editorial board

Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus,

Past President of Yale University

William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan
John Mack Faragher, Yale University
Jay Gitlin, Yale University
George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Martha A. Sandweiss, Amherst College
Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico
Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian, National Park Service
David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University
 recent titles

War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War,

by Brian DeLay
The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen
Frontiers: A Short History of the American West,
by Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher
Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place,
by Benjamin Heber Johnson and Jeffrey Gusky
Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, by Matthew Klingle
Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory,
by Christian W. McMillen
The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, by Earl Pomeroy
Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands,
by Samuel Truett
Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment,
by David J. Weber

forthcoming titles

The Bourgeois Frontier, by Jay Gitlin

Defying the Odds: One California Tribe’s Struggle for Sovereignty in Three
Centuries, by Carole Goldberg and Gelya Frank
Under the Tonto Rim: Honor, Conscience, and Culture in the West, 1880–1930,
by Daniel Herman
William Clark’s World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns,
by Peter Kastor
César Chávez, by Stephen J. Pitti
Geronimo, by Robert Utley
To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.
The Spanish Frontier
in North America
the brief edition

David J. Weber

ya l e u n i v e r s i t y p re s s

ne w haven and l ondon

 Copyright © 2009 by Yale University. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.

Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Adobe Caslon type by

Binghamton Valley Composition, Binghamton, New York.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books,
Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weber, David J.
The Spanish frontier in North America / David J. Weber. —
The brief ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-300-14068-2 (alk. paper)
1. Southwest, New—History—To 1848. 2. Southern States—
History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 3. Spaniards—
Southwest, New—History. 4. Spaniards—Southern States—
History. 5. Frontier and pioneer life—Southwest, New.
6. Frontier and pioneer life—Southern States. I. Title.
F799.W42 2009
975'.02—dc22 2008026316

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper). It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste
(PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Frontispiece: A detail from William H. Powell’s romantic oil paint-

ing The Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, 1541 (12' x 18'), com-
missioned in 1847 for the rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, where it
hangs yet today. Courtesy of the Architect of the U.S. Capitol.
Compadre, I entreat you to do me the favor of taking my son Antonio
among your troops, that when he is old, he may have a tale to tell.
Fulano de Escobedo to Alonso de León, Coahuila, ca. 1690
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List of Maps, xi
Spanish Names and Words, xiii
Introduction, 1
1 Worlds Apart, 13
2 First Encounters, 26
3 Foundations of Empire: Florida and New Mexico, 48
4 Conquistadors of the Spirit, 69
5 Exploitation, Contention, and Rebellion, 90
6 Imperial Rivalry and Strategic Expansion: To Texas,
the Gulf Coast, and the High Plains, 109
7 Commercial Rivalry, Stagnation, and the Fortunes of War, 130
8 Indian Raiders and the Reorganization of Frontier Defenses, 153
9 Forging a Transcontinental Empire: New California to
the Floridas, 176

ix
 contents

10 Improvisations and Retreats: The Empire Lost, 199

11 Frontiers and Frontier Peoples Transformed, 221
12 The Spanish Legacy and the Historical Imagination, 243
For Further Reading, 265
Index, 279

x
 Maps

1 Spanish explorers, 1513–43, 27

2 The Spanish frontier, ca. 1550–1600, 52
3 Pueblos in New Mexico, ca. 1650, 71
4 Missions in Spanish Florida, ca. 1674–75, 75
5 English Raids on Florida during the War of the Spanish
Succession, 105
6 Texas and the Gulf Coast, 1685–1721, 114
7 The Villasur Expedition, 1720, 128
8 Florida during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1739–42, 137
9 Spanish-Franco-Indian Frontiers in the mid-eighteenth
century, 140
10 Presidios of northern New Spain, ca. 1766–68, 154
11 Sonora and the coasts of the Californias, ca. 1769, 178
12 The reconnaissance of 1774–76, 186

xi
 maps

13 Spanish settlements in New California, 1784, 193

14 The Gulf Coast during the American Revolution, 196
15 The disputed Spanish–American border, 1783–95, 204
16 New Spain’s disputed northern border, 1803–19, 214

xii
 Spanish Names and Words

Hispanic surnames usually include the names of one’s father and mother, the
father’s name preceding the mother’s, as in Luis del Río Jiménez. If a person
prefers to use only one name, it is usually the name of the father (in this case,
Río) rather than the mother’s name ( Jiménez). Then and now, however, ex-
ceptions were common. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, for example, did not
inherit his father’s name, which was Vera, but rather the name of Núñez, an il-
lustrious ancestor on his mother’s side, along with his mother’s family name,
Cabeza de Vaca. He dropped Núñez in favor of Cabeza de Vaca, an even more
illustrious family name, and so modern writers have followed his lead by refer-
ring to him as Cabeza de Vaca instead of Núñez.
The irregularities of Spanish usage have been compounded by eccentric
Anglo-American practices. The name of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y
Luxán, for example (whose mother’s name was Luxán), appears in docu-
ments of his day by the name of his father, Vázquez or Vázquez de Coron-
ado, but Americans have come to know him simply as Coronado. The
incorrect American usage has become so entrenched that it seems wise to
yield to the traditional error rather than jolt readers by making the familiar

xiii
 spanish names and words

strange. Similarly, Hernando de Soto and Diego de Vargas would be ren-

dered Soto and Vargas throughout most of the Spanish-speaking world, but
Anglo-Americans know them as De Soto and De Vargas, and that usage
seems destined to prevail.
For the convenience of English-speaking readers, I have also used
present-day renderings of some place-names: the familiar spelling of St.
Augustine, for example, for San Agustín; Apalachee instead of Apalache;
and San Antonio for the town known properly in the colonial era as San
Fernando de Béxar. Words that should bear an accent but that have become
incorporated into English appear without diacritical markings. Hence,
Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, and Mexico, rather than Santa Bárbara, Santa Fé,
and México. This leads to some inevitable inconsistency. Rio, or river, carries
no accent when used with the familiar Rio Grande, but Río Rojo does.
In Spanish, titles such as duque for duke, marqués for marquis, don for sir,
and fray for friar appear in lowercase, even when combined with a proper
name, as in the marqués de Rubí, don Tomás Vélez Cachupín, or fray Junípero
Serra. Because their meaning is well known to American readers, I have re-
tained these titles in Spanish and left them in lowercase. Titles that may seem
strange to American readers, such as virrey (viceroy), appear in English.
I have used Spanish words so sparingly that a glossary seems unnecessary,
but I define the few exceptions, such as mestizo and encomienda, when I use
them for the first time. The index, then, should be your guide to definitions.

xiv
the spanish frontier in north america
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents. . . . Thus far,
impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon
ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from
the British Islands only . . . which is a very great mistake.
—Walt Whitman, 1883

Across the southern rim of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pa-
cific, aged buildings stand as mute reminders of an earlier Hispanic America
that has vanished. On Florida’s Atlantic coast, some seventy miles south of
the Georgia border, a great symmetrical stone fortress, the Castillo de San
Marcos, still occupies the ground where its bastions once commanded the
land and water approaches to Spanish St. Augustine. Founded in 1565, the
town of St. Augustine itself is the oldest continuously occupied European
settlement in the continental United States. Farther west, at Pensacola, in
the Florida panhandle, the ruins of the eighteenth-century Spanish forts of
Barrancas and San Carlos look out over the shallow waters of the Gulf of
Mexico. In New Orleans’s vibrant French Quarter, nearly all of the oldest

1
 introduction

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

1. The Castillo of San Marcos at St. Augustine. Courtesy,

National Park Service, Harpers Ferry.

buildings were constructed in the city’s Spanish era, between 1763 and 1800.
Fires in 1788 and 1794 obliterated the earlier, French-built New Orleans,
so that even those venerable and much-modified landmarks on Jackson
Square—the Cabildo, the St. Louis Cathedral, and the Presbytère—date to
the era when New Orleans and all of Louisiana belonged to Spain.
Still farther west, across southwestern America from Texas to California,
preserved or reconstructed Spanish forts, public buildings, homes, and mis-
sions dot the arid landscape. Today, some of those structures serve as muse-
ums, perhaps the best known being the old stone mission in downtown San
Antonio, popularly called the Alamo, and the long, one-story adobe Gover-
nor’s Palace facing the plaza in Santa Fe. Other buildings continue to serve
their original functions. Near Tucson, for example, desert-dwelling Pima
Indians still receive the sacraments inside the thick walls of the dazzlingly
white mission church of San Xavier del Bac.

2
 introduction

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

2. The Palace of the Governors at Santa Fe as viewed from the plaza. Photograph
by Arthur Taylor, 1977. Courtesy, Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 70213.

Old walls of stone and adobe remain among the most visible reminders
that the northern fringes of Spain’s vast New World empire once extended
well into the area of the present-day United States. Spain’s tenure in North
America began at least as early as 1513, when Juan Ponce de León stepped
ashore on a Florida beach, and did not end until Mexico won independence
in 1821. Spain governed parts of the continent for well over two centuries,
longer than the United States has existed as an independent nation.
The extent of Spanish control over North America shifted with its politi-
cal fortunes and those of its European and Indian rivals, but Spanish sover-
eignty extended at one time or another at least as far north as Virginia on the
Atlantic and Canada on the Pacific. Between the two coasts, Spain claimed
much of the American South and the entire West, at least half of the conti-
nental United States. Present-day Spain is three-fourths the size of Texas,
yet its imperial claims in North America alone embraced an area larger than
Western Europe.

3
 introduction

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

3. The Mission of San Xavier del Bac. Courtesy, Jim Griffith,

Southwest Folklore Center, University of Arizona.

Not only did Spain claim much of what is today the United States, but its
sons and daughters settled throughout the continent’s southern tier, building
towns, missions, and fortifications from Virginia through Florida on the At-
lantic, from San Diego to San Francisco on the Pacific, and across the states
that make up the present American South and Southwest. Spanish subjects
also found their way over trails that took them deep into the continent, pur-
suing treasure in Tennessee, fighting Pawnee and Oto Indians on the Platte
River in Nebraska, and exploring the Great Basin.
In the more northerly latitudes of America, no physical remains of
Spain’s presence have endured, but across the land the names of states,
counties, towns, rivers, valleys, mountains, and other natural features, from
California to Cape Canaveral, testify to America’s Spanish origins. The
Spanish derivation of most of these place-names is obvious, but for some it

4
 introduction

is not. The name of Key West, for example, holds no hint that it derives
from Cayo Hueso (Bone Key), words that Americans would mispronounce
and misspell.
Less evident than buildings or place-names, but of greater significance,
are the human and environmental transformations that accompanied Spain’s
conquest and settlement of North America. Spaniards introduced an aston-
ishing array of life-forms to the continent, ranging from cattle, sheep, and
horses to the grasses those animals ate. At the same time, Spaniards unwit-
tingly introduced alien diseases that ended the lives of countless Native
Americans and inadvertently created new ecological niches for the peoples,
plants, and animals that crossed the Atlantic.
This brief edition of The Spanish Frontier in North America explains
Spain’s impact on the lives, institutions, and environments of native peoples
of North America and the impact of North America on the lives and insti-
tutions of those Spaniards who explored and settled what has now become
the United States. It does so with concision. Intended for general readers,
it is a condensed version of a longer book with the same title. This brief
edition does not contain the notes or bibliography or acknowledgments of
the original edition, and it represents less than 60 percent of the text. Those
seeking to locate my sources should consult the unabridged edition of Span-
ish Frontier in North America, which Yale published in 1992. The section “For
Further Reading” at the end of this book contains guidance to publications
that have appeared since 1992.
This brief edition fills the need for a survey that, as one of my neighbors in
New Mexico diplomatically explained to me, will not tell readers more than
they need to know. I suspect that many of my students felt the same way
about the longer book but were reluctant to confess that to their professor.

The idea of Spaniards in North America requires definitions. First, I use

Spaniard as a political and cultural term, not as a racial category. Although
Spaniards proudly proclaimed their purity of blood and diligently sought to
protect the limpieza de sangre of their families, considerable racial mixture
had occurred on the Iberian Peninsula even before the discovery of America.
In North America most of Spain’s subjects were either mestizos (a word that
when used loosely meant racially mixed peoples), mulattos, Indians, or

5
 introduction

blacks. If these people lived in the manner of Spaniards rather than Indians,
I generally refer to them, their institutions, and their society as Spanish or
Hispanic. Second, I employ the term North America to mean the continent
north of Mexico. America, in this book, usually means that part of North
America that would become the United States (with apologies to Latin
Americans who object to the way in which yanquis have preempted the term
and who have correctly pointed out that the entire hemisphere is America).
On both sides of the Rio Grande an American is understood to be a citizen
of the United States.
I readily admit that it is anachronistic to place Spaniards on the North
American frontier, for few of them would have identified themselves as res-
idents of North America. Instead, like their counterparts in English Amer-
ica, they thought of themselves as residents of provinces or locales, such as
California, New Mexico, or Florida, which existed in isolation from one an-
other. Since the United States did not exist during most of the period under
consideration, it is also anachronistic to frame this study within the bound-
aries of the present continental United States. This is a useful anachronism,
however, given my goal of broadening Americans’ understanding of their
past by illuminating its Hispanic origins, and it does not gainsay the fact
that America’s Spanish past also belongs to the history of colonial Latin
America. Although it may discomfit those who yearn for neater categories,
the study of Spain’s North American borderlands can add to one’s apprecia-
tion of the varieties of regional experiences within colonial Latin America,
while at the same time extending and enriching one’s appreciation of the
history of the United States.
In telling the story of America’s Spanish origins I try not to cast Spaniards
as the villains so often portrayed by hispanophobic writers. At the same time,
I do not put a gloss on Spanish behavior, as apologists tend to do. The well-
known false dichotomies of the Black Legend, which portrays Spaniards as
uniquely cruel, and the White Legend, which ennobles them, only distort
understanding. Instead, I seek to recreate the past with its own integrity and
within its own terms of reference. The behavior of Spaniards toward Indians
in the early sixteenth century, for example, often seems cruel and repugnant
by present standards. Nonetheless, it fell within the bounds of acceptable be-
havior for many western Europeans of the late Middle Ages, whose behavior
toward one another was also cruel and repugnant by our lights. In that time

6
 introduction

and place the release of aggressive emotions was “open and uninhibited,” in
the words of the sociologist Norbert Elias. “Rapine, battle, hunting of men
and animals—all these were vital necessities which . . . for the mighty and
strong . . . formed part of the pleasures of life.”
It is, of course, commonplace to suggest that one should not judge histor-
ical figures and events by the standards of modernity, but by the standards of
their age. This, however, begs the question—what were the standards of an
age? In complex societies several standards of conduct can exist side by side.
If, for example, “killing and torturing others . . . was a socially permitted
pleasure” in late medieval Europe, as Elias concluded, it was also true that
Spanish monarchs, from the time of the discovery of America on, urged hu-
mane treatment of Indians. Royal orders to Columbus, issued in 1493, ex-
plained that he was to “treat . . . Indians very well and lovingly” and punish
severely those who mistreated them. It is also true that standards and prac-
tices change over time, even during what moderns, from a distance, imagine
was a single age or era. The Spaniards of the sixteenth-century were not the
Spaniards of the late eighteenth century.
Only by understanding the existence of contradictory and competing val-
ues and practices and the changes wrought by time and circumstance can
one move beyond caricatures to full portraits of a society. It seems danger-
ous, however, to allow understanding to lead to the moral neutrality sug-
gested in the French saying, “To understand is to forgive,” for it is too easy
a step from there to “Forgive and forget.” History should help one remember
that in every age, some men and women have found ingenious ways to ra-
tionalize brutality in the name of religion, truth, or the common good. One
can understand, but one need not condone their behavior.
One of the themes of this book is that natives and Spaniards who met on
North American frontiers failed to understand one another because they
came from different worlds. So do people today inhabit a world stunningly
different from the worlds of either Indians or Spaniards. Common cultural
roots tie most Americans to the history of Western Europe, but culture is
ever changing, and Europeans of a few hundred years ago were not merely
“simpler” versions of ourselves. As historian David Lowenthal has reminded
us, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” For
Spaniards of the seventeenth century, for example, historian Ramón Gutiér-
rez tells us, love “was considered a subversive sentiment,” and such a basic

7
 introduction

idea as choice held meanings for Spaniards of the early modern era that one
might find unrecognizable today. When sixteenth-century Spaniards asked
Indians to choose between Christianity and slavery, it may seem in retro-
spect as though they offered the natives no real choice. Nonetheless, in the
prevailing Spanish mentalité, Indians did have a choice, even if they made
the wrong one and brought the wrath of Christendom down upon them-
selves.
Just as the cultural milieu of Spanish North America differed profoundly
from that of America in the early twenty-first century, so did the physical
environment. Those who dwelled or traveled in the southern rim of the con-
tinent in the 1500s, 1600s, or 1700s encountered colder and wetter weather
than is known today. Spaniards had arrived in North America at the onset
of what has come to be called the Little Ice Age, and for the next three cen-
turies, in many areas of the continent, growing seasons were shorter than in
the twenty-first century, rainfall higher, and rivers that seldom freeze over
today could be crossed on ice. The advent of Europeans and their zoological
and biological imports changed the natural world beyond recognition. All
across the continent, tall native grasses and climax forests have vanished,
swiftly flowing streams have slowed, and flora and fauna alien to pre-
Columbian America have established themselves.

To tell of Spanish frontiers in North America in a single volume has re-

quired distilling the essence of the story, not compiling inventories. Much as
an artist must foreshorten to fit a large scene on a small canvas, I have had to
skip over foreground details to bring larger themes into focus.
The main themes of Spain’s enterprises in North America can be under-
stood in many ways. Traditionally, Americans and Europeans have ex-
plained Spain’s early ventures in what is now the United States as episodes
in an age of discovery, although scholars have come more recently to under-
stand that Native Americans probably regarded Europe’s discoverers as blind—
oblivious to meanings, observers of form instead of discoverers of function.
Traditionally, American and European scholars have categorized Spain’s
colonizing activities as chapters in the expansion of European institutions,
although they now suppose that natives perceived the expansion of Europe
as the invasion of America—or, if they understood the impact of European

8
 introduction

diseases, as the infestation of America. An anthropological model might ex-

plain Spain’s North American colonies as the domination and transforma-
tion of preliterate societies comprised of tribe, band, and other local units by
the emerging literate state societies of Europe. A sociological or economic
paradigm might posit Spain’s North American colonies as the periphery of
an empire that was, itself, part of an emerging world economic system. Still
another economic framework might place Spanish North America beyond
the periphery of the world economic system and even beyond the fringes of
empire. From local perspectives, where the imperatives of empire paled be-
fore the exigencies of daily life for both natives and Spaniards, competition
between classes and cultures for control of resources in distinctive environ-
ments provides a powerful device for explaining the varieties of Spanish ex-
periences in North America. From another level of abstraction, the stories of
Spaniards in North America might be seen as elaborate fictions constructed
from accounts kept by colonial record keepers and agreed to by historians,
all of whom have created a discourse of colonialism that obscures more than
it reveals.
All of these modes of explanation are useful, but no one is fully satisfy-
ing. Preferring eclecticism to reductionism, I have sought to incorporate a
variety of models into a framework that depicts Spain’s empire in North
America as one side of a many-sided frontier. The notion of the frontier as
a line representing the inexorable “advance of civilization into the wilder-
ness” may still hold sway in the popular imagination, but serious students
no longer see frontiers in such ethnocentric terms. Frontiers have at least
two sides. Expanding frontiers inevitably edge onto someone else’s fron-
tier. Today we see frontiers as zones rather than lines—zones where the
cultures of the invader and of the invaded contend with one another and
with their physical environment to produce a dynamic that is unique to
time and place.
As such, frontiers represent both place and process, linked inextricably. The
Spanish frontier in North America, for example, waxed and waned with the
fortunes of empire, the expansiveness of Spain’s own claims, and the assertive-
ness of its opponents, both European and Native American. This process of
expansion and contraction gave shape to the place that Spain regarded as its
North American frontier—or, perhaps more accurately, the distinctive places
that Spain regarded as its multiple North American frontiers. Expansion and

9
 introduction

contraction occurred at different rates, of course, so that one Spanish fron-

tier zone might contract even as another expanded.
Within Spain’s shifting frontier zones in North America several other
processes worked at differing rates and exerted diverse ranges and depths of
influence. Perhaps the broadest, yet most shallow, range of Spain’s influence
was its claim to much of the continent—a geopolitical frontier of the imag-
ination that existed as an abstraction on Spanish maps and in documents,
but that had little actual impact on Native Americans or rival European
powers. To give substance to its geopolitical claims, Spain occupied territory
by planting settlements that became the centers of spheres of Iberian fron-
tier influence. Those settlements exerted varying ranges and depths of in-
fluence on native peoples. Indians who lived close to Spanish settlers, for
example, usually found their lifeways altered substantially, as Navajos did
when they began to raise European-introduced sheep and to weave wool
into textiles. Natives who lived so far from Spanish settlements that they
never saw a Spaniard still felt the transformative power of European culture,
as they obtained European curiosities such as metal tools and coins, cloth-
ing, horses, and watermelon and peach seeds through trade with Indian
intermediaries.
In contrast to the Anglo-American frontier in North America, which
largely excluded natives, Spain sought to include natives within its new world
societies. Thus, Spanish missionaries labored to win the hearts and minds of
Indians in what might be defined as a spiritual or cultural frontier—a frontier
that some natives resisted with a fervor that matched the missionaries’ zeal to
convert them. Natives who declined to submit passively or who resisted mil-
itarily often found themselves caught up in another zone of Spanish frontier
influence. Along a wide-ranging military frontier, soldiers and soldier-settlers
pounded some natives into submission and tried to hold others at bay
through fear and intimidation.
Spaniards, of course, were not alone in contending with natives for con-
trol of North America and its peoples. On the North American frontiers of
European empires, France, England, the United States, and Russia vied with
Spain and with one another as well as with Native Americans.
These overlapping zones of political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual,
military, and imperial influence constitute the main subjects of the chapters
that follow. Most of the chapters are held together by the themes of con-

10
 introduction

tention and transformation. Contention for power and resources is, of

course, part of an ongoing struggle between classes, cultures, races, and gen-
ders within established societies. In frontier zones, however, where peoples
of different polities, economies, and cultures come into contact, transfrontier
contention for hegemony can have powerful transformative effects.
In frontier zones, contention occurs at two interrelated levels. First, fron-
tiersmen from both the societies of the invader and the invaded continue
their intramural contention. Along frontiers, new opportunities for spoils
often intensify these internal struggles for power and, in the case of state so-
cieties, the weak moderating influence of distant central governments also
permits intramural contention to escalate unchecked. Second, intermural
contention, unique to societies that face one another along frontiers, gives
rise to cultural conflict and cultural exchange. Conflict and exchange across
frontier societies can take place in a variety of ways that might simultane-
ously include accommodation, acculturation, assimilation, syncretism, and
resistance. But whatever form conflict and exchange might take, be it bicul-
turalism, a new synthesis, or the eradication of one culture by another, the
old orders are transformed, and new orders arise out of the maelstrom of
contention.
It is the power of frontiers to transform cultures that gives them special
interest. In the case of the United States, the transformative power of the
Anglo-American frontier has been regarded by many historians as so pro-
found that it not only altered the culture of frontier folk, but also transformed
America’s national character and institutions. In other societies historians
have made no such claims for their frontiers. It does appear to be universally
true, however, that at those edges where cultures come in contact, friction and
cross-fertilization transform local peoples and institutions, giving rise to trans-
frontier regions with distinctive cultures, politics, economic arrangements, and
social networks that set them apart from their respective metropolises. “Hu-
man populations,” anthropologist Eric Wolf has argued, “construct their cul-
tures in interaction with one another, and not in isolation.”
The Spanish frontier cannot be understood apart from its non-Spanish
neighbors who influenced it in countless ways. At the most basic level, for
example, the character of indigenous societies determined which Spanish
institutions would flourish and which would wither. Where Spaniards en-
countered sedentary peoples, they could extract labor to support civilian

11
 introduction

settlements. Where Spaniards encountered resistant nomads, forts with paid

soldiers often became the dominant institution. Native peoples, then, must
be understood as more than a mere challenge to Spaniards, as an earlier gen-
eration of historians suggested. Thus, even a book such as mine, which at-
tempts to illuminate the Spanish experience, must include Indians, whose
societies and cultures Spaniards transformed, but who, in turn, transformed
the frontier societies and cultures of the Spaniards.

12
 1
Worlds Apart

Give the natives to understand that there is a God in heaven

and the Emperor on the earth to command and govern it,
to whom all have to be subjected and to serve.
—Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza
to fray Marcos de Niza, 1538

They wore coats of iron, and warbonnets of metal, and carried

for weapons short canes that spit fire and made thunder. . . . these black,
curl-bearded people drove our ancients about like slave creatures.
—Zuni tradition

At no time in history has there been such a significant degree

of culture contact between peoples of completely distinct traditions.
—George Foster, 1960

Early in the summer of 1540 a group of young Spanish adventurers, mounted

on horseback, approached the Zuni village of Hawikku in what is today

13
 wor lds apart

western New Mexico. Led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a thirty-year-

old nobleman from the Spanish university town of Salamanca, the Spaniards
had traveled for six months to reach this barren and forbidding land of brilliant
skies, broad vistas, and sharp-edged red-rock mesas. Coronado had moved
ahead of the main body of his army with a small group of mounted men, num-
bering little more than one hundred. Although it was summer, some of
Coronado’s men feared Indian arrows more than oppressive heat and wore
protective coats of chain mail or thick buckskin. Coronado himself sported a
plumed helmet and a suit of gilded armor that dazzled the eyes when it caught
the rays of the sun.
The Spaniards had traveled long and hard. They had come through a
stretch of uninhabited country, and several men had died of hunger and
thirst. “I thought we all should die of starvation if we had to wait another
day,” Coronado later recalled. But as the Spaniards made their way along the
narrow plain of the Zuni River, they expected to be rewarded for their suf-
fering by the sight of a splendid city—one of seven cities of a rich province
that Indian informants had called Cíbola. Instead, they saw the sun-baked
mud-brick walls of a modest town of multistory apartments, whose inhabi-
tants displayed none of the gold, silver, or jewels that symbolized wealth to
the Spaniards.
Unlike the Spaniards, the Zunis were dressed for the season. Coronado
noted that “most of them are entirely naked except for the covering of their
privy parts.” Only able-bodied men remained at Cíbola. Women, young-
sters, and the elderly had been sent away, for the Zunis did not intend to al-
low Coronado’s party to enter, much less provide the food and shelter their
visitors desperately needed. Coronado’s arrival had not surprised the Indi-
ans. Their scouts had followed the strangers’ movements. Even before Coro-
nado reached the outskirts of Hawikku, Zunis had attempted an ambush.
When that failed, Zunis sought supernatural assistance. With sacred golden
cornmeal, their warriors drew lines on the ground, warning the intruders not
to pass beyond them.
While the Zunis waited to see if sacred cornmeal would turn back the un-
welcome strangers, the Spaniards also appealed to metaphysical sources for
help. Through an interpreter, probably a Pima Indian, Coronado assured the
Zunis that he had come on a holy mission. The Spaniards read aloud a state-
ment that summarized Spanish theology, explaining that Spain’s monarchs

14
 wor lds apart

had received temporal powers from a deity through one they called pope.
Their monarch required them to communicate this requerimiento, or notifi-
cation, to natives throughout the New World, and on occasion Spaniards
followed the letter if not the spirit of the law by reading it in Spanish to In-
dians who did not speak or understand their tongue. The requerimiento de-
manded that Native Americans accept the dominion of the Spanish Crown
and embrace Christianity. If Indians resisted, it warned, their lands would be
taken from them, and they would be killed or enslaved. Although learned
men in Spain had written the requerimiento and a notary probably attested to
its reading at Hawikku, as the law required, the document failed to win the
Zunis’ obedience.
Instead of submitting, Zunis fired arrows at the Spaniards. Coronado
responded with orders to attack, crying out as an incantation the name of
St. James—Santiago! In the bloody battle that followed, Zunis took several
Spanish lives, and Coronado himself almost perished. Nonetheless, armed
with guns and steel swords, Spaniards fought their way into the natives’

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

4. The Cíbola that Coronado stormed was the Zuni pueblo of Hawikku
as depicted in 1920 following an archaeological excavation. Courtesy, Museum
of New Mexico, neg. no. 146086.

15
 wor lds apart

homes within an hour. The vanquished defenders fled, leaving behind store-
houses of corn, beans, turkeys, and salt, to the delight of their hungry visitors.
Why the Zunis refused to permit Coronado’s band to enter Hawikku may
never be fully understood, but it seems likely they already knew enough
about the metal-clad, mounted strangers to reject them. Like natives through-
out northwestern Mexico, Zunis must have heard reports of Spanish slave
hunters operating to the south. Then, too, a small Spanish scouting party
headed by a black former slave, Esteban, had reached Zuni the year before
Coronado arrived. The Zunis killed the black man, they explained to Coro-
nado, because of liberties he had taken with their women. The natives, then,
had ample reason to rebuff the overtures of the bizarrely costumed, bearded
interlopers. Their resolve to keep the Spaniards out, however, may have been
strengthened by the timing of Coronado’s visit. He arrived during the cul-
mination of the Zuni sacred summer ceremonies. His presence threatened to
interrupt the return of Zuni pilgrims from the sacred lake and thus endanger
the prospects for abundant summer rains and a good harvest.
Whatever the reason for Zuni resistance, one essential fact seems clear:
Nothing in either group’s previous experience had prepared them to compre-
hend the other. Coronado’s translators could convert words from one language
to another, but they could not convey the deepest meaning of the requerimiento
to the Zunis. Nor could Zunis convey to the Spaniards the meaning of lines of
sacred cornmeal or the significance of their summer ceremonies. The two peo-
ples who met at Hawikku in 1540 came from different worlds.

The worlds of the sixteenth-century Spaniards and their contemporaries

in North America differed profoundly, but neither Iberians nor native North
Americans can be characterized easily because neither constituted a uniform
group. Physically, Amerindians were relatively homogeneous, most of them
having descended from waves of hunter-gatherers who had crossed the
Bering Strait from Asia. By the time Europeans first encountered them,
however, even those natives who appeared to outsiders as a single tribe, such
as the peoples whom the Spaniards called Pueblos, varied considerably from
town to town.
Beyond the Zuni towns, Coronado met many more natives who lived in
compact communities of esplanades, courtyards, and apartment houses, some

16
 wor lds apart

rising to three and four stories. Spaniards called these prosperous farmers
Pueblos because in contrast to their nomadic neighbors they lived in towns,
or pueblos. No central government linked the autonomous towns of the
Pueblos, but they seemed to the earliest Spanish visitors to be one people.
They grew maize, beans, cotton, and gourds in irrigated fields, dressed in
cotton blankets and animal skins, and appeared to Coronado’s men to have
“the same ceremonies and customs.” Despite superficial similarities, signifi-
cant differences in Pueblo religious practices and in political, social, and
family organization probably existed then, as they do now. Indeed, Pueblos
spoke and still speak several mutually unintelligible languages, and the
Pueblos offer only one example of the diversity of North American Indians.
The variety of languages, religions, and customs of North American Indi-
ans in the sixteenth century appears to have been greater than that of their Eu-
ropean contemporaries. Some Indians lived in large urban centers and others
in family homesteads, and their social structures, governments, economies, re-
ligious beliefs, technologies, histories, and traditions ranged across a wide
spectrum. Native Americans engaged in a variety of economic activities, from
hunting, fishing, and gathering to irrigating fields and manufacturing tools
and wares. Native trading networks ranged from the local level to the
transcontinental. Yumas on the Colorado River, for example, knew of Coron-
ado’s arrival at Cíbola, nearly four hundred miles to the east, soon after the
event, and Coronado’s contemporary in the Mississippi valley, Hernando de
Soto, met Indians who owned turquoise that came from the direction of the
sunset—from the lands of the Pueblos.
Notwithstanding the great variety of their cultures, it appears that many
North American Indians held certain beliefs in common, some of which set
them apart from Europeans in general and Spaniards in particular. Com-
pared to Spaniards, for example, most North American Indian people inter-
acted more intimately with the natural world, placed less emphasis on the
accumulation of surpluses of food and other goods, and tended to regard the
users of land as possessing greater rights than the nominal owners of land.
At the time of Coronado’s arrival, natives throughout North America lived
in small units, none of which seems to have approached in size what Europe-
ans would come to call a state. Larger political or economic units existed in
Arizona and New Mexico centuries before Coronado’s arrival, but scholars
know these so-called Anazasi and Hohokam peoples very imperfectly, largely

17
 wor lds apart

through physical remains of their great urban centers and cliff dwellings
(such as the ruins known today as Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Casa
Grande) and through artifacts unearthed and interpreted by archaeologists.
The same may be said of the great chiefdoms of what archaeologists call the
Mississippian tradition, which reached its apogee throughout southeastern
America about 1200 to 1450 AD.
The Native American cultures the Spaniards encountered were not only
smaller than states but also lacked some of the institutions of the emerging
states of Europe, especially those designed to enforce social order: armies,
police, and bureaucracies. As the historian Frederick Hoxie has written,
Amerindian communities were not “smaller, backward versions of European
villages,” but rather unique, non-Western cultures “rooted in the obligations
of kinship rather than the appeal of political ideology.” Beyond this, few
generalizations about Native Americans at the time of Coronado’s visit have
value; it is more useful to consider individual tribes than to speak inaccu-
rately of Indians in the aggregate.

In contrast to the cultures of Native Americans, which had grown in-

creasingly diverse since their ancestors crossed the Bering Strait, the cultures
of the various peoples who inhabited the Iberian peninsula had begun to
amalgamate by the sixteenth century. Unlike Native Americans, who proba-
bly had a common group of ancestors, the peoples of Iberia descended from
a wide variety of tribes and genetic strains from outside the peninsula, in-
cluding Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Franks, Jews, and Mus-
lims. Indeed, even these broad categories included still smaller tribes and
bands, each with its discrete culture.
Like North American Indians in the early sixteenth century, Spaniards
were not a unified people. The nation-state that came to be called Spain had
consisted of many tribes organized into kingdoms, such as Castile and Cat-
alonia, which spoke distinct languages. These realms vied with one another
for power, and factions within them fought ruinous civil wars. In 1469, the
marriage of Queen Isabel of Castile to Prince Fernando of Aragón had
brought two powerful kingdoms together in a condominium that laid the
foundations of the modern Spanish state. Under Isabel and Fernando the
realms that would become Spain moved toward greater political and cultural

18
 wor lds apart

homogeneity, although they never fully achieved it. Because Castile’s mon-
archs took the position that the Spanish pope, Alexander VI, gave the New
World to Castile in the celebrated papal donations of 1493, its monarchs be-
lieved themselves to have exclusive sovereignty over the newly discovered
lands (excepting the east coast of South America, which they inadvertently
gave to Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494).
Spain remained politically disunited and culturally heterogeneous in the
sixteenth century, but by 1492 its peoples possessed greater organizational
unity and common hierarchical and religious values than did the peoples of
North America. This relative political and cultural unity worked to Spain’s ad-
vantage when its seafaring sons discovered another world. In North America,
where decision making in most native societies depended on what one anthro-
pologist has described as “a slow process of achieving consensus,” Spaniards
and other Europeans enjoyed an advantage. Unencumbered by democratic
restraints, Spanish leaders had authority to take quick, concerted action.
So, too, did Spaniards’ prior experience with “infidels” from North Africa
work to their benefit in the New World. A prolonged struggle to reconquer
the Iberian peninsula from Muslim invaders profoundly influenced Spanish
values and institutions, making Spaniards uniquely suited among European
nations to conquer, plunder, and administer the New World. The reconquest,
or reconquista, of Iberia began soon after the Muslim invasion of 711; it did not
end until 1492, when the combined forces of Isabel and Fernando entered the
Alhambra in triumph as the last Moorish kingdom, Granada, capitulated.
The Spanish struggle to control the New World and its peoples became, in
effect, an extension of the reconquista, a moral crusade to spread Spanish cul-
ture and Catholicism to pagans in all parts of the Americas. Optimism born
of religious zeal, ignorance, and intolerance gave Spain’s onward-moving
Christian soldiers another powerful advantage in their encounters with Na-
tive Americans. Spaniards believed in a supreme being who favored them,
and they often explained their successes as well as their failures as manifesta-
tions of their god’s will. Was it not providential, for example, that Spaniards
discovered America, with its fresh supply of infidels, in the same year they
completed the long struggle against the Muslims in Iberia?
With or without the reconquista, Spaniards of the early sixteenth century
would have believed that Providence sided with them. They knew that persons
radically unlike themselves, who neither held Christian beliefs nor lived like

19
 wor lds apart

Christians, were inferior human beings, perhaps even bestial, deserving of

enslavement or whatever other ills might befall them. Like other Christians,
Spaniards understood that their god had given them “dominion” over all
creatures on the earth, including these infidels. The god of the Christians,
according to their holiest text, had ordered them to “be fruitful and multiply,
and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of
the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth.” In 1493 Pope Alexander VI asserted that he had the right,
“by the authority of the Almighty God,” to “give, grant, and assign” the New
World to Isabel and Fernando so that they might convert its inhabitants. In
a similar document, an earlier pope had cited biblical justification ( Jeremiah
I:10) for a papal donation of so-called pagan lands in Africa: “See, I have this
day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull
down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.”
Christianity thus imbued Spaniards with a powerful sense of the righ-
teousness of their aggression against those natives in North America who
threatened to block their advances. Nowhere was this clearer than in the re-
querimiento that Coronado read to the Zunis. Conquistadors had read this
summons to countless indigenous Americans since it had been drawn up in
1513. The requerimiento commanded Indians to “acknowledge the [Catholic]
Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world, and the high priest
called Pope, and in his name the king and queen [of Spain].” Those natives
who did so, the document said, would be treated well. Those who did not
were assured that “with the help of God we shall forcefully . . . make war
against you . . . take you and your wives and your children and shall make
slaves of them . . . and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can.”
More zealous than any other European power in attempting to fulfill what it
saw as its legal obligations to the natives, Spain put Indians on notice that if
they failed to obey, “the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are
your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours.”
Christian belief contrasted sharply with the religious views of many of the
natives of North America. Instead of the extraterrestrial god of the Spaniards,
who had created nature but was not in nature, the North American natives
generally believed in the interconnectedness of god and nature. Natives re-
garded spirits as residing in the natural world, not outside of it. The spiritual
world of the Zunis, for example, was and is earth-centered. Zunis believe that

20
 wor lds apart

their ancestors entered this world through a hole in the earth and that after
death a Zuni’s spirit continues to reside in the world, in clouds or other natu-
ral phenomena depending on the role the deceased played while he walked
the path of life. Instead of offering prayers and sacrifices to a deity in a distant
heaven, as Christians do, Zunis direct their prayers and offerings toward the
natural world. They seek to maintain harmony with earth, sky, animals, and
plants, all of which are regarded as living beings capable of taking on several
forms. Coronado was close to the mark when he noted that the Zunis “wor-
ship water, because they say that it makes the maize grow and sustains their
life.” Like other North American Indians, Zunis had apparently received no
divinely inspired message to subdue the earth.
Spaniards had material as well as spiritual motives to subdue the earth. Like
other Europeans, Spaniards placed high value on gold and silver and were will-
ing to suffer extraordinary hardships to obtain these minerals. Hernán Cortés
exaggerated only slightly when he sent a message to Moctezuma saying that
the Spaniards had a disease of the heart that only gold could cure. In contrast,
gold and silver held little intrinsic value for most North American Indians un-
til they discovered the value of those metals to Europeans. “These Indians do
not covet riches,” one seventeenth-century observer wrote of Indians of
Florida, “nor do they esteem silver or gold.”
For Spaniards, the accumulation of gold and silver was not merely a means
to an end, but an end in itself. Thus, men with means to live comfortably
gambled all they had in order to acquire more, and the Spanish Crown en-
couraged their risk taking. Free enterprise had fueled Castile’s reconquest of
the Muslims and had set precedents that would carry over to the New World.
In fighting the Muslims the king of Castile licensed an entrepreneur, or ade-
lantado (what the English would later call a proprietor), to push forward the
frontiers of Christianity. These military chieftains risked their own capital,
knowing that success would bring titles of nobility, land, broad governmental
powers over the conquered domain, and the right to part of the spoils of war.
Thus, even before the discovery of America, a peculiarly Spanish ethos
had developed that would enable the future conquerors of America, most
of them ambitious and predatory young men like those who accompanied
Coronado, to serve God, country, and themselves at the same time. These
goals did not seem contradictory. On the contrary, if Spaniards served their
god well, it seemed only right that he should reward them. Bernal Díaz, a

21
 wor lds apart

soldier who fought in the conquest of Mexico, explained the matter clearly:
Spaniards had left Europe “to serve God and his Majesty, to give light to
those who were in the darkness and to grow rich as all men desire to do.”
In addition to this ethos, hardened in the crucible of the reconquest of
Iberia, the conquistadors brought to the New World overheated imagina-
tions, fired by the popular literature of their day—romantic novels posing
as history. Literate and illiterate alike knew the stories contained in these
widely circulated romances. The novels extolled knight-errantry in exotic
lands, where brave men found wealth and glory. They exalted courage, sto-
icism, and heroism and glorified the warrior as the ideal of Spanish man-
hood. Manifestly works of fiction, these romances came to be regarded as
fact by their ordinary readers or listeners.
Like that of his Spanish contemporaries, Coronado’s view of reality had
been shaped by literature and lore. When reports reached Mexico in the late
1530s of seven cities to the north, Coronado abandoned the comforts of home
and position to venture into the unexplored interior of North America. There
perhaps he would find the seven Cities of Antilia, said to have been founded
by seven Portuguese bishops who had fled across the Atlantic during the
Muslim invasion of Iberia. Instead, he found the Zunis. Spaniards like Coro-
nado projected their fantasies onto an unfamiliar world, where they became
superimposed on the garbled translations of stories they heard from Indians.
But the dreams of Coronado and his fellow conquistadors floated over
bedrock of reality. Coronado knew of the extraordinary discoveries of
Cortés and Pizarro, where fact seemed more fantastic than fiction. In this
new world, dreams had come true. It seemed reasonable to expect that a
new Mexico awaited discovery over the next horizon.
In short, fact and fantasy intertwined to shape the minds and motives of
those Iberians who came to the New World in the first decades after its dis-
covery. Today’s conventional wisdom holds that Indians lived in a world of
myth and legend while Europeans inhabited a world of rationality and well-
grounded religious faith. In truth, each world contained elements of the
mythic and the rational.

The coming together of Spaniards and Indians in North America repre-

sented more than an encounter of peoples with differing values and institu-

22
 wor lds apart

tions. Spaniards arrived in the New World with a variety of practical advan-
tages that enabled them to turn many of their dreams into realities. One ad-
vantage was technology. Europeans living in an age of iron and steel entered
a hemisphere where technology remained in the Stone Age.
At the time of their first encounter with outsiders from across the sea,
Native Americans who lived in the Southeast knew how to build and navi-
gate large, swift dugout canoes that could carry people and trade goods
along coastal waters and from island to island in the Caribbean. Spaniards,
however, sailed more sophisticated craft than the natives had ever known. In
the century before the discovery of America the Europeans, with Iberians in
the vanguard, had mastered the winds. Innovations in reckoning latitude,
shipbuilding, and rigging had made Spanish vessels suitable for sailing be-
yond the continental shelf. No matter how cramped, crowded, filthy, or
vermin-infested their vessels, and how much the uncomfortable passengers
and often-mutinous mariners suffered from spoiled food, acrid water, illness,
and monotony, Spaniards could cross the Atlantic void and return again to
Spain. The disparity between European and Indian mastery of the seas de-
termined that their encounters would take place in the New World rather
than the Old.
Carried to American shores by the new technologies and navigational know-
how, Spaniards found that the technological superiority of their weaponry—
steel swords, guns, and explosives—gave them tactical and psychological
advantages that helped them defeat overwhelming numbers of natives on their
home ground. Weapons, for example, apparently gave Coronado the edge
when he took Hawikku despite the Indians’ defensive position.
Europeans gained further advantages from animals, plants, and microbes
that were commonplace in the Old World but not previously known in the
New. Columbus’s voyage marked the beginning of a lengthy and profound
biological exchange between the two worlds. Although the exchange went
both ways, it initially facilitated the European domination of North America.
North American natives, for example, had only one domesticated four-
legged animal, the dog. Whatever their virtues as man’s best friend, dogs are
inferior sources of food and leather and less effective beasts of burden than
two European domestic quadrupeds, horses and cattle. Having no competi-
tors or predators in the new American environment, some European ani-
mals flourished and played a vital role in the military campaigns of their

23
 wor lds apart

Spanish masters. Herds of pigs and cattle provided a mobile larder for the
Spanish invaders. Horses, some of them trained for war, increased the range
and speed of the conquistadors’ movement on land, just as their vessels in-
creased their mobility on the water, and also gave Spaniards a psychological
advantage. “The most essential thing in new lands is horses,” one of Coron-
ado’s soldiers wrote upon returning to Mexico. “They instill the greatest fear
in the enemy and make the Indians respect the leaders of the army.” Simi-
larly, greyhounds, unknown in America but long trained by Europeans for
hunting and warfare, guarded the Spaniards’ camps, tore limbs from Indian
adversaries, and frightened others into submission.
Invisible organisms, unknown in the western hemisphere before the
1500s, took passage on Spanish ships and committed silent carnage. Ameri-
can Indians certainly did not live free of illness before the arrival of Europe-
ans. In southwestern America, for example, they suffered the ravages of
parasites, tuberculosis, and dental pathology. Contagious “crowd” diseases
endemic to Europe, however, seem to have been unknown in the western
hemisphere—including smallpox, measles, diphtheria, trachoma, whooping

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

5. Pictograph of Spaniards on horseback in Cañón del Muerto, Arizona.

Photograph by Helga Teiwes. Courtesy, Arizona State Museum,
University of Arizona, neg. no. 28883.

24
 wor lds apart

cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, amoebic
dysentery, and influenza. These became epidemic killers in the New World,
where natives had no prior exposure and therefore had acquired no immuni-
ties against them.
Disease not only took Indian lives, but also demoralized grieving sur-
vivors and weakened their resolve to resist, if not to live. The same diseases
raised the spirits of Europeans and strengthened their faith in a divine prov-
idence. One of Cortés’s followers put it succinctly when he explained the fall
of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán: “When the Christians were exhausted
from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.”
Ironically, then, it may be that disease, the least visible transatlantic bag-
gage, was Spain’s most important weapon in the conquest of America. Had
diseases worked against them, Spaniards might have found North America as
impermeable as sixteenth-century West Africa, a “white man’s grave” where
indigenous diseases formed a deadly shield against encroaching Europeans
and their animals. Instead, disease in North America worked so much in the
favor of Europeans in thinning the native population that it is more accurate
to think of subsequent generations of settlers as resettlers of the continent.
Although it might be argued that disease was the single most important el-
ement in assuring the Spaniards’ quick victory over the natives, such an asser-
tion cannot be proved. In practice Spaniards took advantage of a combination
of circumstances—institutional, technological, and natural—that they believed
their god had presented to them. These circumstances became a potent mix-
ture when blended with the powerful motives of individual Spaniards who
journeyed into a new world to pursue particular religious, imperial, and per-
sonal goals. This heady mixture of motives and circumstances enabled the sons
and daughters of Iberia to penetrate a world they dimly understood and to
make a stunningly rapid series of discoveries and conquests in lands where na-
tives vastly outnumbered them. In the process, Spaniards began to transform
that new world, even as it began to transform them.

25
 2
First Encounters

I grant you permission and authority to go to discover and settle . . .

the Indians who should be in the island aforesaid, shall be allotted in
accordance with the persons [in your expedition].
—King Fernando to Ponce de León, 1512

[In Alabama] we dressed our wounds with the fat of the dead
Indians as there was no medicine left.
—Luys Hernández de Biedma to the king, 1544

[In Texas] half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us.
—Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1542

From a European perspective, intrepid explorers sailed across the Atlantic to

discover a new world. From Native American viewpoints, Europeans came
as predators. Both were correct. The western hemisphere had not existed to
Europeans until they found it, and it had taken courage and ingenuity to
cross the ocean sea. To indigenous peoples, however, it must have seemed

26
Map 1
 first encounters

inconceivable that Europeans had discovered them or had a right to push

into their lands and claim sovereignty over them.
Whether one understands the first significant encounters between peo-
ples from the two hemispheres as discoveries or as invasions, it is clear that
those encounters were remarkably swift and pervasive. Spaniards, who
stood in the vanguard of European westward expansion, penetrated some
of the most remote corners of the hemisphere within a half century of
Columbus’s first landing. As Spaniards moved into lands almost invariably
occupied by natives, the first meetings between discoverer and discovered
were brutal.

Before all else, the geographic contours of the major Caribbean islands
quickly became known to Spanish mariners. Spaniards claimed sovereignty
over the large native populations of Española, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Ja-
maica, but within a few decades Spain controlled empty islands. Caribs and
Arawaks died in appalling numbers, their way of life severely altered by the
Spanish invaders, their bodies wracked by strange diseases, and some killed
outright by Spanish steel. Soon after invading these islands, then, Spaniards
needed to find additional lands with fresh sources of Indian laborers for the
mines and plantations. Even though the Spanish Crown forbade the taking
of Indian captives without provocation, Spaniards went in search of Indians
to enslave, and the search led them to make further discoveries. So, too, did
their continuing search for Asia, which had eluded Columbus.
The Gulf of Mexico remained “a hidden sea,” in the phrase of one histo-
rian, until 1508, when Spanish navigators threaded through the Greater An-
tilles in search of richer Asiatic islands. Beyond Cuba, however, lay neither
the Spice Islands nor the Orient. Instead, the contours of another continent
gradually emerged. The first part of the North American coast to reveal it-
self to Spanish mariners was Florida, which they initially believed formed
part of Asia.
The first recorded visit to Florida was that of Juan Ponce de León, a vet-
eran of Columbus’s second voyage to America (in 1493) and a former gover-
nor of Puerto Rico, whose conquest he had spearheaded in 1508. With its
abundant placer gold and Indian workers, Puerto Rico had made Ponce one
of the richest men in the Caribbean and added luster to his reputation. It

28
 first encounters

had not dulled his ambition. When he lost a struggle for political control of
the island, Ponce began to look elsewhere for gold and Indian slaves and
perhaps, as the often-told story has it, also sought a fountain of youth. The
idea of such a fabulous fountain, located on an enchanted island, was deeply
rooted in the lore and imagery of medieval Europe. In March 1513 Ponce
sailed northwest from Puerto Rico and made landfall far up the Atlantic
coast of Florida, perhaps near present Daytona Beach. Going ashore on
Easter Sunday, he named the “island” of Florida for that day, the Pascua
Florida. Like European explorers who followed him in North America,
Ponce took possession of the land for his sovereign in a stylized ceremony.
Natives would surely reject such presumption, but until the late eighteenth
century most European nations recognized these rituals of possession as es-
tablishing legal validity of claims to sovereignty over terra nullius—land pre-
viously unknown to Europeans. Native rulers, Europeans concluded, lacked
legitimate dominion over their lands and subjects because they were neither
Christians nor did they live according to what Christians understood as
natural law.
From Daytona Beach, Ponce’s expedition made its way south, hugging the
shore to avoid being swept northward by the Gulf Stream and rounding the
tip of the Florida peninsula through the dangerous Florida Keys, sailed up
the gulf coast, and then returned to Puerto Rico. Although Ais and Calusa
Indians attacked his party, Florida impressed him. Authorized by the Span-
ish Crown to settle the new island of Florida, Ponce de León returned in
1521 on what proved to be a fatal voyage. Struck by a Calusa arrow, Ponce re-
treated to Cuba, where he died within a few days. He went to his painful
death still believing that Florida was an island. Word had not reached him
that a recent expedition had proved otherwise.
Alonso Álvarez de Pineda had set out from Jamaica in early 1519, sailed
to the gulf side of the Florida peninsula, then westward along the shallow
waters of the unexplored northern shores of the gulf. Along the way Álvarez
noted several large rivers, including the Mississippi, which he named the
Espíritu Santo—the River of the Holy Spirit—because he saw it during the
feast of Pentecost. It remained the Espíritu Santo on early maps, having
been discovered by Álvarez and not by the later expeditions of Hernando
de Soto or the Sieur de La Salle, as is commonly believed. Álvarez became
the first European known to see coastal areas of western Florida, Alabama,

29
 first encounters

6. Based on the voyage of Alonso Álvarez de Pineda in 1519 and perhaps drawn
by Pineda himself, this is the first map to show the entire Gulf of Mexico,
with the Mississippi River (the Espíritu Santo) flowing into the gulf and
Florida attached firmly to the mainland. From a tracing of the original
in the Archivo General de Indias, relettered for greater legibility.
Courtesy, Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio.

Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. He demonstrated that Florida was a

peninsula, not an island, and that no passage to India threaded its way out
of the gulf.

Meanwhile, Spanish mariners had also begun to probe the Atlantic coast
of North America. As early as 1500 Spaniards knew the outline of the conti-
nent north of present New England as a result of English exploration. It ap-
pears, however, that no European visited the coast between Maine and
Florida until Spanish slave hunters from the Antilles began to probe the area

30
 first encounters

illegally, beginning in 1514, if not before. Behind these expeditions stood the
money and influence of several prominent residents of Española, who justi-
fied the enslaving of Indians on the grounds that they were cannibals and
sodomites.
One of these well-to-do figures, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a high-
ranking government official and sugar planter from a prominent family in
Toledo, returned to Spain in 1521 to seek the Crown’s permission to colonize
the new land. Ayllón, who had not visited the North American coast him-
self, took with him a remarkable witness, a native captured at Winyah Bay in
1521 on a stretch of coast Spaniards called Chicora. The captive, known to
Spaniards as Francisco de Chicora, captivated the Spanish court, telling fab-
ulous stories that may have helped persuade Ayllón that South Carolina
was, if not a land of milk and honey, at least a land of almonds, olives, and
figs—a new Andalusia. In 1523 Ayllón received a license to settle, at his
own expense, a vast stretch of the Atlantic coast over which he, as adelan-
tado, would have a temporary monopoly. Ayllón mortgaged his fortune to
recruit and supply some six hundred colonists, including women and chil-
dren. When his six vessels set out from Española for Chicora in 1526, they
also carried some unwilling passengers—black slaves and Indians seized on
previous expeditions, who, along with Francisco de Chicora, were to serve as
interpreters.
Ayllón’s fleet made landfall in the area of Winyah Bay and the South San-
tee River in present South Carolina. Home again, Francisco de Chicora and
other Indian interpreters fled into the swamplands, revealing little apprecia-
tion for the supposed benefits of European civilization. This part of Chicora,
Ayllón quickly discovered, was too thinly populated to supply Indian labor,
and its acidic soils were uncongenial for pasturage and farming. Ayllón
abandoned the site and sent his ships down the coast while he and a small
party of horsemen rode south along the coastal Indian trails. The two parties
reunited on Sapelo Sound in present Georgia, where Ayllón established the
town of San Miguel de Gualdape, the first Spanish settlement in what is
now the United States.
Ayllón had come to stay. His colonists built houses and a church among
Indians whom the Spaniards called Guales, but before winter’s end a series
of misfortunes ended the life of the colony. Only a fourth of the colonists re-
turned to Española alive, and Ayllón was not among them. Out of this

31
 first encounters

tragedy, however, came knowledge of the middle latitudes of the Atlantic

coast and the mirage of a new Andalusia, which would rise again on the At-
lantic horizon to beguile a later generation of Europeans.
Meanwhile, far to the north of Chicora still more of the Atlantic coast
came into view. In September 1524 Estevâo Gomes, a Portuguese pilot in
Spain’s employ, sailed directly from Spain to America in search of the elusive
passage to Asia. Gomes cruised an enormous stretch of the Atlantic coast of
North America in a single vessel, making an especially close survey of the
coast between either Narragansett Bay or Buzzard’s Bay and Cape Breton.
In addition to coasting the shoreline of what would become New England,
Gomes sailed up the Penobscot River, in present Maine, to the head of nav-
igation at today’s Bangor. He took note of such landmarks as the “Río de
San Antonio,” which came to be called the Merrimac River, and “Cabo de
las Arenas,” known today as Cape Cod, and he also took slaves, perhaps
Algonquian speakers.
As a contributor to cartography, Gomes achieved little more than reveal-
ing Cape Cod to European mapmakers. The Italian mariner Giovanni da
Verrazzano, sailing in the service of Francis I, went out in 1524–25, just ahead
of Gomes, and crafted what one historian has termed “the first coherent nar-
ratives and maps of the east coast from Florida to Cape Breton.” Nonethe-
less, Gomes and other mariners sailing for Spain strengthened its claim to
the Atlantic coast by right of discovery. This was suggested on an exquisite
manuscript map of 1529 by Diego Ribero, which shows the mid-Atlantic
north of Florida as the “Land of Ayllon” and the New England states as the
“Land of Estevâ [sic] Gomez.”
Yet the woodlands and their inhabitants along the cold waters of the
Atlantic held little attraction for a people who had found the riches of the
Aztecs and the Incas in warmer latitudes. As Peter Martyr, the Italian hu-
manist in the Spanish court of Carlos I and an acquaintance of Ayllón’s,
wrote, “What need have we of what is found everywhere in Europe? It is to-
wards the south, not towards the frozen north, that those who seek their for-
tune should bend their way.”

At the same time that Spaniards explored the Atlantic coast of North
America, some of their countrymen investigated the Pacific coast. Crossing

32
 first encounters

7. Fragment of the Diego Ribero manuscript map of the world, 1529. Courtesy,
the Vatican Library, which holds the original, and the Newberry Library, Chicago.

the isthmus in present Panama in 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa was appar-
ently the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the shores of the New
World (although Asian mariners almost certainly had visited America
before Columbus). Less than a decade after Balboa sighted the Pacific,
Spaniards sailed across it. In 1522, Sebastián Elcano completed the epic voy-
age around the world begun by Ferdinand Magellan, who had been killed by
natives in the Philippines. Meanwhile, in 1519 Hernán Cortés began the epic
march into Mexico that would quickly take him to the Pacific.
In 1522, within a year of the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán,
Cortés began the slow, costly work of constructing ships at the Pacific port
of Zacatula, north of present Acapulco. In 1523 the project caught the atten-
tion of Carlos V, who ordered Cortés to dispatch his ships to search for a
strait through North America, which blocked the way to the Orient. With

33
 first encounters

characteristic bravado Cortés announced to the king that he would not only
explore the Pacific, but would send a fleet along the gulf coast to Florida and
up the Atlantic to Newfoundland. A strait, “if it exists,” could not elude this
two-pronged quest, Cortés told the king, but at the very least “many great
and rich lands must surely be discovered.”
More pressing business diverted Cortés, but in 1533 one of his pilots, Fortún
Jiménez, sailed into a placid bay, which he named La Paz, on what he believed
to be an island off the west coast of New Spain. In actuality, he had discovered
the tip of the nearly eight-hundred-mile-long Baja California peninsula. Per-
haps it was Jiménez who gave California its name—a name taken from a pop-
ular tale of chivalry, Las Sergas de Esplandián by García Ordóñez de Montalvo.
This story told of an island called California, located “at the right hand of the
Indies.” There, Amazon-like women entertained men once a year in order to
engage in a ritual designed to perpetuate the human race.
Not until 1539 did another mariner working for Cortés, Francisco de
Ulloa, sail to the head of the Gulf of California and discover that Baja Califor-
nia was actually a peninsula. The first to follow the peninsula’s Pacific coast
to what is today the United States, however, was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo,
who sailed in the employ of Cortés’s rival, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the
highest-ranking Spanish official in the New World. Cabrillo set out in 1542
with instructions to explore the Pacific coast and then continue to China.
On September 28, 1542, Cabrillo touched land in the magnificent harbor of
San Diego, an act that has won him immortality as California’s discoverer.
As the Spaniards came ashore, natives fled before them, but a few who re-
mained behind conveyed through signs the remarkable news that people like
the Spaniards had passed through the interior of the country. “In the inte-
rior,” Cabrillo learned, “men like us were traveling about, bearded, clothed
and armed . . . killing many native Indians, and . . . for this reason they were
afraid.” On three more occasions, as the expedition moved northward, Cabrillo
heard similar reports.
From San Diego, Cabrillo continued to follow the coast, dropping anchor
at such places as Santa Catalina Island and San Pedro, today the principal
harbor of Los Angeles. North of Santa Barbara, beyond Point Conception,
autumn storms and heavy seas made the going slow. Cabrillo’s ships put in
on Santa Catalina Island and waited out the winter. When they left again,
they did so without their commander. Cabrillo had died shortly after the

34
 first encounters

New Year, apparently from an infection that set in when he fell on slippery
rocks and shattered a shinbone while trying to rescue some of his men from
Indian attack.
With the commander dead, leadership of the expedition fell to the chief
pilot, Bartolomé Ferrer, who pointed the three ships north beyond Cape
Mendocino to the area of the present California–Oregon boundary at 42°
latitude. There a shortage of supplies and a tempest “with a sea so high that
[the sailors] became crazed” forced him to abandon plans to continue to
China. He turned back to Mexico, having reached the high-water mark of
Spanish exploration on the Pacific in the sixteenth century.
Although Cabrillo and Ferrer had failed to locate either a strait or rich
civilizations, they did explore some twelve hundred miles of California
coastline and establish a Spanish claim to the Pacific coast of North Amer-
ica that was not challenged seriously for two and a half centuries. They also
provided evidence to Spanish cartographers that Asia and North America
were two separate continents, made exceptional navigational notes that
would be of use to later mariners, and added to the growing doubts that a
strait through North America would ever be found.

With Cabrillo’s voyage of 1542–43, just three decades after Ponce de León
discovered Florida, Spaniards had completed a remarkable reconnaissance of
North America’s coastlines. Meanwhile, Spaniards on land had kept pace
with their seafaring countrymen. The reports Cabrillo heard of “men like us”
in the interior of California were true. Members of the expedition of Fran-
cisco Vázquez de Coronado, which had set out from Mexico in 1540, reached
the Colorado River about 150 miles due east of San Diego, and word of their
presence had reached Cabrillo. On the other side of the continent, contem-
poraneous with Coronado’s foray into southwestern America, Hernando de
Soto cut a swath across the Southeast.
Fortunately for the Spaniards, the interior of North America was penetra-
ble. No deadly diseases, hostile animals, extremes of climate, or geographical
barriers stood insurmountably in their path. The interior also beckoned
powerfully. Moreover, Peru and Mexico had demonstrated that rich civiliza-
tion would be found in the interior, not along the coasts. Thus, when Alvar
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca returned from an unintentional journey across the

35
 first encounters

unexplored interior of North America in 1536, Spaniards had good reason to

believe his hints that he had found something valuable. It was his return that
set into motion the Coronado and De Soto expeditions.
In the spring of 1536, Spaniards hunting slaves in what is today the north-
western Mexican state of Sinaloa encountered Cabeza de Vaca, a white man
dressed as an Indian, traveling with an Indian retinue. They were, Cabeza de
Vaca later wrote, “dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely undressed and
in company with Indians.” So ended the odyssey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca and three companions, which had begun eight years before at Tampa
Bay, where the men formed part of a large Spanish expedition that tried and
failed to conquer Florida. Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions had
survived Indian attacks, storms, a shipwreck on the gulf coast of Texas,
hunger, and enslavement by Indians, eventually making their way south-
westerly across Texas and today’s northern Mexico to reunite with fellow
Spaniards in Sinaloa. Through happenstance the four wanderers became the
first Europeans to cross the continent north of Mesoamerica.
Cabeza de Vaca’s report of the land and its peoples, although restrained,
stirred the ambitions of the two most powerful men in Mexico, Viceroy An-
tonio de Mendoza and Hernán Cortés. Inspired in part by Cabeza de Vaca’s
reports, Cortés sent the expedition of Francisco de Ulloa to investigate
the Pacific coast in 1539. A year before Ulloa left, Viceroy Mendoza had
launched his own quiet investigation of the north, hoping to stave off Cortés
and other potential rivals. In the autumn of 1538 the viceroy put a peripatetic
Franciscan, fray Marcos de Niza, in charge of a reconnaissance, reckoning
that a small expedition led by a priest would draw little attention. To guide
fray Marcos, Mendoza turned to one of Cabeza de Vaca’s companions, a
black slave named Esteban.
Within a year fray Marcos returned to Mexico City, stirring up sensa-
tional rumors of rich kingdoms. In a written report, he claimed to have seen
a city “bigger than the city of Mexico.” The natives, the friar learned, called
this place Cíbola, perhaps from an Opata word meaning Zuni (Spaniards
later applied the word cíbolo to the curious “cattle” they found on the great
plains: the buffalo). Fray Marcos described Cíbola as just one of seven cities
in a country that appeared to be “the greatest and best of the discoveries.”
Fray Marcos did not, however, claim to have entered Cíbola. He said that he
feared he might meet the same fate as Esteban, whom he had sent ahead to

36
 first encounters

scout. Esteban had reached one of the Cíbola cities, fray Marcos said, but
the natives had killed him. Fray Marcos prudently decided to view the city
from a nearby hilltop. Some historians doubt that fray Marcos ever saw
Cíbola or even came close to it.
On the strength of fray Marcos’s reports, Viceroy Mendoza authorized
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to lead one of Spain’s most elaborate expe-
ditions into the interior of North America. With funds from a providential
marriage and a larger contribution from the viceroy, Coronado outfitted an
enormous party: over three hundred Spanish adventurers (at least three of
them women), six Franciscans, more than one thousand Indian allies, and
some fifteen hundred horses and pack animals. Most of the Spaniards who
signed up with Coronado had come to the New World recently and, like
Coronado himself, were novice conquistadors. At the head of the Francis-
cans went fray Marcos, sent to guide Coronado to the fabulous new lands.
The party traveled north over well-worn Indian trails to Hawikku, the end
of the trail for the unfortunate fray Marcos. The startling contrast between
that Zuni village, numbering perhaps one hundred families, and the great city
of his description won fray Marcos the curses of the soldiers. Coronado sent
him back to Mexico City, telling the viceroy, “He has not told the truth in a
single thing he said, but everything is the opposite of what he related, except
the name of the cities and the large stone houses.”
For Coronado there would be no turning back. After taking Hawikku by
force, Coronado made it his headquarters, then sent scouting parties out in
several directions. Pedro de Tovar led a group that headed to the northwest,
climbed the Colorado Plateau, and crossed the Painted Desert to investigate
the people called Hopis, a Shoshonean-speaking group rumored to dwell in
seven cities. Tovar found the Hopis living in splendid isolation in towns that
resembled Cíbola, nestled at the bases of windswept mesas. Word of the
Spaniards’ attack on Cíbola had preceded them, and so the Hopis refused
hospitality. As they had at Zuni, the Christian invaders invoked the aid of
Santiago and seized a pueblo.
Don Pedro returned to Cíbola bearing reports of a great river still farther
west, so Coronado dispatched another scouting party, led by one of his most
trusted lieutenants, García López de Cárdenas. Twenty days beyond the Hopi
villages, López de Cárdenas stopped. His Hopi guides had brought him to the
edge of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, near the vista known today as

37
 first encounters

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

8. Zuni, photographed circa 1890 by Ben Wittick. Courtesy, School of American

Research Collections in the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 16440.

Moran Point. There was no getting across. Impressed by the immensity of the
canyon, the Spaniards saw it as a formidable obstacle, but they appear not
to have regarded it as a place of beauty. To the sensibilities of most sixteenth-
century Europeans, unbridled wilderness held little aesthetic appeal.
While some of his lieutenants explored the lands to the west of Cíbola,
Coronado had sent others to the east. On the Rio Grande and its tributaries,
Coronado’s emissaries entered the heart of the Pueblo country, where irri-
gated fields produced food and forage in a land of little rain. Spanish scout-
ing parties explored the Rio Grande, from Taos in the north to El Paso in
the south and eastward beyond the great river to the imposing pueblo of
Pecos on the edge of the buffalo plains. Meanwhile, Coronado moved his
main army from Zuni to the Rio Grande. There, not far from Albuquerque,
he made his winter headquarters.
Coronado quickly became an unwelcome guest. Hundreds of Spaniards and
Mexican Indians, together with their ravenous livestock, strained the resources

38
 first encounters

of Pueblo farmers. The Christians took the clothes off the Pueblos’ backs and
food from their tables in the cold winter of 1540–41 and subjected them to
countless other indignities. One soldier lured an Indian away from home by
asking him to watch his horse, then returned to rape the Indian’s wife.
Spanish excesses soon provoked Pueblo resistance, which Coronado’s
men crushed. Determined to make an example of one village in order to dis-
courage still more from rebelling, García López de Cárdenas set fire to the
pueblo of Arenal. As Indians fled the smoke-filled rooms he captured them
and burned them alive at the stake. Still the Pueblos refused to submit. The
conflict did not end until spring of 1541, by which time Coronado’s forces
had destroyed perhaps as many as thirteen villages.
That spring Coronado pushed deeper into the continent, still looking for
seven cities. This time he sought a kingdom called Quivira, described to him
by a native of that land whom Coronado’s men had encountered at Pecos
Pueblo and whom they called the Turk. The Turk described Quivira as fab-
ulously wealthy, and a beguiled Coronado followed the Turk onto the High
Plains of today’s West Texas, then northeast across the panhandles of Texas
and Oklahoma before ending in frustration at a Wichita village on the
Arkansas River in central Kansas. There, Spaniards garroted the Turk, hav-
ing learned from him that Pueblos from Pecos had asked him, as Coronado
put it, to “take us to a place where we and our horses would starve to death.”
The next spring, 1542, Coronado’s expedition returned to Mexico the way
it had come, taking with it nothing more than hard-won knowledge. In New
Mexico, Coronado left behind some Indian allies and Negros, two Francis-
cans who soon became martyrs, and embittered Pueblos who would long
remember these first Spanish intruders.
In Mexico City a broken Coronado faced an official investigation of his
management of the expedition. The court exonerated him of all charges, a
decision that may have been influenced by his failed health and changed
character. “He is more fit to be governed . . . than to govern,” the presiding
judge wrote to the king. Coronado died in Mexico City in 1554, a dozen
years after returning from his failed quest. Coronado’s chief lieutenant, Gar-
cía López de Cárdenas, was less fortunate. Tried in Spain of various crimes
against Indians, he died in prison.

39
 first encounters

During the same years that Coronado explored the southwestern corner of
the continent, Hernando de Soto became the first European to penetrate the
heart of the Southeast, traveling several thousand miles through ten states in
what is today the American South. De Soto’s nine ships landed on the west
coast of Florida in late May 1539, probably at Tampa Bay, with a large number
of horses, mules, pigs, dogs, and well over six hundred Europeans. Most were
young soldiers, but at least two Spanish women and several priests were on
board. De Soto hoped to enlist Cabeza de Vaca to guide him, but Cabeza de
Vaca had declined, going instead to Paraguay, where further misadventures
awaited him.
De Soto, who had come to pillage, was a scourge upon the land. He was
more ruthless than Coronado, but he also traveled through more prosperous
and populous country than Coronado had seen and so enjoyed opportunities
for greater destruction. Along his path stretched fertile farmlands and great
urban centers of peoples who belonged to the so-called Mississippi tradi-
tion, Indians whose distant descendants we know today by such names as
Caddos and Creeks.
The linguistically diverse but culturally similar Mississippians inhabited
most of southeastern America, west to the perimeters of the dry country be-
yond the Trinity River in Texas and north to the edges of the colder climates
of the upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys. They had built the most elaborate
civilization north of Mexico, with large towns, ceremonial centers with im-
mense temple mounds, sophisticated arts and crafts, and hierarchical politi-
cal, economic, social, and religious systems. Water, more bountiful in the
Southeast than in the arid Southwest, nourished this world. Across much of
the South, the rich, well-drained soils of the floodplains of numerous rivers
and streams yielded surpluses of corn, beans, and squash to native farmers,
and dense woodlands offered abundant game, fish, nuts, fruits, and berries to
hunters and harvesters. If some of the great urban centers of the Mississippi
tradition were in decline in De Soto’s day others still functioned vigorously,
as he discovered to his delight and to his sorrow.
De Soto had brought an ambulatory larder in the form of hundreds of pigs
whose numbers increased along the march, but he regularly plundered the
natives’ food supplies, taking dried corn, squash, and beans. He had brought
twice the number of Spaniards that Coronado did, but unlike Coronado, who
imported Indian allies into North America from central Mexico and treated

40
 first encounters

them reasonably well, De Soto captured slave labor along his route. He had
worked out the plan before leaving Spain, for he brought along iron chains
and collars to link Indians into human baggage trains. Uncooperative Indians
might be put to the sword, thrown to the dogs, burned alive, or have their
hand or nose severed. Indians in De Soto’s path often resisted his incursions
by abandoning their towns and employing guerrilla tactics, but Spanish fire-
power took a terrible toll. De Soto could be weakened, but he could not be
stopped. Journeying wherever rumors of gold took them, De Soto and his
men left a trail of shattered lives, broken bodies, ravaged fields, empty store-
houses, and charred villages.
Cutting a sanguinary path northward through the Florida peninsula and
the lands of Tocobagans and various Timucuan tribes, De Soto halted near
present Tallahassee. There, among the prosperous Apalachees, he spent his
first winter in Florida. In the spring, after Apalachees burned the town that
the Spaniards had appropriated for the winter, De Soto resumed his journey.
Using Indian guides and following Indian trails, he traveled northeasterly
through central Georgia and South Carolina to a kingdom called Cofi-
tachequi, which Indians described as rich in gold, silver, and pearls.
At the principal town of Cofitachequi (located perhaps on the Wateree
River near Camden, South Carolina, where mounds still testify to an ancient
site), Indians carried a young woman provincial leader to the river’s edge on “a
litter covered with delicate white linen,” according to De Soto’s secretary. This
“Lady of Cofitachequi,” as the Spaniards called her, crossed the river in a canoe
covered with a canopy. She greeted the Spaniards with gifts of clothing and
placed a string of pearls around De Soto’s neck. The Spaniards found no gold
or silver among these impressive people, but freshwater pearls, inferior to the
saltwater variety, abounded. De Soto’s men stole pearls wherever they could
find them, looting temples and tombs. One grave yielded Spanish axes, a
rosary, and some trade beads, leading De Soto to conclude correctly that he was
“in the territory where the lawyer Lucas Vazquez de Ayllón came to his ruin.”
After pillaging nearby villages, De Soto seized his gracious hostess and
moved on toward another people who reportedly enjoyed great wealth, the
kingdom of Chiaha. The Lady of Cofitachequi managed to slip away, but
the Spaniards pushed northward without her into present North Carolina
before turning westward into the Appalachians. Mountains, De Soto knew,
had yielded the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas. Propelled on the wings

41
 first encounters

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

9. A Timucuan “queen elect,” carried to the king on a litter. Engraving

by Theodore de Bry after an original watercolor by Jacques Le Moyne, 1564.
Theodore de Bry, Historia Americae (Frankfort, 1634). Courtesy,
DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

of avarice, De Soto’s men became the first Europeans to cross the Appalachi-
ans; they crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains through Swannanoa Gap to the
French Broad River, which they followed into the Tennessee Valley. This
achievement brought no consolation. When they reached the principal set-
tlement of Chiaha, near present Dandridge, Tennessee, rumor once again
fell hard upon reality. No treasure was to be found in the lands of these
Muskoghean-speaking peoples.
Stories of wealthy kingdoms to the southwest then drew De Soto from
Tennessee down the length of present Alabama. Not far from present Selma,
Choctaw forces, led by the handsome, tall chief Tascaloosa, mauled De Soto’s
army at the stockaded town of Mabila. The Spaniards suffered heavy casual-
ties and lost horses, supplies, clothing, and booty, including a chest of pearls
hauled all the way from Cofitachequi.
At this juncture a less determined leader would have turned back, but De
Soto turned the tattered remnants of his army away from the gulf. After lead-

42
 first encounters

ing his men northerly through difficult country between the Alabama and
Tombigbee rivers, he stopped to winter at “Chicaça” near Tupelo in northeast-
ern Mississippi, some fifty miles below the Tennessee border. In March, before
the Spaniards broke camp, ancestors of the modern Chickasaws launched a
surprise attack, setting De Soto’s winter quarters afire and burning horses and
swine as well as Spaniards and their clothing, saddles, and remaining supplies.
The Chickasaws inflicted even greater losses than the Spaniards had suf-
fered at Mabila. Still De Soto pushed on, following Indian trading trails to
the “Rio Grande”—the Mississippi River. De Soto’s band became the first
land expedition to see the Mississippi, probably near Friars Point in the
northwest corner of the present state of Mississippi. The great river might
have carried De Soto’s shattered army quickly toward safety on the gulf.
Instead, he ordered his men to build barges and cross the river.
In Arkansas another harsh winter came and went. Aware, perhaps, that he
had come to the edge of the same buffalo plains where Cabeza de Vaca had
reported impoverished Indians, De Soto decided to lead a retreat to the
Mississippi, where in May 1542 he took ill and died. His diminished party,
now led by Luis de Moscoso, started overland for Mexico. For four months
they traveled westward, crossing present-day Arkansas and pushing well
into Texas, perhaps beyond present Fort Worth, until they found themselves
beyond the borders of the Mississippian corn culture and among a people
who “neither planted nor gathered anything.” With what must have been
heavy hearts, they turned back to the Mississippi River.
Over the winter of 1542–43 near today’s Natchez, they built seven sturdy
boats on the Mississippi and stocked them with animals, dried meat, fruits,
corn, and beans. The first Europeans known to sail on the Mississippi, they
reached the Gulf of Mexico despite continual harassment by natives. In Sep-
tember 1543, fifty-three days after entering the gulf, they arrived at a small
settlement near the mouth of the Pánuco River. The survivors, some three
hundred men and one young woman, a servant named Ana Mendez, repre-
sented about half of those who first landed with De Soto on the Florida coast
in 1539.

When the survivors of the De Soto expedition entered the harbor at

Pánuco in 1543, thirty years had passed since Ponce de León had first sighted

43
 first encounters

Florida. During that interval tenacious Spaniards not only coasted the At-
lantic, Pacific, and gulf seaboards of North America, but spanned the conti-
nent. These remarkable forays failed to yield a strait to Asia, the fabled cities
of Antilia, or another Mexico or Peru, but they did open new geographic
vistas. By the 1520s the broad outlines of the North American continent had
begun to appear on European maps.
Most of the details uncovered by Spain’s explorers, however, did not ap-
pear on printed charts. Two explanations seem clear. First, even the most
purposeful of those explorers who penetrated the interior of North America,
Coronado and De Soto, did not emphasize mapmaking or the systematic
acquisition of geographical knowledge. By responding to stories of treasure,
they allowed Indians to set the course of their travels. Second, eager to pro-
tect its New World discoveries from European rivals, Spain guarded the re-
ports of its explorers as state secrets. New pilots, for example, took an oath in
the name of the Holy Trinity never to alienate their charts to foreigners.
In Seville, Spanish officials recorded the results of discoveries on a master
chart, the padrón real, but prohibited its publication.
Spain succeeded remarkably well at blocking the dissemination of geo-
graphic information. Into the nineteenth century, printed maps failed to
portray accurately the interior of North America as generations of Spain’s
explorers understood it (printed foreign maps often came closer to the mark
than those printed in Spain). But Spain succeeded to a fault. By not publi-
cizing its discoveries, Spain weakened its later claims to ownership by right
of prior exploration and handicapped its own explorers. Expeditions that
sailed from Spain seem to have made good use of the geographic informa-
tion that rested in archives in Seville, but Spanish explorers who set out from
bases in North America often lacked knowledge of previous discoveries.
That Baja California was a peninsula, that New Mexico existed, and other
lesser details of geography uncovered during the initial phases of Spanish
exploration were forgotten. Thus, a new generation of Spaniards continued
to search North America for a strait to Asia, wealthy civilizations, and other
fabulous places long after the so-called age of exploration had ended.
Spaniards had swarmed over a vast portion of North America by 1543, but
they acquired little knowledge about the native North Americans them-
selves. Cabeza de Vaca may be an exception, for he lacked the means to im-
pose his will upon the natives. In order to survive he had to learn Indian

44
 first encounters

languages and adopt Indian lifeways, even when it meant eating plants, ani-
mals, and insects unfamiliar to European palates. To a remarkable degree,
Cabeza de Vaca penetrated the worlds of North American Indians and came
to understand them on their own terms. Coronado and De Soto, on the
other hand, had no reason to adapt or to learn. They brought sufficient arms,
men, and animals to impose their will. Rather than try to comprehend Indi-
ans, who interested them chiefly as a source of wealth, Coronado and De
Soto projected their own dreams upon Indians. They exploited Indian labor,
food, and know-how in unsuccessful efforts to make their dreams come true.
In the nightmares that followed, Spaniards blamed Indians for treacherously
deceiving them.
Perhaps it could not have been otherwise. These Christians of the late
Middle Ages and the early Renaissance had traveled beyond the horizons of
their intellectual experience. They had moved beyond their known geogra-
phy into worlds that did not fit their conceptions of history, theology, or the
nature of man and beast. Attempting to understand a strange new world
required mental adjustments that engaged and defied the best European
minds. Even as Spanish exploration of North America reached a crescendo
in the early 1540s, Spanish scholars had entered into a new round of inquiry
about the nature of America and its native peoples. But to incorporate
Amerindians into their schema required that Europeans either question and
revise deeply held beliefs in religious traditions such as monogenesis and
Noah and his ark, or hold fast to their assumptions. Initially, their assump-
tions prevailed.
If the early exploration of North America opened hazy vistas of a new
world to the Spaniards, it began to diminish and alter the worlds of the na-
tives. Over the course of the next several centuries, North American Indians
would adopt elements of European culture, many native peoples becoming
acculturated over time. In the initial phase of Spanish–Indian contact, how-
ever, deculturation rather than acculturation characterized the transforma-
tion of Indian cultures.
If natives learned anything of value from their contact with brutal Spanish
explorers in the first half of the sixteenth century, it was probably to distrust
them. In these first brief encounters Indians had little opportunity and per-
haps little desire to learn European folkways or acquire European material
goods—tools, weapons, or other trade items—as they would in subsequent

45
 first encounters

centuries. In pursuit of sexual pleasures, Spaniards had begun the process of

miscegenation in early sixteenth-century North America, but the numbers of
mestizos were too small to make a significant impact on Indian communities.
Horses, which would dramatically alter the lives of Plains Indians by the
eighteenth century, appear not to have remained in North America in the af-
termath of these first Spanish entradas. Among the animals introduced by the
Spaniards in the early sixteenth century, perhaps only pigs escaped in suffi-
cient numbers into the southern forests to reproduce and become a staple of
Indian diet.
Pathogens, on the other hand, followed Spain’s first explorers everywhere,
with devastating and profoundly transformative effects on some Indian com-
munities. Fragments of documentary, archaeological, and circumstantial evi-
dence suggest that the collapse of the North American population began
when Spain’s explorers introduced new diseases early in the sixteenth century.
The collapse of native populations must have begun to restructure Indian
societies, even before Europeans established permanent settlements. Disease
probably caused some natives to flee their communities, and heavy losses of
population must have led to the abandonment of those native towns that
lacked enough residents to carry on the specialized functions of urban life.
Shortages of skilled persons to make complex societies function probably led
to the simplification of political, economic, and social institutions and weak-
ened the control of elites. Survivors, even those from different ethnic groups,
apparently came together to form new living arrangements. Nowhere was
this process more dramatic than in the Southeast, where the great chiefdoms
of the Mississippi tradition began to disintegrate as their population bases
began to dwindle.
Still other effects of large-scale demographic disaster seem likely. Among
some native peoples, including the Pueblos, motives for intertribal warfare
may have lessened as a shrinking population raised the per capita resource
base. In other areas, diseases probably tipped the balance of power between
tribes. The riverine peoples of the lower Mississippi valley and its tributar-
ies, for example, enjoyed considerable power at the time of De Soto’s arrival,
but probably declined in influence as diseases, carried swiftly along water-
ways, weakened their population base. Their decline facilitated the rise in in-
fluence of upland peoples, such as Chickasaws and Choctaws, whose relative
isolation may have afforded them greater protection from European diseases.

46
 first encounters

The first disease-bearing Spaniards, then, inadvertently set into motion

cultural and structural transformations of native societies that would con-
tinue inexorably over the next two centuries, whenever Spaniards or other
Europeans pushed onto new frontiers in North America. As diseases caused
their numbers to diminish, the natives’ ability to resist European invaders
declined, and more land became available for subsequent waves of Europe-
ans and their livestock.

47
 3
Foundations of Empire: Florida
and New Mexico

He shall endeavor, in every way possible, to carry out the said discovery in all
peace, friendship and Christianity. . . . he must be given the title of adelantado
[of Florida], for himself and for his heirs in perpetuity.
—Agreement between Felipe II and Pedro
Menéndez, March 15, 1565

In the name of the most Christian king, Don Philip . . . I take

and seize tenancy and possession, real and actual, civil and natural,
one, two, and three times . . . and all the times that by right I can and should . . .
without limitations.
—Juan de Oñate at El Paso, April 1598

In the afternoon of September 8, 1565, at a sheltered harbor in a land he had

seen for the first time on the day of San Agustín, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés
stepped ashore from a small boat to take possession of Florida in the name
of his king, Felipe II. Before an assembly of his officers and natives from the

48
 foundations of empire

nearby village of Seloy, Florida’s newest adelantado knelt to kiss the cross and
to establish the municipality of St. Augustine.
For the previous three days his men had worked unceremoniously to dig
defensive trenches around Seloy, a palisaded village of Timucuan-speaking
Indians of a group called Saturiba. The Spaniards feared an attack from
French Protestants. Just the year before, a group of Huguenots, as French fol-
lowers of John Calvin were called, had constructed a fort called Caroline near
the mouth of the St. Johns River, some forty miles to the north. Now, instead
of waiting for the French to attack, Menéndez launched an offensive.
On the dawn of September 20, with rain falling, Menéndez’s men sur-
prised the luckless Frenchmen, many still in their nightshirts. The Protes-
tants offered little resistance. As Menéndez knew, most of the Huguenots of
fighting age had sailed south in pursuit of two ships from Menéndez’s fleet.
Victory, then, came easily for the Spaniards, who showed the French
heretics no mercy. Menéndez spared women and children, but he reported
with pride to his Catholic king that over 130 members of the “evil Lutheran
sect” had vanished from the earth.
Leaving a small garrison at Fort Caroline, which he renamed San Mateo,
Menéndez returned to St. Augustine. There he learned that the French
ships that had left Fort Caroline had met disaster farther south, wrecked on
the beach by a storm. Survivors had started north along the coast toward
Fort Caroline. Menéndez met them at a broad inlet about eighteen miles
south of St. Augustine. There, at a place known to this day as Matanzas—
the “slaughters”—the Protestants offered to surrender if Menéndez would
spare their lives. “I answered,” Menéndez reported to the king, “that they
might give up their arms and place themselves at my mercy; that I should
deal with them as Our Lord should command me.” The Frenchmen ac-
cepted. As they were brought in small groups across the Matanzas inlet,
Menéndez had them taken out of sight: “I caused their hands to be tied
behind them, and put them to the knife.”
Menéndez’s king, Felipe II, approved of this harsh punishment of
“Lutheran enemies.” Felipe, who inherited the throne from his father, Car-
los V, in 1556, subscribed to his father’s dictum that because Protestants were
“guilty of rebellion, they can expect no mercy.” Like a cancer, heretics needed
to be removed lest they infect the body politic, in America or in Europe.

49
 foundations of empire

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

10. Menéndez de Avilés, with the cross of the Order of Santiago on his left
breast, in an engraving reportedly based on a portrait by Titian, lost in a fire.
From Retratos de los españoles ilustres con un epítome de sus vidas (Madrid:
Imprenta Real, 1791). Courtesy, St. Augustine Historical Society.

The austere Felipe II, who ruled Spain from 1556 to 1598, succeeded no bet-
ter than his father in stopping the tide of the Protestant Reformation that
swept over northern Europe. In North America, however, Felipe did stop
French Protestants from establishing a beachhead on the Atlantic. During
his long reign Spain established the foundations of its own North American
empire by planting colonies in Florida and New Mexico and planning the
settlement of California, where foreigners also seemed to threaten Spanish
hegemony. To establish these settlements, the king found men of broad vi-
sion: Menéndez for Florida and Juan de Oñate for New Mexico. Each as-
pired to a transcontinental Spanish frontier in North America, but each
would be disappointed. As they contended with natives for territorial control,
Menéndez and Oñate managed only to found modest outposts of empire.

50
 foundations of empire

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

11. Felipe II (1556–98) defending the Church, with the Escorial in the background
and the inscription “suma ratio pro Religione” (all reason for religion) under his
right arm. From Luis de Cabrera de Córdova, Filipe [sic] Segundo, Rey de España
(Madrid, 1619). Courtesy, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

St. Augustine represented the culmination of a half century of Spanish ef-

forts to settle Florida, which offered several advantages. First, French pirates
or corsairs, a nuisance in times of peace, had become a menace to Spanish
shipping and to the Spanish economy as relations between France and Spain
deteriorated in the 1550s. A Spanish base on the Florida coast would help
protect the homebound silver fleets. Second, a base would provide refuge for
survivors of all-too-common wrecks of Spanish ships and serve as a center
for salvaging. Florida’s treacherous Keys and the wide shoals hidden beneath
the waters of the east coast as far north as Cape Canaveral snared so many
ships that Indians on both sides of the Florida peninsula—Ais and Calusas
in particular—had stored up a substantial amount of treasure from Spanish

51
Map 2
 foundations of empire

wrecks and held captive a number of hapless passengers and crewmen.

Third, Frenchmen also threatened Spain’s claim to all of North America
(the English evinced little enthusiasm for overseas colonies in the sixteenth
century). French Huguenots, who had tried and failed to plant colonies in
Canada and Brazil, had succeeded in establishing Charlesfort in 1562 on an
island in Port Royal Sound in present South Carolina, which Spaniards
knew as Santa Elena. Spain launched an expedition from Cuba in 1564 to ex-
pel the Huguenots from Charlesfort but discovered only abandoned build-
ings, which they destroyed. The Huguenots had failed again, but Spain feared
they would return, and a base in Florida could serve to deter them.
Finally, settlement of Florida seemed the best way to establish an effective
claim that rival monarchs would respect. Decades of diplomacy had failed to
persuade France or England to recognize Spanish claims to much of the New
World based on the papal donations of 1493. Francis I had summed up the
French position in 1540, when he apparently told a Spanish envoy that the
pope lacked authority “to distribute lands among kings.” The French king
impertinently remarked that “he much desired to see Adam’s will to learn
how he had partitioned the world.” Perhaps more disquieting for Spain, the
papacy itself denied that Spain had an exclusive right to North America since
it had not been discovered at the time of the donations of 1493.
After several false starts at settling Florida, Felipe turned to Pedro Menén-
dez de Avilés, a dynamic businessman and sailor, and the two, after consider-
able haggling, signed an adelantado contract on March 20, 1565. Ten days later,
the alarming report reached the Spanish court that French Huguenots had
established another colony on the Atlantic, at the ill-fated Fort Caroline. The
new French threat prompted the king to give Menéndez more than he had
bargained for, including direct financial assistance, thus making the Florida
enterprise an unusual joint venture. Menéndez set sail from Cádiz with over
a thousand persons, including three hundred soldiers on the king’s payroll
and the promise of reinforcements. Menéndez headed toward Fort Caroline,
making landfall nearby at what would become St. Augustine.
Menéndez had a clear, if inflated, idea of what Florida might become. He
envisioned nothing less than the economic exploitation of the continent from
northwestern Mexico to Newfoundland, all of which Spain claimed, and
control of the Grand Banks with its valuable cod fishery. Menéndez moved
swiftly. By March of 1567, within a year and a half after he had founded

53
 foundations of empire

St. Augustine and destroyed Fort Caroline, he had established seven coastal
bases designed to hold Florida and the critical Bahama Channel.
One of those bases served as his capital. In the middle of Port Royal Sound,
on what is today Parris Island, Menéndez built fort San Felipe and established
the municipality of Santa Elena, not far from the village of Charlesfort that
French Protestants had established in 1562. He pronounced the port of Santa
Elena “the best there is in the whole of . . . Florida,” and he might have made
his initial settlement there had Fort Caroline not diverted him southward
to St. Augustine. He saw Santa Elena as the hub for further expansion to the
north and west, and in 1566 he sent out expeditions in both directions.
To the west Menéndez dispatched a party with instructions to open a
road to Mexico, search for precious minerals, and pacify Indians along the
way. He hoped to blaze a trail from Santa Elena to Zacatecas, the site of the
richest silver mines in New Spain. The adelantado entrusted the expedition
to a vigorous captain, Juan Pardo, who led expeditions toward Zacatecas in
1566–67 and again in 1567–68. Pardo made it across the Carolinas and as far
as the Tennessee Valley, building five small forts along his route, but Zacate-
cas eluded him. His garrisons and their occupants disappeared.
To the north of Santa Elena, Menéndez tried to plant a settlement on
Chesapeake Bay, known to the Spaniards as the Bahía de Santa María.
Menéndez suspected that the bay stood strategically at the entryway to a
long-sought passage through the continent to the Orient, a mythical water-
way that Spaniards would come to call the Strait of Anián and Englishmen
the Northwest Passage. In 1570 eight Jesuit missionaries set out from Santa
Elena, sailed up the James River, and succeeded in building a mission near a
place on the York River where Englishmen would later find Powhatan’s vil-
lage. The Spanish clerics hoped to convert the Algonquian-speaking Indians
and to find “an entrance into the mountains and on to China.” Instead, they
began to starve. They had brought few provisions and had arrived in the au-
tumn of 1570 during a time of famine. The local Algonquian speakers had no
surplus to share with missionaries, and the Jesuits’ remarkable guide, an Al-
gonquian Indian captive who had lived in Mexico City and twice visited
Spain, deserted them. Luis de Velasco, as Spaniards knew him, returned to
his people and took several wives, to the Jesuits’ disgust. In February 1571, ap-
parently chafing from Jesuit insults to their religion and culture, Luis de
Velasco led a group that put the outsiders to death.

54
 foundations of empire

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

12. This imaginative engraving by Melchior Küsell, done for an early

Jesuit history by Mathias Tanner, S.J., Societas Iesu Militans . . . (Prague, 1675),
shows Father Segura and his three companions, “murdered in Florida for the
Faith of Christ.” The ax-wielding don Luis personally killed Segura,
according to one account. Courtesy, Bridwell Library, Perkins School
of Theology, Southern Methodist University.

Like the Jesuit outpost on the Chesapeake, most of the missions and
garrisons that Menéndez established in Florida came under Indian attack
and failed. Santa Elena and St. Augustine survived native assaults, but nar-
rowly. In part, these reverses reflected a scarcity of Spanish resources and
will. Having achieved the limited objective of securing the east coast of
Florida from the French at considerable cost to the royal treasury, Menén-
dez had taxed his own capital and credit to the limit. He could not persuade
the king to pour still more treasure into a grand vision for Florida’s future
if it yielded no immediate return. The greatest deterrents to Spain’s rapid
expansion in Florida, however, were the absence of precious metals, which
would have justified further investment, and the Florida natives themselves,

55
 foundations of empire

whose labor proved difficult to exploit and who harassed Spanish farmers
and ranchers.
Like adelantados before and after him, Menéndez’s instructions required
“the good treatment and conversion to our Holy Catholic Faith of the na-
tives,” and he initially treated Indians tactfully. He ordered his followers not
to pillage Indian villages. He urged the king to send a year’s supply of corn for
every horse he brought, “for in no manner, will it be well to take it from the
Indians, that they shall not take up enmity against us.” Menéndez’s diplo-
macy, however, could not overcome the antagonism that soldiers and priests
aroused among the Florida natives. Unruly soldiers assaulted the persons and
the property of the natives, while well-intentioned missionaries insulted their
religious beliefs and practices. Little wonder that Indians—Calusas, Teques-
tas, Ais, and Saturiba Timucuas—turned on the outsiders. Unable to under-
stand the natives’ motives for attacking them, Menéndez and his compatriots
decided that the coastal tribes of Florida were naturally treacherous and
deceitful—“warlike” and of “bad disposition,” as one Spaniard put it. In 1572
Menéndez urged the Crown to permit “that war be made upon them with all
vigor, a war of fire and blood, and that those taken alive shall be sold as slaves,
removing them from the country and taking them to the neighboring islands.”
If Indians remained, Menéndez warned the Crown, the colonists might
abandon Florida entirely.
In urging the Crown to fight a war of extermination against Florida Indi-
ans, Menéndez recommended a course of action that many colonials en-
dorsed. The morality of a “war of fire and blood” became the subject of
debate among the bishops of New Spain a decade later. Although they heard
a number of arguments in favor of exterminating rebellious Chichimecas of
northern Mexico, and even though members of the religious orders equivo-
cated, the bishops took the unpopular position of condemning total war.
They blamed their fellow Spaniards for violating the king’s instructions and
provoking Indians to retaliate; among the offenders they singled out adelan-
tados, who won favors from the king with “false promises of new lands.” The
bishops recommended peaceful colonization by Spaniards and Christian
Indians, presumably indoctrinated by missionaries.
Behind Spanish Indian policy lay antithetical impulses: to convert obedi-
ent Indians and to kill or enslave Indians who seemed “rebellious.” Menén-
dez himself personified these seemingly contradictory strategies. In 1573, for

56
 foundations of empire

example, he pronounced the coastal Indians of Florida an “infamous people,

Sodomites, sacrificers to the devil . . . wherefore it would greatly serve God
Our Lord and your majesty if these [Indians] were dead, or given as slaves.”
The next year, just before he died after the sudden onset of an illness, this
same Menéndez wrote, “After the salvation of my soul, there is nothing in
this world that I desire more than to see myself in Florida, to end my days
saving souls.”
When Menéndez died in 1574, at Santander in Spain, Florida had been
reduced to two settlements: St. Augustine and Santa Elena. Despite the
presence of troops, both communities lived on the edge of extinction. Orista
Indians forced the abandonment of Santa Elena in 1576. Spaniards reoccu-
pied it but left permanently after Francis Drake revealed the vulnerability of
the Florida outposts. In 1586, en route home to England with a substantial
force that had sacked Santo Domingo and Cartagena, Drake stopped to raze
St. Augustine, burning its houses to the ground, cutting down its fruit trees,
and carrying away everything of value.
Drake’s shattering assault on St. Augustine suggested to Spanish officials
the wisdom of consolidating the two sparsely settled and highly exposed
Florida communities. Santa Elena was believed to occupy the less defensible
position. It disappeared in 1587 almost as violently as if pirates had attacked it.
Under orders from the Crown, Spaniards burned the town and dismantled
the nearby fort lest any other power try to occupy the site. This time Spaniards
left Port Royal Sound for good. Its residents moved to what remained of
St. Augustine, which became the sole Spanish settlement in Florida.
By century’s end, only a single garrison remained to sustain Menéndez’s
vision of an empire that would control the southeastern part of the conti-
nent, export hides and sugar, and dominate sea routes to Asia and land
routes to the mines of Mexico. Shattered dreams and modest success would
also be a by-product of the settlement of New Mexico, the other salient of
the Spanish empire to extend into North America during the waning years
of the sixteenth century and the reign of Felipe II.

On the south side of the Rio Grande, not far below the ford in the river
where El Paso would be founded nearly a century later, Juan de Oñate,
governor, captain general, and soon-to-be adelantado, took possession of

57
 foundations of empire

New Mexico at the end of April 1598. In a lengthy discourse that echoed the
book of Genesis, he proclaimed Spanish dominion over the new land and its
inhabitants, “from the leaves of the trees in the forests to the stones and
sands of the river.” In addition to the usual solemn High Mass, sermon,
trumpets, and banners, the choreography of conquest included a play. Writ-
ten by one of Oñate’s officers, the dramatic production imagined New Mex-
ico Indians happily embracing Christianity.
Several days later, Oñate’s armored and heavily armed band forded the
river at the site of present-day El Paso and continued north for another two
months. Three hundred miles beyond El Paso Oñate conducted similar cer-
emonies at a large town of Keresan-speaking Indians that still stands above
present-day Albuquerque. At this town, which the Spaniards called Santo
Domingo, he assembled leaders from nearby Pueblo communities. In a large
kiva—a windowless, circular, semisubterranean ceremonial room—Oñate
addressed the Pueblo leaders. He explained through interpreters that the na-
tives’ submission to the rule of Spain would yield peace, justice, protection
from enemies, and the benefits of new crops, livestock, and trade. Obedience
to the Catholic Church would bring them an even greater reward: “an eter-
nal life of great bliss” instead of “cruel and everlasting torment.” Upon hear-
ing this, the natives “spontaneously” agreed to become vassals of the Spanish
Crown and to render obedience to the Spanish god, or so it seemed to the
Spaniards. The Pueblo leaders, the Spaniards noted, submitted “of their own
accord,” and so it was “recorded and attested for the greater peace and satis-
faction of the royal conscience.” Oñate and this entourage repeated these
ceremonies on six more occasions, with leaders from all of the pueblos
ostensibly swearing their fidelity. Although Spaniards no longer read the
requerimiento, it remained important to the king that his subjects agree vol-
untarily to become his vassals and that their submission be recorded.
At the Tewa-speaking pueblo of Ohke, which the Spaniards called San
Juan, Oñate established his headquarters. An oasis in a land of little rain,
San Juan occupied a rich alluvial floodplain on the east side of the Rio
Grande, north of present Santa Fe. Just as Pedro Menéndez de Avilés estab-
lished Florida’s first settlement in an Indian village, Juan de Oñate and his
colonists crowded into the apartments of the king’s new vassals, who were
permitted to remain to provide labor, food, and clothing. Within a short
time, perhaps because quarters in the pueblo of San Juan had become

58
 foundations of empire

uncomfortably tight and because the colonists declined to build their own
settlement nearby, the Spaniards moved across the Rio Grande to another
Tewa pueblo, Yúngé. Oñate had persuaded most of the residents of Yúngé
to move to San Juan, allowing the Spaniards to occupy their vacated apart-
ments. Oñate declared the pueblo a Spanish town, renamed it for Saint
Gabriel, and remodeled the dwellings and constructed a church. San Gabriel
would remain the sole Spanish settlement in New Mexico until some of
Oñate’s colonists began to move south to Santa Fe, a more defensible and
less crowded location, perhaps as early as 1608.
So it was that in the last year of the reign of Felipe II another kingdom in
North America was added to his realm, a kingdom that, like Florida, repre-
sented the culmination of earlier Spanish efforts to settle it. Spanish efforts
to plant a colony among the Pueblos dated back to the reign of Felipe’s
father and the unsuccessful entrada of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, but
within a generation the precise location of Tierra Nueva, as Coronado’s men
called the lands from Cíbola to Quivira, had been forgotten.
Spaniards rediscovered those lands, and Juan de Oñate initiated perma-
nent European settlement in them, as a result of the northward movement
of the mining frontier of New Spain and the initiative of Franciscans. By the
mid-1560s, Mexico’s mining frontier had pushed north of Zacatecas into
what is today the state of Chihuahua, where silver strikes created several
boomtowns. Santa Bárbara, in the valley of the Río Conchos, from which
Oñate set out in 1598, was the most important. Inevitably, Spaniards who
poured into Santa Bárbara and adjacent towns heard rumors of rich lands
and important peoples just beyond the northern horizon. At the request, it
appears, of a Franciscan, Agustín Rodríguez, who sought a new group of
Indian converts, the viceroy of New Spain authorized a small expedition
to probe the far north in 1581.
Royal approval was essential. In order to protect Indians and to preserve
royal prerogatives, the Spanish Crown had consistently discouraged efforts
to explore and settle Indian lands without royal permission. Appalled by the
excesses of individuals in the first decades of the conquest of America, Felipe
II took stronger measures. Comprehensive Orders for New Discoveries, is-
sued by the Crown in 1573, had emphatically prohibited the entry of unli-
censed parties into new lands, under “pain of death and loss of all their
property.” The regulations prohibited the use of the word conquest to describe

59
 foundations of empire

“pacifications” of new lands, a habit that proved impossible to break, and

they made missionaries the primary agents for exploration and pacification.
Under these new regulations, Father Rodríguez apparently had no difficulty
in securing official approval to investigate the lands to the north.
In 1581 Rodríguez led a small group up the Conchos River to the Rio Grande
and continued several hundred miles beyond into the Pueblo world. They
believed themselves the first to visit the Pueblos: “Before this time numerous
Spaniards with ample commissions from the viceroys of New Spain had en-
tered the land in an attempt to discover this settlement, and they had not found
it. Thus we concluded that our project was directed by the hand of God.” The
Rodríquez expedition named the area San Felipe del Nuevo México.
Spanish rediscovery of New Mexico, where Indians lived in multistory
houses, cultivated corn, and wore cotton clothing, excited considerable at-
tention. In 1583, Felipe II authorized the viceroy of Mexico to find a suitable
person to pacify the potentially rich new lands, in conformity with the Or-
ders for New Discoveries of 1573. Applicants came forward and bureaucratic
wheels moved slowly because, in contrast to Florida, no foreign power chal-
lenged Spain’s sovereignty over New Mexico and no pirates threatened the
transport of Spanish treasure. While officials pondered over the applicants,
two unauthorized expeditions invaded New Mexico and both came to grief.
Finally, the position of adelantado went to Juan de Oñate, who set out for
New Mexico in 1598.
Perhaps owing more to relatively meager resources than to lack of vision,
the scope of Oñate’s achievements in New Mexico was more modest than
that of Menéndez in Florida, but his motives and methods were similar.
Like Menéndez, Oñate had entered North America with a contract from
the king that permitted him to settle New Mexico at his own expense.
Oñate seemed a wise choice. Nearly fifty years old, this Mexican-born aris-
tocrat from the silver mining town of Zacatecas was an experienced leader
from a prestigious family that possessed a substantial fortune, and he had the
ear of the viceroy, Luis de Velasco. Unlike Menéndez, Oñate initially re-
ceived no financial support from the king, who had ordered that “this dis-
covery and pacification is to be accomplished without spending or pledging
anything from my treasury.” For the Crown, the stakes were much lower in
New Mexico. Then, too, such a policy was consistent with the 1573 Orders
for New Discoveries. In a reference to earlier adelantados, perhaps including

60
 foundations of empire

Menéndez, the orders noted that leaders of previous expeditions had “sought
to enrich themselves from the Royal Treasury” and prohibited the use of
Crown funds in future efforts at settlement.
When Oñate finally set out for New Mexico in 1598, delays had reduced his
army to about 130 men of fighting age, a sixth of the size of the force Menén-
dez brought to Florida. Some of Oñate’s men traveled north with their wives,
children, servants, and slaves; the entire expedition may have numbered over
five hundred persons. Ten Franciscans went along; the Crown, not Oñate,
bore their expenses, as was usual in such cases. Oñate, then, lacked the man-
power and resources to establish a network of far-flung bases, as Menéndez
had done. He also lacked seaports and navigable rivers that would have facili-
tated the transport of reinforcements and supplies. Nonetheless, Oñate sent
out or led exploring parties that stretched his small band to the limit.
Like Menéndez and other would-be adelantados, Oñate had visions of
grandeur. “I shall give your majesty a new world, greater than New Spain,” he
told the king. His official declarations emphasized the saving of souls as his
principal mission, but his carefully worded contract with the king makes clear
that he also expected to receive broad governmental powers, rich mines, lands,
Indian labor, access to a strait through North America, and a seaport on the
Pacific or the Atlantic, or both. Like Menéndez, Oñate underestimated the
distance across the continent. He believed that New Mexico could be supplied
by sea, from either the Atlantic or the Pacific, and he had asked for the right to
bring two ships annually to the Pueblo country. His request was granted.
In Mexico City, Viceroy Velasco had intelligence that New Mexico stood
at the same latitude as the recently established English colony at Roanoke,
and that the distance between New Mexico and Roanoke, “though not actu-
ally known, is not thought to be too great.” Even a lengthy trek to the
Quivira villages on the Great Plains failed to disabuse Oñate of his belief in
the proximity of the Atlantic. In 1601 Oñate led seventy men on a journey
toward the Atlantic. In south central Kansas, in the lands of the prosperous
Wichitas Quivirans, Oñate reluctantly halted and turned back toward New
Mexico, his animals exhausted and his men restive. Eight wooden carts
pulled by mules and oxen (the first wheeled vehicles on what would become
the Santa Fe Trail after 1820) had creaked so steadily over the plains that
Oñate reckoned they could have made it to the Atlantic Ocean, “which can-
not be very far away.”

61
 foundations of empire

On three occasions, Oñate also tried to find a route to the Pacific. He had
hardly established himself at San Juan before setting out in the autumn of
1598 to “discover the South Sea.” Forced to turn back, he tried again the next
year, sending one of his lieutenants, who also failed to get through. Finally,
in a journey of 1604–05, Oñate succeeded in making his way across present
Arizona and descending the Colorado River to its mouth on the Gulf of
California. On his return, he stopped at El Morro, a great sandstone
promontory along the old Indian trail that ran between Ácoma and Zuni
pueblos, and etched a message in the cliffside over an Indian petroglyph. His
inscription is still visible: “There passed this way the adelantado Don Juan de
Oñate, from the discovery of the South Sea, on the 16th of April, 1605.”
As Oñate knew, the establishment of a Spanish settlement on the Pacific
coast of North America had taken on strategic importance that recalled
Spain’s earlier interest in planting a settlement along the Bahama Channel
on the continent’s Atlantic coast. California’s coast gained new significance
for Spanish officials in 1565 when fray Andrés de Urdaneta solved the vexing
problem of how Spanish vessels engaged in rich trade from Mexico to the
Philippines could return again to Mexico against contrary winds and cur-
rents. A haven high on California’s outer coast would enable returning
galleons to stop for repairs and refresh their crews after four or five months of
transpacific sailing. Then, too, the idea of a base on the California coast took
on special urgency when foreign pirates, beginning with the ubiquitous
Francis Drake, found their way into the Pacific, previously a Spanish lake.
Spain responded to this new challenge by authorizing exploration for a
suitable place to plant a settlement. The search culminated with the voyage
of Sebastián Vizcaíno, an energetic merchant with long experience in the
Pacific trade and in Baja California. In 1602–03, while Oñate yearned to
reach the Pacific from New Mexico, Vizcaíno mapped the California coast-
line and bestowed new names on it, replacing those left sixty years before by
Cabrillo, whose charts had apparently been forgotten. With few exceptions,
Vizcaíno’s names remain unchanged. Vizcaíno recommended that Spain es-
tablish a base on the bay that he named for the conde de Monterrey, the
viceroy who sponsored his expedition. In retrospect, it appears to be a curi-
ous decision, for California had two manifestly superior bays. San Francisco,
hidden behind the Golden Gate, had eluded Vizcaíno as it would other
mariners, and San Diego, Vizcaíno’s second choice, was too far south of the

62
 foundations of empire

landfall of ships returning from Manila. It also seemed to lack sufficient

wood and game.
Vizcaíno’s recommendation still remained under consideration when
Oñate’s exuberant report of his discovery of “a great harbor on the South
sea”—actually the mouth of the Colorado River at the head of the Gulf of
California—reached Mexico City in 1605. The marqués de Montesclaros,
who had succeeded Monterrey as viceroy and who believed that no good
would come of the New Mexico venture, sardonically noted that Oñate’s
discovery was “the greatest benefit that we could hope for” from his entire
operation.
In Viceroy Montesclaros’s eyes, Oñate’s standing as an explorer may have
risen when he claimed to have discovered a great harbor on the Pacific, but
his reputation as a leader had fallen. Reports of the poverty of the land, the
dissatisfaction of the colonists, and abuses of Indians had long before
reached Mexico City and weakened the viceroy’s confidence in Oñate. In
the summer of 1598, having barely arrived in New Mexico, forty-five disillu-
sioned soldiers and officers, over a third of his small army, had planned to
mutiny and flee the province. As that first winter came on, a familiar sce-
nario began to unfold. Soldier-settlers had extorted corn, beans, and squash
and clothing from the Pueblos, resorting to torture, murder, and rape. A
wide chasm separated the Crown’s good intentions, as expressed in the
Orders for New Discoveries of 1573, from the practices of its disillusioned
and desperate representatives. The Pueblos’ wary hospitality soon turned to
overt hostility.
Before the first year was out, Indians on the mesa-top Pueblo of Ácoma
retaliated by killing eleven Spanish soldiers, including Oñate’s nephew, Juan
de Zaldívar, in a surprise attack. After consulting with the Franciscans and
determining that Spanish law permitted him to punish the Ácomas because
they had violated their oath of obedience to the king, Oñate retaliated swiftly
and audaciously. He sent Vicente Zaldívar, the younger brother of the slain
Juan, to invite the Ácomas to either surrender the rebels and submit to Span-
ish rule or face war with no quarter—war by fire and blood. It was a bold
challenge to Pueblos who lived atop what one of Coronado’s men described
as “the greatest stronghold ever seen in the world.” Through a diversionary
tactic, Zaldívar’s band gained the top of the seemingly unassailable mesa.
Aided, it was said, by Santiago, who rode a white horse and carried a flaming

63
 foundations of empire

sword, the small Spanish army of seventy-two men achieved a stunning vic-
tory. In three days of hard fighting they destroyed the pueblo, killed some five
hundred men and three hundred women and children and took some eighty
men and about five hundred women and children captive. These Oñate sub-
jected to a formal trial, providing them with a defense attorney.
Found guilty of murder, the Ácomas received a punishment calculated to
make them living reminders of the cost of resistance. Oñate sentenced all
the captives between the ages of twelve and twenty-five to twenty years of
personal servitude, and he condemned males older than twenty-five to have
one foot severed. Such mutilations were a common punishment for miscreants
in Renaissance Europe, and in America they were not unique to Spaniards, as
Englishmen proved at Jamestown. Oñate ordered the mutilations to be carried
out in public, but there is little evidence that his orders were followed.
Spaniards may have theatrically spared the condemned at the last minute to
demonstrate their mercy along with their power.
Zaldívar’s destruction of Ácoma momentarily ended overt Pueblo resis-
tance, but the problems that caused the revolt remained. Reinforcements,
fewer than one hundred, arrived in 1600 but did not alleviate disillusion or dis-
content. Meanwhile, eager to find avenues to spectacular wealth, Oñate neg-
lected San Gabriel, failing to build it into a self-sufficient base. In 1601, when
he returned from an extended trip to the eastern plains in search of Quivira, he
found San Gabriel nearly deserted. Most of his colonists, expressing fear that
they and the Pueblos alike would starve to death, had fled to Mexico.
By 1605, when the adelantado returned from the Gulf of California,
Viceroy Montesclaros had become convinced that the New Mexico enter-
prise should be abandoned. The following year, the king ordered that Oñate
be replaced and charges of his mismanagement investigated. In 1614 author-
ities in Mexico City acquitted Oñate of a number of charges but found him
guilty of others, including abuses of Indians, ill-treatment of some of his
own officers, colonists, and priests, and adultery. Stripped of the privileges
and titles he had been promised in his initial contract, he was fined and ban-
ished permanently from New Mexico.

As instruments of royal policy, Juan de Oñate and Pedro Menéndez had

laid the foundations of what would become Spain’s North American empire,

64
 foundations of empire

but the footings were so precarious that the Crown considered abandoning
both enterprises at the outset of the 1600s. Neither England nor France,
Spain’s principal rivals, had succeeded in establishing a permanent base in
North America and would not do so until the founding, respectively, of
Jamestown in 1607 and Quebec in 1608. Initially, neither colony posed a sig-
nificant threat to Spain’s interests, but the establishment of Jamestown may
have contributed to the Crown’s decision not to abandon Florida.
Spanish policy makers feared that colonists from Jamestown would suc-
ceed in their professed goal of preying on Spanish shipping. Spain protested
the English presence in Virginia and employed agents in England and per-
haps in Jamestown itself to sabotage the colony. Spain insisted that the En-
glishmen had settled on “lands that are not theirs and that do not belong to
them,” but higher priorities in Europe discouraged Spain from carrying out
plans to dislodge the intruders.
Inadvertence and domestic distractions, however, more than Spain’s de-
fensive initiatives, explain the failure of France and England to contend suc-
cessfully for a share of North America in the sixteenth or early seventeenth
centuries. Thus, Spain’s claims to North America remained secure well after
the founding of Jamestown, and the Crown appeared to have met its most
pressing strategic goals. On the Atlantic coast, the arena of greatest imperial
contention, Spain had dislodged the French from Florida, strengthened its
hold on the vital Bahama Channel, and established a base that would pro-
vide relief for Spanish victims of shipwrecks.
Securing North America had proved costly. In the Spanish imperial sys-
tem, the Indies existed largely as a source of revenue to support Spain’s
European ventures, yet Florida and New Mexico consumed revenue rather
than generating it. Little wonder the Crown considered abandoning each
enterprise. Initially, the Crown had relied upon private capital to develop
these new North American colonies, promising Menéndez and Oñate that
they and their immediate heirs could operate their proprietary colonies for a
profit as semi-independent fiefdoms. In both cases, however, the Crown had
found the work of its adelantados wanting and had supplanted them. Florida
and New Mexico were transformed into colonies of the Crown, their gover-
nors appointed by royal officials. Until the eighteenth century, Florida’s gover-
nors answered directly to the Council of the Indies; New Mexico’s governors
answered directly to the viceroy of New Spain. In both cases, the royal

65
 foundations of empire

treasury bore much of the cost of maintaining what the adelantados had
begun.
Florida proved to be the more expensive of the two enterprises. From the
beginning, the Crown’s special arrangements with Menéndez had produced
deficits. In the first three years of what had begun as a private venture, from
1565 to 1568, the Crown invested four pesos for every one that Menéndez
spent. Beginning in 1570, the government agreed to send an annual subsidy,
or situado, to support the Florida garrisons, and it did so regularly. New
Mexico cost less than Florida because the Crown maintained no garrison of
salaried soldiers there. Nonetheless, it too drained the treasury. When the
Spanish Crown entertained the notion of abandoning these North Ameri-
can outposts, however, the king’s council yielded to Franciscan arguments
that it was impractical to remove large numbers of baptized Indians and sin-
ful to abandon baptized Indians without the sacraments. In 1608 the Crown
decided not to abandon Florida, and it authorized Franciscans to remain in
New Mexico and minister to the Pueblos.
California never gained such a royal reprieve. Viceroy Montesclaros
halted plans to build a Spanish outpost on the California coast. Rather than
repel foreign interlopers and protect the Philippine trade, a Spanish base
would attract English and Dutch smugglers who would come to trade, as
they did in the Caribbean and on the Florida coast. California’s security,
Montesclaros believed, resided in its inaccessibility. Late in the 1600s, Span-
ish soldiers and missionaries began the slow occupation of the southern por-
tion of the eight-hundred-mile-long peninsula of Baja California, but Spain
did not plant a settlement in what is today the American state of California
until 1769, over a century and a half after Viceroy Montesclaros declared
such a plan impractical.
Although plans to plant a colony in California faltered, Florida and
New Mexico endured to become the first permanent European enclaves in
territory that has become the United States. Saved from abandonment by
Franciscan missionaries, the two outposts developed in the seventeenth
century chiefly as centers for Franciscan proselytizing of Indians. Both
skidded initially into decline as their limited opportunities became evident
to the pioneers who founded them. Young, unemployed men had re-
sponded eagerly to Menéndez’s and Oñate’s promises of wealth, Indian la-
bor, and the title of hidalgo, the lowest rank of minor nobility. When

66
 foundations of empire

promised lands proved unpromising, however, would-be hidalgos aban-

doned their adelantado and soldiers deserted their posts. This phenomenon
was widespread among Spaniards in America. Although some 440,000
Spaniards immigrated to the New World by 1650, few were drawn to the
backwater provinces such as Florida or New Mexico. Unlike English and
French voyagers to the New World, for whom North America was the
only option, Spaniards had opportunities to make their fortunes in the
fabulous mining regions of Mexico and Central America and in the An-
dean regions of South America.
From the abandonment of Santa Elena in 1576 until the founding of Pen-
sacola in 1698, St. Augustine was the only Hispanic settlement of conse-
quence in Florida. A muddy garrison town of flammable palmetto huts, St.
Augustine supported a population of just over five hundred in 1600, includ-
ing men, women, children, and twenty-seven slaves. By 1700, St. Augustine’s
population had risen to between fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred per-
sons, including black slaves and Hispanicized Indians. Many of the His-
panic residents of the town actually lived on outlying ranches and farms but
maintained their official residence in St. Augustine.
New Mexico, isolated by hundreds of miles from the nearest settlements of
northern New Spain, also grew slowly in the seventeenth century. The num-
ber of Spaniards in New Mexico in the 1600s probably never exceeded three
thousand—twice the size of Florida but still a modest number. Through
most of the century, New Mexico had only one formal municipality, the Villa
Real de Santa Fe, founded under viceregal orders of 1609 by Oñate’s succes-
sor, Pedro de Peralta, who moved the capital from San Gabriel to a more de-
fensible site that locals had begun to settle in 1608. In contrast to Florida, no
formal presidio existed in New Mexico in the 1600s, but the king expected its
leading citizens to serve as soldiers as well as settlers.
As in Florida, many of New Mexico’s pioneers lived outside of the
province’s single urban center in clusters of farms and ranches too small to
be called towns. The Hispanic population had scattered up and down the
Rio Grande, from Taos Pueblo to below Albuquerque (founded in 1706), in
order to be close to the province’s most evident source of revenue, the labor
of Pueblo Indians. Farther south along the Rio Grande, still within the
jurisdiction of New Mexico, a small community of Hispanics and Hispani-
cized Manso Indians also took root at El Paso del Norte, where Franciscans

67
 foundations of empire

had begun in 1659 to build the mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe at

the site of present-day Ciudad Juárez.
Measured against the expectations of Pedro Menéndez, Juan de Oñate,
and the Crown, the gains made in Florida and New Mexico were modest.
Born in dreams of transcontinental empire, the two colonies hung on
through much of the seventeenth century as little more than the precarious
towns of Santa Fe and St. Augustine. Begun as entrepreneurial ventures de-
signed to enrich the Crown, the adelantados, and their followers, both enter-
prises drained the resources of their founders, of the Crown, and especially
of those Indian peoples in whose midst Menéndez and Oñate planted these
outposts of empire. Built on high-minded sentiments of peaceful persua-
sion, Spain’s enclaves in Florida and New Mexico degenerated into places
where natives and colonizers alike lived in profound fear of one another. Un-
welcome Europeans maintained themselves with brutality, using gunpow-
der, fire, and the sword to punish and intimidate natives. In turn, natives
found ways to accommodate to the demands of the intruders.
However modest these initial Spanish settlements, Spaniards in New
Mexico and Florida began to transform nearby lands and peoples, just as the
land and the people would transform them. In the absence of a significant
influx of new colonists or the growth of the military, however, missionaries
came to play the most dynamic role in expanding and transforming Spain’s
feeble North American frontiers in the seventeenth century.

68
 4
Conquistadors of the Spirit

If your highness may be pleased to have the Holy Gospel preached to the
people in those provinces with the necessary zeal, God our Lord will be served
and many idolatries and notable sins which the devil has implanted among the
natives will be eradicated. Thus having succeeded in this holy purpose your royal
crown will be served by an increase of vassals, tribute, and royal fifths.
—Baltasar Obregón to the king, Mexico City, 1584

It has been impossible to correct their concubinage, the abominable crime of

idolatry, their accursed superstitions, idolatrous dances, and other faults.
—fray Nicolás de Freitas, New Mexico, 1660

On the feast of the Pentecost, June 3, 1629, a day in which Christians com-
memorate the descent of the Holy Spirit to the twelve apostles of the son of
their god, fray Estevan de Perea led a group of thirty road-weary Spanish
priests into the tiny, adobe town of Santa Fe. They had come to the end of
a dangerous, fifteen-hundred-mile journey, begun nine months before in
Mexico City. In New Mexico these holy men planned not only to minister

69
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

to the fledgling colony that Juan de Oñate had founded in 1598, but to de-
stroy the indigenous religion and replace it with their own.
These Spanish priests believed that Jesus Christ, who had lived some six-
teen hundred years before, was the only son of the one true god. In the
words of the Christians’ creed, Jesus Christ “was crucified, died and was
buried. He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;
He ascended into Heaven to sit at the right hand of God.” The priests
sought to convince the natives of the truth of this credo and of the efficacy
of their god. The task must have seemed daunting, for tens of thousands of
natives occupied the vastness that Spaniards called New Mexico, and there
were few priests to convert them. The thirty new arrivals more than doubled
the number already there, bringing the total to fifty. Notwithstanding the
odds against them, faith and reason told these conquistadors of the spirit
that they would prevail.
Fray Estevan’s tiny band wore no armor and carried no weapons. Mem-
bers of a religious order of celibate males founded in 1209 by Francis Bernar-
done of the Italian town of Assisi, Franciscans vowed not to possess private
or community property. They lived only on alms, for which they begged or
which the king or other patrons bestowed upon them. Like members of
other mendicant brotherhoods, the friars, or brothers, wore the simple robe
and cowl of an Italian peasant of St. Francis’s day.
Franciscans had come to America with a militant vision that rivaled the
more worldly dreams of the conquistadors. The discovery of America seemed
to provide a heaven-sent opportunity to rescue the spirits or souls of be-
nighted aborigines and send them to the Christians’ eternal paradise. Some
Spaniards had doubted that Indians were human beings who possessed a
soul, but in 1537 in a papal bull, Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III had put the
question officially to rest by declaring that “Indians are truly men capable of
understanding the catholic faith.” In addition to saving souls, most Francis-
cans also hoped to reshape the natives’ cultures. At first, many Franciscans
paternalistically and optimistically regarded Indians as pliable, childlike in-
nocents, uncorrupted by Europeans—clay to be molded into ideal Christian
communities.
In the decades following the fall of the Aztecs, Franciscans had worked
with special urgency to construct an earthly paradise in central Mexico. The

70
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

Map 3

discovery of previously unknown pagans seemed to foretell the end of the

world, predicted in early Christian writings, and this would be the friars’ last
opportunity to fulfill their destiny of converting all peoples of all tongues. By
their own accounts, the Franciscans achieved a series of stunning successes
in saving the souls of the native Mexicans, but within two generations their
future in New Spain looked bleak.
Although the apocalypse expected by the friars failed to arrive, the world
of the Aztecs crumbled. Opportunities for Franciscans to make further con-
versions declined as European diseases consumed the natives. At the same
time, the demands of colonists for the diminished supply of Indian laborers
grew intense and put more pressure on missionaries to relinquish control
over Indians. Finally, the Crown itself concluded that the Franciscans had

71
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

outlived their usefulness in central Mexico. In 1572, in an effort to cut

government costs and to control the powerful and independent friars, the
Crown began to replace the Franciscans in Mexico with their bitter rivals,
the secular or diocesan clergy. Doctrinas, or Indian parishes, which had re-
ceived support from the royal exchequer, were to become self-supporting
diocesan parishes. Indian converts were to become tax-paying citizens
whose labor could be more easily exploited than when they had been under
the paternalistic care of the friars. The secularization of the missions left the
mendicants with two alternatives, as historian Robert Ricard succinctly ex-
plained: “to abandon their ministry and retire to their convents, or to under-
take the conversion of remote pagan regions.” The friars chose the latter and
discovered that whatever influence they had lost in their tawdry struggle
with the diocesan branch of the church in central Mexico, they more than
regained on the frontiers of the empire.
The decline of opportunities for mendicant missionaries in central Mexico
had coincided with issuance of the Royal Orders for New Discoveries of 1573,
which gave missionaries the central role in the exploration and pacification of
new lands. The royal orders reiterated the Crown’s often expressed intention,
that “preaching the holy gospel . . . is the principal purpose for which we or-
der new discoveries and settlements to be made,” and established stricter
rules to assure that this pious wish would become a reality. The royal orders
prohibited conquest or violence against Indians for any reason. Pacification
rather than conquest would be the new order of the day. Missionaries, their
expenses still paid by alms from the Crown, were to enter new lands before all
others and have another opportunity to build a terrestrial paradise.

The Franciscan reinforcements who arrived in New Mexico with fray Es-
tevan de Perea on the feast of the Pentecost in 1629 found their brethren had
made rapid progress in building missions among the Pueblo Indians. By that
year, according to one count, Franciscans had already overseen the construc-
tion of fifty churches and friaries (residences for priests) in New Mexico.
Under the friars’ supervision, Pueblo women did the actual work of building
the walls, just as they constructed those of their own homes, while Pueblo
men apparently did much of the carpentry.
The Pueblo communities, as one Franciscan noted, spread out across New

72
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

Mexico in the shape of a huge cross, evocative of the crucified Christ, and
the Franciscan missions followed that configuration. The arms of the cross
ran up the Rio Grande Valley, from the Piro pueblo of Socorro in the south
to the Tiwa pueblo of Taos in the north, over 200 miles. The top of the cross
extended eastward, from the Rio Grande to the pueblos of Pecos, Chililí,
and Abó, where Franciscans had also established missions. Work along the
long western base of the cross, however, awaited the arrival of the Francis-
cans who arrived in 1629. That year, eight of those friars completed the cross
by establishing missions in the pueblos of the Ácomas, Zunis, and Hopis,
the latter some 250 miles west of the Rio Grande.
In the late 1620s Franciscans in New Mexico basked in a moment of
extraordinary optimism, when anything seemed possible. Their spiritual
conquest of the Pueblos had proceeded with remarkable speed, but with a
thoroughness that would prove illusory. Franciscans in New Mexico would
go on to establish a mission in what is today downtown Ciudad Juárez,

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

13. The mission chapel at Zuni, with the friars’ quarters attached on the left.
“Pueblo of Zuñi, New Mexico.” Engraving of a drawing by Seth Eastman,
from a sketch by Richard H. Kern, 1851. Henry Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes,
6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1851–57), vol. 4.

73
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

across the river from present-day El Paso (then considered a part of New
Mexico), but in the main the friars had reached the limits of their expansion
into New Mexico in 1629.
Meanwhile, using Spain and the Antilles as their bases, Franciscans had
begun a similar process of converting natives on the Atlantic Coast. A gen-
eration before the Franciscans began to minister to the Pueblos of New
Mexico, friars had already established themselves in the humid, low-lying
areas of what is today Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama, then
known simply as Florida. They too reported rapid success at mission build-
ing, and they continued to expand their operations in Florida long after the
New Mexico enterprise had reached its peak.
The first Franciscans arrived in Florida in 1573, the year after the Jesuits
who came with Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had left. Between 1566 and 1572,
Florida had been the scene of the first Jesuit proselytizing in Spanish Amer-
ica. Jesuits had built ten missions at sites ranging from Virginia, near present
Jamestown, to south Florida at present Miami, and up to Tampa on the gulf
coast, but they met such fierce Indian resistance that they gave up on the
area as a lost cause. The Franciscans persisted. Beginning a sustained, large-
scale program in 1595, the friars’ missions steadily expanded. As in central
Mexico and New Mexico, Franciscans established themselves in existing vil-
lages. By 1655, seventy Franciscans served in Florida (the high for that cen-
tury) and ministered to twenty-six thousand natives, a claim some historians
find exaggerated. Twenty years later, in 1675, the Franciscans reached the high
point of their territorial expansion in Florida. Although the number of friars
had diminished to forty, and they had retrenched on the Atlantic Coast, the
Florida missions extended westward over 250 miles beyond St. Augustine.
By 1675, Spanish Florida had come to comprise four mission provinces:
Guale, Timucua, Apalachee, and short-lived Apalachicola (map 4). Each
province corresponded to the friars’ understanding of a distinctive zone of
Indian culture. Yet whatever differences the friars perceived, these native peo-
ples seemed to share many characteristics common to southeastern Indians,
including social organization, culture, and language (all, with the possible ex-
ception of the Timucuans, spoke Muskhogean languages, although those
languages were mutually unintelligible). Most lived in small, scattered towns
with circular public plazas that also served as ball courts. These towns gener-

74
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

Map 4

ally held a variety of circular buildings with dome-shaped roofs of palm

thatch: communal storehouses, large public meeting halls called buhíos, and
private residences with their own outbuildings for storage. Most cultivated
corn, beans, and other crops and supplemented their diet by hunting, fishing,
and gathering. The Guales, who had lived along the inland waterway and sea
islands of the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, and the coastal-dwelling
Timucuans may have reversed the emphasis, migrating seasonally to fish,
hunt, and gather and supplementing those activities with farming.
On the southern fringes of seventeenth-century North America a small
number of Spanish preachers—seldom exceeding fifty at a time in either
Florida or New Mexico—made rapid inroads into the communal and indi-
vidual lives of large numbers of natives. Alone, or with the aid of a single

75
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

companion and a small military escort, a Franciscan moved into an Indian

community and persuaded the residents to construct a temple to an alien
god. Among the Pueblos of New Mexico and the natives of the four
provinces of Florida, whose largest enclosed public spaces had been circular
kivas or council houses, the Franciscans oversaw the construction of small,
rectangular, fortress-like churches.
These foreign priests persuaded numerous Indians to participate in
Christian rituals and, at the least, to take on some of the external attributes
of Spanish Christians. Franciscans also altered native societies in ways that
had nothing to do with Christianity but everything to do with living in civ-
ilized or European fashion. For many of the Spanish padres, like their
English and French counterparts, it seemed plain that a people could not
become Christian unless they lived like Christians. Only if natives lived like

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

14. A palisaded Timucuan town, with its palm-thatched houses and sentry posts
at its narrow entrance. Engraving by Theodore de Bry after an original watercolor
by Jacques Le Moyne, 1564. Theodore de Bry, Historia Americae (Frankfort,
1634). Courtesy, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

76
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

Spaniards would they move upward on the hierarchical scale of humankind,

from barbarism to the apex that Europeans believed they occupied. Given
that premise, missionaries concluded that they had “to deal a body-blow
at the whole structure of native society,” as one Franciscan historian has
explained.
Depending on climate, soils, and local needs, missionaries in Florida and
New Mexico taught native converts to husband European domestic animals,
including horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens; cultivate European
crops, from watermelon to wheat; raise fruit trees, from peaches to pome-
granates; use such iron tools as wheels, saws, chisels, planes, nails, and spikes;
and practice those arts and crafts that Spaniards regarded as essential for civ-
ilization as they knew it.
Although the rate of success varied with time and place, it seems remark-
able in retrospect that a small number of Franciscans managed to direct
changes in the external and internal lives of many Indians. How does one
account for the expansion of the friars’ missionary programs in New Mexico
and Florida? Perhaps, as Franciscans believed, divine intervention played a
role, but more worldly explanations suggest themselves: the zeal and skill
of the Franciscans, the powerful economic and bureaucratic apparatus of
church and state that supported them, and the natives themselves, who de-
cided when and how they would cooperate with the Christians.

The Franciscans’ work in North America coincided with a general decline

in clerical fervor in the Hispanic world, but many of the missionaries who
served on the fringes of Spain’s empire, whatever their religious order, went
prepared to make great sacrifices in the new lands. Some wore hair shirts,
walked barefoot, or flagellated themselves. All sacrificed a way of life, “vol-
untarily depriving ourselves,” as one Franciscan explained, “of our homes
and loved ones in the solitude of the forest, destitute, without enjoyment,
comforts, medical aid in sickness and accident, and without the company of
others like us.” Some preachers seemed eager to make the ultimate earthly
sacrifice, believing that martyrdom would guarantee them a favorable place
in an eternal afterlife, and many had their wish fulfilled.
Along with extraordinary dedication, Franciscans brought to North Amer-
ica a number of shrewd strategies for imposing Christianity upon native

77
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

peoples. Refined through decades of experience, some of these strategies had

proved so effective that the Crown had mandated their use in the Royal Or-
ders for New Discoveries of 1573, and they remained popular with religious
orders for over two centuries throughout the Spanish empire.
In the initial entrada or misión stage, Franciscans often sought to dazzle
natives with showy vestments, music, paintings, statuary of sacred images,
and ceremonies. They often won native people over with gifts, such as glass
beads, hatchets, knives, scissors, cloth, and clothing. In many Indian soci-
eties, as among many Spaniards of that day, the acceptance of gifts estab-
lished a sense of obligation and reciprocity.
Once they won the confidence of a group of natives, Franciscans at-
tempted to bring about conversions. In seventeenth-century Florida and
New Mexico, the friars concentrated on the time-honored strategy of insin-
uating themselves into existing communities of sedentary natives. In indige-
nous towns where they chose to reside, Franciscans persuaded the natives to
build friaries or conventos for priests and temples that the Christians called
iglesias, or churches. Urban centers gave Franciscans access to the greatest
concentrations of natives, and they extended their influence to nearby towns
by employing the cabecera-visita system that they used in central Mexico.
Towns where friars resided became the head, or cabecera, of mission districts.
Like later-day circuit riders, but often on foot, friars regularly toured nearby
villages, tours they termed visitas, thus increasing the scope of their native
congregations, or doctrinas.
The spiritual success of missions required that Indians live in towns,
within the sound of the mission bell and the reach of the sacraments, and
the “civilizing” of Indians required that they follow the Spanish ideal of
urban life. In Florida and New Mexico, missionaries found ample Indians
already living in towns. On occasion, the friars tried to relocate sedentary
natives in order to increase the size of towns, make them more defensible,
and minimize travel to distant visitas. In general, however, the Franciscans
in Florida and New Mexico did not need to devote energy and resources to
gathering small Indian towns together into what they called congregaciones;
the problem of bringing dispersed, nonsedentary Indians into towns, or
reducciones, remained.
Extrapolating from their knowledge of European societies, Franciscans
made a special effort to win the allegiance of native leaders. They assumed

78
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

that if they won over the “natural lord” of a native group they would also
gain the loyalty of the lord’s vassals. The opportunistic Franciscans also di-
rected their attention to the conversion of children, whom they perceived to
be more malleable than adults. Once the celibate missionary fathers had
made Indian children their own, they enlisted their aid in converting others
and in discrediting the beliefs and undermining the authority of obdurate
members of the older generation, including native religious leaders.
As they had on earlier frontiers, many Franciscans became linguists and
ethnographers in order to facilitate conversion and perhaps to fulfill the
Crown’s requirement that all missionaries learn native languages (a require-
ment that many missionaries resisted and that proved impossible to en-
force). Throughout Spain’s long tenure in North America, some Franciscans
recorded native languages, and a few published the results in the form of cat-
echisms and confessionals. These bilingual texts facilitated the Franciscans’
efforts to enter the private worlds of the natives without the intermediary of
a translator and to redefine Indians’ values, including their sexual behavior.
A priest using a bilingual confessional, for example, could ask in the native
language, “Have you shown some part of your body to arouse in some person
desires of lust or to excite them?” or “Have you had intercourse with some-
one contrary to the ordinary manner?”
Notwithstanding official injunctions to learn native languages, most
Franciscans apparently failed to do so. “Words, such as God, Trinity, Person,
Blessed Sacrament,” as one Franciscan in New Mexico noted, needed to be
taught in Castilian because Indian languages did not have “equivalent
terms.” Even as the Crown required priests to learn native languages, how-
ever, it also urged friars to teach Castilian to natives. This would not only
rescue Indians from their barbarism by making them more like Spaniards,
but also reduce the babble of Spain’s New World domain to a common lan-
guage.
Paradoxically, the same padres who sought to bring Spanish culture into
every corner of native life also tried to insulate Indians from what they saw
as the baneful influence of Spanish laymen. Pope Pius V had reminded
Menéndez de Avilés that “there is nothing more important for the conver-
sion of those idolatrous Indians than . . . to keep them from being scandal-
ized by the vices and bad habits of those who go to those lands from
Europe.” His concern was well founded. In New Mexico, one Franciscan

79
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

15. One of two woodcuts carved in Mexico to illustrate fray Francisco

Pareja’s Confesionario en lengua castellana, y timuquana (Mexico 1613),
this image was probably designed to show Timucuans that the
devil would try to prevent them from confessing their sins. Courtesy
of New-York Historical Society, New York City.

80
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

reported, a Pueblo Indian had asked, “If we [Spaniards] who are Christians
caused so much harm and violence, why should they [Pueblos] become
Christians?” In variant forms, this question would echo across the next two
centuries, posed by Indians from California to Florida.
To shield Indians from Europeans, missionaries tried to maintain segre-
gated communities. That policy coincided with the Crown’s vision of Indians
and non-Indians residing in separate spheres or “republics”—a common-
wealth of Indians and a commonwealth of Spaniards. By law, mission Indi-
ans could not leave their village to travel to Hispanic towns such as St.
Augustine or Santa Fe without a pass, and Europeans, mestizos, blacks, mu-
lattos, and other non-Indians could not live in Indian villages or spend more
than three days in one. Law and practice, of course, are two different things.
The spiritual conquest of North American Indians moved forward on
more than Franciscan zeal and technique. Franciscans also had behind them
a sizeable state apparatus. The Spanish Crown, which enjoyed patronage
over the Catholic Church in its American colonies and used the Church as
an instrument of conquest and consolidation, provided the friars with re-
sources and military support that enabled them to impose their will by force
upon certain natives. In the 1600s, New Mexico alone cost the Crown nearly
2,390,000 pesos, according to one estimate, with more than half, some
1,340,000 pesos, representing direct costs of maintaining missions and mis-
sionaries. Florida, with its permanent paid garrison, cost nearly three times
as much as New Mexico, where unpaid citizen-soldiers served, or were sup-
posed to serve, the friars.
The Crown supported the Franciscans in North America for reasons both
pious and practical. First, the papal bull that gave the Spanish monarchy title
to the Indies in 1493 had obliged Spain’s monarchs to convert Native Amer-
icans. Franciscans did not fail to remind the Crown of its responsibility.
Second, if missionaries succeeded in Hispanicizing natives, they would add
to the number of laborers and taxpayers, an important consideration for a
nation so small in relation to the size of its empire. Natives themselves
would become Hispanic residents of frontiers that might otherwise be neg-
lected for lack of Spaniards. Third, the government regarded support of mis-
sions as an investment in war and peace. Missionaries, it appeared, could
pacify natives at less cost and with longer-lasting results than could soldiers.
Franciscans, however, usually did not attempt a spiritual conquest without

81
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

the aid of soldiers. The Royal Orders for New Discoveries of 1573 had pro-
hibited military conquest as an instrument for pacifying frontiers, and some
missionaries took the extreme view that North American natives were best
converted in the complete absence of armed men. Military men, some friars
believed, engaged in scandalous behavior, setting immoral examples for In-
dian converts. In general, however, friars thought it prudent to take minimal
military precautions to avoid failure and the senseless deaths of missionaries,
especially as Indians obtained firearms and horses.
In North America, soldiers accompanied Franciscans to ensure their
safety but not to impose Christianity by force on unbelievers. Following
a brief period of theological dispute over the question, missionaries (with
some exceptions) rejected forced conversion as bad theology and poor strat-
egy. “With suavity and mildness an obstinate spirit can better be reclaimed
than with violence and rigor,” fray Estevan de Perea wrote from New Mex-
ico. Once natives consented to receive baptism of their own free will, how-
ever, Franciscans commonly relied upon military force to prevent them from
slipping back into apostasy. If new converts were allowed to leave the mis-
sions, they might miss essential sacraments and fall into the company of
pagans, who would surely lead them further into sin. Franciscans turned to
soldiers to compel baptized Indians to remain in mission communities, as
Spanish law required, hunt down neophytes who fled, and administer corpo-
ral punishment to natives who failed to live up to the canons of their newly
adopted faith or who continued religious practices that Spaniards found
loathsome.
To many Franciscans, native religious beliefs seemed to mock Christian-
ity and to represent the work of the devil, whose playground extended to the
New World as well as the Old. “They adore the Devil,” one Franciscan
in Florida exclaimed. Missionaries sought to remove all traces of what they
saw as Satan-inspired caricatures of the True Faith. Initially, friars in North
America fought the devil through persuasion and prayer. When exorcism
and other nonviolent means failed, however, Franciscans reached into their
arsenal and made war.
In New Mexico and Florida, as they had done since the earliest stages of
the conquest of America, the preachers smashed, burned, or confiscated
objects sacred to the natives—what one friar in New Mexico described as
“idols, offerings, masks, and other things of the kind which the Indians were

82
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

accustomed to use in their heathenism.” Franciscans also tried to suppress

native religious rituals and ceremonial dances because they saw them as ex-
pressions of “idolatry and worship of the devil.”
Franciscans who defended the use of corporal punishment and force did
so on firm philosophical ground. First, as one padre claimed, only through
forcible means could a people “of vicious and ferocious habits who know no
law but force” be rescued from their barbarism. Second, schooled in a time
and place where the good of the community prevailed over the rights of the
individual, some Franciscans regarded it as their duty to punish individuals
harshly lest they infect others with their wicked ways. Third, thoughtful
Franciscans saw the use of force as essential to saving their own souls, for
their theology suggested that “he who could prevent a given sin and failed to
do so was actually cooperating in the offense committed against God and
therefore shared in the guilt.” Finally, in a struggle with Satan, the end surely
justified the means.
Even when the friars did not use force or unleash soldiers on the natives,
the possibility of force must have persuaded some natives to accept baptism
and cooperate. To suppose, for example, that Indians would have voluntarily
performed such tasks as building churches because priests and soldiers were
too few to compel them to work misses an essential point. In the process of
“pacifying” Florida and New Mexico, Spaniards had inflicted devastating
punishment on Indians and probably broke the will of some Indian commu-
nities to offer overt resistance to missionaries accompanied by soldiers.

Whatever skill, resources, and force the Franciscans brought to their strug-
gle to extend Christianity to North American natives, they did not succeed
unless Indians cooperated, and Indians cooperated only when they believed
they had something to gain from the new religion and the material benefits
that accompanied it or too much to lose from resisting it.
Some natives welcomed missionaries, calculating that friendly relationships
with friars would bring material benefits, such as gifts and access to Spanish
trade goods. Other natives saw Franciscans as a key to defense against preda-
tory Spaniards or predatory Indian neighbors. Natives often regarded priests as
useful intermediaries between themselves and the potentially hostile Spanish
soldiers. Indians, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza reported, “welcome the friars,

83
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

and where they flee from us like deer . . . they come to them.” Some natives
saw an alliance with the friars as a way to shift the balance of power against en-
emies from other tribes. Thus, natives sought to manipulate missionaries to
promote their own security much as the Spanish Crown tried to utilize mis-
sionaries to secure its frontiers from natives and imperial rivals. When condi-
tions were right, the natives’ tactics worked and enabled some of their societies
to survive.
Initially, at least, submission to the foreign priests also seemed to offer na-
tives access to awesome spiritual power. To some Indians, Franciscans may
have appeared to be “powerful witches” who needed to be appeased or power-
ful shamans with whom it seemed wise to cooperate. Like Christians, many
North American Indians believed that priests and ceremonies had power to
mediate between humans and nature, and Franciscans claimed such power as
they conjured cures, rain, and good harvests. From the first, several signs of
the friars’ power were readily evident to Indians. Armed Spanish soldiers and
splendidly attired government officials prostrated themselves before the un-
armed, plain-robed friars. Franciscans introduced and controlled domestic
animals, larger than the natives had previously known, and could thereby
provide a steady supply of meat without hunting. Strange diseases that took
lives of Indians spared Europeans who followed the Christian god.
The extent to which Indians saw themselves as beneficiaries of relation-
ships with missionaries was, in part, specific to the values of each native so-
ciety. Franciscan celibacy may have seemed unremarkable to some natives,
for example, but probably awed the Pueblos, for whom, as historian Ramón
Gutiérrez has put it, “coitus was the symbol of cosmic harmony.” Pueblo
males believed that by abstaining from sexual activity for several days they
achieved greater strength for the hunt, for curing, or for conjuring rain.
What power might accrue to those friars who practiced lifelong sexual absti-
nence!
Economic and environmental conditions also figured into the natives’ cal-
culations of costs and benefits. Nomads and seminomads, such as Apaches
and Chiscas, succeeded at retaining their spiritual and physical indepen-
dence for they could move beyond the Spanish sphere and leave behind
little of value at traditional hunting or gathering places—a fact that Francis-
cans recognized. Conversely, Franciscans in Florida and New Mexico made
their earliest conversions among town-dwelling agriculturalists, who had the

84
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

most to lose if antagonized Spaniards burned their villages and trampled

their crops—the more so perhaps in arid New Mexico, which offered few
ecological niches to which native farmers might escape.
Natives who decided to accept missions after weighing their apparent
benefits and liabilities also determined which aspects of Christianity and
European culture they would embrace and which they would reject. As
a rule, those native societies that had not been vitiated by war or disease
adopted from the friars what they perceived was both useful and compatible
with their essential values and institutions. Ideally, they sought to add the
new without discarding the old or to replace elements in their culture with
parallel elements from the new—as they had done long before the arrival of
Europeans. In the religious sphere, for example, many natives simply added
Jesus, Mary, and Christian saints to their rich pantheons and welcomed the
Franciscans into their communities as additional shamans.
However selectively neophytes adopted aspects of Christianity and Span-
ish culture, their decisions began to transform their cultures—often in ways
that neither they nor the missionaries intended. Indians such as the Guales,
for example, who had enjoyed a rich variety of foods from fishing, hunting,
and gathering, experienced a decline in nutritional quality on the more re-
stricted mission diet, making them more prone to disease, iron-deficiency
anemia, and lower birthrates. On the other hand, by cultivating certain Eu-
ropean crops and raising European domestic animals, other natives enriched
their diet, lengthened the growing season, deemphasized hunting in favor of
agriculture, and made it possible for their villages to support denser popula-
tions. Their prosperity also made them more attractive targets for raids by
nomads and forced them to devote more resources to defense. In these ways,
and many others that varied greatly among Indian peoples, acceptance of
missionaries transformed native economies, polities, social structure, and
family life. Indians who had previously enjoyed independence found them-
selves reduced from the status of sovereign peoples to subject populations,
occupying one of the lowest rungs on the socioeconomic ladder of the new
social order.
It is impossible, of course, to know the depth of change that Franciscans
effected in the interior lives of numerous Indians. Some probably underwent
profound and complete conversions, and others almost certainly found ways to
synthesize old and new religions, much as their Christian contemporaries in

85
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

Spain blended elements of pagan and Catholic belief and ritual. Then, too,
some mission Indians made superficial adjustments to please the friars or to
win the favor of the Christian god, such as participating in Catholic rituals
or changing burial customs, but also continued to practice the old religion.
One can imagine many reasons neophytes did not succumb so com-
pletely to the blandishments of the new religion that they rejected the old.
One reason seems especially evident. The bright future Franciscans offered
at the outset of the courtship quickly lost its luster as the terms of exchange
shifted against mission Indians. Along with gifts and access to trade goods
had come demands for labor and resources, and those demands on individ-
ual neophytes increased as local Indian populations declined. Obedience to
the Franciscans and their god did not stop the spread of strange, new dis-
eases. The worlds of the natives continued to collapse. By 1680, the Pueblo
population had fallen by at least half, to some 17,000, since the Franciscans’
arrival. In Florida, the Eastern Timucuans had nearly disappeared by 1680;
a Spanish census of 1675 reported that only 1,370 Timucuans remained,
most of them west of the Suwannee River. Florida, as one historian has put
it, “had become a hollow peninsula.” The Apalachees had declined from
about 25,000 at first contact with missionaries early in the 1600s to some
10,000 by about 1680. Enemy raids, desertions, movement into colonists’
communities, and forced labor also diminished the numbers of Indians in
missions, but epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other difficult-to-
identify diseases appear to have been the principal cause of premature
Indian deaths.
The prayers of the padres did not shield the natives from European dis-
eases or from other natural or man-made disasters. In the semiarid South-
west, years passed when little rain fell upon the land. Crops failed, hunger
increased, and the surviving crops and livestock proved tempting targets
for Apache raiders. In the Southeast, a skilled Indian labor force at the
Spanish missions proved irresistible to English slave hunters by the late
1600s.
In such troubled times it must have seemed to Indian neophytes that
Franciscan shamans had lost their magic or that the Christian god did not
have the strength of the old god. Thus, to control the forces of the cosmos
mission Indians turned more openly to traditional gods, prayers, ceremonies,

86
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

and priests that had proved efficacious in the past. Indians learned to their
sorrow, however, that Christianity was incompatible with some of their most
cherished values and institutions and that their decision to accept baptism
was irrevocable in the eyes of the friars. Mission Indians heard their tradi-
tional religious practices condemned as idolatrous by the padres, who
quashed non-Catholic public religious ceremonies and who intruded into
the most private aspects of natives’ lives. Friars, for example, attempted to
end polygamy among those natives who practiced it and to impose upon
them indissoluble monogamy. In so doing, the friars often enraged and hu-
miliated native males who lacked the Christian arithmetic that one wife was
better than two or three. Among the Pueblos, where sexuality and sanctity
were closely linked, the affront to their dignity must have been especially
deep, and the hypocrisy of Christians (including some of the friars), who
themselves engaged in sexual practices they sought to prohibit, could not
have gone unnoticed.
Oppressed in body and in spirit, many mission Indians sought ways to ex-
tricate themselves from the loving embrace of the sons of St. Francis. Strategies
varied. Some individuals fled, as did entire communities on a few occasions.
Others tried to rid themselves of individual priests by murdering them or by
making their lives miserable. Prior to their successful rebellions of the late
1600s, neophytes rebelled on a large scale at least once in each of the four
mission provinces of Florida and on a number of occasions in New Mexico.
Friars often understood these revolts as the work of the devil or as a sign of
native ingratitude, but natives’ actions make it clear, at least in retrospect,
that the rebellions represented efforts to achieve freedom of religious and
cultural expression.

The Spanish Franciscans who contended with native religions on the

seventeenth-century frontiers of North America both succeeded and
failed—as friars would on subsequent Spanish frontiers in North America.
By their own count, missionaries succeeded when they tallied the numbers
of souls saved through baptism and the number of mission communities
where natives worshiped as Catholics and lived as Spaniards. If baptized In-
dians died from European diseases, friars regarded that as God’s will. As

87
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

historian Robert Archibald observed, “Missionaries would have philosophi-

cally preferred dead Christians to live pagans.”
At a less transcendental but more demonstrable level, the friars could also
count among their achievements the number of natives saved from extinc-
tion at the hands of unscrupulous Spanish settlers and soldiers. The Spanish
missions, historian Herbert Bolton observed nearly a century ago, were de-
signed “for the preservation of the Indians, as opposed to their destruction,
so characteristic of the Anglo-American frontier.” Yet the friars intended to
preserve the lives of Indian individuals, not the individual’s Indian life.
Whatever they accomplished, the Franciscans recognized that they fell
short of their goal of weakening the indigenous religions and replacing them
with their own. After eighty years of missionary efforts among the Pueblos,
for example, one Spaniard complained that most of them “have never for-
saken idolatry, and they appear to be Christians more by force than to be In-
dians who are reduced to the Holy Faith.” A true synthesis of the belief
systems of the natives and the Spanish intruders did not occur in
seventeenth-century North America any more than it had in sixteenth-
century New Spain. Rather, religions and values remained in lively con-
tention with one another. When militant Franciscans persecuted native
religious leaders and tried to impose religious orthodoxy by force, they may
have driven true believers into secret worship and provoked violent resis-
tance.
The friars also failed to achieve fully their goal of Hispanicizing Indians.
In retrospect, it seems clear that they could not have done so in an institu-
tion that often isolated Indians from the larger Hispanic community.
Finally, missions failed to serve the defensive function that the Crown en-
visioned. In Florida and New Mexico, native rebellions proved especially
costly. They not only destroyed the missions but also, as we shall see, rolled
back the entire Spanish frontier.
Whatever their spiritual successes, missionaries failed to advance perma-
nently, defend effectively, or Hispanicize deeply North American frontiers in
the seventeenth century. Although Franciscans succeeded initially in pushing
the edges of Christendom into parts of North America, natives pushed them
back. Despite new safeguards that the Spanish Crown had built into the
system in the late sixteenth century, friars and natives in seventeenth-
century North America repeated a cycle that had played itself out a century

88
 c o n q u i s ta d o r s o f t h e s p i r i t

before in other regions of Spanish America where natives’ initial acceptance

of missionaries had turned to disillusion, estrangement, and finally to resis-
tance in its many forms, including rebellion. The reasons for the failures of
the missions, however, lay only partially with Indians and missionaries, for
missions represented but one of the oppressive frontier institutions of the
Spanish state.

89
 5
Exploitation, Contention, and Rebellion

Indians [of New Mexico] do not attend mass and the teaching
of the doctrine . . . because they flee from the excessive work which the religious
make them do under guise of instruction.
—Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal to fray
Diego de Santander, New Mexico, 1660

These natives [of Florida] have not had justice. . . . I beg that Your
Majesty will . . . [give] them the relief which they request, in order that
these provinces be not destroyed and made waste.
—Antonio Ponce de León to the king, Havana, 1702

In Florida and New Mexico, Spain’s laboriously constructed colonies fell

apart with surprising speed. New Mexico’s demise took only a matter of days
in 1680. In a display of unity that astonished Spaniards, Pueblos forcibly
evicted all Hispanics and sent them retreating down the Rio Grande to El
Paso. The mission provinces of Florida disintegrated more slowly. Because
the Castillo of San Marcos at St. Augustine held firm, natives did not oust

90
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

the Spaniards entirely. Nevertheless, between 1680 and 1706 the Florida mis-
sions collapsed.
In both upheavals, attacks by outside forces served as catalysts: drought
and Apaches in New Mexico and Englishmen and their Indian allies in
Florida. In each case, however, a deep structural weakness of Spain’s frontier
colonies contributed to the native rebellions. New Mexico and Florida stood
on a foundation of Indian labor. When the demands of friars, soldiers, set-
tlers, and government officials weighed more than the natives wished to
bear, they rebelled.
In their dependence on forced labor, these first Spanish colonies in North
America typified frontiers in other times and places. Contrary to conventional
wisdom, frontier zones with open resources often foster human bondage rather
than free labor. Why should people work willingly for others when free land
and opportunity beckon? On many frontiers, only coercion could guarantee a
steady supply of cheap workers so that compulsory labor took its place along-
side racial and ethnic tensions as an important cause of violence and unrest.

Franciscans depended almost entirely on native laborers to make missions

work. Under Spanish law Indians paid no tithes to the Church, but Indian
men, women, and children constructed the buildings of the mission com-
plex, performed the daily mission routines from the ringing of bells to the
preparation of food, and raised the stock and tilled the fields that fed neo-
phytes and friars alike. Neophytes also produced surpluses that friars mar-
keted to raise money to supplement the subventions they received from the
Crown. No doubt many natives worked “voluntarily” at missions, “much to
their pleasure,” as one friar claimed. There is evidence, too, however, that
some neophytes worked unwillingly and resentfully.
The Franciscans’ reliance upon Indian labor brought them into direct
competition with soldiers, settlers, and government officials who sought to
build a secular society on a base of native workers. Spanish gentlemen, or
would-be gentlemen, might operate farms, ranches, or mines, but these ca-
balleros had no intention of performing monotonous, backbreaking manual
labor if Indians could be made to do it for them. Viceroy Luis de Velasco, ex-
aggerating only slightly, once complained that “no one comes to the Indies
to plow and sow, but only to eat and loaf.”

91
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

Spaniards, who had a long tradition of extracting wealth and prestige

from the work of conquered peoples on the frontiers of Iberia, may have
placed less value on their own manual labor than did their European coun-
terparts. In the New World, however, differences in European attitudes to-
ward work were not initially apparent. Neither the Frenchmen whom
Menéndez cut down at Fort Caroline in 1564–65, nor the Englishmen who es-
tablished a short-lived settlement at Roanoke in the 1580s and a more endur-
ing colony at Jamestown in 1607 came to America to “plow and sow.” Instead,
like Spaniards, they devoted their energies to searching for gold and silver and
seeking a strait to the Pacific. They depended on Indians for their survival.
Like Spaniards, Englishmen taxed the natives’ resources beyond the breaking
point. When demands for food by the colonists at Roanoke and Jamestown
provoked Indian resistance, English gentlemen retaliated with a brutality
that their countrymen believed to be uniquely Spanish. That Englishmen
and Frenchmen came to rely less on Indian labor than Spaniards may have
had more to do with American opportunities than with attitudes and insti-
tutions Europeans brought with them.
Like other European colonizers, Spaniards initially relied upon natives to
feed them. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and Juan de Oñate lived in Indian
communities and collected tribute from Indians in the form of maize and
other foods. As the colonies of Florida and New Mexico matured, Spaniards
continued to depend on Indians for their well-being. If they did not exploit
Indians to extinction, as they had in the Caribbean, it was in part because
they had found no precious metals and because the Crown had taken mea-
sures to curb the greatest excesses. Nonetheless, Spaniards found a variety of
ways to exploit Indians, some of them legal, by Spanish definition, and oth-
ers illegal.
One legal means of exploitation was through the collection of tribute,
which the Crown determined that all subject natives owed. In New Mexico,
the Crown transferred its right to collect tribute to a few privileged citizens,
or encomenderos—trustees who held a specified number of natives in trust,
or in encomienda. Rewarded by Oñate and his successors according to their
rank and services to the Crown, encomenderos enjoyed the privilege of receiv-
ing tribute from one or more pueblos or fractions of pueblos.
The encomienda represented the survival of a feudal institution through
which the king or his representative rewarded subjects who risked their

92
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

lives in frontier warfare. Accorded the privilege of collecting tribute for a

lifetime, encomenderos could often pass their encomienda on to their heirs
for two generations. In exchange, encomenderos were obliged to provide
military service for the Crown and assume responsibility for the natives’
defense and spiritual welfare. In the initial decades after the conquest of
America, encomenderos abused the system infamously. Eager to bring the
independent encomenderos under control, Carlos V had attempted to abol-
ish the encomienda in 1542. The powerful encomenderos managed, however,
to thwart reforms and to maintain most of their privileges. Guided by ex-
pediency, the Crown continued throughout the sixteenth century to allow
the establishment of new encomiendas, even though it disapproved of them
in principle.
Commonly, Indians in New Mexico paid tribute to their encomenderos in
goods, set at an annual legal limit per household of a fanega of maize (1.6
bushels) and a cotton blanket or deer or buffalo hide. In a province with few
Spaniards and many tributary Indians, tribute represented a bonanza for the
encomenderos, who formed the local aristocracy. Initially, Pueblo households
may not have regarded tribute as excessive, but it seems to have grown more
burdensome over the course of the seventeenth century, especially in times
of drought and of raids by nomads on Pueblo fields.
However it should have worked in theory, the encomienda continued to be
abused in practice. For example, some encomenderos in New Mexico, as in
other areas far from royal control, exacted tribute in the form of direct labor
or personal service even though the Crown prohibited the practice. The bur-
den of this illegal employment fell on men and women alike, but Indian
women working in Spanish households often bore the additional anguish of
sexual assaults by their employers. Other encomenderos violated royal policy
by settling on native land. By law, encomiendas never included land.
Although the encomienda was the key Spanish institution for organizing
labor in seventeenth-century New Mexico, it never took root in Florida.
When Menéndez de Avilés contracted to settle Florida in 1565, the en-
comienda stood in especially bad repute with the Crown. Instead of creating
a class of soldier-citizens dependent upon Indian tributaries, as he would in
New Mexico, Felipe II maintained a garrison of paid soldiers in Florida.
Spaniards’ perennially weak position relative to the natives may also explain
why the encomienda was not established by later governors. Indeed, Indian

93
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

recalcitrance apparently discouraged officials in Florida from establishing a

regular system of collecting tribute for the Crown. What they failed to col-
lect in tribute, however, Florida officials made up for by compelling Indians
to labor on public works—as they were in New Mexico as well.
Indians were assigned to public projects through the repartimiento de in-
dios, a time-honored institution by which Spanish officials distributed native
men to work on a rotating basis for tasks deemed to be for the public good.
For the natives, participation in the repartimiento was compulsory, but they
were to receive wages, and the law set limits on the length of their service
and the type of work they could be compelled to do. In practice, however,
Spanish officials commonly ignored these legal safeguards. On the frontier,
as throughout the Spanish empire, Indians were unpaid, underpaid, paid in
overvalued merchandise, unfed, underfed, kept for longer periods of time
than regulations permitted, and pressed into the personal service of individ-
uals who confused their own good with the public weal.
Just as the Crown found it impossible to prevent abuses of the repar-
timiento, it found it difficult to abolish the institution itself. The repartimiento
lingered in peripheral areas such as Florida and New Mexico long after it had
disappeared in central New Spain, Peru, and other more settled areas of the
Spanish empire.
Still another source of exploitable native labor was trade with Indians, or
rescate, in which Spaniards paid ransom to free Indians that one tribe or
band had captured from another. Christian charity and Spanish law required
that these captives be rescued. Apaches, Navajos, Utes, and other ransomed
Indians were often placed with Christian families, among whom they might
become Hispanicized and, in exchange, earn their keep by doing household
work. The orphaned children of mission Indians sometimes met the same
fate. In the seventeenth century, Christian households in New Mexico com-
monly had one or more of these servants, or criados, and the number proba-
bly rose in the eighteenth century. By the mid-1700s, Indian servants easily
averaged one per Hispanic household.
Technically these indios de depósito were not slaves, although New Mexi-
cans in the seventeenth century paid the price of a good mule, thirty or forty
pesos, for them. In theory Indian “servants” were to be set free after a speci-
fied period of time; they could not pass their condition of servitude onto
their children. Such legal niceties were probably not appreciated by the cap-

94
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

tives. Some may have been treated warmly in New Mexico households, but
all were demeaned and marginalized, and some were brutalized. Women, in
particular, had little defense against sexual abuse by their masters—such as
one Alejandro Mora, who raped his servant Juana “to determine if she was a
virgin.” Juana said that when she resisted, “he hung me from a roof-beam
and beat me.” Some New Mexicans whose avarice exceeded their scruples
apparently sold ransomed Indians into slavery in markets to the south.
In addition to exploiting Indian labor through the legally sanctioned in-
stitutions of missions, encomiendas, repartimientos, and rescate, some
Spaniards turned directly to the patently illegal enterprise of taking Indian
slaves. Spaniards seldom enslaved mission Indians (they had other ways of
exploiting their labor), but they did reach beyond the frontiers of Christen-
dom to seize pagans, most of them women and children. Spaniards had
bought and sold natives since the earliest stages of the conquest of America
( just as Indians had bought and sold one another before the Spaniards’ ar-
rival), but by the late 1500s the Crown had made it plain that Indians should
not be enslaved for any reason. Most clergy concurred, although some
wondered if slavery would not improve the natives’ lot. Frontiersmen of all
classes, however, ignored royal and religious prohibitions and continued to
enslave pagans who committed unprovoked attacks on Spanish settlements.
Those unconverted Indians who would ordinarily not oblige Spaniards with
an unwarranted attack were on occasion provoked into doing so by Spanish
slaving parties.
In Florida, the overwhelming majority of domestic slaves were not Indi-
ans but blacks imported legally from nearby markets in the Caribbean (al-
though the Crown prohibited enslavement of Indians, it had long condoned
black slavery). New Mexicans, on the other hand, had no need to import
costly black slaves for they garnered enough Indian slaves to produce a sur-
plus. Indeed, New Mexico became a net exporter of Indian slaves in the sev-
enteenth century, sending captives south to be sold to Christian families in
the labor-short mining regions of New Spain.
Spaniards, then, found a variety of ways to coerce Indians into working
for them, either through institutions that Spaniards, if not Indians, regarded
as legal or by violating laws designed to protect Indians. There is special
irony in Spaniards’ illegal exploitation of Indian labor, for Spain had debated
the rights of Indians and developed a more enlightened body of law to

95
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

protect them from involuntary labor than any other European colonizing
power. The pragmatic Crown, however, often allowed appearances to mask
harsh realities and did not look too closely into the ways in which its distant
colonials circumvented laws intended to shield natives from compulsory
labor. For example, to enforce laws that would prevent Spaniards from
wronging natives, the Crown had established the office of Protector of Indi-
ans. In seventeenth-century North America, however, this office was filled
only on rare occasions.
In a legal sense, the Protector of Indians was a superfluous office be-
cause all government officials, implicitly or explicitly, had a responsibility
to protect Indian rights. In peripheral areas, however, officials charged
with upholding laws favorable to Indians were most likely to violate them.
Governors are a clear example. Throughout the Spanish empire in the sev-
enteenth century, governors and other high-ranking officials regarded
public office as a way to enrich themselves, legally or illegally. Governors
commonly bought their office from the Crown and, in addition, paid a tax
equivalent to half of a year’s salary (a media anata). In order to recapture
their initial investment and turn a profit, governors went into private busi-
ness, flaunting regulations and direct orders that prohibited them from en-
gaging in commerce in their jurisdictions. For governors of Florida and
New Mexico, the labor of Indians was their only source of profit. Always
outsiders, governors held no encomiendas in the provinces to which they had
been assigned. Thus, they commonly relied on slave labor and the repar-
timiento to assemble an unpaid or underpaid workforce for a variety of
personal ventures.
Frontier officials who misbehaved had little to fear from the institution
that the Crown established to keep them in check. Royal policy required an
incoming governor to conduct an investigation, or residencia, of his prede-
cessor’s conduct in office. These investigations, which occurred every few
years as governorships changed hands, became notoriously corrupt. The in-
coming governor often demanded a bribe to clear the record of the outgoing
governor. To pay these predictable bribes, governors had to raise still more
money while in office—money often earned by the sweat of native brows.
The Crown reformed the procedure for residencias in the eighteenth century,
but the investigators and the investigated both had more to gain from collu-
sion than they did from obeying the law. Governors continued to find ways

96
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

around the system in the remote North American provinces, far from the
watchful eye of royal officials.

Throughout the Spanish empire the sacred and the profane contended for
Indian labor, but in remote areas that lacked powerful mediators and had no
other sources of wealth, the struggle became especially intense. New Mex-
ico, more isolated than Florida and less able to depend upon outside
resources for support, seems to have been the scene of especially bitter con-
tention over Indian labor.
In both Florida and New Mexico, as on later Spanish frontiers in North
America, the invaders’ demands for Indian labor exceeded the supply—the
more so as native populations and productivity declined. Inevitably, at the
same time they struggled to maintain a docile native labor force, Spaniards
quarreled among themselves. In ever-shifting alliances, friars, encomenderos,
soldiers, settlers, and frontier officials contended with one another for a larger
share of native workers, insisting that their own claims on Indian labor were
in the natives’ best interests.
Franciscans defended their use of Indian labor with the classic rationali-
zation of colonialists, arguing that it improved the natives’ naturally indolent
character. Conversely, the missionaries accused settlers, soldiers, and govern-
ment officials of exploiting natives in ways that were not only illegal, but
that also weakened the mission Indians’ ability to provide for their own
livelihood and that obstructed the friars’ efforts to evangelize. Excessive de-
mands for labor and tribute from Christian Indians, the friars argued, made
pagans wary of missionaries.
Determined to maintain their control over mission Indians and ignoring
the exhortation of their order’s founder to “neither quarrel nor contend in
words,” Franciscans marshaled the power of church and state. Over the heads
of local governors, Franciscans in Florida appealed directly to the king; friars
in New Mexico appealed directly to the viceroy. The men of the cloth usually
emerged victorious. As the only religious order in Florida or New Mexico,
Franciscans generally spoke with one voice. Because they represented the most
sacred values of their culture, at least in theory if not always in practice, they
made a persuasive case against local officials. Complaints lodged by Francis-
cans, for example, led to the arrest and conviction of Gov. Juan de Eulate for

97
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

exporting slaves from New Mexico; Franciscan charges that Diego de Re-
bolledo abused Indians led the king to remove him from the governorship of
Florida and bring him to Spain to stand trial. Rebolledo died before his case
was heard.
In addition to enlisting the aid of outside authorities, Franciscans in New
Mexico wielded fearsome spiritual weapons to win their way. In remote New
Mexico, where they operated independently of episcopal authority and where
Indian labor was the only source of wealth (New Mexico had no garrison to
receive an annual stipend, or situado), Franciscans utilized their ecclesiastical
arsenal with less restraint and greater fervor than they did in Florida. Friars in
New Mexico excommunicated so many of their political opponents that the
town council of Santa Fe complained to the viceroy in 1639 that “on the doors
of the church are posted more excommunications than bulls.”
Reliance upon force instead of diplomacy brought mixed results for the
Franciscans. In the short run, victory often came their way. In Florida, for
example, after the padres denied him the sacrament of confession for a year,
Gov. Juan Marques Cabrera (1680–87) suffered a nervous breakdown and
abruptly deserted his post. In the long run, however, the Franciscans lost re-
spect. They alienated government officials and settlers alike, just as they
alienated Indian neophytes, with unrestrained displays of power over what
were often petty issues.
Contention over Indian labor was not the only issue that caused Francis-
cans to take aim at their secular rivals, but it often lay behind their fusillades.
For their part, officials, settlers, and soldiers defended their own use of native
labor and attacked the friars for exploiting the natives. Unlike the friars, the
secular community spoke with many voices, for its members contended with
one another as well as with the priests for native workers. Missionaries,
however, who usually controlled the best land and whose neophytes consti-
tuted nearly all tributary Indians, were the easiest target. The most outspo-
ken of the governors assailed the friars for failing to pay Indians for their
work, for overworking Indians so that they fled the missions, and for enrich-
ing themselves at the expense of Indians.
Not content to limit their charges and countercharges to appeals to
higher officials, Spaniards fought openly with one another. In New Mex-
ico, where the struggle over Indian labor was most bitter, insults and blows
were exchanged, mail opened, and documents forged. One governor inter-

98
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

rupted mass to call a priest a liar, and friars hurled the pew of another gov-
ernor into the street in front of the church. Friars used the authority of the
Inquisition to arrest and imprison governors, and governors arrested friars.
At their most bitter, these conflicts between church and state amounted to
civil war. Gov. Luis de Rosas was assassinated by his enemies—Franciscans
among them, although the friars did not bloody their own hands. In
Florida as well as New Mexico, all sides engaged in character assassination,
accusing one another of sexual improprieties and greed—often with good
reason.
Natives could not remain blind to these contretemps, and at times they
were caught in the middle. In Apalachee, for example, women neophytes
who failed to spend days in the woods gathering nuts to make oil received
fifty lashes from one priest. Capt. Francisco de Fuentes, who objected to the
missionaries’ demands on these women, threatened them with one hundred
lashes if they did obey the priest. Both the friars and the governors enlisted
or coerced natives to testify against the other side. Through such behavior,
Spaniards must have demeaned themselves in the eyes of natives and dimin-
ished their own prestige and authority. Certainly among the Pueblos, where
one sign of an effective religious leader was an ability to maintain harmony
in the community, the contentious Franciscans must have lost face. At the
very least, the Spaniards’ failures to cooperate among themselves in Florida
and New Mexico weakened the administration of the two colonies and left
them more vulnerable in time of crisis.
Conflict between representatives of church and state in seventeenth-
century Florida and New Mexico was apparently the norm—interrupted
only occasionally by harmonious relations between particularly accommo-
dating personalities. Friction over jurisdiction and privilege often seemed to
be the source of the discord, but the deeper issue of who would exploit In-
dian land and labor stood at the core of the Spaniards’ debilitating intramu-
ral contention.

By squandering their moral authority and dissipating their energies in in-

ternal quarrels, Spaniards weakened their hold over their Indian subjects. At
the same time, native societies grew increasingly volatile, aggrieved by reli-
gious persecution and oppressive demands on their labor and resources.

99
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

When the natives’ resentment reached the boiling point, it shattered the
fragile colonial structures of Florida and New Mexico.
Violent eruptions that Spaniards characterized as rebellions but which
Indians probably saw as armed struggles for freedom broke out in Guale in
1597, 1645, and the early 1680s, in Apalachee in 1647, in Apalachee and Timu-
cua in 1565, and in Apalachicola in 1675 and 1681. In New Mexico, in the first
half of the sixteenth century alone, Pueblos took the offensive at Zuni in
1632, at Taos in 1639–40, at Jémez in 1644 and 1647, and in a number of Tewa
villages in 1650. Indeed, Pueblos and Florida Indians may have rebelled
more frequently than Spanish reports indicated. In all of these episodes,
Spaniards lost property and lives—especially the lives of missionaries.
Although vastly outnumbered, Spaniards crushed most of these rebellions
mainly because the linguistically and culturally diverse native communities
could not unite. On a few occasions, as in New Mexico in 1650 and 1667, several
Indian villages joined in rebellion, but they lacked sufficient strength to prevail.
Spaniards hung their leaders and sold suspected participants into slavery.
Not until 1680 did Pueblos launch a highly unified offensive against
Spanish intruders. Mission Indians in Florida, scattered in three provinces,
never emulated the Pueblos by cooperating with one another to drive
Spaniards out, but by the early 1700s they had achieved much the same re-
sult. The appearance of outside forces—Apaches and drought in New Mex-
ico and Englishmen in Florida—provided the impetus for the large-scale
native resistance that began in both places in the 1680s.
Pueblo society in New Mexico grew increasingly restive during two de-
cades of low rainfall and higher-than-average temperatures that began in
1660 and lasted until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Pueblos lost herds and crops
to bad weather and to raids by Navajos, Apaches, and others who, themselves
made more desperate by the drought, intensified their raids on the Pueblos’
fields, flocks, and storehouses. To the Pueblos, these years of hunger, disease,
and death offered grim testimony to the Christians’ inability to intercede
with supernatural forces. In search of more efficacious prayers, Pueblos
turned to traditional religious leaders and ceremonies. Anxious to halt this
Pueblo religious revival and to maintain orthodoxy, Spaniards harshly sup-
pressed native ceremonies and persecuted native priests.
The escalation of Spanish oppression at a time of unusual stress galva-
nized many Pueblo leaders. They worked out a strategy to regain their reli-

100
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

gious freedom and, perhaps of equal importance, to free themselves from

obligations of labor and tribute. Rather than settle for halfway measures that
had failed in the past, they planned to rid New Mexico entirely of Spaniards.
In 1680 Pueblo leaders united most of their communities against the Euro-
pean intruders.
It required careful planning to coordinate an offensive involving some
seventeen thousand Pueblos living in more than two dozen independent
towns spread out over several hundred miles and further separated by at least
six different languages and countless dialects, many of them mutually unin-
telligible. The magnet that drew these disparate people together seems to
have been Popé. A resolute religious leader from San Juan Pueblo, Popé had
been among those accused of sorcery and whipped. Concealing himself in a
sacred room, or kiva, at Taos, the most northerly and remote Pueblo in the
province, Popé directed a rebellion against his oppressors. He sent runners
with calendars in the form of knotted cords to participating pueblos. Each
knot marked a day until the Pueblos would take up arms in a simultaneous
rebellion.
Although the Spaniards had received warnings, they could not have
imagined the magnitude of this unprecedented assault. The revolt caught
them off guard. Scattered in farms and ranches along the Rio Grande and its
tributaries, Spaniards were easy prey. In a matter of weeks, the Pueblos had
eliminated them from New Mexico. The natives had killed over four hun-
dred of the province’s twenty-five hundred foreigners, destroyed or sacked
every Spanish building, and laid waste to the Spaniards’ fields. They permit-
ted the survivors, including several hundred Pueblos who remained loyal to
the Spaniards, to retreat down the Rio Grande some three hundred miles to
El Paso.
There could be no mistaking the deep animosity that some natives, men
as well as their influential wives and mothers, held toward their former op-
pressors. “The heathen,” wrote one Spanish officer in New Mexico, “have
conceived a mortal hatred for our holy faith and enmity for the Spanish na-
tion.” Some Pueblo leaders, including Popé, urged an end to all things Span-
ish as well as Christian. After the fighting subsided, they counseled against
speaking Castilian or planting crops introduced by the Europeans. This na-
tivistic resurgence succeeded only partially in reversing the cultural transfor-
mation that Spaniards had set in motion. Pueblos continued to raise

101
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

Spanish-introduced crops and livestock and to make woolen textiles. Just as

they had been selective in adapting aspects of Hispanic culture, so too were
they selective in rejecting them.
The Pueblos’ repudiation of the symbols of Christianity suggested the
strong religious impulse behind the rebellion. The natives desecrated churches
and sacred objects. They killed twenty-one of the province’s thirty-three mis-
sionaries, often humiliating, tormenting, and beating them before taking
their lives. Spaniards clearly understood the Pueblo Rebellion as a rejection
of Christianity. As Gov. Antonio de Otermín watched the church in Santa
Fe burn, he listened to “the scoffing and ridicule which the wretched and
miserable Indian rebels made of the sacred things, intoning . . . prayers of
the church with jeers.”
The Pueblos had carried out one of the most successful Indian rebellions
against Spanish colonizers anywhere in the hemisphere, and they main-
tained their independence for thirteen years.
Most of the Spanish survivors, meanwhile, remained in or near El Paso,
then located on what is today the Mexican side of the Rio Grande at Ciudad
Juárez. Site of a mission since 1659, El Paso’s beginnings as a Hispanic civil
community dated to the Pueblo Revolt, when it became New Mexico’s tem-
porary and unhappy capital. Instead of using El Paso as a launching point to
reassert control over the Pueblos, Spanish soldiers, colonists, and missionar-
ies found themselves hard-pressed to hold ground. Beginning in 1684, the
rebellion of the Pueblos had begun to spread beyond the Pueblos’ world, like
an epidemic, as one Spanish official put it. The contagion eventually spread
as far east as Coahuila and as far west as Sonora, in what some historians
have termed the Great Northern Revolt.
The great rebellions of the 1680s and 1690s might have delayed indefi-
nitely the Spanish reconquest of the Pueblos had it not been for the intrepid
Diego de Vargas. Vargas made a preliminary expedition into the Pueblo
country in 1692, planning to test the waters before plunging in with an occu-
pying force and colonists. His initial four-month campaign seemed to suc-
ceed beyond all expectation. With the aid of Pueblo allies who had come
with him from El Paso or joined him in New Mexico, and through skillful
diplomacy and intimidation, the steel-nerved Vargas avoided annihilation
on several occasions and won the token allegiance of twenty-three Pueblo
communities.

102
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

16. This portrait of Diego de Vargas, which hangs in the private chapel of San
Isidro in Madrid, was apparently painted in Madrid prior to his departure
for New Spain in 1672, at age twenty-nine. Courtesy, J. Manuel Espinosa.

But Vargas’s claim to victory proved premature, as he discovered the next

year. Encouraged by the Pueblos’ initial professions of friendship, the viceroy
gave Vargas financial support and authorization to recruit colonists, soldiers,
and priests to reoccupy New Mexico. For Spain, the province had strategic
value in the face of what Spanish officials perceived as growing Indian and
French threats to the northern frontier.
When Vargas returned to New Mexico in late 1693 with some eight hun-
dred persons, including one hundred soldiers and a number of Pueblo allies,
many of the Pueblos who swore obedience to him the year before now of-
fered staunch resistance. It had cost the Pueblos nothing to humor Vargas
on his reconnaissance in 1692, but when he returned to stay the Pueblos were

103
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

less accommodating. No amount of diplomacy, for example, could persuade

the Pueblos to relinquish Santa Fe, which they had occupied since 1680.
Spaniards, with Indian allies augmented by volunteers from Pecos Pueblo,
stormed the former capital and executed seventy natives who refused to sur-
render, charging them with treason against church and state. The hard-won
victory at Santa Fe gave Vargas a foothold among the Pueblos, but only
through determined military campaigns waged throughout 1694 did Vargas
subdue most of the remaining Pueblos.
The natives’ fealty remained more apparent than real. As Franciscans be-
gan to rebuild missions in the pueblos, they met such bitter hostility that
many fled back to Santa Fe. They reported that the Pueblos planned another
revolt and begged Vargas to assign soldiers to the missions. In June of 1696,
the predicted rebellion broke out. Although it was not as carefully coordi-
nated as the revolt of 1680, Pueblo rebels killed five Franciscans and burned
churches and convents. Many Indians abandoned their pueblos rather than
continue to submit to Spanish rule.
Better prepared for another rebellion than Governor Otermín had been
and more cunning, Vargas launched a methodical war of attrition, striking
food supplies as well as rebel positions. After a six-month campaign, Vargas
and his Pueblo allies had reasserted Spanish control over all of the rebellious
communities except the westernmost—Ácoma, Zuni, and Hopi. Ácoma and
Zuni soon submitted again, but the isolated Hopis, their population swelled
by refugees from the Rio Grande pueblos, retained their independence
throughout the next century.
The struggle for independence had cost the Pueblos dearly. Their popula-
tion declined sharply, from about seventeen thousand in 1680 to fourteen
thousand in 1700. Exhausted from war, their property and population di-
minished, Pueblos did not launch another major rebellion while under
Spanish rule. Nor did the Spaniards, fearful of another rebellion, offer as
much provocation. After the revolt of 1696 the Spaniards lowered the level
of exploitation. In the eighteenth century, pragmatic Franciscans displayed
less zeal in attempting to stamp out Pueblo religious practices, and colonists
and officials eased (but did not cease) their demands on Pueblo laborers. The
encomienda system, destroyed by the Pueblos, was never reestablished in
New Mexico. The reduction of Spanish provocation diminished tensions
and opened the way for an era of peaceful coexistence between Pueblos and

104
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

Hispanics—a coexistence cemented by their common need for defense

against unrelenting attacks by Utes, Apaches, and Navajos.

In Florida as in New Mexico, mission Indians who resented religious per-

secution and heavy demands on their labor occasionally erupted in bloody
rebellions. In Florida, however, marauding Englishmen rather than Apaches
served as the spark that touched off a series of explosions that permanently
crippled the Franciscan missions.
English traders had operated on the fringes of Spanish Florida for de-
cades, but not until 1670, when they established a permanent settlement at
Charleston, did they threaten Spanish hegemony over southeastern America.
Although alarmed by this foreign presence on the northern edge of the

Map 5

105
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

Guale missions, Spain failed to dislodge the English from Carolina. Instead,
the Charleston settlers, whose royal charter granted them lands claimed by
Spain, including the northern gulf coast and St. Augustine itself, put
Spaniards in Florida on the defensive. Eager to control the sea lanes and ex-
pand the fur trade, the Carolinians entered into alliances with neighboring
tribes and plotted to eliminate their Spanish rivals. Over the next decades,
they attacked Spanish missions, sold mission Indians into slavery, and nearly
succeeded in driving Spaniards out of Florida entirely.
Carolinians and their Indian allies launched this long-term offensive in
1680 in Guale, with attacks on missions on Jekyll Island and Santa Catalina.
Within six years they had shut down nearly all of the Spanish missions in
Guale and had begun to chip away at Timucua and Apalachee. Hostilities
abated somewhat in the 1690s, in a period of amicable relations between
Spain and England, but resumed with the outbreak of the War of Spanish
Succession in 1701—known to English colonists in America as Queen
Anne’s War. During that war, in 1702, Gov. James Moore of Carolina led si-
multaneous land and sea attacks on St. Augustine. He devastated the town
but failed to take its redoubtable fort of San Marcos, which provided refuge
for townspeople, loyal Indians, and Spanish troops until reinforcements
arrived and Moore fled.
Disgraced by his failure to take the fort, Moore lost his position as gover-
nor but not his interest in preying on his Spanish neighbors. With the bless-
ings of the Carolina assembly, he raised a private army of slave hunters who
invaded Apalachee twice in 1704. Within a year Moore’s forces destroyed
Florida’s most prosperous and populous mission province, reducing most of
its mission towns to ashes and presiding over horrifying carnage. Apalachee
could not survive. Later that year Spaniards abandoned the province. By the
end of 1706 Carolina raiders had destroyed most of the remaining missions of
Timucua. Only St. Augustine and villages in its immediate vicinity survived.
The Carolinians succeeded in large part because they had won Indians to
their side. Nonmission Indians such as the Yamasees had joined Englishmen
in their raids on Guale, and Moore had supplemented his army of fifty
whites with some thousand Creeks when he invaded Apalachee. En-
glishmen offered Indians powerful incentives in the form of rum, arms, am-
munition, booty, and cheap trade goods. Spain, on the other hand, had little
more to offer than a foreign religion.

106
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

Equally important in assuring English success, large numbers of Indians

deserted the Spanish missions and went over to the English side, a process
that had begun even before the English attacks began. Repelled by their
treatment by Spanish missionaries and colonists and lured to the English
cause by guns, ammunition, and other trade goods, Indian apostates at-
tacked their former mission homes alongside the Carolinians. Some mission
Indians who joined the English side, however, discovered they had made a
devil’s bargain. The Carolinians enslaved many of them and shipped them
off to labor in other English colonies. Like Spanish imperialists, En-
glishmen justified their exploitation of Indian labor as being beneficial for
Indians. As one Carolina slaver explained, “Some men think . . . it is a more
Effectual way of Civilizing and Instructing, then [than] all the Efforts used
by the French Missionaries.” As in New Mexico, many mission Indians re-
mained loyal to the Spaniards, but for a variety of reasons few of them sur-
vived. Apalachees, once described as prosperous by Cabeza de Vaca and De
Soto, became extinct as a people.
By 1706, the laboriously constructed chains of Franciscan missions that
once ran north from St. Augustine into Guale and west through Timucua
and Apalachee had collapsed. Spain continued to hold military bases in
Florida but never again converted or exploited significant numbers of na-
tives. Control over Florida’s meager Indian population shifted to traders
from England and France who had more experience and more abundant
trade goods to offer than their Spanish rivals.

As profoundly tragic and consequential as rebellions in New Mexico and

Florida were for all parties involved, they did not end the cycle of exploita-
tion, contention, and rebellion. As Spaniards expanded into new arenas in
North America in the 1700s, missionaries and settlers alike continued to
exploit native labor and to provoke violent responses as they had in New
Mexico and Florida in the 1600s. Sometimes natives won temporary free-
dom, as the Pimas, or O’odham, did in southern Arizona in 1751. Occasion-
ally, Indians permanently blocked the advance of the Spanish frontier, as at
San Sabá in central Texas in 1758 and at the strategic ford of the Colorado
River in 1781, where Yumans (Quechans), closed the overland route to Cali-
fornia for as long as Spain ruled in North America.

107
 e x p l o i tat i o n , c o n t e n t i o n , a n d r e b e l l i o n

In the eighteenth century, however, a new element came increasingly into

play. The successful expansion of the Carolinians and a growing French
presence in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 1600s had made it clear that Eu-
ropean control of the Southeast and its native laborers would be a three-way
contest. As Spaniards had learned to their horror in Florida, foreign arms in
the hands of hostile natives could quickly turn the odds against them. If the
Spanish Crown wished to maintain its claims to North America, it would
have to check the expansion of its imperial rivals—France, England, Russia,
and, after 1783, the United States. Friars with crosses, small military escorts,
and soldier-citizens lacked muscle. The new challenge required a larger mil-
itary presence and a more imaginative Indian policy to offset the commercial
advantages that natives received from Spain’s rivals. North America would
prove to be more complex and costly for the Bourbons, who ascended to the
Spanish throne in 1700, than it had for their Hapsburg predecessors.

108
 6
Imperial Rivalry and Strategic Expansion

To Texas, the Gulf Coast, and the High Plains

If we do not make one kingdom of all of this, nothing is secure.

—Gov. Joseph de Zúñiga y Cerda to the king,
St. Augustine, 1704

Your Excellency can see what a condition the French are placing us. They
are slipping in behind our backs in silence, but God sees their intentions.
—Francisco Hidalgo to the viceroy,
San Francisco de los Tejas, 1716

From their base in Carolina, Englishmen had set in motion the forces that
nearly destroyed Spanish Florida, but in the late 1600s England was not the
only European power to challenge Spain for territory along the southern
fringes of North America. In the 1680s, as Carolinians and their Indian allies
began to wreak havoc in the missions of Guale and as Pueblos regained au-
tonomy over New Mexico, France established an outpost on the Texas coast.
Spanish policy makers correctly regarded the French intruders as a potential

109
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

threat to Florida, New Mexico, the mines of northern Mexico, and the
strategic sea lanes that carried silver out of the Gulf of Mexico.
French interest in the gulf coast worried England, too, which had designs
on the same region. By the eighteenth century, the southern rim of the con-
tinent, from the Texas coast to St. Augustine, had become the scene of a
protracted three-way struggle among Western Europe’s most expansive em-
pires. The contest, which inevitably involved Native Americans, further
transformed the political map of the continent.

France’s imperial ventures on the gulf coast began with the disaster-
ridden attempt of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, to plant a colony
at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1685. Three years earlier, La Salle had ex-
plored the Mississippi Valley in an epic journey from Canada to the Gulf of
Mexico. At the mouth of the Mississippi, he had claimed for France the re-
gion that De Soto had explored for Spain 140 years before. La Salle named
it Louisiana for his king, Louis XIV.
La Salle had returned to France in 1683 to promote the idea that a post at
the mouth of the Mississippi would serve as a springboard to invade silver-
rich northern New Spain. A small number of Frenchmen, La Salle argued,
could carry out a successful invasion with the assistance of fifteen thousand
Indians. Indians, he said, “have a deadly hatred for the Spaniards because
they enslave them.” When Spain declared war on France in October 1683,
Louis XIV found La Salle’s idea irresistible.
La Salle set sail from France with four vessels on August 1, 1684. Two
weeks later, hostilities between France and Spain ended, the enthusiasm of
Louis XIV for invading New Spain faded, and La Salle, his government
assistance evaporated, was on his own. His small expedition, numbering
some 280 persons, entered the western part of the gulf, where his miscalcu-
lations of latitude and longitude led him to believe he would find the Mis-
sissippi. Unable to locate the mouth of the great river, he supposed it lay
hidden behind one of the many barrier islands that shield the lagoons and
sandy brush country along the flat Texas coast. In February 1685, far from the
Mississippi, La Salle began to construct a small fort on the Texas mainland.
Choosing a site that would conceal his location from Spaniards, he ordered
his colonists to construct what he called Fort St. Louis, five miles up Garci-

110
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

tas Creek on an extension of what is today called Matagorda Bay. From

there, La Salle continued to search by land for the great river that had eluded
him from the sea. Some of his men traveled overland as far west as the Rio
Grande, questioning Indians about the whereabouts of Spaniards and Span-
ish mines, offering gifts and friendship, and explaining the virtues of
Frenchmen and the evils of Spaniards.
Meanwhile, French officials had taken pains to keep La Salle’s purpose a
secret by suggesting Canada as his destination. A year passed from the time
he had left France before Spaniards learned of his mission. Only a serendip-
itous encounter with a young French peasant who had deserted La Salle in
Santo Domingo alerted Spanish officials, in September 1685, to “Monsieur
de Salaz” and his intention to establish a base on the “Mischipipi.”
The alarming news galvanized Spanish officials. As one high official
warned, the Frenchmen might “settle as far as New Mexico and make them-
selves Lords of many Kingdoms and Provinces.” Although Spain had not
protested French settlement in Canada, which began with Quebec in 1608, or
French expansion into the region around the Great Lakes beginning in the
1670s, it moved quickly to stop France from establishing a foothold on the
strategic gulf. In the judgment of Carlos II’s Council of War, Spain needed to
take swift action “to remove this thorn which has been thrust into the heart
of America. The greater the delay, the greater the difficulty of attainment.”
Nonetheless, considerable delay ensued. Before Spaniards could remove
the thorn they had to find it. Not only had La Salle concealed his location,
but Spaniards no longer recalled the geography of the gulf that their coun-
trymen Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, Hernando de Soto, and others had re-
vealed over a century before. Spaniards had ceased to explore the monotonous
gulf coast of present-day Texas and Louisiana and had made no attempt to
colonize it. La Salle’s “Mischipipi,” a name that meant nothing to Spanish
officials, seemed, however, to correspond to the River of Espíritu Santo,
found by Alvarez de Pineda in 1519.
The Spanish quest for La Salle and the River of Espíritu Santo began in
earnest in 1686 and went on and on. Five expeditions by sea and five by land
failed to turn up any sign of La Salle except the wreck of a French ship.
Then, in the spring of 1689, the sixth land expedition, led by the governor of
Coahuila, Alonso de León, found La Salle’s fort. It lay in ruins. Karankawa
Indians, angry at Frenchmen who had seized their canoes without payment,

111
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

had retaliated a few months before. Everywhere before him León saw signs
of destruction and death—“books and papers throughout the patios, broken
chests and bottle cases, and more than a hundred broken harquebuses.” The
men also found the remains of three of La Salle’s colonists, their flesh
gnawed away by animals. In an effort to explain the terrible scene, the expe-
dition’s chronicler, Juan Bautista Chapa, speculated that God had punished
the Frenchmen “as an admonition that Christians should not go directly
against the bulls and mandates of the pontiffs.” Pope Alexander VI, Chapa
recalled, had granted the Indies exclusively to the Spanish monarchs.
From two French survivors whom he found tattooed, painted, and living
nearby among Indians, León learned of the sequence of events that had
ended with the collapse of the French colony: the loss of La Salle’s ships;
deaths from disease, exposure, and hostile Indians; La Salle’s efforts to reach
Canada by way of the Mississippi; La Salle’s murder by several of his own
men; and the assault by Karankawas that had destroyed Fort St. Louis. La
Salle had died in March 1687, more than two years before León stepped into
the ruined fort. What the French-speaking Spanish officer who interrogated
the two survivors did not learn was that one of them, Jean L’Archevêque,
had been one of La Salle’s assassins.

Spain’s four-year search for La Salle exemplified the essentially reactive

nature of its policy toward its European rivals in North America. Stretched
too thin to initiate settlements throughout the hemisphere, Spain concen-
trated on vital areas, such as the great natural harbors of the Caribbean that
lie along the route of the silver fleets—Porto Bello, Veracruz, Havana, and
San Juan. In peripheral areas of the empire, Madrid took no action until for-
eign powers threatened. If Spain had planted no settlement of its own along
the arc of the gulf from the Rio Grande to the tip of Florida, neither could it
allow a European rival to occupy that strategic coast. Thus, as it had done in
Florida in the sixteenth century, Spain attempted to forestall further French
initiatives by occupying more territory. In the late seventeenth century,
spurred on by La Salle’s venture, the Crown authorized modest outposts in
eastern Texas and at Pensacola.
Spain moved first to secure Texas, blending strategic and religious objec-
tives in a way that achieved neither. Although well-founded reports of

112
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

continued French activity in the lower Mississippi valley suggested the need
to defend Texas militarily, Spain’s response was essentially ecclesiastical.
Spanish officials hoped to continue the tradition of advancing and defend-
ing its frontiers with peaceable and inexpensive missions.
At first, prospects looked bright. It seemed to Spaniards that the same di-
vine providence that had sealed La Salle’s fate had brought them into con-
tact with a remarkably sophisticated and receptive people beyond the Rio
Grande. On the same expedition on which he had located La Salle’s fort in
1689, Alonso de León had made contact with a representative of the Caddo-
speaking peoples who inhabited the rolling woodlands between the Trinity
and Red rivers in what is today eastern Texas and western Louisiana. León
did not enter the Caddo country that year, but he and a priest who accom-
panied him, the Mallorcan-born Franciscan Damián Mazanet, reported that
the Caddos yearned for Christianity.
Culturally similar to other southeastern tribes, such as the Natchez and
the Creeks, Caddo farmers inhabited a universe that Spaniards could appre-
ciate. As León told the viceroy, the Caddos lived in “towns with wooden
houses, and plant corn, beans, squash, watermelons, and melons . . . they
have civilization and government like the Mexican Indians.” Caddos made
their homes in dispersed communities rather than in compact villages,
building their houses near their fields in fertile bottomlands. They were or-
ganized politically into some twenty-five communities, most of which be-
longed to one of three confederacies: the Hasinai, the Kadohadacho, and the
Natchitoches. The reputation of the prosperous Caddos extended below the
Rio Grande and as far west as New Mexico, where Franciscans had heard
stories about the largest and westernmost Caddo confederacy, the Hasinai.
Early reports referred to the Hasinai confederacy as the “Kingdom of
Tejas”—derived from a Caddo word meaning “friends” or “allies” that Hasi-
nai used to address one another. Spaniards ultimately appropriated the name
for their province—Tejas or Texas.
Thus pragmatism, piety, and geopolitics combined to persuade officials in
New Spain to establish an outpost in the distant land of the congenial Cad-
dos along what is today the Texas–Louisiana border rather than among the
nomadic Coahuiltecan-speaking hunters and gatherers who lived closer to
the Rio Grande and the settlements of northern New Spain. Officials also
chose to ignore the strategic Texas coast, including the site of La Salle’s fort

113
Map 6
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

on Matagorda Bay, where Karankawa Indians had gained a reputation for

ferocity. Spain, then, prepared to occupy a site inaccessible by sea and over
six hundred miles from the Rio Grande over a difficult land route.
In 1690, Alonso de León and Father Damián Mazanet led a small party of
soldiers and four priests into the Hasinai country, where they received a
friendly reception and established three missions. The ecclesiastical character
of this project became clear when Father Mazanet refused to tolerate soldiers
in the neighborhood of the new missions. When trouble threatened, then,
the isolated and poorly supplied missionaries had no effective defense. Trou-
ble came soon in the form of a smallpox epidemic, fatal to Caddos but not to
Spaniards, and the Christian message failed to comfort the Caddos. One of
the friars, Father Francisco Jesús María Casañas had explained to them that
the deaths of their friends and neighbors was God’s “holy will.” The Natives,
Casañas said, “were amazed.” In the autumn of 1693, the Tejas warned the
Franciscans to leave or die. Choosing to live rather than win a martyr’s eter-
nal reward, Father Mazanet led his fellow friars on a harrowing four-month
retreat to the Rio Grande. Spain could not sustain a modest missionary out-
post so far beyond the frontier without a strong military presence or the co-
operation of the natives. Pressed on other fronts, including the effort to
reconquer New Mexico from the Pueblos, Spanish officials ignored Texas for
the next twenty years, until Frenchmen seemed to threaten it once again.
Meanwhile, La Salle’s intrusion prompted Spain to consider occupying the
gulf coast itself. From the first reports of La Salle’s activities, Spanish policy
makers had talked of such a project, but years went by before officials chose
an appropriate site. Spanish mariners had dismissed La Salle’s Matagorda
Bay as insignificant and had ruled out the muddy delta at the mouth of the
Mississippi, with its complicated maze of bars, banks, and shoals. Instead,
they had extolled Pensacola Bay. “The best bay I had ever seen in my life,”
one seaman enthused. Even after the king selected Pensacola and ordered its
occupation, however, actual settlement did not occur until reports of a new
French colonizing expedition to the gulf prodded Spain into action. In No-
vember 1698, after years of procrastination, Spaniards began to build a small
fort of pine logs at Pensacola. The timing was fortuitous. The signing of the
Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 had ended a struggle known in the Anglo-
American colonies as King William’s War and had freed both France and
England to pursue their long-standing interests in the gulf.

115
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

In the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain had acknowledged France’s undisputed

possession of the western half of the island of Santo Domingo (today’s
Haiti), thus strengthening France’s position in the Caribbean and giving it a
base for further expansion. The next year, France sent five vessels to the gulf
under a naval officer, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville, who had distin-
guished himself in Canada. The French minister of marine had instructed
Iberville to find and occupy the mouth of the Mississippi, without antago-
nizing the Spaniards; the mines of northern New Spain continued to attract
French attention. On January 26, 1699, Iberville’s vessels entered the fog-
bound harbor of Pensacola, which he apparently hoped would be the mouth
of the Mississippi. When the fog lifted, he discovered that Spaniards had
beaten him. He had arrived two months late.
Noting no great river flowing into Pensacola Bay, Iberville continued his
quest for the Mississippi, following the coast westward to the Mississippi
Delta. Like Spanish mariners before him, he could not find clear passage
into the river’s channels, but he accidentally discovered an entryway when
foul weather chased him toward shore. Through serendipity, Iberville be-
came the first European to enter the Mississippi from the sea. He returned
to Biloxi Bay, where he established the tiny Fort Maurepas along the coastal
approach to the Mississippi. Soon after, his brother, Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne
de Bienville, after discovering that a British sea captain had guided a vessel
up the Mississippi in late 1699, built Fort Mississippi near the river’s mouth,
some thirty miles below present-day New Orleans. While Spain might con-
tinue to claim the Mississippi by right of prior exploration and Englishmen
might have an interest in colonizing the area, France now had the strongest
claim—actual occupancy.
Although Spain had won the three-way race for Pensacola, it had cap-
tured the wrong prize. Pensacola Bay and the Escambia River, which flows
into it, would prove valuable to traders as a gateway to the Creek country,
but no river system that might serve as a major highway for commerce emp-
tied into the bay. Moreover, the large bay could not be easily defended, and
the sandy pine barrens behind the bay were inhospitable for agriculture. The
colony never produced enough to feed itself, failed to attract civilian settlers,
and proved ineffective as a base for converting nearby tribes. Pensacola hung
on as nothing more than an isolated military post, without financial assets to
offset its liabilities. Soldiers shunned it as a place of disease, famine, and

116
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

17. The first commander of the presidio of San Carlos de Austria, Andrés de
Arriola, made this map of Pensacola Bay in 1698. The presidio, which seemed
indefensible to him, stood at the entrance to the bay. Courtesy, J. P. Bryan Map
Collection, Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas.

death. Ironically, the small fort survived its initial decade because of the hos-
pitality of Frenchmen in neighboring Louisiana.
Inadvertently, fin de siècle France had grabbed the gold ring. By seizing
the mouth of the Mississippi, it gained access to the great river system that
led into the heart of the continent and connected the gulf with French
Canada, and it cracked Spain’s monopoly on the north coast of the gulf by
driving a wedge between northern New Spain and Florida.

The establishment of French forts on Biloxi Bay and on the Mississippi in

1699 marked the beginning of French hegemony in Louisiana and the end of
Spain’s claim to exclusive control of the gulf coast of North America. For
another year, the opportunity remained for Spain to dislodge the French
from Biloxi, but it lost the moment through indecision, if not incompetence.
With the death in 1700 of the last Hapsburg monarch, the deranged Carlos II,

117
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

Franco–Spanish rivalry in North America took a curious turn. On his

deathbed, the childless Carlos II had designated as his heir Phillipe d’An-
jou, the grandson of the French king Louis XIV. A member of the French
Bourbon family, the Hapsburgs’ long-standing nemesis, ascended to the
Spanish throne. That improbable event gave the French colony in Louisiana
a measure of protection from Spanish forces during its formative years. In
his new role as Felipe V of Spain, Philippe d’Anjou refused to expel his
grandfather’s colonists from the Louisiana coast.
In the years that followed, the French colony continued to grow as the
War of the Spanish Succession brought Spain and France closer together.
That war, triggered by the Bourbons’ acquisition of the Spanish throne in
1700 and its implications for the balance of power in Europe, pitted France
and Spain against England, Holland, and Austria. Throughout the war,
which began in 1701 and lasted until 1713, Spaniards and Frenchmen put
aside their mutual distrust to cooperate against mutual enemies.
In North America, where English colonists knew it as Queen Anne’s War,
the War of the Spanish Succession put Spain on the defensive. Carolinians
and their Indian allies, led by James Moore, burned the town of St. Augustine
and laid unsuccessful siege to its fort in 1702. In 1704, with the assent of the
Carolina legislature, Moore rampaged across northern Florida, destroyed the
missions in Apalachee, and caused Spaniards to abandon the province.
On balance, the War of the Spanish Succession weakened Spain’s position
in the Southeast. Not only did Spain lose Apalachee, but English influence
over tribes far to the west of Carolina threatened to reduce Pensacola, in the
words of historian Lawrence Ford, “to an enclave in a British domain.”
Moreover, from their new base in Apalachee Englishmen could continue
southward down the gulf coast to Tampa Bay and the Keys. From there, as
the governor of Florida, Francisco de Córcoles y Martínez, warned the king,
they could easily harass Spanish shipping.
As England expanded at Spain’s expense during the war, so too, by in-
creasing its presence on the gulf, did its French ally. From Mobile, French
traders made their way via the Alabama–Tombigbee river system to interior
tribes like the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Alabamas and gained influence
among Indians as far east as Pensacola and as far west as Caddo country
along the Red River. But lamentably for Frenchmen in Louisiana, the war
consumed resources, and the government-sponsored colony languished.

118
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

Unable to attract colonists in significant numbers, it could not even feed it-
self. Louisiana served as little more than a center for the Indian trade, and its
residents depended upon Indians for food. In 1712, before the war came to a
close, Louis XIV attempted to infuse new energy into Louisiana by turning
it over to a private trading company. The colony continued to flounder, but
nonetheless it provoked Spanish officials into reoccupying Texas.
Louisiana’s new governor, Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, who
had founded Detroit in 1701, pinned his hopes for the colony’s prosperity on
trade with Spanish neighbors. His hopes seemed dashed when the War of the
Spanish Succession ended in 1713, and Spain closed its ports to its former ally.
That summer, however, a remarkable letter from a Franciscan missionary in
New Spain arrived at Mobile, a letter that kept alive Cadillac’s plans for trade
with New Spain and altered the political landscape of North America.
The Franciscan’s letter asked for French help in reestablishing missions
among the Tejas Indians. Its author, fray Francisco Hidalgo, had served in
Texas with Damián Mazanet two decades before. He had regretted leaving
the deteriorating missions and had promised the Caddos he would return
one day with more missionaries. Unable to get support from Spanish offi-
cials, Hidalgo suggested that French officials send missionaries into Texas,
apparently calculating that their presence would provoke a Spanish counter-
response. If this was Hidalgo’s plan, it worked brilliantly.
Cadillac, seeing an opportunity to open contraband trade with Mexico, sent
one of his most experienced and shrewdest traders, Louis Juchereau de Saint-
Denis, to find Hidalgo. In the autumn of 1713, Saint-Denis ascended the Mis-
sissippi and Red rivers to the heart of the Caddo confederacy of Natchitoches,
in what is today northwestern Louisiana. He had first visited the Natchitoches
in 1700 while trying to find his way to the Spanish settlements, and he knew
that his canoes would carry him no farther. He struck out overland for the
west, to the Hasinai villages where he had also traded in the past, and contin-
ued across Texas with three French companions and several Hasinai guides.
When Saint-Denis’ little band showed up on the edge of the Spanish
frontier at San Juan Bautista in July 1714, the elderly captain of the fort,
Diego Ramón, recognized the threat he posed. “If His Majesty does not in-
tervene . . . ,” Captain Ramón explained to Father Hidalgo, “the French will
be masters of all this land.” Officials in Mexico City agreed. Fearing that
Frenchmen would flood northern New Spain with contraband and perhaps

119
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

even invade its mining districts, the viceroy, the duque de Linares, ordered
the reoccupation of East Texas as a buffer.
The force the viceroy sent to Texas did not correspond to the supposed
magnitude of the French threat. In April 1716, about seventy-five persons
crossed the Rio Grande near San Juan Bautista, at a ford appropriately
named Francia, en route to found a colony. Capt. Domingo Ramón, one of
the presidial commander’s sons and the leader of the group, counted eighteen
soldiers, ten Franciscans (including the instigator of the enterprise, Francisco
Hidalgo), and assorted colonists and Indian guides. Astonishingly, Saint-
Denis served as chief of supplies, drawing the same salary from the Spanish
government as the expedition’s leader. Although the resourceful Frenchman
had arrived at San Juan Bautista unable to speak Spanish, he had managed to
ingratiate himself with his Spanish captors. While nominally under arrest in
the comfort of Diego Ramón’s house he had courted the captain’s grand-
daughter, Manuela Sánchez Navarro, and won her heart. Sent on to Mexico
City for interrogation, Saint-Denis had also wooed Spanish officials, per-
suading them of his ardor to become a Spanish subject and of his fidelity to
the Spanish Crown. Instead of receiving a prison term—the fate of many a
French intruder before and after him—Saint-Denis returned to San Juan
Bautista with the appointment of supply master on the proposed expedition.
There he married Manuela.
Among the Hasinais, whom they continued to call Tejas or Texias,
Spaniards built the fort of San Francisco de los Dolores in the summer of
1716 and four small wooden churches. Saint-Denis, who apparently spoke
the native language, had smoothed the way for the Hasinais’ friendly recep-
tion of the friars, but as Father Hidalgo noted, the Tejas resisted baptism “for
they have formed the belief that the [holy] water kills them.”
Meanwhile, Capt. Domingo Ramón continued eastward through the
dense pine forests to Natchitoches, where he found that Frenchmen had built
a stockade on an island in the middle of the Red River. Unbeknown to the
Spaniards, the impetus for fortifying Natchitoches had been intelligence sup-
plied by Saint-Denis, who appears to have played both sides to his advantage.
Even while in Spanish custody, the wily trader had managed to keep Gover-
nor Cadillac informed of the Spaniards’ plans to reoccupy Texas. Fearful that
he would be squeezed between eastward-moving Spaniards and westward-
moving Englishmen and that Louisiana would be reduced to Mobile, Cadillac

120
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

had ordered a post constructed at Natchitoches in order to establish a

French presence beyond the Mississippi. It worked. Tacitly, Captain Ramón
acknowledged Natchitoches as the limit of Louisiana, but he tried to block
further French expansion. Just to the west of Natchitoches, Ramón founded
two more missions in nearby Caddo communities: San Miguel de los Adaes
and Dolores de los Ais.
This time, Spain had come to Texas to stay. It moved quickly to reinforce
East Texas. In late 1716, just months after Ramón’s party had established itself,
a new viceroy, the marqués de Valero, appointed a governor for Texas, Martín
de Alarcón, and charged him to take further defensive measures against the
French. These included building a way station between the Rio Grande and
the East Texas missions, which became San Antonio. In the spring of 1718,
Governor Alarcón marched into Texas and laid the foundations for a presidio,
San Antonio de Béjar, and a mission named for the viceroy, San Antonio de
Valero—its chapel later became known as the Alamo. Nearby, he also estab-
lished the chartered municipality of San Antonio, then called Béjar. Following
the viceroy’s orders, Alarcón designated San Antonio a villa, a status higher
than a pueblo, or village, but below a ciudad, or city. Notwithstanding its status
as the only villa in Texas and its fine location near the headwaters of the San
Antonio River, San Antonio did not immediately become the provincial capi-
tal. Texas governors made their headquarters closer to the French nemesis.
Leaving colonists behind at San Antonio to begin planting and ranching
in a country of broad vistas and gently rolling hills covered with live oaks,
chaparral, and mesquite, Alarcón continued into pine-forested East Texas.
There he found the new missions on the verge of collapse. Soldiers had de-
serted and supplies had run so low that the padres were reduced to eating
crows, which they shot out of trees. The Hasinais, well provisioned with
French firearms and ammunition, trade goods, and horses, had proved unco-
operative. Alarcón reinforced the missions of eastern Texas with fresh sup-
plies and tried to placate the Hasinais with gifts. He considered destroying
the French post at Natchitoches, but the missionaries apparently talked him
out of the idea, arguing that it might cause an international incident.

In 1719, the year after Alarcón reinforced Texas, a new war in Europe
spilled over to America and put all of Spain’s North American possessions in

121
 To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

18. The villa, presidio, and missions at San Antonio, surrounded by fields of wheat
and corn, circa 1730. The villa actually developed at the site of the presidio, rather
than beside the mission of San Antonio de Valero, as the marqués de Aguayo, who
made this sketch, imagined it would. Courtesy, Institute of Texan Cultures.
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

peril. In this so-called War of the Quadruple Alliance, Spain fought alone.
Its former ally, France, aligned itself with England, Holland, and Austria to
check Spanish ambitions in Italy. Both France and England regarded the
conflict as an opportunity to divest Spain of its North American holdings,
from its new outposts in Texas and Pensacola to its long-established colonies
in New Mexico and Florida. Spanish officials harbored opposite intentions,
hoping to make preemptive strikes that would eliminate Englishmen from
Carolina and the French from Louisiana.
On the Atlantic coast, Spaniards anticipated renewed attacks from the
Carolinians, who had laid waste to much of Florida in the War of the Span-
ish Succession. St. Augustine’s defenses had been strengthened in the in-
terim, however, and Apalachee, lost in 1704, had been reclaimed. In an effort
to win the allegiance of the Lower Creeks, in 1718 Spaniards had reestab-
lished the coastal fort of San Marcos de Apalachee on Apalachee Bay, first
built in the late 1670s with Apalachee labor but destroyed by pirates in 1682.
Regarded as a link between Pensacola and St. Augustine, the Apalachee post
endured as long as Spain held Florida.
While Spain had strengthened its position in Florida, Carolina had lost
ground. In 1719 Carolinians were still recovering from a devastating setback—
a rebellion they called the Yamasee War. In 1715, the Carolinians’ abused and
indebted Yamasee clients had turned against them. Joined by members of
powerful inland tribes, particularly Lower Creeks, Yamasees and their allies
had nearly destroyed the colony. After slaughtering hundreds of Carolinians,
the Yamasees had withdrawn to Florida and joined the Spaniards, some set-
tling near Pensacola and others at St. Augustine. That same year, Spanish
agents had lured many Lower Creeks (still known to them as Apalachicolas),
out of the English trading orbit and had brought them over to the Spanish
side. For the moment, most of the tribes from Pensacola to Carolina leaned
toward Spain; a delegation of seven Creek leaders even traveled from Pen-
sacola to Mexico City in 1717 to offer allegiance to the viceroy.
Devastated and deprived of key Indian allies, Carolinians were in no po-
sition to take the offensive against Spanish Florida during the War of the
Quadruple Alliance. France was. In May of 1719, a French fleet set sail from
Louisiana and took Pensacola by surprise; the shocked Spanish commander
did not know that war had broken out. Easier to take than to hold, the rot-
ting wooden fort at Pensacola changed hands two more times that year.

123
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

Meanwhile, French officials in Louisiana conspired to expand westward

at Spain’s expense by invading Texas as far as the Rio Grande, where they
wrongly imagined the existence of mines near San Juan Bautista. This inva-
sion started with a whisper rather than a bang. In June 1719, a force of seven
Frenchmen from Natchitoches overwhelmed the mission of San Miguel de
los Adaes, defended by a single soldier who had no prior knowledge of the
war. The French invaders brought reports that their countrymen had seized
Pensacola and that one hundred more French soldiers were on their way to
Natchitoches to destroy the nearby Spanish missions. Undersupplied, nearly
unarmed, and unable to depend on the loyalty of the pro-French Caddos,
Spanish colonists, missionaries, and the twenty-five soldiers assigned to pro-
tect East Texas fled to San Antonio.
In response to this French offensive, the Spanish Crown accepted the of-
fer of a Spanish-born nobleman and wealthy resident of Coahuila, the mar-
qués de San Miguel de Aguayo, to reconquer Texas. Granted the title of
captain general and governor of Coahuila and Texas, the marqués raised the
most imposing force Spain would ever send into Texas—some five hundred
men and enormous herds of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. Initially, Felipe
V ordered him to march through Texas and invade Louisiana in order to
“force the French to abandon the territory they unjustly hold.” Meanwhile,
a Spanish fleet assembled in the Caribbean for a simultaneous invasion by
sea. On the eve of his departure from Mexico, however, Aguayo received a
disappointing change in instructions. Fighting had stopped in Europe, and
Felipe V, eager to rebuild his broken alliance with France, had called off the
invasion of Louisiana. Aguayo was to limit himself to retaking eastern
Texas without use of force, and so he did using the threat of force to ad-
vance diplomacy.
Twelve miles from Natchitoches (near present-day Robeline, Louisiana),
the marqués de Aguayo built the fort of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los
Adaes. The wooden presidio of Los Adaes became the capital of Texas and
held that position until the French flag came down over Louisiana. Aguayo
also oversaw reconstruction of the nearby presidio of San Francisco that
Domingo Ramón had established in 1716 among the Tejas and of the presidio
that Alarcón had begun at San Antonio. In addition, he initiated construc-
tion of a new fortification at the scene of La Salle’s failure on Matagorda Bay,
which Spaniards had called the Bay of Espíritu Santo. To forestall further

124
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

19. The capital of Texas until 1770, Los Adaes consisted of a hexagonal wooden
presidio (the governor’s house is inside its walls), a scattering of houses, and a
nearby mission chapel and friary (5, 6). Detail from a drawing by José de Urrutia in
1767. Courtesy, British Library and Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 15051.

attempts by Spain’s rivals to seize that symbolic spot, Aguayo ordered the
presidio of Nuestra Señora de la Bahía de Espíritu Santo constructed on the
very site of La Salle’s Fort St. Louis.
When Aguayo rode out of Texas in 1722, the province had four presidios
instead of one, over 250 soldiers instead of 50, ten missions, including six in
East Texas that had been abandoned in 1719, and the nucleus of a small civil-
ian settlement at San Antonio. French provocation had strengthened rather
than weakened Spanish Texas.

The War of the Quadruple Alliance also had repercussions in far-off New
Mexico, where officials anticipated a French offensive and made efforts to
counteract it. Spanish authorities had long feared that Frenchmen would try

125
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

to seize New Mexico. This concern seemed especially well founded as re-
ports of Frenchmen on the eastern plains filtered into Santa Fe along with
their trade good and weapons. In the hands of Pawnees, Missouris, and oth-
ers, French firearms began to take a toll on friendly Apaches—Cuartelejos,
Jicarillas, and Sierra Blancas. Then, too, the southward movement of Co-
manches, a group previously unknown in New Mexico, put additional pres-
sure on the province. The right combination of Indians and Frenchmen
could easily destroy New Mexico.
With the outbreak of war with France in 1719, New Mexico seemed more
threatened than ever. That year, Gov. Antonio Valverde y Cosío of New
Mexico led a large expedition of Spanish troops, volunteers, and Indian al-
lies to the northeast to punish Utes and Comanches. On the Arkansas River
(in present-day southern Colorado), Cuartelejo Apaches told him the usual
stories of Frenchmen on the plains, but one Apache with a bullet wound in
the belly gave the governor especially alarming news. Farther north, among
the Pawnees, the Indians reported Frenchmen had built two towns, each
“as large as that of Taos”; they had armed the Pawnees and insulted the
Spaniards, calling them women.
The governor’s disquieting report, coupled with the loss of Pensacola and
East Texas to French forces that same year, prompted the viceroy, the mar-
qués de Valero, to instruct Governor Valverde to take energetic measures
against the French, among them to search out the French settlements
among the Pawnees. Disaster followed.
In the summer of 1720, Valverde’s lieutenant governor, Pedro de Villasur,
led a small group of forty-five experienced New Mexico soldiers and sixty
Pueblo Indian auxiliaries to the northern plains in search of Pawnees. Along
to serve as interpreter should the expedition encounter Frenchmen was the
expatriate Jean L’Archevêque, one of La Salle’s murderers. Eager to escape
life among the Indians, L’Archevêque had thrown himself on the mercy of
the Spanish expedition that found La Salle’s fort in 1689. After interrogation
in Mexico City and imprisonment in Spain, L’Archevêque had returned to
New Spain as a Spanish subject and soldier in 1692, where he joined Diego
de Vargas in the reconquest of New Mexico. L’Archevêque, or Archibeque,
as Spaniards spelled his name, remained in Santa Fe, married there, and
worked as a merchant, soldier, and interpreter on several earlier expeditions.
This time there would be no opportunity to use his linguistic skills.

126
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

20. In this detail of an extraordinary painting done on hide by an unknown

artist, the Villasur party makes its last stand at the confluence of the Platte and
Loup rivers. The delineation of features on the faces of the soldiers suggests that
the artist knew them personally. Villasur lies dead beyond this scene;
L’Archevêque is probably the hatless man facing forward in the main group.
Photograph of “Segesser II,” courtesy of the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe.

Villasur led his men up the plains to the confluence of the Platte and
Loup rivers in present Nebraska. As the Spanish party broke camp in tall
grass early one morning, Pawnees and Otos surprised them. Eleven Pueblos
and thirty-two Spaniards died, including Villasur and L’Archevêque. Some
of the survivors who straggled back to Santa Fe reported that Frenchmen
fought with the Pawnees, but other survivors disputed the charge. New
Mexicans did not return to investigate further or to seek revenge; the Santa
Fe garrison had lost a third of its fighting force on the Platte. In the years
that followed, reports of French activity on the plains east of New Mexico
continued to reach Santa Fe, but with peace in Europe such reports no
longer produced alarm in Mexico City or Madrid. Talk of establishing a

127
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

Map 7

permanent Spanish presence on the plains in today’s Colorado came to an

end.

As the War of the Quadruple Alliance drew to a close, French negotiators

received instructions to reach an accord that would push Louisiana’s western
boundary to the Rio Grande and its eastern border to Tampa Bay. They
failed. Despite setbacks on all frontiers, Spain emerged from the War of the
Quadruple Alliance in 1721 with its North American possessions intact. Al-
though New Mexico had failed to expand to the northeast, and French
traders drew ever closer, the Crown lost no ground in New Mexico itself. In
Texas, the marqués de Aguayo had not only retaken the territory seized by
the French at the outset of the war, but also strengthened the defenses of the
province. Pensacola, which had remained in French hands at the end of the

128
 i m p e r i a l r i va l r y a n d s t r at e g i c e x pa n s i o n

war, reverted to Spain as part of the treaty arrangements. St. Augustine and
Apalachee had not been threatened directly.
If Spain had suffered no permanent losses in the war, however, neither
had it made the most of its own opportunities to drive the English out of the
Carolinas or France out of Louisiana. Those failures proved costly in the
long run, for Spain’s imperial rivals used their North American bases ever
more effectively to weaken Spain’s commercial system, lure Indians out of
the Spanish orbit, and challenge Spain for more territory.
“If we do not make one kingdom of all of this, nothing is secure,” Florida
governor Joseph de Zúñiga y Cerda had warned the king in 1704. He and
other officials who urged strong measures to preserve Spanish hegemony in
North America had glimpsed the future. With France and England well es-
tablished, nothing would again be secure.

129
 7
Commercial Rivalry, Stagnation,
and the Fortunes of War

That these Indians get along so well with the English, Sir, is because the latter
do not oblige them to live under the bell in law and righteousness, but rather,
only as they wish to . . . the English bring them guns, powder, balls, glass
beads, knives, hatchets, iron tools, woolen blankets and other goods.
—fray Alonso de Leturiondo to the king,
St. Augustine, Florida, ca. 1700

The heathen of the north are innumerable and rich. They enjoy
the protection and commerce of the French; they dress well, breed horses,
handle firearms with the greatest skill.
—Col. Diego Ortiz Parrilla to the viceroy,
San Luis de Amarillas, Texas, 1758

A scant dozen miles or so from the French post at Natchitoches, Spaniards

had built a small fort at Los Adaes to halt French encroachment, weaken
French influence among the neighboring tribes, and prevent French traders
from using Louisiana as a base for illicit commerce with northern New

130
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

Spain. Los Adaes fell so far from advancing those goals that Frenchmen,
who might have easily destroyed the fort, preferred to see it stand.
Frenchmen dominated commerce on the Texas–Louisiana frontier, and
Spaniards offered no competition. Surrounded by Caddo Indians armed
with French weapons and loyal to French traders, unable to draw a labor
pool from failed missions, and eight hundred miles from dependable sources
of reasonably priced Spanish merchandise in Coahuila, Spanish officers, sol-
diers, and their families at Los Adaes had no choice but to turn to their
French neighbors for supplies—traveling as far as New Orleans on occasion.
Lest the community starve, Texas officials relaxed the normal prohibitions
against dealing with foreigners and permitted the residents of Los Adaes to
purchase food from the French. Trade in corn, beans, and other vegetables,
however, provided cover for Frenchmen to smuggle foreign manufactures
into Los Adaes, including guns and ammunition that the Adaeseños sorely
needed, in exchange for Spanish horses.
The reliance of Los Adaes on foreigners, which continued throughout its ex-
istence, was not unusual. Residents of Pensacola turned on occasion to nearby
French Mobile for essential supplies. Needy officials in St. Augustine sent ves-
sels to both Mobile and New Orleans and also traded with Englishmen. In-
deed, at one juncture Spanish officers in St. Augustine obtained weapons
from Carolina merchants in order to defend themselves in a war with those
very same Carolinians. Spanish dependency extended even to colluding with
pirates and begging from Indians—humiliations that Spain’s European rivals
seldom experienced.
Spain simply could not deliver the goods, either to its own subjects or to
Indians, and its North American holdings stagnated. Unlike more populous
areas of the Spanish empire, which enjoyed fabulous mineral wealth and re-
sponded to shortages by gearing up local production, frontier communities
were too small, impoverished, and beleaguered to rally. Caught in a vicious
circle, the frontier communities remained small because they had little to
attract immigrants and much to repel them. The shortage of merchandise
for the Indian trade also hindered Spain’s ability to expand its frontiers.
Across the borderlands, from Florida to New Mexico, wherever English or
French competition increased in the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century,
Spain lost control of the Indian trade—the key to empire in North America.
The expanding Spanish frontier sputtered and stalled and in some areas

131
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

rolled back. Ultimately, however, the gains and losses scored in commercial
rivalries were canceled out by the fortunes of war and the negotiations of
distant diplomats who redrew the map of European holdings in North
America in 1763.

The economic malaise that afflicted Spain’s North American colonies re-
flected the weakness of the Spanish economy itself, built traditionally on the
exportation of raw materials and the importation of manufactured goods. In
the seventeenth century, severe structural problems had exacerbated Spain’s
trade imbalance, causing the kingdom’s wealth and productivity to decline. Fed
by bullion from America, spiraling inflation had raised the cost of Spanish
manufactures and made them uncompetitive. Relatively inexpensive foreign
goods flooded Spanish markets, leaving Spain dependent on foreign imports
and unable to supply its own needs, much less those of its colonials.
For the colonies, the shortage of trade goods was aggravated by Spain’s
restrictive commercial policies, which aimed to benefit the mother country
at the expense of the colonials. A late medieval mercantile system, which
endured with only minor adjustments until the late eighteenth century,
limited the supply and raised the cost of imported goods throughout the
empire. Spanish policy generally limited trade to Spanish goods handled by
Spanish merchants and carried on Spanish vessels. To maintain control over
this closed trading system, Spain permitted commercial vessels to call at
only a few key ports in the New World. None of the natural harbors along
the Texas coast were among them. Fearful of encouraging smuggling, Spain
kept the Texas coast closed to legal shipping until the end of the colonial era,
despite entreaties from officials who pointed out the benefits to commerce.
By law, goods bound from Spain for Texas, New Mexico, or anywhere else
in New Spain could enter the viceroyalty only at Veracruz. From there,
merchandise destined for northern New Spain was hauled over a torturous
mountain highway to Mexico City, then transported over rude roads until it
reached the end of the trail at places such as San Antonio, Los Adaes, Santa
Fe, Taos, or the edges of Pimería Alta, where Jesuits had built missions in
what is today Arizona. The cost of transportation plus profits for numerous
middlemen and additional internal customs duties (alcabalas) along the way
drove the price of some items to many times their Veracruz or Mexico City

132
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

value by the time they reached the frontier. One outspoken critic of the sys-
tem described it as “economic slavery.”
Although Spanish vessels did land at St. Augustine and Pensacola, their
residents fared little better. Monopolies and regulations kept goods scarce in
those ports, too, and unscrupulous merchants charged what the market
would bear. The parish priest at St. Augustine complained in 1700 that a bar
of soap or a box of sugar might sell in St. Augustine for five times its value in
Havana or New Spain.
For suppliers and consumers alike, such artificially high prices made
smuggling so attractive that perhaps two-thirds of all commerce throughout
the Spanish empire consisted of illegal trade, much of it with foreigners. In
Spanish North America, contraband had been a conspicuous feature of
commercial life from the beginning, and it increased as English and French
merchants grew more numerous and more proximate. Under-the-table deals
became a mainstay of trade in those frontier communities with greatest
access to foreign merchandise, as at Los Adaes, where foreign-made manu-
factures far outnumbered those from Spain in the mid-eighteenth century.
Along with its economic weakness and restrictive policies, Spain’s colonial
priorities assured the stagnation of its North American outposts. By the
eighteenth century, Spain regarded its northernmost colonies in the hemi-
sphere as essentially defensive. Lacking precious minerals and a large popu-
lation of docile Indians to work plantations or mines, the colonies from New
Mexico to Florida served primarily to protect adjacent areas—the sea lanes
of the gulf and the Atlantic and the mines of northern New Spain—rather
than as areas to produce minerals or agricultural wealth for export. By defi-
nition and in practice, the northern colonies were marginal and dispensable.
In the negotiations ending the War of the Quadruple Alliance, for example,
Spain had offered to give Florida to England in exchange for Gibraltar
(which Spain had lost to England in 1713), but England had declined to
make the swap.

While Spain came to regard its North American colonies as money-losing

outposts of a vast and profitable empire, England and France saw North
America as their main chance for profit in the Americas. In contrast to
Spain, which formed its empire in the sixteenth century, when European

133
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

kingdoms put primacy on territorial acquisition through political and religious

domination, England and France entered North America in an era when
control of trade had become more important than control of territory. For
Englishmen in particular, America was a business. England’s most successful
colonies were joint stock ventures developed in the seventeenth century,
when mercantile interests dominated a weak monarchical government that,
compared to Spain’s, left its subjects unhindered by regulations and taxes.
In the absence of gold and silver in French and English America, furs
and hides became the continent’s most immediately remunerative commod-
ity. In general, Frenchmen and Englishmen had a large edge over Spaniards
as they competed for the loyalty of Indian trappers and hunters who fur-
nished furs and hides. England and France had larger domestic markets
that drove demand, and they enjoyed a number of other competitive advan-
tages as well.
France and England adhered to the prevailing mercantilism of the day
and, in theory, operated closed trading systems along the same lines as Spain’s.
But France and England enjoyed greater capacity to produce and distribute
goods, absorb raw materials, and generate capital. In competition for Indian
customers France and England had the edge. In the colonies themselves,
Frenchmen in Louisiana and Englishmen in the Carolinas did not antagonize
their potential Indian trading partners by demanding that Indians alter their
religion or their culture. Nor did Frenchmen and Englishmen imitate
Spain’s self-defeating policy of denying Indians muskets, powder, and shot—
weapons that helped tip the balance of power across the Spanish frontier.
Although bows and arrows had decided advantages over the cumbersome,
inaccurate muskets and balls of the era, Indians coveted European firearms
and ammunition, and Europeans and Indians alike tended to regard Indians
with firearms as more dangerous than those with bows and arrows. The dif-
ference between Spain’s policy of not giving or trading firearms to Indians
and the French and English use of weapons as trade goods should not,
however, be drawn too starkly. Spaniards commonly violated the Crown’s
prohibitions.
In the end, however, Spain lost ground to its competitors because of its de-
clining metropolitan economy, retrograde mercantile policies, and insistence
on proselytizing its customers. Although France had seized the heartland of
the continent and its Indian trade, in the long run England proved to be

134
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

Spain’s most formidable rival—and France’s as well. Demography and com-

merce worked in England’s favor, as Spain discovered first in the Southeast.

The English and northern European population along the Atlantic

seaboard grew stunningly from some 72,000 in 1660 to 1,275,000 in 1760.
Most immigrants moved into New England, the Chesapeake, and the middle
Atlantic colonies, but a significant number of those white colonists, together
with imported black slaves, settled along the Spanish rim. There, they soon
enjoyed vast numerical superiority and challenged Spain for control of
Georgia, Florida, and the Indian trade along the gulf from Apalachee to
Pensacola. By 1700, just thirty years after its founding, the white population
of South Carolina had reached some 3,800 (plus 2,800 black slaves), more
than double the Spanish population of long-established Florida, which
stood then at about 1,500. Over the next decades, the gap widened dramati-
cally. By 1745, the number of Europeans in South Carolina was nearly ten
times that of Florida (20,300 to 2,100).
As the burgeoning English population pushed south and west, the border-
lands between Florida and Carolina became a turbulent arena of contention
between warring European tribes. Spaniards and Englishmen each tried to
win Indians over to their side with guns, ammunition, and alcohol as well as
trade goods, and Indians played off one side against the other in order to
extract the most favorable terms.
In the so-called American Treaty signed at Madrid in 1670, England had
abandoned all claims to the flat, forested country along a 150-mile stretch from
just below Charleston to St. Augustine. Nonetheless, Englishmen made re-
peated efforts to occupy this land, beginning with their destruction of the
prosperous Spanish mission province of Guale in the 1680s and 1690s.
Spaniards had not returned to Guale after the devastation of the Franciscan
missions, and the remaining native inhabitants, Yamasees and Lower Creeks,
had abandoned the region when they went over to the Spanish side after the
Yamasee War of 1715. Carolinians moved to fill the void. Spain tried to stave
off the Carolinians’ southward expansion, but the Englishmen and their In-
dian allies, particularly the Creeks, outnumbered and outgunned them.
Spain’s hold on Florida weakened further with the establishment in 1733
of Georgia, an English proprietary colony whose title granted it the territory

135
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

between the Savannah and the Altamaha rivers, from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. Led by James Oglethorpe, Georgia had expanded quickly from its
main base at Savannah. Within a few years Georgians had moved southward
toward Florida, an expansion that culminated in the construction of Fort
George, fifty miles north of St. Augustine at the mouth of the St. Johns
River. This cypress-lined waterway held strategic importance for Florida
since it curved sharply to the south, penetrated the hinterlands behind
St. Augustine, and cut across the road to Apalachee.
Spain strengthened its fortifications in and around St. Augustine but
stretched its two-hundred-man garrison beyond its limits and could not
marshal the economic resources to build effective relationships with south-
eastern tribes. Instead, well-supplied English traders easily got the upper
hand. By the end of the 1730s, trade goods and Oglethorpe’s personal diplo-
macy had persuaded many Lower Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws to join
him. They proved to be a considerable asset, particularly during the bitter
fighting that began with the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739 and merged
into the protracted War of the Austrian Succession (known as King George’s
War in the English colonies).
The war came home to Florida in the spring of 1740 when Oglethorpe in-
vaded with a force of over two thousand, including Indian allies, and easily
took Spanish posts at San Diego, Picolata, Pupo, and Mose—the latter a new,
stone-walled village just two miles north of St. Augustine. Mose had been
built by about one hundred former black slaves and their families who had
fled Carolina to freedom with the encouragement of Florida officials in need
of extra manpower. For thirty-eight days, Oglethorpe laid siege to Fort San
Marcos, where most of the residents of St. Augustine and outlying villages
had taken refuge, but when reinforcements from Cuba arrived Oglethorpe
withdrew. In 1742, Spain sent a large expedition against Georgia but met de-
feat. For the next six years, small-scale but inconclusive raids continued along
the Florida–Georgia frontier. When the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended
hostilities in Europe in 1748, Georgia remained in British hands.
Stagnant Florida barely survived these decades of contention with the
steadily growing English colonies. Florida’s missions never recovered from
the English–Indian attacks of the turn of the century, and the colony had
not attracted civilian settlers. The Crown had to subsidize the few who
came. By 1760, the Hispanic population of Florida had risen to just over

136
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

Map 8

3,000. That year, the white population of the thirty-year-old Georgia colony
stood at 6,000 (plus 3,600 black slaves); white South Carolinians, who had
amounted to some 20,000 in 1745, now totaled 38,600 (plus nearly 60,000
black slaves).
Until 1763, when Spain temporarily lost Florida to Britain, the province
consisted of little more than its military garrisons and the population that
served them. The high percentage of the population dependent upon the
military payroll and the near absence of an industrial sector in garrison
towns like St. Augustine contrasted sharply with the commercially oriented
English urban centers that had developed along the Atlantic coast. Harassed
by hostile Indians and lacking the labor of mission Indians, St. Augustine
could not produce enough to feed itself, much less revive ranching and fur
trading to produce, as it had in the previous century, a surplus of hides,

137
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

tallow, dried meat, and furs for export. Although St. Augustine had many of
the features of a town, it remained a military base with an officer in com-
mand and without a town council, or cabildo, common to the government of
Spanish civilian communities.
St. Augustine could mount an effective defense. Nearby Havana reinforced
its garrison when foreign attack threatened, and after the War of Jenkins’ Ear
its troops and fortifications blocked English expansion below the St. John’s
River. Englishmen, however, did not test Florida’s defenses again after 1748,
nor did they need to. It became clear to Carolinians and Georgians that
Florida’s stagnant economy and modest population posed no offensive or
commercial threat. The Florida–Georgia border entered the longest period
of calm it had enjoyed since the founding of Charleston in 1670.

Through the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time it sought to halt

a seemingly inexorable advance of Englishmen toward St. Augustine and
Pensacola, Spain confronted aggressive French traders along the gulf coast
and on the high plains as far west as New Mexico. Compared to the bloody
Anglo-Spanish rivalry in northern Florida and Georgia, the Franco-Spanish
borderlands were tranquil after the War of the Quadruple Alliance ended in
1721. The beleaguered Bourbon monarchs of Spain and France, who needed
one another’s good will, entered into a series of so-called Family Compacts
in 1733, 1743, and 1761 and tried to avoid the risk of new confrontations in
North America. When a governor of Louisiana proposed to invade Texas
and Mexico in 1753, higher authorities in France simply ignored him.
Spain never abandoned its assertion that France had no legal right to
Louisiana but rather than press that case, Spain settled for a policy of quiet
containment. In 1735, for example, Spain protested when Saint-Denis moved
Natchitoches from its site on an island to the western side of the Red River.
Saint-Denis refused to budge, but Spain never pushed. In the 1750s, French
traders moved into the valley of the lower Trinity River, territory that Spanish
officials claimed was Texas. Spain countered peaceably, building the presidio
of San Agustín de Ahumada and the Mission of Nuestra Señora de la Luz
de Orcoquisac near the mouth of the Trinity at Galveston Bay.
With Louisiana a fait accompli, the focus of Spanish–French contention in
North America had shifted to the control and economic exploitation of Indi-

138
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

ans, at which Frenchmen excelled. In contrast to most of the English colonies,

French Louisiana had grown haltingly in the first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Badly governed, dependent on imports to feed itself, and costly to de-
fend, Louisiana had become a financial liability to France and to the private
stock companies that held monopolies there from 1712 to 1731. The hot, humid,
mosquito-ridden coast had attracted few voluntary immigrants. By 1731, when
the colony reverted to the Crown, its European population totaled about
2,000, including soldiers, convicts, vagrants, and other involuntary immigrants,
together with an additional involuntary population of 3,800 black slaves.
French Louisiana continued to grow slowly. By 1760, its European population
reached about 4,000, and the number of black slaves came to 5,000. The
colony remained a net liability, but a small number of traders in this marginal
colony did extend French influence far into the interior of North America.
Well beyond their initial footholds at Biloxi and Mobile, Frenchmen in
search of furs and hides established a series of trading posts in native vil-
lages along the great river system that drains the heart of the continent.
Nouvelle Orléans, established in 1718 on high ground on the east bank of
the Mississippi 100 miles above the gulf, became the colony’s headquar-
ters in 1722 and one of the hubs of an extensive trading network. Saint-
Denis’ post at Natchitoches on the Red River marked the westernmost
edge of that network, while its northern edge extended up the Mississippi,
past a post established in 1714 on the bluffs at Natchez, to the Arkansas
Post, built in 1721 on the lower Arkansas River to tap trade with the Qua-
paws. Far to the east, with Mobile as its hub, another trading network ex-
tended northward, up the Alabama–Tombigbee–Mobile river system.
Upstream, 170 miles to the northeast of Mobile, Frenchmen had built Fort
Toulouse in 1717 near the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, hop-
ing to neutralize the influence of Carolinians among the Alabamas and
other bands of Creeks; for over four decades the traders at Fort Toulouse
succeeded. Louisiana also came to include the sparsely settled Illinois coun-
try, or Upper Louisiana, a vaguely defined area lying south and west of
Lake Michigan, with a scattering of settlements from Detroit down to
Kaskaskia and Ste. Genevieve (St. Louis was not established until 1764). By
midcentury, an additional 1,500 Frenchmen lived in this region, whose
economy remained more closely linked to that of French Canada than to
that of the lower Mississippi Valley.

139
Map 9
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

Out of the vast trading network of lower Louisiana, furs and hides obtained
from Indian hunters made their way to New Orleans and Mobile and then
to Europe to feed a growing leather industry. Deerskins formed the main-
stay of this trade and also constituted French Louisiana’s most consistently
important export item. The skillful French traders who harvested these furs
and hides capitalized on Spain’s weaknesses to win the allegiance of Indians
along the gulf and across the southern plains from Texas to the borders of
New Mexico. By giving Natives a choice, French traders ended native de-
pendency on Spaniards; by furnishing Natives with arms, ammunition, and
promises of protection, foreign traders gave them additional means to main-
tain their independence.

In Texas, Franciscans learned of the French impact on Indians when they

returned to the Caddo country in 1716. The Hasinais, coached by Saint-Denis,
had obligingly built churches and agreed to enter missions, but their subse-
quent actions betrayed their loyalties. They had refused to congregate into
tight communities around the chapels, and they had declined to receive
baptism except on the point of death. The padres stood by helplessly, unable
to force their will on the Indians. “We do not have a single gun,” the two
Franciscan leaders lamented, “while we see the French giving hundreds of
arms to the Indians.” When a royal inspector visited eastern Texas in 1727, he
reported quite simply that “there were no Indians in the missions.” Three of
the six East Texas missions were soon abandoned and reestablished near San
Antonio in 1731. The remainder hung on into the 1770s, even though Indians
continued to decline baptism.
Caddos had little need for Spanish missions when they had a French trad-
ing partner with well-stocked shelves and interest in their bear- and deer-
skins, chamois, tallow, and horses. Spaniards, on the other hand, could barely
fill their own larder. With all ports on the gulf closed to legal shipping, sup-
plies destined for Texas had to travel a lengthy overland route under harsh
and dangerous conditions that raised transportation costs substantially, took a
heavy toll on pack animals, and made the lives of travelers miserable.
While the East Texas missions languished, Spain made several attempts
to exert influence over the tribes to the north and west of the trail that ran

141
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

from San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande to San Antonio and to Los
Adaes. In the hope of checking French influence among the Apache-like
Tonkawas, who lived to the north of San Antonio, Spanish officials au-
thorized the building of a mission and presidio in the mid-1740s. The ef-
fort, undermined in part by Frenchmen with trade goods, failed after a
decade, and the military garrison moved to the northwest of San Antonio
to protect missions that Franciscans intended to build among Lipán
Apaches on the San Sabá River. This experiment at converting Apaches
would end shockingly.
Over the years, Lipán Apaches had expressed interest in missions, but
Spanish officials had dismissed the Lipáns’ requests as insincere ploys to enlist
Spanish aid against their Comanche enemies. In 1757, however, viceregal
authorities responded favorably to Apache pleas by sending missionaries,
soldiers, and their families to the San Sabá River (near present-day Menard).
The gamble seemed worth it, for San Sabá held potential to become the first
of a series of mission-presidio complexes that would neutralize Apaches,
expand the Spanish frontier farther north, and open the way for the discov-
ery of mineral wealth or an overland trading route to Santa Fe.
In the spring of 1757 Franciscans built Santa Cruz de San Sabá, the first of
three missions planned for the San Sabá River. Three miles away, soldiers built
a log stockade, San Luis de Amarillas, with room enough for 300 to 400 per-
sons, including the 237 women and children who would reside there. At the
padres’ insistence, the fort went up across the river and three miles from the
mission so that soldiers would not corrupt Indians. Of that, there was no dan-
ger. However pleased they might have been with a Spanish military presence
in the area, Apaches shunned the mission and put the Franciscans off with
promises. Santa Cruz de San Sabá did not last a year. Comanches, incited by
the Spaniards’ alliance with their Apache enemies and joined by Indians from
several other tribes, including Tonkawas and Hasinais, pillaged and burned the
mission on March 16, 1758.
For the viceroy and his advisors, the destruction at San Sabá cried out for
revenge, lest the plains tribes lose respect for Spaniards and take Spanish in-
action as license to attack other frontier posts. A year after the tragedy, the
commander of the presidio at San Sabá, Col. Diego Ortiz Parrilla, led over
five hundred men north to the Red River, deep in Indian territory. There he
found Comanches and other tribes forewarned, well equipped with French

142
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

muskets, and waiting for him in a fortified village of the Taovayas, one of
several Wichita peoples whom the Spaniards termed the Nations of the
North. A French flag few over the Taovaya town, which was surrounded by
a stockade and moat. Following an initial skirmish in which he saw a tenth
of his force either killed, wounded, or deserting, Ortiz wisely organized an
orderly retreat. Spanish forces remained at San Sabá to show Spanish resolve,
but Comanches and their allies kept Spaniards holed up in the fort and
picked off those soldiers who dared to venture out in small numbers. Finally,
in 1769, Spanish forces abandoned the presidio.
Two centuries before, Spaniards had had their way with Indians. Now they
found themselves fighting a better armed, more mobile, and more savvy adver-
sary. The Comanche attack on the mission of Santa Cruz de San Sabá in
1757 and Ortiz Parrilla’s failure brought a stunning halt to Spanish efforts to
expand north and west of San Antonio. Those lands would remain part of a
great despoblado—an area considered uninhabited by Spaniards but peopled
by Apaches and increasingly by Comanches—a southward-moving people
unknown to Hispanics in Texas for the first four decades of the century.

Missions did not fail everywhere in Texas, but the restrictive mission life,
in which one might receive four or five lashes for missing morning assemblies
and worse punishment for more serious offenses, attracted mainly Indians who
had nowhere else to turn. Particularly susceptible to the blandishments
of Franciscans were small bands of hunters and gatherers, many of them
Coahuiltecan-speaking peoples of the lower Rio Grande who represented
an astonishing number of groups that have since become extinct. Squeezed
between Hispanics moving north into Coahuila and Tamaulipas and Apaches
moving southward, some members of these small bands had found food and
refuge in the mission of San Antonio de Valero and in the four additional
missions that had sprouted along the San Antonio River downstream from
San Antonio between 1720 and 1731. The five San Antonio missions were the
most successful in Texas, but the number of converts remained small compared
to early days in Florida and New Mexico. The native population of each of
the five San Antonio missions seldom exceeded three hundred and fluctuated
with the seasons and from year to year. Sometimes epidemics or massive
flights lowered the mission population drastically.

143
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

With day-to-day life made insecure by armed nomads, few docile Natives
to exploit, high transportation costs for exports and imports, and little evi-
dence of precious metals, Texas failed to attract colonists. This left Texas of-
ficials with a familiar conundrum: there would be safety in numbers, but
they could not raise the numbers without guarantees of safety. As in the case
of Florida, Spanish officials tried to break out of this bind by simultaneously
increasing defenses and urging the Crown to subsidize colonists from Spain
and New Spain. In 1723, the king offered to resettle two hundred families of
Canary Islanders, providing them free transportation, livestock, tools, arms,
land, their maintenance for a year, and the title of hidalgo. There was no
shortage of peasant volunteers from the impoverished islands, but the project
became ensnared in Spanish bureaucracy. In March 1731, the first and last
contingent of government-sponsored immigrants from the Canary Islands
reached San Antonio: fifty-five people from Tenerife, most of them children
and teenagers. Together with those colonists who had come to Texas with
the early expeditions of Domingo Ramón, Martín de Alarcón, and the mar-
qués de Aguayo, the islanders, or isleños, brought the Hispanic population of
the province to perhaps five hundred, and that of San Antonio itself to about
three hundred.
At San Antonio, the new isleño families found temporary lodging in the
homes of the older residents and began to organize a town and assign them-
selves lots. They revived San Antonio, founded in 1718 as the villa of Béjar,
and renamed it the villa of San Fernando. They surveyed its municipal lands
and formed a municipal government—the first and only civilian government
in Spanish Texas (the capital of Texas remained at the presidial community
of Los Adaes so long as France held Louisiana). Then, showing little grati-
tude toward their hosts, the isleños took control of the town government and
lorded it over San Antonio’s original soldier-settlers, to whose irrigated
farmlands the isleños laid claim.
Economic realities in the new villa of San Antonio, however, must have
disappointed the new land-owning hidalgos. Having no Indian laborers, the
isleños did their own farming and ranching and found these to be dangerous
enterprises, especially since they had no experience with ranching and did
not know how to use guns. Ranching became the principal economic activity
in Texas, but tejanos had little incentive to produce beyond their needs. Until
the 1770s, when the expansion of silver mining raised demand for beef in

144
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

northern Mexico and the American Revolution created a need in Louisiana,

tejanos lacked viable external markets. Ranching remained primitive, amount-
ing to little more than an annual roundup of wild cattle.
In San Antonio tejanos could not compete with the cheap communal labor
and large-scale irrigated agriculture at the subsidized Franciscan missions.
Mission Indians managed large herds on the open range and raised corn that
the friars sold at bargain prices to the presidio. The isleños twice sent dele-
gates to Mexico City to petition the viceroy for a guaranteed market at the
garrison and permission to hire Indian laborers from the missions, but Fran-
ciscans successfully lobbied against them. The military payroll was the motor
that ran the town’s debt-ridden barter economy, but government regulations
made it sputter. They required soldiers to buy from the commissary rather
than from local merchants and prohibited settlers from selling produce in the
interior of Mexico, in Louisiana, or at trade fairs in neighboring provinces.
The friars, the Canary Islanders, and the descendants of the community’s
first Hispanic settlers carried on a running feud over the valley’s limited re-
sources, until intermarriage and common interests eventually united the two
factions of townsfolk against the Franciscans.
Dependent almost entirely on natural increase rather than immigration,
Hispanic Texas grew slowly. Its population rose from 500 persons in 1731 to
1,190 by 1760. Of those 1,190 persons, about 580 lived in San Antonio, 350 at
Los Adaes, and some 260 at La Bahía. Those figures do not include mission
Indians or Hispanics who lived in the El Paso area, then part of New Mexico,
or in the lower Rio Grande Valley. South Texas below the Nueces River be-
longed to the neighboring province of Nuevo Santander, the precursor of the
modern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where Laredo (1749) had sprung up
on the north side of the Rio Grande.
Spanish Texas languished as one of the least populated provinces on the
northern frontier of New Spain. By 1790, when the Hispanic population of
Texas stood at 2,510, Nuevo Santander had over ten times as many Hispanics,
and New Mexico, with 20,289, had eight times that number. Only the two
Californias had lower Hispanic populations than Texas. In 1790 San Antonio,
La Bahía, and Nacogdoches, which had replaced Los Adaes as the principal
settlement in East Texas, had non-Indian populations of roughly 1,500, 600,
and 400, respectively, making them more akin in size to the small presidial
towns of St. Augustine or Pensacola than to the provincial capitals in central

145
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

New Spain (Mexico City surpassed 110,000 in 1793; Puebla had nearly
53,000; Guanajuato had over 32,000). As in Florida, high percentages of
Hispanics in Texas were soldiers or depended upon the military for their
subsistence. The military, in turn, depended heavily on the Crown, which
paid dearly for its failure to develop Texas economically, as the king’s own
auditor had concluded.
Texas, then, retained the character of a defensive outpost. Although friars
and soldiers continued to draw up plans to build more presidios and mis-
sions to the north, Spanish Texas failed to grow beyond the three points that
the marqués de Aguayo had reinforced in 1721—San Antonio, La Bahía, and
Los Adaes. The explanation for Spain’s failure to develop Texas more fully is
not to be found in the allegedly inhospitable nature of the Great Plains or
the woodlands of East Texas, as some writers have suggested, but with dis-
tance, danger, and government policies that gave advantages to foreign rivals
and with missions that retarded civilian economic growth.

Like Texas, New Mexico failed to fulfill its original promise. By the mid-
eighteenth century, the missions had lost their vigor, and the number of
Franciscans had declined. What Spaniards still referred to as “the spiritual
and temporal conquest” never extended beyond El Paso and the narrow
sphere of the Rio Grande Pueblos. Although older, more complex, and more
populous than Texas, New Mexico still had a scanty Hispanic population
through the midcentury. In 1765, non-Indians numbered 9,580, of whom 3,140
lived in the El Paso district. That same year, Hispanicized Pueblo Indians and
detribalized Indians were counted at 10,500, of whom 1,600 lived in or near El
Paso. Since it had become home to Spanish and Pueblo refugees following the
Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the population of El Paso proper had grown to 2,635 by
1765, making it the largest urban center on the northern frontier. Santa Fe
came a close second, with 2,324 (San Antonio, without its outlying missions,
had about 1,000). New Mexico boasted four villas—Santa Fe (ca. 1609), El
Paso (1680), Santa Cruz de la Cañada (1695), and Albuquerque (1706).
In the 1700s, missionaries and settlers continued to exploit Pueblos, but
mutual enemies—Navajos, Utes, Comanches, and Apaches—had forced the
Pueblos to make common cause with Spaniards. Most Hispanos and Pueblos
were also united by poverty. Observers from near and far characterized New

146
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

Mexico as “little populated and poverty-stricken, although endowed with

natural resources,” features it shared with Spain’s other frontier provinces.
Compared to Florida and Texas, however, a smaller percentage of New
Mexicans were soldiers or military dependents.
New Mexicans carried on a vigorous trade with neighboring tribes, ex-
changing weapons, munitions, horses, and agricultural produce for furs, buf-
falo hides, meat, and slaves, and they had sent some local products south to
Chihuahua. Until the 1780s, though, distance, danger, and Spain’s monopo-
listic policies deprived the nuevomexicanos of profitable external markets and
hard currency. A few Chihuahua merchants who controlled the New Mexico
market paid low prices for New Mexico’s sheep, raw wool, buffalo hides,
buckskins, pine nuts, pottery, and wool and cotton manufactures and charged
New Mexicans dearly for goods from Spain and central New Spain, advanc-
ing them on credit. The unfavorable trade balance drained New Mexico of
currency so that a barter economy prevailed—as was true in Florida and Texas
as well. Unlike their counterparts in Florida and Texas, nuevomexicanos had
little opportunity to buy or sell from French or English smugglers. Over nine
hundred miles from Natchitoches, New Mexico remained relatively isolated
from French traders in neighboring Louisiana.
Frenchmen made their way to New Mexico nonetheless. In 1739, the broth-
ers Pierre and Paul Mallet and six companions ascended the Missouri River by
boat from the Illinois country to present South Dakota, believing, as did their
contemporaries, that the river led to New Mexico. When Arikara Indians told
them they had gone too far north, they returned downstream to an Omaha
village in northeastern Nebraska, where they purchased horses. The Mallets
apparently rode into Santa Fe without their merchandise, personal posses-
sions, and most of their clothing—all lost in crossing a river (or so New Mex-
ico officials said). Hungry for better terms of trade than the price-gouging
Chihuahua merchants offered, New Mexican officials welcomed the bedrag-
gled Frenchmen and lodged and fed them for nine months while they waited
for the viceroy to rule on their fate. Permitted to leave, the brothers traveled to
New Orleans by way of the Canadian and Arkansas rivers, carrying at least
one shopping list from a frustrated New Mexico consumer.
The Mallets’ report of New Mexicans’ eagerness for trade goods, coupled
with their erroneous tale of rich silver mines in New Mexico, drew a number
of French merchants across the plains in the years that followed. Some of

147
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

those Frenchmen apparently sold their wares to Hispanics and Indians on the
periphery of New Mexico, but others met a less friendly reception than the
Mallets had received. After learning that Comanches had received muskets
from French traders, New Mexico officials concluded that the liabilities of
trade with Frenchmen outweighed its advantages. French merchants who
followed the Mallet brothers to Santa Fe faced arrest and confiscation of
their merchandise—a fate that befell several of them, including Pierre Mallet,
on a return trip in 1751. Officials in New Spain detained these new arrivals
indefinitely in order to discourage others from following them.
In remote New Mexico, Spain cut off a trickle of French commerce and
reduced New Mexico to its single lifeline—the camino real, or royal road,
that connected it to Chihuahua and other points south. Not until the 1820s,
with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, which linked New Mexico to the
Missouri, did New Mexicans find an alternative to the Chihuahua trade. By
then France was long gone.

With a few strokes of the pen in 1762 and 1763, European diplomats al-
tered the political, economic, and social arrangements so painfully shaped by
decades of contention and cooperation between European colonials and
North American Natives. Spanish officials who had labored long but unsuc-
cessfully to check the growth of French influence from Louisiana learned
that the French province had passed suddenly into Spanish hands. Con-
versely, Spaniards who had successfully defended Pensacola, San Marcos de
Apalachee, and St. Augustine against Indians and foreigners discovered that
their king had surrendered Florida to Britain without a fight. The diplomatic
arrangements of 1762–63 demonstrated that however vigorously or imagina-
tively frontier officials coped with foreign rivals, Indians, and the stifling
effects of Spanish commercial policies, their success or failure could be de-
termined by distant forces beyond their control. Individuals who lived on the
frontier occasionally altered the course of empire, but more often than not
Spain’s imperial claims in North America waxed and waned with decisions
made in Madrid and other European capitals.
On November 3, 1762, France ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi to
Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau. French motives for this offering
remain murky, but one seems fairly clear: France wanted to get rid of

148
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

Louisiana. The money-losing colony had become more difficult to maintain

after England seized Canada in what came to be known in Europe as the
Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War in the English colonies). For-
mally declared in 1756, the war initially involved only France and England.
Spain entered the war late, in January 1762, on the French side, then promptly
lost Manila and Havana to British fleets. In fulfillment of promises to Spain
and perhaps to compensate Spain for its losses, France surrendered western
Louisiana to Spain at the secret meeting at Fontainebleau.
Spain’s Carlos III accepted Louisiana reluctantly. The colony promised to re-
main a financial liability to Spain as it had been to France, but the same defen-
sive strategy that had led Spain to advance into Texas to counteract the French
thrust into the Mississippi Valley now prompted Carlos III to decide that he
needed Louisiana no matter what the cost. Under Spanish control western
Louisiana could become a bulwark against westward-moving Englishmen.
In the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the war on February 10, 1763,
England recognized Spain as the new owner of Upper and Lower Louisiana
west of the Mississippi, together with the so-called Isle d’Orleans on the east
side of the river—a substantial area from Bayou Manchac south, which gave
Spain effective control over the river’s mouth and the city of New Orleans.
The Treaty of Paris left England as Spain’s only European rival on the conti-
nent because France surrendered to Great Britain the remainder of Louisiana
to the east of the Mississippi and all of Canada. In that same treaty, England
also acquired Florida from Spain. During the war, England had made no
attempt to capture Florida, whose defenses at St. Augustine were apparently
stronger than ever, but in 1763 England bartered it away from Spain in ex-
change for returning Havana, which it had taken from Spain the previous
summer. Faced with a choice between losing Cuba or Florida to the British,
Spain had surrendered Florida.
England took possession of Florida in 1763, splitting it into two adminis-
trative units, West Florida and East Florida, separated by the Apalachicola
and Chattahoochee rivers. Protestant England permitted Spanish subjects
to remain and practice their religion undisturbed, but few accepted the offer.
Nearly all Florida families depended on the government payroll, directly or
indirectly, and they followed orders from their king to evacuate the province.
Eager to salvage its colonists in Florida, the Crown offered free transportation
to those willing to leave.

149
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

In contrast to Spain’s total evacuation of English Florida, few Frenchmen

abandoned Spanish Louisiana. France did not encourage its former subjects
in the Mississippi Valley to repatriate but instead cooperated with Spain to
strengthen Louisiana against further English expansion. The French colo-
nials, however, refused to put out the welcome mat for their new sovereign.
On the contrary, they tried to persuade France to reassert its control over the
Mississippi Valley, and they subverted Spain’s efforts to effect a peaceful
transition of power.
Louisianans lived in an uneasy political limbo from September 1764, when
they learned of the Treaty of Paris, until a rainy Ides of March in 1766, when
the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, reached New Orleans. With
Ulloa came an insubstantial force of about ninety men. Ulloa established a
curious system of joint rule with the last French governor, Charles Aubry,
who, like most other French officeholders, retained his former position. Ulloa
also attempted to incorporate the remaining French soldiers into the Spanish
army and, to the astonishment of the French residents, he did not lower the
fleur-de-lis or raise the red-and-yellow banner of Spain over the city. Ulloa
aimed to conciliate the French population upon which Spain would have to
depend to make the colony thrive, and without adequate troops or funds at
his disposal, Ulloa had no choice but to rely on friendly persuasion.
Whatever he gained with his gentle political transition, Ulloa lost with
his abrasive economic reforms. Before a Spanish Louisiana could fulfill its
intended purpose of shielding northern New Spain against English advances,
its economy needed strengthening. Ulloa tried to achieve that by pulling the
colony’s commerce into the closed Spanish imperial trading system. He
tried to close Louisiana’s traditional markets within the French empire, end
the contraband trade that French colonists had enjoyed with the English,
and require that Indian traders be licensed. Not surprisingly, Ulloa’s efforts
to regulate commerce antagonized Louisiana’s powerful merchant elite, which
led a popular revolt in October 1768. Ulloa abdicated and retreated to Cuba.
Fittingly, perhaps, he left on a French vessel since the only available Spanish
ship was not seaworthy.
Louisiana remained independent for nearly a year before Spanish forces
returned. In August 1769 a new Spanish governor, Gen. Alejandro O’Reilly,
arrived in New Orleans with a well-equipped armada of twenty-one ships
and over two thousand troops, more men than Spain would ever again send

150
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

to the Mississippi Valley. An Irish soldier of fortune who had made a brilliant
career in the Spanish military, O’Reilly easily reasserted Spanish authority.
Taken completely by surprise, convinced of the futility of resistance, and not
suspecting serious reprisals, French leaders in Louisiana welcomed the Span-
ish general. Backed up by the force for which Ulloa had pleaded but never
received, O’Reilly raised Spain’s banner over Louisiana’s settlements for the
first time, including those on the Spanish side of the Mississippi in Upper
Louisiana—Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis. Ste. Genevieve had been founded
about 1750, but St. Louis, established in 1764 by French fur traders at an
advantageous location on a high bluff near the confluence of three great
rivers—the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi—was destined to become the
administrative and economic center of what Spaniards would call Illinois or
Upper Louisiana.
Swiftly and decisively, O’Reilly followed his instructions from the king to
“make formal charge and punish according to the law the instigators and
accomplices of the uprising.” O’Reilly remained in Louisiana until late Feb-
ruary 1770, and during his brief tenure he imposed a new order. He disman-
tled the French administrative structure and placed Louisiana under the
captain general at Havana, as Florida had been before its loss to the British.
He nullified French laws and replaced them with a legal code of his own.
Castilian, he decreed, would replace French as the colony’s legal language.
Finally, he prohibited trade with all foreigners and foreign ports, expelled a
number of foreign merchants, and reformed the colony’s military structure.
Within a decade, Louisianans enjoyed economic prosperity under Spain,
perhaps because local Spanish officials adopted France’s more liberal trading
policies, opened Louisiana to direct trade with several Spanish ports, wel-
comed non-Spanish immigrants, and failed to check a growing contraband
trade with neighboring Anglo Americans. Although Louisiana’s colonists
prospered more under Spain than they had under France, the province re-
mained a net liability for the Spanish Crown.
Spain held title to Louisiana (including the Illinois country) for nearly
four decades but failed to Hispanicize it, much less profit from it. In contrast
to Florida, where English colonists quickly took the places of departing
Spaniards, Louisiana became Spanish more in name than in fact. French cul-
ture and language remained dominant because Frenchmen, who took the oath
of allegiance to Spain, simply overwhelmed Spaniards numerically. Through

151
 c o m m e r c i a l r i va l r y a n d t h e f o r t u n e s o f wa r

incentives, Spanish officials managed to lure Canary Islanders to Louisiana

in much larger numbers than they had to Florida or Texas, but fresh waves
of French immigration canceled out the gains. An indeterminate number of
Frenchmen crossed the Mississippi into Louisiana to avoid British rule,
while others fled to Louisiana from Haiti to escape a slave rebellion in the
1790s. Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia comprised the largest immigrant
group, swelling the French population by perhaps three thousand.

The new imperial boundaries created in 1762–63 existed, of course, largely

in the European imagination. European diplomats had ignored the realities of
indigenous territorial claims, and they had ignored geography itself. How-
ever convenient the Mississippi River had seemed as a boundary line, it
formed the core of a region with its own integrity. Like other river basins,
the Mississippi drew people together rather than dividing them. Spaniards
and Englishmen shared navigation rights on the river and had common eco-
nomic interests, and yet each power fortified its side of the river and thus
created new points of tension. Meanwhile, within the territories that Spain
and England called their own, native Americans continued to assert their
own claims, often with gun and powder as well as bow and arrow. If Spain
were to maintain its hold over the western half of the continent and develop
it economically, it would have to find a way to control the so-called barbarous
Indians—those Natives who had successfully maintained their political and
spiritual independence. Traditional institutions and strategies had failed to
bring these Indians into the Spanish sphere not only on the plains of northern
Texas and eastern New Mexico, but also across much of the southwestern
rim of the continent.

152
 8
Indian Raiders and the Reorganization
of Frontier Defenses

There must be on land defense against so many barbarous Indians

with whom no arrangements can be made because . . . they must
try to defend their lands and liberty.
—fray Alonso de Posada, 1686

I prohibit the commandant-inspector and the captains

of presidios from granting them peace.
—King Carlos III, 1772

A bad peace with all the tribes which ask for it would
be more fruitful than the gains of a successful war.
—Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, 1786

In March of 1766, the marqués de Rubí rode north from Mexico City to in-
spect the formal defenses of northern New Spain. A newcomer to the
American colonies, Rubí had arrived in New Spain in 1764 as part of a mili-
tary mission sent by Carlos III to reorganize the defenses of the viceroyalty,

153
Map 10
 reorganized frontier defenses

a mission prompted by Spain’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War. By seizing the
fortified city of Havana, England had revealed the weakness of Spain’s colo-
nial defenses in its American colonies. Should another war break out, England
could just as easily land troops at Veracruz and invade the population center
of New Spain—an area that Spain previously believed was secure.
Spain’s humiliation had coincided with the beginning of the reign of the
most dynamic, innovative, and American-oriented of its eighteenth-century
Bourbon monarchs, Carlos III (1759–88). In North America, the king’s wide-
ranging program called for regaining Florida, which the British had gained
as part of the peace settlement, and shoring up the defenses of New Spain,
including its interior provinces, as officials termed the northern frontier. The
Crown’s expenditures on the defense of the interior provinces had nearly
doubled since 1700, but Indian reprisals and depredations had increased dra-
matically, particularly after midcentury, when sporadic raids by Apaches
seemed to accelerate into open warfare.
Hoping to reverse this trend, the Crown had ordered the marqués de
Rubí to conduct a reconnaissance of the interior provinces. Along with Rubí
went a military engineer, Nicolás de Lafora, to provide technical assistance.
A twenty-year army veteran and member of the Royal Corps of Engineers,
Lafora would make maps and keep a diary. It was he who pithily explained
the purpose of the mission: to learn why Indians “are so audacious” and why
Spain’s soldiers seemed “of so little use.”
Rubí’s tour consumed the next two years and took him over seventy-five
hundred miles. First he traveled up the camino real to Chihuahua, the capital
of Nueva Vizcaya, and on to the presidios at El Paso and Santa Fe. From
there he retraced his route to inspect fortifications in the harsh lands of north-
ern Nueva Vizcaya at Janos and San Buenaventura, then crossed the Sierra
Madre into Sonora, where he inspected presidios at Fronteras, Terrenate,
Tubac, and Altar before heading south to review Horcasitas and Buenavista.
He then recrossed the Sierras and returned to Chihuahua. So ended his first
year. From Chihuahua he continued northeasterly into Coahuila and Texas,
inspecting presidios as he went. Los Adaes, on the edge of Louisiana,
marked the eastern terminus of his tour. There was no need for him to con-
tinue into Louisiana, where Gov. Antonio de Ulloa was conducting his own
inspection and restructuring regional defenses. Louisiana would further de-
velop its own elaborate system of fortifications, but its purpose would be to

155
 reorganized frontier defenses

protect the province from England (and then the United States) rather than
from Indians. Responsibility for its design fell to the captain general at Havana;
Louisiana was never considered one of the internal provinces of New Spain.
In February 1768, Rubí returned to Mexico City, having inspected twenty-
three of the king’s twenty-four frontier posts and seen firsthand, as the engi-
neer Lafora put it, “the tremendous damage His Majesty’s subjects suffer
daily from the barbarians.” Much of that destruction came from Apaches.
Pushed off the buffalo plains over the course of a century by Comanches

21. El Paso in 1776 consisted of the adobe presidio (A), nothing more
than a captain’s quarters and a guardhouse, the adobe church (B), and
surrounding homes and fields. Drawn in 1766 by José de Urrutia. Courtesy,
British Library and Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 15065.

156
 reorganized frontier defenses

with firearms and by Wichita peoples whom Spaniards knew collectively as

the Nations of the North, various Apache bands had gradually moved south
and west. By the time Rubí made his tour, Apaches had formed a wide band
across the interior provinces, from Texas nearly to Sonora. Across the Gran
Apachería, as Spaniards termed the Apache-held lands, Rubí found numerous
communities, mines, haciendas, ranches, and farms destroyed by Apaches or
abandoned out of fear. Eager for horses, deprived of the buffalo hides and
meat that had been their stock in trade, and often mistreated and enslaved
by Spaniards, Apaches had turned to raiding. In northern Mexico they had
found Spanish horses, mules, and cattle ready for the taking. In the course of
their raiding, they had won admiration for their “amazing . . . conduct, vigi-
lance, speed, order, and endurance,” as Lafora noted, and they had also
gained a reputation for indolence and “extreme cruelty.”
Spaniards, on the other hand, whom Apaches first encountered as slavers
and who continued to enslave Indians despite royal injunctions, probably
enjoyed a reputation for extreme cruelty among Apaches. In Arizona, for
example, it was Spanish custom to cut off the heads of Apaches killed in battle.
Lt. Col. Pedro de Allende boasted of leading a campaign out of Tucson in 1779
in which he killed a “war captain, whose head he cut off before the very eyes of
the enemy. Then he charged the Apache line single-handed, with the head
stuck on his lance.” As one prominent officer observed, “The Spaniards accuse
the Indians of cruelty. I do not know what opinion they would have of us: per-
haps it would be no better. . . . if he [an Indian] avenges himself it is for just
satisfaction of his grievances.”

Whatever its causes, the devastation Rubí witnessed had occurred at a

time when the military was in the ascendancy throughout the Spanish empire
and on the northern frontier of New Spain in particular. By the 1760s presidios
or military bases, most of them fortified, had eclipsed missions to become
the dominant institution on Spain’s North American frontiers. The destruc-
tion of the missions of Florida and New Mexico in the late 1600s, the Indian
rebellions that continued to ripple across northern Mexico, and the growing
threat from foreigners had led Spain to increase and professionalize its military
forces on the northern fringes of the empire and to construct fortifications
on an ad hoc basis, in response to local crises.

157
 reorganized frontier defenses

In Florida, the Crown had added a new military post at Pensacola in 1698
and had steadily increased support for the forts at St. Augustine, Pensacola,
and their dependencies, professionalizing them and linking them to Havana
under special regulations. Since its missions had never recovered from the
devastation that began in the late 1600s, and since it had also failed to attract
colonists, Spanish Florida in the 1700s consisted of little more than military
bases, soldiers, and a small number of civilians who, at least in St. Augustine,
were also organized into militia.
In New Mexico, survivors of the Pueblo Revolt had established a presidio
at El Paso del Norte in 1681. When Diego de Vargas reasserted Spanish con-
trol over the Pueblo country, he had founded a presidio in Santa Fe in 1693.
Earlier, New Mexico had no need of professional soldiers since encomenderos
defended the province at their own expense. After the Pueblo Revolt, how-
ever, Spain did not restore encomiendas in New Mexico, so responsibility for
defense shifted to presidial troops paid by the king. In practice, however,
the professionals needed help from civilian volunteers or militia, and Pueblo
Indians also joined the Spaniards in common cause against Indian maraud-
ers, whom Spaniards called barbaric—indios bárbaros. Although civilians and
Pueblo Indians bore much of the actual burden of defense, economic power
and status in the province came to reside in the professional military with its
access to the government payroll, as had been the case in Florida from the
beginning.
In Texas, Spain had depended almost entirely on missionaries in its initial
attempt at settlement in the 1690s and lost the gamble. When Spaniards
returned to Texas in 1716 to check the expansion of westward-moving
Frenchmen, presidios became a conspicuous institution. Similarly, officials in
Arizona established a presidio at Tubac in 1752, after a Pima revolt by mission
Indians revealed the need for more troops.
As Rubí knew, however, Spain’s heightened military presence had failed
to bring peace. First, decades of exposure to Europeans had transformed
Apaches, Comanches, and other groups into more effective adversaries. Better
armed and mounted than ever before and increasingly cognizant of the
fighting methods and capabilities of their Spanish adversaries, Plains Indians
in particular proved increasingly formidable raiders. Second, throughout the
interior provinces of New Spain, the military operated with notorious inef-
ficiency. Presidios had developed haphazardly, in response to local needs and

158
 reorganized frontier defenses

without an overall plan. Each operated as the local fiefdom of its command-
ing officer, with little coordination of troop movements between presidios or
standardization of weapons, ammunition, and uniforms. As Rubí discovered,
many of the presidios were poorly situated. Officers commonly skimmed the
payroll for personal profit, and soldiers suffered from poor training, shoddy
equipment, acute poverty, and low morale.
Remedies for these ills had been prescribed forty years earlier by Brig.
Gen. Pedro de Rivera, who between 1724 and 1728 had gone over much the
same ground as Rubí. Rivera’s recommendations, codified in the Regulations
of 1729, had been honored mainly in the breach. In the early 1750s, Viceroy
Revillagigedo concluded that the regulations had not only been ignored, but
were out of date and largely unknown because few copies remained in circu-
lation. Revillagigedo’s efforts to rewrite the regulations for the interior
provinces failed. The official to whom he had entrusted the task died, and
Spain drifted into the Seven Years’ War. Thus, many of the problems Rivera
had encountered remained to be addressed anew by Rubí. Moreover, they
needed to be addressed urgently since Indian depredations had worsened.

In the 1770s, prospects seemed bright that the intractable problems of the
frontier presidios might respond to the fresh initiatives supported by Carlos
III and his energetic ministers. Rubí’s extraordinary tour resulted in a new set
of regulations for the frontier presidios and a new strategy for defending the
interior provinces. Promulgated provisionally in Mexico in 1771 and officially
by Carlos III the following year, the Regulations of 1772 replaced those of 1729
and remained in force as long as Spain’s empire endured in North America.
Reflecting the thinking of Rubí and his staff as well as that of many of his
compatriots, the Regulations of 1772 emphasized force over diplomacy. Rivera
had regarded the indios bárbaros as little more than cattle thieves, a people
susceptible to conversion and with no special hatred for Spaniards. Rubí re-
garded them as enemies to defeat through “continuous offensive wars.” By
following Rubí’s authorizing of an offensive war against pagans, the Crown
departed for the first time since 1573 from its ill-enforced but well-intentioned
policy of peaceful expansion.
In military terms, the Regulations of 1772 offered essentially European solu-
tions to American problems. At the heart of Rubí’s recommendations, which

159
 reorganized frontier defenses

the king adopted owing in no small part to the savings they promised, was
the idea of an impregnable “cordon of presidios” spaced uniformly across the
frontier from the Gulf of California to the Gulf of Mexico. As rational and
geometric as it was unrealistic, the plan called for the construction of fifteen
fixed posts, located at one-hundred-mile intervals, to run roughly along the
30th parallel from Altar in Sonora to La Bahía in Texas. Much of the way,
the cordon approximated the future U.S.–Mexican border, with nearly all of
the anticipated presidial sites located just below the present border. The plan
required moving some garrisons, such as Tubac, in order to space them at uni-
form distances and abandoning others to the south and north of the cordon.
It did allow a few exceptions. The presidio of La Bahía in Texas would serve
as the cordon’s eastern anchor even though it was “more than one degree
outside of the line.” Much farther north of the line and not forming a part of
it, presidios were also to remain at Santa Fe and San Antonio, each to form
“a separate frontier.”
Although it disrupted the harmonious proportions of his design, Rubí rec-
ognized that fortifications at Santa Fe and San Antonio were necessary to pro-
tect the substantial populations of Hispanic settlers and Hispanicized Indians
in their vicinities. Moreover, as officials repeatedly pointed out, these provinces
served as the first line of defense for the richer provinces to the south. The
highly exposed garrisons at Santa Fe and San Antonio were to have seventy-
six soldiers instead of the forty-three assigned to the presidios on the line and
were to be linked to the cordon by outlying detachments. The presidios at
Santa Fe and San Antonio would bring the total to seventeen; seven presidios
were to be shut down entirely, representing a substantial savings to the Crown.
Rubí also recommended modifications of the fortifications themselves.
Their designs seemed anachronistic, and their materials and strategic sites
appeared deficient. The presidio at San Sabá exemplified many of the weak-
nesses that offended the sensibilities of this European-trained officer. The
limestone fort stood on a site between two deep gulches, or barrancas, that
provided cover for hostile Indians. The structure itself, a square enclosure,
had towers on two corners from which troops could cover the approaches to
the four walls. One of the towers, however, did not protrude sufficiently from
the two adjacent walls to give defenders an angle to fire along them, and the
tower’s poorly constructed parapets, made of piles of unmortared stones,
seemed likely to collapse under enemy fire.

160
 reorganized frontier defenses

For the marqués de Rubí and his staff, serious flaws in construction and
choice of site were endemic to frontier presidios, and the king agreed. Rubí
required that future fortifications be built near water and pasturage and con-
structed according to standardized designs drawn by the engineer Lafora.
The new specifications exceeded local resources, however, and were usually
ignored or modified. The Santa Fe presidio, for example, was rebuilt in 1791
of adobe rather than stone, as Lafora’s plan required; its walls began to col-
lapse within a generation. Some of the newer presidios were constructed of
better materials and with more sophisticated designs than their predecessors,
but that seldom made them more effective.
Old as well as new presidios enjoyed reputations as secure places of refuge
from hostile Indians, owing less to the refinements of design than to the
Indians’ reluctance to incur heavy losses by laying siege to a fortification,
however crudely constructed. Indians never overran a fortified presidio in a
direct attack, but that was usually not their goal. Rather than occupy a posi-
tion, they generally favored swift attacks to capture horses or gain revenge.

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

22. A soldado de cuera, drawn circa 1803 by Ramón de Murillo,

to accompany a proposal to reform the frontier military system of northern
New Spain. Uniformes, 71, Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

161
 reorganized frontier defenses

Even at San Sabá, the numerous Comanches and their allies who seized the
mission in 1758 stopped short of making a direct assault on the nearby presidio.
As to the soldiers themselves, the Regulations of 1772 again adhered to Euro-
pean ideals rather than to local realities. They prescribed in detail standard-
ized modes of dress, weapons, and accoutrements and spelled out the number
of horses that each soldier must have—“six serviceable horses, one colt, and
one mule.” According to one estimate, the regulations required the properly
equipped presidial soldier to carry 123 pounds of gear in addition to food and
water. This included a knee-length sleeveless leather coat designed to deflect
Indian arrows. Made of seven layers of buckskin, the coat weighed 18 pounds
and served, in the words of one historian, “as both a life-preserver and a
straight-jacket.” This distinctive coat, however, gave the frontier troops their
name, soldados de cuera, or leather-jacketed soldiers. Ideally, then, the indi-
vidual presidial soldier was a mounted arsenal leading his own cavalcade.
Like the presidios themselves, soldiers functioned well as defense units, but
their weighty equipment prevented them from engaging in effective pursuit,
and the cloud of dust their animals raised made it difficult for them to
launch surprise attacks.
Since soldiers had to purchase their uniforms, weapons, saddlery, and
mounts as well as feed and clothe themselves and their families, the Regula-
tions also addressed the problems of assuring a supply of fairly priced goods
of high quality at remote frontier commissaries and of distributing equitably
the military payroll to the troops. For two centuries, these closely related
problems had defied solution in Florida, northern Mexico, and other corners
of the empire. Officers had commonly extorted pay from their soldiers or
paid them in shoddy goods at inflated prices. Soldiers who challenged the
system seldom won a fair hearing, for frontier governors were themselves
officers and often personally involved in extortion and price gouging. The
system demoralized ordinary soldiers, whose well-being depended on their
ability to raise their food and to find other sources of income. They remained
demoralized. The Regulations of 1772 spelled out ways to safeguard presidial
payrolls and supplies from corrupt officers, but they could not wring corrup-
tion out of a society in which public office had long been regarded as a legit-
imate source of private profit.
Finally, the Regulations sought to impose higher standards of military con-
duct and to improve military instruction and drill. These new rules appar-

162
 reorganized frontier defenses

ently had some effect in professionalizing the frontier forces, but local reali-
ties militated against their full implementation. Overworked soldiers, whose
duties often took them away from presidios, had little time for training, and
officers and soldiers born in the provinces had low regard for European mil-
itary drill. Indeed, some observers believed that the tough, hard-riding but
untrained locals were better suited than the regular army for arduous frontier
service.
Most of the articles in the Regulations of 1772 offered traditional European
military solutions to uniquely American problems. Those solutions might
improve the frontier army’s efficiency, but they fell short of a prescription for
containing Indian raiders, who enjoyed numerical superiority and had few
fixed positions to attack. Rubí had tacitly acknowledged the unlikely prospects
of a strictly military solution. Although he had recommended a “continuous
offensive war” aimed at exterminating Apaches and other intractable tribes,
he had also advocated taking women and children prisoner so that hostile
Indians could not reproduce themselves. He also recommended forming
alliances with Comanches and the Nations of the North, whom he saw as
enemies of the Apaches. Rubí’s understanding of the limits of Spanish mili-
tary power was also clear in his argument for building a defensive line of pre-
sidios. Spain, he said, should attempt to control only those regions it actually
occupied—“what should be called the dominion and true possession of the
king.” He recognized that the retreat to the 30th parallel he advocated ran
“contrary to the rule of pushing domination forward,” but he suggested that
Spain needed first to consolidate its position by filling in the open spaces
that separated the interior provinces from New Spain’s population centers
before expanding farther north toward Canada or to California.

Like the Regulations of 1729, those of 1772 might have been quietly ignored
as mere expressions of royal intent had they not received support at the
highest levels of government and included a provision for a high-ranking of-
ficer to enforce them. Inspired by a plan drawn up by José de Gálvez, a special
emissary sent to New Spain by Carlos III in 1765, the Regulations of 1772
called for the immediate appointment of a comandante inspector, or inspector
in chief, who would provide central command for the frontier army. The in-
spector in chief had authority to force presidial captains to implement the

163
 reorganized frontier defenses

new regulations, to plan comprehensive strategies, and to launch coordinated

strikes that involved forces from presidios in several provinces. Large-scale
coordination had not been a feature of frontier military policy, and Apaches
and other tribes had taken advantage of Spanish disunity to attack one
province, then flee to another for sanctuary.
The inspector in chief had jurisdiction over the presidios throughout the
interior provinces: Texas, Coahuila, New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, Sonora,
Sinaloa, and Alta and Baja California. In 1769, Spain had begun to occupy
Alta California, establishing presidios at San Diego and Monterey to fore-
stall foreign settlement on the Pacific coast. In practice, the new California
presidios received little personal attention from the inspector in chief, whose
preoccupation with Indian offenses left him little time to contemplate theo-
retical incursions by foreigners in remote California.
First to occupy the office of inspector in chief was an Irishman, Lt. Col.
Hugo O’Conor. One of the many Wild Geese—Irish Catholics who fled to
the continent to seek service with the enemies of England—the Dublin-
born O’Conor had found a home in the Spanish army. He had come to New
Spain in 1765 and held a number of posts on the northern frontier, including
that of provisional governor of Texas from 1767 to 1770. He was promoted to
colonel and named inspector in chief of the interior provinces in September
1772, after the king approved the new Regulations. O’Conor owed this ap-
pointment to his influential older cousin Field Marshal Alejandro O’Reilly,
who had imposed Spanish rule on Louisiana in 1769.
Making his headquarters in Nueva Vizcaya, the most central of the interior
provinces, O’Conor worked vigorously on all fronts. He led several coordi-
nated offensives against Apaches and other tribes, and he traveled widely to
oversee the complex realignment of the frontier presidios Rubí had recom-
mended.
To the north of the present U.S.–Mexico border, O’Conor moved or shut
down all but three presidios—those at Santa Fe, San Antonio, and La Bahía.
In New Mexico, O’Conor moved the El Paso garrison south to Carrizal in
northern Nueva Vizcaya. In Sonora, Terrenate was moved in 1776 from an
inhospitable rocky hill below the present-day border some fifty miles north
to the San Pedro Valley, not far from present Tombstone. Apaches pounded
it badly, inflicting heavy casualties and preventing the soldiers from harvest-
ing their crops or completing the structure. Within five years, the site was

164
 reorganized frontier defenses

abandoned. In 1776, also following O’Conor’s orders, the Tubac garrison

moved forty miles north to the Pima village of Tucson, beyond the line Rubí
had recommended. Tucson had a good supply of wood, water, and the labor
of mission Indians who had already fortified the village. It also stood along a
newly opened route to California. The fate of the new presidio at Tucson
hung in the balance for many years, but it survived several Apache assaults
to become, by century’s end, the center of a small community of Hispanics,
Pimas, and peaceful Apaches.
One of O’Conor’s most vexing realignment problems involved the Texas–
Louisiana frontier. There, he had to shut down the presidios of San Agustín
de Ahumada and Los Adaes, where he once served as captain and acting
governor, and supervise a Spanish retreat from an area that no longer served
a defensive purpose since Louisiana had passed into Spanish hands. As the
Regulations of 1772 required, soldiers, missionaries, and some five hundred
settlers from the area around the decaying wooden presidio of Los Adaes
were forced to resettle in San Antonio in 1773. The unhappy refugees imme-
diately petitioned to return to their former homes, but O’Conor refused to
permit it. He feared that East Texas would become a center for contraband
trade with Englishmen and the source of more firearms for Indians. Viceroy
Antonio de Bucareli overruled O’Conor. In 1774 he permitted the settlers to
return to eastern Texas—but only as far as the Trinity River, some 175 miles
from Natchitoches. Five years later, after Comanches menaced their new
community, the settlers moved on their own initiative, farther east to the site
of the old mission of Nacogdoches. The new town of Nacogdoches, founded
in early 1779, came to rival San Antonio in importance through the end of
the colonial period because, as O’Conor had predicted, it became an impor-
tant center for contraband.
O’Conor had been particularly concerned that contraband firearms and
powder would find their way into the hands of Texas Indians. He knew that
Spanish officials in Louisiana had recognized the futility of using missionaries
or military means alone to control the colony’s large Indian population. In-
stead, Spanish officials adopted the French model to which Louisiana Indians
had become accustomed, and that included trading arms and munitions. By
1772, Viceroy Bucareli had received reports that Comanches and Apaches as
well as the Nations of the North had such an “abundance of guns, powder
and ball” that many had abandoned their traditional weapons. These

165
 reorganized frontier defenses

firearms, Bucareli learned, came from Spanish Louisiana as well as from En-
glish traders beyond the Mississippi.
Despite such disquieting reports, neither Bucareli nor O’Conor had suffi-
cient authority to prevent Louisiana traders from operating among Texas
tribes or to alter Spain’s new policy in Louisiana. Louisiana fell within the
viceroy’s jurisdiction, but it came under the immediate supervision of the
captain general of Havana and had its own military regulations, army, and
militia. Spain’s troops on the Mississippi, stationed there to defend Louisiana,
Texas, and New Mexico more from British invasion than from Indians, lay
outside of O’Conor’s jurisdiction. Thus two policies coexisted uncomfort-
ably with one another—one bellicose and one based on trade and negotiation.
Notwithstanding the ongoing tensions on the Texas–Louisiana frontier,
O’Conor and Bucareli optimistically believed that by exerting force and fol-
lowing Rubí’s plan of creating a line of presidios “from sea to sea” they were
making substantial progress in pacifying the frontier. Few officials close to
the scene, however, would have agreed. The realignment of presidios had di-
verted the military from campaigns against hostile Apaches, whose attacks
increased in some areas during O’Conor’s tenure, and the impregnable cor-
don of presidios had proved remarkably permeable. Rubí had described the
presidio at San Sabá as a place that “affords as much protection to the inter-
ests of His Majesty in New Spain as a ship anchored in mid-Atlantic would
afford in preventing foreign trade with America,” and the same observation
might have applied to most of the fortifications spaced at one-hundred-mile
intervals along the line. Apaches traveled between them with ease, continuing
to plunder to the south of the cordon, where they now found some commu-
nities undefended because their presidios had been abandoned or moved.

O’Conor had further plans to bring greater military pressure to bear on

Apaches, but his work was interrupted by an announcement from Madrid
that dramatically changed the governing structure of the interior provinces
of New Spain. In May of 1776, Carlos III removed the interior provinces
from the jurisdiction of the viceroy and brought them under the Crown’s di-
rect control. As inspector in chief of the interior provinces, O’Conor would
continue to supervise military affairs, but he would now serve under an official
with broad civil and military authority, a person who combined the offices of

166
 reorganized frontier defenses

governor and commander in chief (comandante general ) and who reported

directly to the king. Disappointed at being passed over for the position,
O’Conor apparently feigned illness and resigned.
This new administrative structure, the Comandancia General de las Pro-
vincias Interiores (Interior Provinces) de Nueva España had been under
study since José de Gálvez proposed it in 1768. Carlos III had approved it in
principle in 1769 and alluded to it in the Regulations of 1772. The plan was not
implemented, however, until Gálvez assumed the position of secretary of the
Indies, on January 30, 1776. Soon after, Carlos III created the comandancia
general, which promised to improve the efficiency of the region’s administra-
tion and to promote its security and economic growth—major and related
goals of Bourbon administrators. Although independent of the viceroy in
theory, the comandancia remained within the viceroyalty of New Spain. Its
commander in chief was required to keep the viceroy informed of his activi-
ties, and all supplies and communications bound for the interior provinces
continued to enter Mexico through Veracruz. In that sense, the comandancia
was only semiautonomous.
First to head the Comandancia General of the Interior Provinces was an-
other foreigner with connections in high places, the French-born Teodoro de
Croix, nephew of the marqués de Croix, the former viceroy of New Spain.
Croix had served in the Spanish army for nearly thirty years before receiving
his appointment to the interior provinces in 1776, but his prior experience in
New Spain had been brief, coinciding with the years that his uncle had
served as viceroy, from 1766 to 1771.
Croix began his long tenure as governor and commander in chief (1776 to
1783) believing, as Rubí and O’Conor had before him, in a military solution
to the Indian problem. Appalled at the notion of defending an eighteen-
hundred-mile frontier with fewer than two thousand troops, Croix appealed
repeatedly to the king and the viceroy for more soldiers. Croix studied the
reports of his predecessors, toured much of his jurisdiction, and began to
make more efficient use of the resources available to him. Drawing on the
years of experience of the frontier officers who served under him, he began
to modify the frontier army to meet frontier conditions. One of Croix’s most
important innovations was the creation of special light troops, or tropa ligera,
in 1778. Less encumbered than the leather-jacketed soldiers, the light troops
moved more rapidly, required fewer horses, and could fight on foot.

167
 reorganized frontier defenses

Another of Croix’s innovations was to shift the balance of power by build-

ing alliances. He began, for example, to implement a strategy, suggested by
Rubí and others, to ally with Comanches and to turn their enmity toward
Apaches to Spain’s advantage. Croix adopted that policy only after weighing
the alternative—making an alliance with Lipán Apaches and enlisting their
aid against Comanches. At the same time he courted Comanches, Croix in-
structed officials in Texas and Louisiana to enlist the aid of the Nations of
the North, who had recently been won over to the Spanish side, so they might
join Comanches to make war on Apaches.
By enlisting more Indian allies and raising the numbers and efficiency of
the presidial troops, Croix hoped to launch a concerted, coast-to-coast offen-
sive that would exterminate Apaches—a policy Rubí had advocated, the
Regulations of 1772 had endorsed, and O’Conor had begun. Croix’s plans, like
O’Conor’s, were thwarted by events beyond his control. On February 20,
1779, the secretary of the Indies, José de Gálvez, explained to Croix that
imminent war with England prevented Spain from sending reinforcements
to the interior provinces. Gálvez instructed Croix to abandon plans for an
offensive and to concentrate on defense.
Croix’s final years as commander in chief of the Comandancia General of
the Interior Provinces coincided with Spain’s war with England. Inventive
by necessity as well as disposition, he continued to implement reforms and
economies that made the frontier military more efficient, including the cre-
ation of presidial companies manned by Indian auxiliaries. His immediate
successors, Felipe de Neve (1783–84) and José Antonio Rengel (1785–86),
benefited from those reforms as the crisis with England passed and they re-
sumed offensive war against the Apaches. Croix’s successors, however, also
enjoyed an increasingly flexible Indian policy that ushered in a new era of
relatively peaceful relations with the indios bárbaros in the interior
provinces.

The likelihood of war with England and its claim on scarce resources had
apparently prompted José de Gálvez to reevaluate Spanish Indian policy in
the interior provinces. Gálvez had concluded that military victory over the
Apaches was impossible, at least for the moment. Instead of relying solely
on offensive war, he had urged Croix in 1779 to win the allegiance of

168
 reorganized frontier defenses

Apaches and other hostile tribes through diplomacy, gifts, and trade, so they
would come to prefer the Spanish way of life over their own. To make trade
more attractive and to increase Indian dependency on Spaniards, Gálvez
reversed a long-standing policy and suggested that firearms be traded to
Indians.
Gálvez’s instructions of 1779 represented a shift in official policy based on
long experience. In practice, Spanish officers and officials had displayed
greater pragmatism than is usually supposed, including in the distribution of
arms to friendly Indians and in the use of diplomacy and trade. In the inte-
rior provinces the most successful Indian policy had been crafted by officers
such as Gov. Tomás Vélez Cachupín of New Mexico, who emphasized
trade, fair treatment, and alliances. Most recently, as Gálvez knew, the
French trading model had worked remarkably well in Louisiana.
As secretary of the Indies, José de Gálvez had received favorable reports
on the French policy in Louisiana from his young nephew and protégé,
Bernardo de Gálvez, whose appointment as acting governor of Louisiana
José de Gálvez had arranged in late 1776. Two years later Governor Gálvez
had urged his uncle to adopt the Louisiana model for the interior pro-
vinces. Although he had no illusions that trade would alter Indian cultures
rapidly, he thought it better than a costly and ineffective war. Through
trade, he argued, “the King would keep them very contented for ten years
with what he now spends in one year in making war upon them.” Con-
versely, he doubted that Spain’s relatively few troops could win a war against
Apaches in the interior provinces, “an expanse equal to that from Madrid to
Constantinople.”
José de Gálvez’s temporary orders of 1779 became the foundation of a new
Indian policy for the interior provinces—one that his nephew would articu-
late with exquisite cynicism in a more permanent document seven years
later: the famous Instructions of 1786. As a result of his heroic conduct during
the American Revolution and his uncle’s penchant for nepotism, Bernardo
de Gálvez became viceroy of New Spain in 1785. Enjoying his uncle’s confi-
dence, Bernardo de Gálvez was also given direct responsibility for the inte-
rior provinces, which temporarily lost their semiautonomous status. After
reviewing Spain’s Indian policy, the new viceroy issued a set of printed in-
structions to the comandante general of the interior provinces, Jacobo Ugarte,
which cogently summarized recent Spanish policy, reconciled conflicting

169
 reorganized frontier defenses

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

23. Bernardo de Gálvez. From Manuel Rivera Cambas, Los gobernantes de México
(Mexico, 1872–73). Courtesy, Vargas Project, University of New Mexico.

practices, and offered some innovations. Henceforth, Spanish Indian policy

was to have three facets: first, the maintenance of military pressure on Indians,
to the point of exterminating Apaches if necessary; second, continued re-
liance on building alliances—“The vanquishment of the heathen,” he coldly
noted, “consists in obliging them to destroy one another”; third, Indians who
sought peace were to be made dependent on Spaniards through trade and
gifts, including guns and ammunition. Gifts, he continued to believe, were
cheaper than war and more effective than the “useless reinforcements of
troops.”
Modified and refined, the Instructions of 1786, together with the Regula-
tions of 1772, governed Spanish–Indian relations on the northern frontier for
the remainder of the colonial period. Like other official policies, they were
not fully implemented, but they did establish clear rules under which some

170
 reorganized frontier defenses

of Spain’s ablest officers could play a new game. Henceforward, minor in-
fractions of the peace by individual Indians were to be overlooked as Spanish
Indian policy followed Gálvez’s dictum: “A bad peace . . . would be more
fruitful than the gains of a successful war.”

Along with trade and toleration, treaties became the cornerstones of a new
French-inspired Indian policy. Rarely used on earlier frontiers by Spaniards,
written treaties implied respectful dealings between sovereign peoples and
replaced the earlier Spanish assumption that all Indians were vassals of the
king. Along with silver-headed canes, or bastones, uniforms, and suits of cloth-
ing, Spanish officials began to bestow banners and medals on Indian leaders.
Spaniards distributed these secular symbols of allegiance to their sovereign
wherever Indians had come to expect them from Frenchmen or Englishmen;
Spain had to compete.
The new policy began to show results in the interior provinces well before
Bernardo de Gálvez reformulated it in 1786. One of the most notable successes
occurred in New Mexico under the leadership of Juan Bautista de Anza, a
third-generation presidial officer whose father had been killed by Apaches
on the Sonora frontier. As governor of New Mexico from 1778 to 1787, Anza
won an enduring peace with Comanches, who had been the scourge of the
province since midcentury. In February of 1786, Anza and Ecueracapa, the
designated leader of one of the main bands of the so-called western Co-
manches (including Yamparikas and Yupes), signed a treaty of peace and
alliance that was to last for the next generation. Once he had come to terms
with Comanches, Anza went on to lay the foundation for an alliance with
Navajos, who were soon persuaded to turn on their former allies, the Gileño
Apaches.
Anza owed these feats of diplomacy in part to the military pressure he
had exerted on Comanches. In 1779, accompanied by the usual contingent of
Pueblo allies, he had led a force into southeastern Colorado, where he
smashed a Comanche camp and killed a prominent war chief, Cuerno Verde.
Anza’s diplomatic success also benefited from the initiative of his counterpart
in Texas, Gov. Domingo Cabello, who had signed a treaty with the eastern
Comanches the previous autumn, after using his alliances with the Nations
of the North to bring more pressure on them.

171
 reorganized frontier defenses

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

24. The Comanche warrior His-oo-san-chees, “The Little Spaniard,” described

by George Catlin as “half Spanish . . . being a half-breed.” A lithograph based
on a painting by Catlin, 1834. Catlin, North American Indians (1844). Courtesy,
Vargas Project, University of New Mexico.

But Spaniards had entered into agreements with Comanche bands on

previous occasions. This time peace endured because it had become the goal
of Spanish policy, because Spaniards now had more to offer Comanches than
the absence of war, and because Comanches found the new arrangement
beneficial. New Mexico officials offered arms, ammunition, and gifts, includ-
ing clothing, hats, mirrors, orange paint, indigo, knives, cigars, and sugarloaves.
They also offered access to trade fairs, cooperation against mutual enemies,
and more equitable and consistent treatment.
Under Anza’s successor, Fernando de la Concha (1787–93), Comanches and
Navajos in particular joined with Spanish forces to increase military pressure

172
 reorganized frontier defenses

on Gileños, Chiricahuas, Mimbreños, and other Apaches. Meanwhile,

Apaches were squeezed from the south. From Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya,
Spaniards and their Opata and Pima allies coordinated campaigns against
Apaches with New Mexicans and their Indian allies. The war against these
indios bárbaros, who refused to conform to the ways of so-called civilized
people, was waged without pity. Beginning at least as early as 1787, Spaniards
offered rewards for pairs of Apache ears. By the 1790s it was common to ship
Apache prisoners of war, including women and children, from New Spain to
Havana, so they might never escape and return to their people. Shackled, in-
carcerated en route, and exposed to new diseases, most failed to survive the
ordeal of the journey to the Caribbean. Those who did generally spent the
remainder of their lives in some form of forced labor.
As the balance of power shifted in favor of the Spanish forces, many
Apaches began to sue for peace and its attendant benefits—not only in
southern New Mexico, but across the northern frontier. The turning point in
Apache–Spanish relations occurred during the administration of the experi-
enced and exceptionally able Jacobo Ugarte, who served as commander in
chief of the interior provinces in 1786–90. Peace with these different Apache
bands was never as firm or as enduring as that with Comanches, but raids and
occasional outbreaks of war notwithstanding, contemporaries recognized that
they had entered a new era. A number of Apaches took Spaniards up on their
offer to make peace more attractive than war and settled in establecimientos—
settlements that resembled Anglo-American Indian reservations. Spanish
policy makers still envisioned turning Indians into town-dwelling Spanish
Catholics who farmed, ranched, and practiced familiar trades, but soldiers
now took the place of missionaries. Acting as Indian agents, soldiers were to
distribute weekly rations of corn, meat, tobacco, and sweets and offer instruc-
tion in the ways of Spaniards.
A considerable gap existed between the ideal and the real. Critics argued
that soldiers corrupted Apaches and failed to teach them to farm and ranch—
although some Apaches already possessed those skills—and that Indians who
enjoyed Spanish largesse continued to raid at will. Franciscans in particular
argued that the system neglected the Indians’ spiritual welfare. Defects and
defections aside, a number of the Apache reservations enjoyed a long life,
especially in Sonora, and endured even through times of scarcity when
Spaniards failed to fulfill their promises of food and supplies. Two generations

173
 reorganized frontier defenses

later, American officials inaugurated a reservation system with similar char-

acteristics, apparently unaware of the earlier experiments under Spain.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century the northern frontier of New
Spain entered a period of relative peace that owed more to diplomacy and a
mutual desire for peace and trade than to military and administrative reform.
Military escalation, coordinated punitive expeditions, and administrative re-
structuring had not in themselves forced Indians to negotiate. The military
buildup had reached its height under Teodoro de Croix by the early 1780s;
thereafter, the number of soldiers and the number and position of presidios
remained static. The advantages of a centralized command for the interior
provinces had diminished after 1786, when José de Gálvez placed the northern
frontier back under the immediate supervision of the viceroy, his nephew.
Thereafter, the office of commander in chief underwent numerous redefini-
tions of jurisdiction in relation to viceroys and to other frontier commanders.
The frequency of these administrative changes militated against continuity
of policy, intensified bureaucratic infighting (generally intense in any event),
and lessened the efficiency of military operations.
The mantle of peace had fallen over the frontier mainly because Spanish
and Indian leaders had come to believe, as Bernardo de Gálvez hoped they
would, that they had more to gain from a bad peace than from a good war.
Spanish officials had arrived at this understanding slowly, only after Indians
had forced them to the bargaining table and extracted from them more gifts,
fairer and more open trading arrangements, and dependable alliances. Only
then did a significant number of Indian leaders agree that peace would bring
greater benefits than raiding or warfare.
Once they had reached agreement, leaders on both sides worked at main-
taining friendly relations. Individually and in small groups, Spaniards and
Indians alike continued to commit murder, mayhem, and theft, but most of
their spokesmen tried to prevent such episodes from degenerating into war.
As they sought peace, some Spanish officers began to describe Apaches more
sympathetically. “If the Indians had a defender who could represent their
rights on the basis of natural law,” one officer wrote in 1799, “an impartial
judge could soon see that every charge we might make against them would
be offset by as many crimes committed by our side.”

174
 reorganized frontier defenses

At heart, economic interests and mutual security united Spaniards and

Indians, and the new peace served those interests well. In Arizona, New
Mexico, and to a lesser extent in Texas, the 1790s ushered in two decades of
prosperity for merchants and artisans and of expansion for Hispanic stock
raisers and farmers (and miners in Arizona), who moved onto lands where
they had once feared to tread. In itself, the decrease in Spanish–Indian hos-
tilities had not caused economic growth or the expansion of trade routes—
additional impetus came from a growing demand for grain, livestock, and
textiles in the revived silver mining districts of Chihuahua and Sonora. But
the decline in Indian hostilities had been a necessary precondition for expan-
sion, and the ongoing need to provide gifts and trade goods to Indian allies
further stimulated local economies. Reflecting this new era of relative security
and economic vitality, travel became safer, and new trade routes opened be-
tween the frontier communities of Tucson, Santa Fe, and San Antonio.
With a single companion, Pedro Vial pioneered a trail from San Antonio
to Santa Fe in 1786–87, a distance of over seven hundred miles, and in 1795,
Capt. José de Zúñiga opened a long-sought pack train route from Tucson to
Santa Fe, much of it through Apache country and mountainous terrain.
In the interior provinces, the imperfect alliances formed with Comanches,
Apaches, Navajos, and other tribes endured until the chaotic decade of
the 1810s. Then, when rebellion in Mexico diverted resources away from the
frontier and made it difficult for Spanish officials to continue to buy peace or
offer a steady supply of trade goods, hard-won alliances began to disintegrate.
On the northeastern frontier in particular, the intramural quarrels between
Spanish royalists and Spanish insurgents, both of whom solicited the aid of
Indians, made Spaniards undependable allies in the 1810s. Indians themselves
became less predictable and more susceptible to the blandishments and wares
of itinerant Anglo Americans.

175
 9
Forging a Transcontinental Empire

New California to the Floridas

Certain foreign Powers . . . now have an opportunity and the most

eager desire to establish some Colony at the Port of Monterrey.
—Viceroy Croix and Visitador Gálvez to the king,
Mexico, January 23, 1768

The king has determined that the principal object of his arms
in America during the present war will be to drive [the English] from the
Mexican Gulf and the neighborhood of Louisiana.
—José de Gálvez to Bernardo de Gálvez
[Madrid], August 29, 1779

In contrast to the consolidation and accommodation that became the foun-

dation of a cautious new policy toward intractable Indians during the long
reign of Carlos III, expansion and high-risk belligerence characterized
Spain’s efforts to counter the influence of its European rivals in North
America. Initially, at least, this aggressive stance brought positive results.
By the time of the death of Carlos III in 1788, Spain had reacquired Florida,

176
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

planted new settlements on the Pacific from San Diego to San Francisco,
and strengthened its claims to the Pacific Northwest coast as far as Alaska.
Remarkably, the dynamic force behind Spain’s imperial policy in North
America was one individual, José de Gálvez, whose singular determination
and ability led to the founding of New California in 1769. That achievement,
in turn, propelled his meteoric rise to prominence in the Spanish court. In
1776 Carlos III appointed him secretary of the Indies, the keystone position
in the colonial bureaucracy, where he presided over the reinvigorated Coun-
cil of the Indies. Enjoying the confidence of the Bourbon monarch who for-
mulated the most ambitious program for imperial reform, Gálvez exercised
greater influence than any secretary of the Indies before or after him. His
portfolio included all of the Indies, but until his death in 1787 Gálvez main-
tained an especially close watch on affairs across the northern fringes of the
empire, a region he knew firsthand.

José de Gálvez had spent six years in New Spain as inspector general, or vis-
itador general, on an extraordinary assignment. His instructions, which gave
him authority over the viceroy himself in some matters, charged him with
carrying out a wide-ranging inspection, or visita, and with recommending
sweeping administrative and economic reforms to the king. Gálvez had arrived
in New Spain on August 25, 1765, as the harbinger of a new order that aimed to
make New Spain more efficient, productive, and profitable for the Crown.
In Mexico City, Gálvez took an early interest in New Spain’s northern
frontier. Where the marqués de Rubí saw the frontier’s problems in regional
terms, as an area threatened by hostile Indians, Gálvez had an international
perspective. Russia, England, and Holland, in Gálvez’s view, represented im-
mediate threats to Spanish claims to the unoccupied Pacific coast of North
America, all of which Spaniards termed California. Based on this broad vi-
sion, Gálvez fashioned an ambitious strategy to defend the Mexican north.
He supported Rubí’s plan for a cordon of defensive presidios, but he also
embraced three other ideas, none entirely original but all aimed at defending
the frontier through expansion rather than through consolidation.
First, Gálvez proposed to strengthen Sonora and the California peninsula,
building firm bases to push the frontier far to the northwest, beyond Rubí’s
presidial line. Second, Gálvez urged the creation of a highly independent

177
Map 11
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

military government for the three western interior provinces of Sonora,

Nueva Vizcaya, and California, with its capital near the junction of the Gila
and Colorado rivers at present Yuma. (On a larger scale, his plan eventually
bore fruit when he became secretary of the Indies and created the Coman-
dancia General of the Interior Provinces of New Spain in 1776). Third, once
the western interior provinces were secure and flourishing, Gálvez would use
them as a springboard to advance far up the Pacific coast to Monterey Bay.
Since the voyage of Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602–03, Spaniards had regarded
Monterey as the most desirable harbor north of San Diego Bay.
In 1767, while Rubí was inspecting the northern presidios, Gálvez began
on his own initiative to lay the foundations for expansion to the northwest.
He took measures to streamline the administration of Sonora and the Cali-
fornia peninsula, to promote economic activity in both provinces, and to
quell Seri and Upper Pima Indians in Sonora, whose chronic resistance
threatened to upset his expansive plans. With characteristic extravagance,
Gálvez planned this Sonora campaign as the first phase of a large military
operation that would extend into Nueva Vizcaya and New Mexico, bringing
peace to the western interior provinces.
Gálvez also planned a precipitous leap to Monterey, and he sent an emis-
sary back to Madrid in May 1767, apparently to arrange the necessary royal
authorization. Nearly a year later, in early April 1768, without yet having re-
ceived the blessings of the Crown, Gálvez left Mexico City with Monterey
his ultimate destination. Within a month, however, a messenger overtook him
with orders from Spain that could not have surprised him. Warned by the
Spanish ambassador to Moscow that large numbers of Russians had landed
on the California coast, the marqués de Grimaldi instructed Gálvez to find
ways of “thwarting them however possible.” These orders must have come as
music to Gálvez’s ears. Although a covering letter from the viceroy prohib-
ited Gálvez from personally continuing on to Monterey because he was
needed in New Spain, Grimaldi’s orders could be interpreted as authoriza-
tion to occupy Monterey Bay.
Legal obstacles to his ambitious plan behind him, Gálvez still faced enor-
mous practical problems. Hostile Seris and Pimas impeded travel in Sonora,
through which any expedition would logically pass, and no Spaniard had
yet explored a route from Sonora to the Pacific coast. Hence, Gálvez and his
advisors decided to send a naval expedition to plant a settlement and a presidio

179
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

at Monterey. With the Monterey project his highest priority, the visitador
moved his headquarters across the Gulf of California to the California
peninsula in July 1768. There he hoped to marshall resources for an expedi-
tion that would complement the naval party by traversing the length of the
eight-hundred-mile-long peninsula and continuing on to Monterey. Gálvez
quickly learned, however, that the barren peninsula lacked sufficient resources
to support such an enterprise. Jesuit missions had been Spain’s main institu-
tion in Baja California (whose non-Indian population numbered no more
than four hundred), but the peninsula’s ordinarily impoverished missions
were at an ebb, their storehouses depleted and their herds butchered. Just
months before, government officials had ousted the Jesuits.
In 1767, Carlos III had ordered the Jesuits expelled from Spain and all of
its colonies, a measure the Portuguese and French crowns had taken in 1759
and 1764, respectively. Carlos III had charged the Jesuits with sedition, but
the claim appears to have been a pretext to eliminate this privileged and
wealthy religious order, which the king’s ministers regarded as a powerful
obstacle to urgent secular reforms. In New Spain, Gálvez himself had exe-
cuted the king’s orders to arrest the Jesuits, ship them out of the viceroyalty,
and confiscate their properties—orders which officials guarded with great
secrecy before carrying them out through much of New Spain on a single
day, June 25, 1767. In California, as in other remote places, the expulsion had
taken longer; Jesuits had not left the peninsula until February 1768.
Gálvez had little use for missions, and initially he and his advisors did not
regard them as central to the Monterey enterprise. Like most Spanish officials
influenced by the Enlightenment, he believed that the Church’s control of
property had hindered the generation of wealth and that missions had slowed
the transformation of Indians into producers and consumers. Nonetheless,
with his troops tied up in the Sonora campaign, Gálvez had to turn to mis-
sionaries for help because they represented the only group experienced in
managing Indians at low cost. Thus, Franciscan missionaries came to play a
central role in the settlement of New California even though the province
was founded in an increasingly secular age.

In the scantily populated California peninsula, Gálvez had the good fortune
to find two talented men to lead the expedition to Monterey: Capt. Gaspar

180
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

de Portolá, upon whose dedication to duty Gálvez could rely, and fray
Junípero Serra, whose religious zeal Gálvez could exploit. Serra and his fellow
Franciscans had come to the peninsula to replace the ousted Jesuits. Gálvez
placed Portolá in overall command of the expedition, while Serra took charge
of the religious contingent. Portolá would have many reasons to dislike his
assignment in California, but he stood ready, as he later put it, “either to die
or to fulfill my mission.” Serra embodied the hard-edged zeal that had char-
acterized the earliest Spanish missionization in America; time and chance
would make him one of the best known and most controversial priests in
American history.
What Gálvez termed the Sacred Expedition moved north in stages to meet
the Russian threat. The San Carlos and the San Antonio, two new brigantines
commandeered from the Sonora campaign along with men and materiel,
lifted anchor in La Paz, where they had undergone final preparations under
Gálvez’s personal scrutiny. The two vessels departed in early 1769, well past
the optimum season for sailing north, and met heavy seas and contrary winds
and currents that slowed their progress, lengthened their time at sea, and
made their crews vulnerable to scurvy. Of the ninety men on the two ships,
only sixteen were healthy enough to attend to the sick by the time the vessels
dropped anchor in San Diego Bay in April. Meanwhile, two land parties
moved up the peninsula toward San Diego Bay; one included Portolá and
Serra.
When the land parties reached San Diego, they expected to see a fortifi-
cation and mission already in place; instead they found a hospital and a
cemetery. The men who had arrived by sea, Portolá explained to the viceroy,
were “immobilized and in so unhappy and deplorable a state as moved my
deepest pity.” Thirty-one had died of scurvy by early July, and twenty more
would succumb to the disease or a related illness in the months ahead.
Gálvez’s instructions had called for both sea and land parties to continue
to Monterey after their rendezvous at San Diego, but the sailors could not
complete the assignment. With a skeleton crew, the San Antonio returned to
San Blas for supplies while the San Carlos rode anchor for want of enough
crewmen to set sail. Eager to beat the winter snows and the Russians, Portolá
decided to continue to Monterey by land, without support from the vessels.
It was, as he recognized, “a rather bold decision” for he had few rations. He
hoped, however, that a third ship dispatched by Gálvez to Monterey, the San

181
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

José, would meet them with supplies; only later did he learn that the San José
vanished without a trace.
Portolá’s band, some sixty able-bodied men and a train of pack mules, left
San Diego on July 14 to break a trail. Near the latitude of Monterey they rec-
ognized from nautical descriptions dating back to the voyages of Vizcaíno
the northern and southern landmarks of Monterey Bay. The broad, sandy
roadstead of the bay itself, however, did not match Vizcaíno’s verbal descrip-
tion of a fine sheltered harbor (a harbor whose virtues may have seemed more
evident from sea than from land). Supposing they had not gone far enough,
they decided to press on. When they reached Half Moon Bay, Portolá real-
ized he had overshot his mark, but the mistake proved serendipitous. It led
to the discovery of San Francisco Bay. Some of Portolá’s men, who had
climbed into the hills above Half Moon Bay to hunt, sighted the magnificent
bay, whose narrow entrance, later known to Americans as the Golden Gate,
camouflaged it from the sea.
Lost, nearly out of supplies, sighting snow on the mountains, and his faith
in connecting with the supply ship San José diminished, Portolá turned south
to resume his search for Monterey Bay. It continued to elude him. Subsisting
almost entirely on the meat of their pack mules, which they butchered daily
toward the end, the group retreated to San Diego.
In San Diego, the immediate future of the enterprise hung in the balance.
Serra had established the Mission of San Diego de Alcalá on June 16, two
days after Portolá had left for Monterey, but not until March 19, 1770, when
the returning San Antonio was sighted, was it clear that they could stay. Re-
provisioned, the indefatigable Portolá ordered the San Antonio to find the
elusive Bay of Monterey, while he led sixteen soldiers to search for it again
by land. This time, his expectations perhaps diminished, he recognized the
bay and established a presidio there “to occupy the port and defend us from
attacks by the Russians, who were about to invade us.” Within the palisaded
compound that enclosed the garrison, the Spaniards also established the
Mission of San Carlos, naming it for the king. Although its harbor had not
measured up to their expectations, Monterey remained, as José de Gálvez
had planned, the capital of what Spaniards called Alta or New California.
A good soldier, Portolá had done his duty but apparently remained skep-
tical about the value of the entire enterprise. Several years later, he report-
edly observed that San Diego and Monterey would be too costly to maintain

182
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

by land or by sea and inadequate to ward off Russians. On both counts, time
proved him correct.

The success or failure of New California as a bastion against Russian ex-

pansion depended on the delivery of reinforcements, food, and supplies. No
one understood the precarious condition of San Diego and Monterey better
than Capt. Pedro Fages, a fellow Catalán whom Portolá had left to preside
over the new province. Fages knew the country and understood that his
token force, separated by the 450 miles between San Diego and Monterey,
could not defend their positions from a concerted attack by Indians, much
less from Russians.
Initially, California’s coastal peoples (perhaps the most culturally and lin-
guistically varied in North America) had received Spaniards with cautious
but friendly curiosity. Growing familiarity, however, soon bred contempt. Ig-
norant of native customs, Spaniards offended Indians with their bad manners
and their pilfering of Indian grains and animals; most offensive, Spanish
soldiers violated native women. Unaccompanied by Hispanic women, the
soldiers had been “condemned to perpetual celibacy,” in the words of the engi-
neer Miguel Costansó, but many soldiers refused to accept that sentence. A
few, with hearty encouragement from Junípero Serra, married Indian con-
verts at the missions; other soldiers forced themselves on Indian women. “It
is,” Serra lamented, “as though a plague of immorality had broken out.” The
soldiers’ behavior not only offended Indians, but hardened Franciscan resis-
tance to integrating non-Indians into the new mission communities.
Notwithstanding the hostility they provoked, the vastly outnumbered
Spanish occupying force survived the initial years. Guns and horses had not
yet spread across mountains and deserts to the Indians of the Pacific and,
most important, the coastal bands and tribes lived in small villages with little
tradition of organized warfare and no centralized political structures or con-
federacies that would have facilitated unified resistance against outsiders.
Spaniards, then, did not need elaborate military campaigns or diplomatic
arrangements to control Natives. Rewards and punishments would do, but
since they had few gifts at first, Spaniards relied heavily on intimidation,
crushing the first signs of Indian resistance with whippings, burnings, and
executions—lest Indians achieve a victory and “come to know their power,”

183
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

as one officer later put it. Such harsh treatment invited retribution. In 1775,
the familiar pattern began. The Ipais burned the mission at San Diego and
killed its priest—the first of several Indian rebellions along the coast. The
Spaniards hung on, but just barely, enduring chronic hunger, deprivation,
and anxiety.
It seemed clear to many that the remedy for Spain’s problems in California
lay in locating a dependable overland route from New Spain to import troops,
married colonists, single women, livestock, and supplies. Lower California
had exhausted its resources in supplying the Portolá expedition, and the tragic
voyages of the San Antonio, San Carlos, and San José had demonstrated the
horrifying cost of sending ships against the prevailing winds and currents.
Even the journey across the difficult waters of the Gulf of California was
fraught with peril. Until a land route could be opened, New California would
remain, in effect, an island.
José de Gálvez had understood the problem from the first, but illness forced
him to return to Spain in 1771 without solving it. A new viceroy, Antonio
María Bucareli, did not share Gálvez’s enthusiasm for the troubled and costly
California enterprise. Bucareli let two years go by before pressure from the
Spanish court and entreaties from frontier officials and Franciscans con-
vinced him of the need to open a land route and strengthen coastal defenses.
In September 1773, Bucareli honored the request of a frontier presidial officer,
Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza, for permission to open a trail “to the new estab-
lishments of San Diego and Monte Rey.” Bucareli also authorized a naval
expedition to sail beyond San Francisco to search for foreigners and to select
sites for further Spanish defensive settlements. The viceroy saw these land
and sea expeditions as of a piece.
Strapped for officers, men, and ships, Bucareli entrusted the naval explo-
ration to an experienced pilot, Juan Pérez, and a single vessel that would
double as a supply ship. In 1774, Pérez set out on a voyage whose destination
the viceroy hoped to keep secret, but that quickly became known as “going to
Russia.” After dropping supplies off at San Diego and Monterey, Pérez set
his course far from the continent, then beat his way north beyond 42° north
latitude, the present boundary of Oregon and California and the previous high
point of Spanish exploration. Pérez made his most northerly landfall near the
present-day Canadian-Alaskan boundary, at about 55°. From there, he cruised
south for a closer look at the coastline of what is now British Columbia,

184
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

Washington, and Oregon. He identified a number of key places, including

Nootka Sound off Vancouver Island, which soon became a point of interna-
tional contention, and Mt. Olympus, which he christened Cerro Nevado de
Santa Rosalía.
Meanwhile, the same month that Pérez set out “for Russia,” Capt. Juan
Bautista de Anza left to open a land route to California. A third-generation
veteran of the Sonora frontier, the ambitious and able Captain Anza com-
manded the presidio of Tubac, the northernmost in Sonora. Anza’s small
party included twenty-one soldiers and two priests, one of whom, Francisco
Garcés, had already explored the first part of their intended route. Garcés,
one of many Franciscans sent to Sonora to take charge of the former Jesuit
missions of Pimería Alta, had made an extraordinary series of forays alone
on horseback from the mission of San Xavier del Bac into the desert country
of the Lower Colorado between 1768 and 1771. Garcés’s discoveries, together
with reports from Indians, had convinced Anza that the distance from
Sonora to Monterey, as he told the viceroy, “cannot be so great as formerly
has been estimated, or the way so difficult.”
As Anza led his small band across the Sonora Desert by way of Altar in
early 1774, he acquired an unexpected Indian guide named Sebastián Tara-
bal. A Cochimí Indian, Tarabal had fled from the mission of San Gabriel on
the Pacific. Anza pressed Tarabal into service and continued to the Col-
orado, where Yuma Indians obligingly helped his soldiers ford the river.
Continuing westerly, Anza tried to penetrate what he soon regarded as the
“impassable sand dunes” of the Colorado Desert, and Tarabal, whose wife
had perished on his earlier crossing of the dunes, found them equally im-
passable. Lost and parched, Anza’s group turned back to the river after ten
days. On a second try, they skirted the dunes and reached a point on the
western edge of the desert (not far from today’s Anza-Borrego State Park),
where Tarabal saw familiar landmarks. The Cochimí led the Spaniards to
water, then through the San Jacinto Mountains into the Los Angeles basin
to San Gabriel. Anza had opened over six hundred miles of new trail, but he
rested only briefly at Mission San Gabriel before riding north to Monterey
and back to Tubac, completing a round trip of some two thousand miles in
five months. From Tubac, Anza continued an additional fifteen hundred
miles to Mexico City, as his instructions required, to report personally to the
viceroy.

185
Map 12
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

Later, Anza’s enemies argued that Sebastián Tarabal had discovered the
route to California and challenged Anza’s right to make that claim. For the
time being, however, Anza’s feat won him honors and had important conse-
quences for New California. Viceroy Bucareli ordered Anza to repeat the trip
with colonists to select a site for a presidio on San Francisco Bay. Anza ably
led 240 people, most of them women and children from Sinaloa, over desert
and mountain, through drought, cold, snow, and rain, to San Gabriel and
then to San Francisco. Mission accomplished, he returned to Mexico City,
where the viceroy promoted him to the governorship of New Mexico, an
office he held with distinction from 1778 to 1787.

At the same time that Viceroy Bucareli authorized Anza to open a trail
from Sonora to Monterey, he encouraged exploration of a route between
Santa Fe and Monterey from two directions. The task of finding a route
eastward from California to Santa Fe fell to fray Francisco Garcés, a tenacious,
patient, and experienced young priest who accomplished alone what Euro-
peans ordinarily did in teams. Early in 1776, the Indian-like Garcés traveled
up the Colorado River from the Yuma crossing to the Mojave villages at
present Needles, trying apparently to put himself closer to the latitudes of
Monterey and Santa Fe. From Needles, Garcés explored west and east. First,
he persuaded Mojaves to lead him over a well-worn trading trail through the
Mojave Desert and over the San Bernardino Mountains to Mission San
Gabriel. Garcés then returned to Needles, by way of the San Joaquín Valley,
and continued eastward toward Santa Fe. Guided by Havasupai, Yavapai,
and other Indians, the Franciscan horseman crossed the Colorado Plateau of
central Arizona, traveling south of the Grand Canyon. He nearly made it to
New Mexico before his progress ended abruptly at the mesa-top pueblo of
Oraibi, the largest of the Hopi villages. Hopis had never returned to the
Spanish fold following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and unlike other Indians
whom Garcés encountered, they refused to accept gifts or to give him food,
water, or shelter. On July 4, 1776, the same day that rebel representatives from
the British colonies on the other side of the continent approved a declaration
of independence, Garcés rode out of the pueblo fearing for his life. Lacking
sufficient supplies and guides to continue to Santa Fe, he went back the way
he had come.

187
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

Although he himself failed to make the last leg of the journey to Santa Fe,
one of his letters did. Before he left Oraibi, Garcés wrote to the Franciscan
priest at Zuni, the most westerly of the New Mexico missions. The letter
eventually reached fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, who, by coincidence,
was in Santa Fe, where he and his superior, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez,
were preparing to embark on their own search for a route to Monterey. Dis-
couraged by the aridity of the land and the belligerence of Indians due west
of Santa Fe, they took what they believed to be a safer, more direct north-
westerly route. Domínguez and Escalante never reached Monterey, but they
did gather a fund of knowledge on an epic autumn journey into the Great
Basin. They went as far as Utah Lake, the site of future Provo, and they
learned of the Great Salt Lake from Utes even though they did not visit it.
Instead, they headed southwesterly toward California until snow began to
fall, leaving them “in great distress, without firewood and extremely cold.”
When the snow stopped, they could see that it had covered the mountains
and would surely block the passes that led to the coast. They returned to
Santa Fe on January 2, 1777, having covered in five months on horseback some
eighteen hundred miles, much of it through country previously unknown to
Europeans.
The explorations of Garcés and Domínguez-Escalante suggested the im-
practicality of reinforcing New California from New Mexico. Viceroy Bucareli
had optimistically calculated that twenty days separated Santa Fe from Mon-
terey; when traders began to ply a route from Santa Fe to Los Angeles in the
1820s, a normal trip took closer to two months. New Mexicans in search of
furs and slaves continued to trade in the Great Basin, but official Spanish
expeditions never revisited the country seen by the Franciscan explorers of
1776. Serious geographical misconceptions, such as the existence of a great
river, the Buenaventura, that flowed westward from the Rockies directly to
the Pacific, remained to confound a later generation of explorers.

With the failure of the New Mexico connection, the future of California
rested squarely on the route that Anza had opened from Sonora. The viability
of that route, however, depended on the critical Yuma crossing of the Col-
orado River, and access to that crossing depended on some three thousand
Quechan Indians, whom Spaniards knew as Yumas. Without the friendship

188
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

of the Yumas, Garcés had warned, “it would not be easy to maintain the estab-
lishments at Monterey except at great expense to the Royal Treasury.” Thus,
when one of the Yuma leaders, known to the Spaniards as Salvador Palma,
asked for missionaries and Spanish arms, José de Gálvez, now secretary of
the Indies, responded favorable.
Responsibility for fulfilling Gálvez’s orders to send missionaries and troops
fell to Teodoro de Croix, who as the first general in chief of the newly created
Interior Provinces of New Spain had immediate responsibility for matters that
previously would have fallen to the viceroy. Croix’s response was feeble, partly
because Spain’s involvement in war with Great Britain severely limited his re-
sources. Rather than establish presidios or missions on the Colorado, Croix
authorized two fortified villages, each with twenty-five government-subsidized
families of soldiers, colonists, artisans, and two Franciscans. Croix limited the
friars’ authority to the spiritual realm. The priests could try to persuade the
Yumas to move into the two Spanish settlements and live like Christians, but
they could make no claim on Indian labor or property. Like Gálvez, Anza, and
others, Croix deplored the coercive nature of traditional missions.
By mid-January of 1781, the two small villages had been established on the
California side of the Colorado near today’s Yuma. These hybrid communi-
ties lasted only six months. On the morning of June 17, 1781, while Father
Garcés said Mass, Yumas began to attack Spaniards. Within three days, the
Yumas had destroyed the towns, beaten the four missionaries to death with
war clubs, including Garcés, and killed many of the Spanish soldiers.
Catalyst for the revolt had been the demands on Yuma hospitality and
pasturage made by colonists and livestock bound that summer for hard-
pressed California. Most of this group, led by Capt. Fernando Rivera y
Moncada, had moved on before the revolt started, but they represented only
the most recent indignity for the disillusioned Yumas. Spanish arrogance,
failed promises, corporal punishment, and demands for food and arable land
had aroused anger throughout the Yuma community, alienating even the
cooperative Salvador Palma. For their part, the Franciscans blamed Croix
for sanctioning a low-budget enterprise and for limiting their control over
the temporal lives of the Yumas. Croix blamed Anza and the Franciscans for
misrepresenting Yuma docility.
Spain never regained the Yuma crossing. Much as the Comanche attack
on San Sabá a generation before had dashed Franciscan plans to build a

189
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

chain of missions from San Antonio to Santa Fe, the Yuma rebellion of 1781
brought an abrupt halt to Garcés’s dream of extending missions up the
Lower Colorado River and into central Arizona.

The closing of the Sonora route left New California dependent on the sea
once again and stunted its growth. In the few years it was open between 1776
and 1780, however, the trail to Sonora had nurtured the fledgling colony to
a point where it could sustain itself. The cattle and horses that Anza and
Rivera had driven over the trail soon made California self-sufficient in do-
mestic livestock, then multiplied beyond local needs. Families who came
with Anza and Rivera formed two farming communities that lessened Cali-
fornia’s dependence upon imported grains, and additional soldiers reinforced
California’s pitifully small garrisons.
The 242 soldiers and civilians who arrived with Anza in 1776 probably
doubled the non-Indian population of California, and they founded two
communities on San Francisco Bay—one military and one civil. Led by Lt.
José Joaquín Moraga, the newcomers built the presidio of San Francisco in
1776 on a high cliff overlooking the mouth of the bay—New California’s
third presidio after San Diego and Monterey. Under Spain, however, San
Francisco never amounted to more than a small military post and a mission,
San Francisco de Asís, also established in 1776. The next year some of the
newcomers also founded the town of San José, the first in New California,
near the southern tip of the bay in a broad, sheltered valley chosen for its
agricultural potential.
In 1781, more than sixty soldiers, colonists, and their families came over-
land to California and, like Anza’s group, founded a civil and a military com-
munity. Organized in Sonora and Sinaloa by Fernando Rivera y Moncada,
the new recruits traveled north in two groups. One crossed the Gulf of Cal-
ifornia and journeyed up the long trail through the California peninsula to
Mission San Gabriel. Nearby, some of its members received plots of land
at California’s second civil settlement, Los Angeles, founded late that year.
Meanwhile, the larger of the two groups entered California by way of the
Sonora desert and the Yuma crossing, most of the party having left Yuma
before the Indians began to kill Spaniards that summer. In 1782, soldiers and
their families from this contingent built New California’s fourth presidio at

190
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

Santa Barbara, situated to hold a narrow point along the coastal trail to
Monterey where numerous Chumash Indians could easily cut communica-
tion between north and south.
Col. Felipe de Neve had overseen this unusual spurt of civil–military ex-
pansion. When the Crown had ordered Neve to Monterey as governor in
1776, it recognized that New California had become more important than
the old. The two Californias comprised a single political unit, the Province
of the Californias, but prior to 1776 the governor had resided at Loreto on
the peninsula, while the lieutenant governor served in Monterey. After José
de Gálvez became secretary of the Indies in 1776, the Crown reversed the
two positions. Neve, governor since 1775, made the thirteen-hundred-mile
journey overland from Loreto to Monterey, the new seat of provincial gov-
ernment, arriving in February 1777; Rivera y Moncada traveled south to
Loreto, which became the permanent residence of the lieutenant governor.
Felipe de Neve regarded New California’s importance to the Crown as
chiefly strategic, notwithstanding royal rhetoric that gave preeminence to
converting Natives, and he sought to make California more self-reliant and
thus more secure. He had planned the two civil settlements of San José and
Los Angeles as farming communities that would provide grain and vegeta-
bles to nearby presidios: San Francisco and Monterey in the north and San
Diego and Santa Barbara in the south. Since California’s presidios existed
as much to defend the coast from foreigners as to protect the province from
Indians, Neve drew up special regulations to address the peculiar needs of
the province. In theory, the fortifications of the Californias formed part of the
interior provinces of New Spain and fell under the Regulations of 1772, but in
practice they functioned in isolation from the presidial cordon that ran
across northern New Spain. In this respect, they resembled the garrisons of
Louisiana and Florida, but in miniature. In 1794, for example, during a time
of tension with England, the total military complement of all four presidios
of New California was 218, including officers (by itself, the presidio at
St. Augustine, Florida, had twice that number in times of crisis).
Like other enlightened officers, Neve had scant regard for traditional mis-
sions and hoped that new ones would be open to Hispanic residents who
would help acculturate Indians. Elsewhere in New Spain, the notion of sep-
arate “republics” of Indians and Hispanics had long since broken down in
practice and in theory. Franciscans in California, however, had come largely

191
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

from Spain. They held the Mexican-born Hispanic settlers in low regard,
and they deplored the soldiers’ sexual exploitation of Indian women. The friars
fought successfully to maintain segregated mission communities, to the dis-
gust of Neve, who echoed the sentiments of his immediate superior, Teodoro
de Croix, by declaring the “fate” of the mission Indians “worse than that of
slaves.” Neve also failed to nudge the friars toward secularizing missions—
that is, converting them into parishes with parish-supported secular priests
and dividing the communal property among the Indians.
In California, the friars had struck a bonanza of potential converts. With
perhaps 300,000 Indians within the boundaries of the present state, California
had the highest population density of any area of North America. Moreover,
reminiscent of the first decades of Spanish missionary activity in America,
the friars in California did not have to compete for Indian loyalties with
European rivals bearing trade goods. By the time of Junípero Serra’s death in
1784, the Franciscans had some 4,650 Indians residing in their nine missions.
The number of Indians baptized by Franciscans exceeded this figure by far,
but some of those Indians had fled the missions and others had died prema-
turely in the missions.
To the consternation of the friars, Indian recruits probably survived mis-
sion life in California for only ten to twelve years. As elsewhere, the tight
mission quarters contributed to the spread of European diseases, some that
proved fatal and others, like syphilis, which often caused sterility. Indian
birth rates declined. The Indian population of the coastal region fell from
some 60,000 in 1769 to perhaps 35,000 in 1800; the overall Indian popula-
tion of what is today California may have fallen from 300,000 in 1769 to
200,000 at the end of the colonial era in 1821.
Declining Indian populations, which doomed missions to extinction in
Pimería Alta and Texas in the late eighteenth century, did not sound a
death knell for the Franciscans’ California enterprise. The populous interior
of California continued to yield Indian recruits, and the mission population
rose steadily. By 1800 the number of missions in New California had
reached eighteen, and the resident population had climbed to 13,500. In
1821, the last year of Spanish rule over California, the mission population
crested—twenty missions had over 21,000 Indian residents. The mission
economies had also continued to prosper. Since diseases carried off a larger
proportion of the young and the old at the missions, unusually high per-

192
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

Map 13

centages of their resident populations tended to be in their most productive

years, between ages nineteen and forty-nine. The mission economies, then,
profited from the low ratio between workers and their dependent young
and elderly.
Paradox and irony surrounded the New California missions. They ex-
panded even as Indians died. They functioned in a traditional manner, de-
spite the efforts of enlightened officials to reform them. They became the
dominant Spanish institution in an era when government officials sought to
minimize their influence, and in a place that Spain regarded principally as a
defensive outpost against foreign intruders.
In large part, missionaries in New California owed their curious pre-
eminence to the failure of the military–civilian sectors to develop
correspondingly—a failure that pleased many of the friars. After the Yuma

193
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

revolt of 1781 and the establishment of California’s fourth presidio, at Santa

Barbara in 1782, no large influx of soldiers or colonists arrived, no additional
presidios were built, and only one more town was established—a halfhearted
effort to establish a villa near mission Santa Cruz, named Branciforte for the
viceroy, in 1797. The closing of the Sonora road in 1781 had left California
dependent once again on the sea, and the province’s limited opportunities
offered no incentive for immigrants to make the arduous ocean voyage.
Although immigration never exceeded a trickle, the Hispanic population of
California grew at a healthy rate, from 990 in 1790, to 1,800 in 1800, and 3,200
in 1821. In contrast to the mission Indians, Hispanics in California enjoyed
remarkably low infant mortality. When the Spanish era ended in 1821, most
of the 3,200 californios were descended from those immigrants who had ar-
rived before 1782. All lived along a five-hundred-mile stretch of coastal plain
between San Diego and San Francisco, concentrated in or near one of the
province’s three municipalities—Los Angeles, San Jose, and Branciforte—or
at one of New California’s four military posts—San Diego, Santa Barbara,
Monterey, and San Francisco.
However sparse their numbers and few their communities, Hispanics had
seized control of the California coast from Native Americans and estab-
lished a sufficient Spanish presence to stake a Spanish claim that other Eu-
ropean powers could not ignore. The individual sacrifices of dutiful Spanish
soldiers, dedicated Franciscans, and ambitious colonists had made the dream
of José de Gálvez come true. Moreover, in the great reconnaissance of
1774–76, Anza, Garcés, and Domínguez-Escalante had opened new trails
across the continent and naval expeditions (including one led by Bruno de
Hezeta in 1775) had established Spanish claims beyond California to Alaska.
Spain, however, faced by claims on its limited resources to meet crises
throughout its empire, had reached the limits of its ability to strengthen and
expand its presence in or beyond California. In North America alone, the
push to New California had coincided with the rising costs of defending
northern New Spain from Indian raiders and with involvement in a new war
against Great Britain that would shift the focus of Spanish attention in
North America away from the Pacific to the Mississippi Valley and the coast
of the Gulf of Mexico.

194
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

25. A leather-jacketed soldier at Monterey, sketched by one of the

artists on the Malaspina expedition, 1791. Courtesy of the Museo
de América, Madrid, and Iris Engstrand.

When thirteen of England’s American colonies rebelled in 1775–76, they

presented Spain with a chance for revenge after the humiliating defeat of the
Seven Years’ War as well as opportunities for gain from England’s distress.
Spain’s primary interest lay in Europe, particularly in regaining Gibraltar
and Minorca, which it had lost to England in 1713. In North America, how-
ever, war with Britain also gave Spain a chance to drive England out of the
lower Mississippi Valley and regain the Floridas.
No sympathy for the cause of the rebel English colonies lay behind
Spain’s animus toward Britain. On the contrary, Spanish officials correctly
saw that the revolutionaries’ success would establish a dangerous precedent
for its own American colonials. Hence, although the Anglo-American rebels

195
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

adopted the Spanish peso as their unit of currency in November 1776 and
sought an alliance with Spain, Madrid initially resisted their overtures. When
Spain finally entered the war against Britain in 1779, it was as an ally of France
rather than of the thirteen colonies. The Bourbon monarchies of France and
Spain were still bound by the Third Family Compact of 1761.
Despite its antipathy for the Anglo-American rebels’ cause, Spain infor-
mally supported them against the common British enemy for several years
before it officially entered the war. While maintaining a semblance of neutral-
ity, Spain smuggled guns and ammunition to the rebels and sent subsidies and
loans through agents. Spain also supported a network of spies, directed from a
distance by José de Gálvez. Spain also bought the allegiance of Indians from
Illinois to Louisiana and Florida, sponsored the emigration of Spaniards from
the Canary Islands, Málaga, and other parts of Spain to shore up Spanish
Louisiana, and built up the army on the west bank of the Mississippi and in
New Orleans in the event of an anticipated English attack.
Louisiana and its valuable prize, New Orleans, faced an imminent British
invasion when Spain entered the war in the summer of 1779, an eventuality
that José de Gálvez had anticipated by putting his talented twenty-nine-
year-old nephew, Bernardo de Gálvez, in the governorship three years ear-
lier. As governor, Bernardo de Gálvez assisted the American rebels from the

Map 14

196
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

first and corresponded secretly with many of its leaders, including the gover-
nor of Virginia, Patrick Henry. By 1779, Gálvez knew from intercepted dis-
patches of the British plans to invade. Rather than stand tight and defend
Louisiana, as his advisors suggested, Gálvez took the offensive. He struck
swiftly and surprised the numerically superior but scattered British forces in
West Florida, who were poised to resist an attack from American rebels
rather than from Spaniards. In August and September 1779, Gálvez swept
the lower Mississippi and its lakes clear of British ships and took the British
forts at Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. With both sides of the Mis-
sissippi now under Spanish control, Gálvez then turned his attention to
Britain’s two gulf coast ports in West Florida, Mobile and Pensacola, and
seized both.
Bernardo de Gálvez’s stunning successes, combined with effective Spanish
defenses of Manchac, Natchez, St. Louis, and the Illinois country against
British–Indian invasions and loyalist rebellions, prevented Britain from

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

26. An engraving of “The Capture of Pensacola,” by Bernardo de Gálvez.

Recueil d’estampes representant les différents événmens de la guerre qui a procuré
l’indépendance aux Etats Unis de l’Amérique (Paris, 1784). Courtesy, Special
Collections, John C. Pace Library, University of West Florida.

197
 f o r g i n g a t r a n s c o n t i n e n ta l e m p i r e

seizing New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley. Those engagements, which
caused Britain to divert men and resources toward the south and west, com-
bined with direct Spanish financial and other aid to the American rebels,
contributed mightily to the Anglo-American victory.
In the peace accords signed at Paris in 1783, the thirteen rebellious colonies
won official British recognition of their independence and a western bound-
ary that extended to the Mississippi—farther west than Spain would have
preferred. In those same accords, Britain officially recognized West Florida
as a Spanish possession. Britain also surrendered East Florida to Spain, even
though St. Augustine still remained British at the end of the war. Augmented
by refugees, East Florida’s population had grown to some seven thousand
mostly loyal British subjects and ten thousand black slaves, but without West
Florida, England had little use for East Florida. Moreover, it represented a
sop to Spain, which had held out in vain for Gibraltar, even though it had
failed to capture it in the war.
With East and West Florida restored to the empire and settlements
firmly planted along the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco,
the Spanish frontier in North America had become transcontinental. Great
Britain, Spain’s chief rival, had been held at bay on the west coast and elim-
inated from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi Valley. Britain still held
its Canadian provinces and had claims to the Pacific Northwest, but along the
continent’s southern rim Spain had won the long fight for empire against
England and France—just in time to face a new American contestant.

198
 10
Improvisations and Retreats
The Empire Lost

A new and independent power has now arisen on our continent. Its
people are active, industrious, and aggressive. . . . It would be culpable
negligence on our part not to . . . thwart their schemes for conquest.
—Juan Gassiot to Felipe de Neve, Arizpe,
Sonora, October 9, 1783

I would also like to eradicate . . . the notion that it matters not

if we surrender or lose our territories because they are unpopulated, produce
nothing, or burden the royal treasury.
—Report of José Cortés, Mexico City, 1799

Due to its proximity and interests . . . the United States

must always be our natural and permanent enemy.
—Félix Calleja to the president of Spain and the
Indies, Mexico City, October 29, 1808

When Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes arrived at St. Augustine to assume the

governorship of East Florida in the early summer of 1784, the future seemed

199
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

bright. The sixty-four-year-old colonel from La Mancha, a veteran of over

forty years of military service in the Indies, had lived to see Spain avenge the
humiliating losses of the Seven Years’ War. Under the dynamic leadership of
Carlos III and his able ministers, Spain had reasserted itself in North Amer-
ica. It had acquired Louisiana in 1762, expanded to New California in 1769,
seized the lower Mississippi and the gulf coast in 1779–81, and gained title to
both Floridas in 1783. Once again, Spain controlled the Bahama Channel
and both shores of the Mississippi. Farther west, Spain had reformed the
administrative structure of the interior provinces of New Spain and had re-
formulated commercial and military policies that had begun to improve its
relationships with independent Indian peoples. It must have been with some
pride, then, that Governor Zéspedes watched British artillery salute the white
flag with the Burgundy cross as it flew over the Castillo of San Marcos—a
fort that had never fallen to an enemy.
Notwithstanding the great gains made under Carlos III, Spain’s hold over
its North American empire was precarious. Spaniards remained a distinct
minority within each of Spain’s North American provinces. Indians, who
communicated readily with one another over well-defined trading trails and

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

27. The governor’s house in St. Augustine, which faced the plaza and, beyond
that, the bay. Watercolor sketch, November 1764, original in British Library,
Kings Maps, cxxii862a. Courtesy, St. Augustine Historical Society.

200
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

watercourses from the gulf to the Great Lakes and from the Atlantic to the
Mississippi, outnumbered Spaniards everywhere except perhaps in New
Mexico. Spain’s borderlands had also begun to be invaded quietly by westering
Anglo Americans. Neither wilderness nor international boundaries seemed
to impede them, and their own government could not control them.
Zéspedes, who governed Florida from 1784 to 1790, first encountered the
American frontiersmen just fifty miles above St. Augustine, where the St.
Marys River separated Georgia from East Florida—as it still does today. In
the early 1780s, Americans had begun to trade and settle on the Spanish side
of the river, joining a smattering of British loyalist families who had remained
behind in Spanish territory. From his listening post at St. Augustine, Zéspedes
picked up public and private reports of American schemes to expand farther
into Spanish territory. The Americans, he thought, had inherited their
British forebears’ insatiable appetite for land.
Many knowledgeable Spanish officials shared Zéspedes’s view of American
frontiersmen and regarded the independent United States as a more imme-
diate threat to Spanish dominion than France or England had been. The
Americans had both an expansionist reputation and the advantage of prox-
imity. In the 1780s, British and French observers also predicted American
expansion at Spain’s expense—for good reason. Publicly and privately, Anglo
Americans boasted that Providence had marked them to occupy the entire
continent; circumstances had given them the means as well as the will to fulfill
what they saw as their manifest destiny. Before the rebellion of 1776, the pop-
ulations of the thirteen English continental colonies had grown stunningly,
and that growth continued so that the United States outstripped not only
Spain’s most proximate colonies in North American, but New Spain itself.
In 1790 the populations of the United States and New Spain both stood at
about 3.7 million (the U.S. figure did not include Indians, who comprised 60
percent of the population of New Spain, but it did include black slaves). By
1820, the population of the United States had increased to 9.6 million (still
not counting most Indians), while New Spain’s had grown to 6.2 million.
Most dangerous for Spain, large numbers of Americans poured over the
Appalachians in pursuit of territory and trade in the Mississippi Valley. The
population of Kentucky, for example, jumped spectacularly, from perhaps
12,000 in 1783 to over 73,000 in 1790, and to 221,000 by 1800 (it became a
state in 1792). In comparison, Louisiana, Spain’s most populous North

201
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

American province, probably had over 50,000 non-Indian inhabitants in

1800—a figure that included more Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, and
Germans than Spaniards.
The American economy also grew with extraordinary vigor during these
years, surpassing even that of New Spain, the most prosperous colony in the
Spanish empire. New Spain had made remarkable strides in mining and
commerce in the eighteenth century and boasted more millionaires than any
other part of the hemisphere, but despite the reforms of Carlos III, Spanish
regulations, policies, institutions, and values continued to stifle entrepreneurial
activity and commerce. In contrast, by the time of the rebellion against
England, Anglo-American society had become highly commercial and sec-
ular, “with the major focus,” as historian Jack Greene has put it, “upon pro-
duction, profit, trade, and consumption.” By 1800, the economy of the agrarian
United States was twice as productive as that of New Spain.
Anglo-American demographic and economic growth put Spain on the de-
fensive in North America, prompting officials to improvise new policies and
practices. Executing these policies, however, proved exceedingly difficult as
the empire staggered through several decades of catastrophic decline under
inept leadership. First, Madrid’s colonial administration lost momentum after
the death of José de Gálvez in 1787. Second, the monarchy itself was crippled
with the death of Carlos III in 1788 and the succession to the throne of his
phlegmatic son, Carlos IV (1788–1808).
Within a year after Carlos IV came to power, Parisians stormed the Bastille
and held Charles’s Bourbon cousin Louis XVI and his family as prisoners.
As key members of the Spanish court recognized, the French Revolution
also posed a serious challenge to royal authority in Spain. For a time, the
ministers of Carlos IV managed his government ably, but the incapacity of
Carlos IV to govern became painfully evident in 1792 when his faithless and
domineering wife, María Luisa, maneuvered him into appointing her lover,
twenty-five-year-old Manuel Godoy, as his chief advisor. Within months,
the vain, politically inexperienced Godoy foolishly brought Spain into war
against the regicidal French Republic. French troops swept across the Pyre-
nees into Spain’s northern provinces and forced Godoy to sue for peace in
1795. Spain then abandoned its recent partnership with England and resumed
its traditional alliance with France; England, betrayed, went to war with
Spain in 1796 and imposed a blockade that effectively cut off trade between

202
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

Spain and its empire. Any hope of lifting that blockade, which lasted with
only brief periods of respite until 1808, evaporated when England twice
smashed Spanish fleets—first in 1798 at Cape St. Vincent and again at Trafal-
gar in 1805.
The collapse of colonial trade, the decline of public revenue, and the grow-
ing expenses of war ruined the Spanish economy. Political collapse followed
when Napoleon Bonaparte imposed his brother, Joseph, on the Spanish
throne in 1808, after forcing Carlos IV and his son Fernando VII to abdicate.
Most Spaniards opposed the French pretender, and six years of bitterly vio-
lent civilian resistance followed. Overwhelmed by British forces and the
harassment of the populace, whose tactics bequeathed the name guerrilla to
a type of warfare, King José abandoned his throne in 1814. Meanwhile, Spain’s
American colonies drifted rudderless, buffeted by competing claims for
authority. Spain’s ebb in the Old World gave rise to a tide of New World
revolutions that swept away nearly all of its American colonies, including
those in North America.

The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the collapse of Spain
had been beyond imagining when Spain reacquired the Floridas in 1783, at the
height of Spanish power under Carlos III. Then, Spain quickly reestablished
itself in East and West Florida, maintaining them as distinct political units.
Col. Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes presided over East Florida from St. Augus-
tine (1784–90), and Col. Arturo O’Neill, an Irish-born veteran of the battle of
Pensacola, governed West Florida from Pensacola (1781–93). Spain never drew
a clear line to separate the two Floridas, but West Florida extended easterly to
include Apalachee Bay, which Spain shifted from the jurisdiction of St. Au-
gustine to Pensacola, which was more accessible by water. The Mississippi and
the Isle of New Orleans continued to divide West Florida from Louisiana, but
in practice West Florida was governed as an extension of Louisiana, and the
governor at Pensacola came under the de facto supervision of the governor-
general at New Orleans, Col. Esteban Miró (1782–91). With brief exception,
all three governors fell under the immediate purview of the nearby captain
general of Cuba rather than of the distant viceroy of New Spain.
In both Floridas, the initial transition from English to Spanish rule went
smoothly. Spanish officials, all of them military officers, met little of the

203
Map 15
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

resistance their counterparts had faced in trying to assert control over

French Louisiana after the Paris Treaty of 1763. The Floridas quickly became
re-Hispanicized. Mobile, Pensacola, and San Marcos de Apalachee resumed
their earlier roles as garrison towns and centers for the Indian trade but re-
mained understaffed, impoverished, unhealthy, and isolated, even from one an-
other. Their Hispanic civilian populations remained relatively small, stagnant,
and heavily male. At Pensacola, the administrative center of West Florida, the
number of civilians (not counting soldiers and slaves) barely exceeded 400
from 1784 to 1803. In 1786, St. Augustine and its immediate environs had a pop-
ulation of nearly 2,000, of whom 450 were soldiers (most without families) as-
signed to the castillo, and about 300 more were persons who lived on the town’s
outskirts.
Beyond St. Augustine, San Marcos de Apalachee, Pensacola, and Mobile,
Spanish officials governed provinces over which they had only nominal
authority. Spanish claims notwithstanding, Spanish East Florida consisted
of no more than a strip of land about twenty-five miles wide between the
St. Johns River and the Atlantic coast and stretching ninety miles below the
St. Marys River. The rest of East Florida was controlled by Creeks—
commonly called Seminoles by the British in Florida, who had adopted and
corrupted the Spanish word cimmarón, or “wild.” By the late eighteenth cen-
tury, whites knew nearly all Indians in Florida as Seminoles, just as earlier
they had attached the label Creeks to a variety of Indian peoples across the
Southeast.
Spanish West Florida, too, amounted to little more than small enclaves of
Spanish settlement; the interior of what is today the Florida panhandle, west-
ern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi was dominated by Creeks, Choctaws,
and Chickasaws and peoples such as those known to Europeans as Alabamas,
Hitchitis, Shawnees, Tuskegees, Yamasees, and Yuchis. Numerous blacks who
had fled from slavery on English plantations also lived in the interior of the
Floridas.
Outnumbered by Indians, Spanish officials preferred to maintain harmo-
nious relations with them. Moreover, Spain needed their help. A series of
Spanish governors hoped to use Natives as human barriers against encroach-
ing Anglo Americans who claimed the northern reaches of West Florida as
their own. The treaties of Paris of 1783 had failed to specify a clear northern
boundary for West Florida. England had recognized the southwestern

205
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

boundary of the American Confederation as a line running along the 31st

parallel. Spain, having received West Florida from Britain in a separate agree-
ment, placed the line over a hundred miles farther north along 32° 28'. Spain
clearly had the stronger argument, for 32° 28' had been the British boundary
of West Florida since 1764. Spain also claimed the east side of the Mississippi
up to the Ohio and Tennessee rivers by virtue of its successful military oper-
ations against the British in that region during the American Revolution. At
stake in this dispute were the fur-rich lands of the southern tribes and
frontage on the Mississippi River.

Initially, Spain sought a diplomatic settlement with the United States, but
the American government delayed, calculating correctly that time was on its
side. In the meantime, Spanish officials improvised, taking radical measures
to protect their border provinces from becoming overwhelmed by Anglo
Americans. Spain had long since abandoned the idea of using missions to
win over southern tribes, and the lengthy border made presidios impractical.
Instead, Spanish policy makers tried to regulate commerce, promote immi-
gration, and create a barrier of pro-Spanish Indians. These strategies were
not new, but resourceful Spanish officials gave them a new twist, with the
impetus for innovation usually coming from officials closest to the scene.
First, in 1784 Spain tried to stanch the flow of Americans into the Missis-
sippi Valley by closing the lower Mississippi to all but Spanish shipping. The
measure caused a furor among the self-styled “men of the western waters”
in Kentucky and Tennessee, who could profitably market flour, bacon, and
other bulky produce only by floating it on flatboats to the gulf. To ease the
pressure, Spain backed down in 1788 and, following the lead of Gov. Esteban
Miró, allowed Americans to use the Mississippi, subject to payment of a 15
percent duty.
Second, Spain made unusual commercial concessions to its subjects in the
endangered borderlands. On January 22, 1782, the Crown permitted Spanish
subjects in New Orleans and Pensacola to trade with certain French ports,
hoping that goods from its French ally could supply the needs of its colonials
and undercut British and American shippers and smugglers. This privilege,
granted for ten years, was renewed and amplified in 1793. It was also extended
to St. Augustine, where dissatisfaction with traditional trade restrictions ran

206
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

deep and smuggling was rampant. Nowhere else in its empire did Spain relax
its rigid mercantile system at this early date.
The plan failed dismally. British manufactures and American foodstuffs
continued to pour into the gulf colonies in the 1780s—some smuggled by
Americans, some delivered by French intermediaries, and some transported
by American vessels that sailed to New Orleans boldly flying Spanish colors.
After the French Revolution, as Spain’s ability to supply goods deteriorated
further, governors of Louisiana and the Floridas opened their provinces to
American shipping on their own initiative.
The large, proximate American markets gave a tremendous boost to the
plantation economies of Louisiana and the Floridas, which sent cotton, in-
digo, tobacco, and sugar to American ports, along with naval stores, fruit,
and furs. Commerce reached new heights, but the balance of trade worked in
favor of the Americans and left Louisiana and the Floridas economically de-
pendent on the United States long before the United States acquired them.
Spanish officials also adopted an innovative immigration policy for its most
endangered border provinces. From St. Augustine to St. Louis, local officials
recognized there was safety in numbers, so when they could not attract
colonists from Spain or its American colonies some of those officials began
in the mid-1780s to allow immigrants from the United States to settle in
Louisiana and the Floridas. Convinced, for example, that nothing could stop
the flow of Americans, Gov. Esteban Miró invited immigrants to settle in
supervised communities where they could be assimilated. In 1788, this local
practice became Crown policy as a result of Miró’s lobbying. The new Spanish
policy required immigrants from the United States to take an oath of alle-
giance, but, in a unique reversal of previous policy and practice, it did not
insist that Protestants convert to Catholicism. Rather than discourage poten-
tial immigrants with such a requirement, the Crown relied upon Irish priests,
some of them Spanish-trained, to convince American Protestants of the error
of their ways. Americans never acquired Spanish citizenship in the numbers
Miró hoped for, but legally and illegally they came to Louisiana and helped
swell its population from some 20,000 in 1782 to 45,000 a decade later.
Spanish officials had by no means been unanimous in supporting this
risky and paradoxical strategy of importing aliens and heretics to ward off
aliens and heretics. In hindsight the policy’s opponents appear to have been
right. From Upper Louisiana to East Florida, immigrants from the United

207
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

States began to Americanize Spain’s border provinces long before the United
States acquired those territories politically.
Just as extraordinary circumstances on the North American frontier led
Spain to depart radically from its normal commercial and immigration poli-
cies, so did Spanish officials adapt time-honored Indian policy to new frontier
exigencies. Happily for Spain, its interest in protecting its claims by blocking
the southwesterly flow of Americans coincided with that of many tribal
leaders, who regarded the burgeoning American population as a threat to their
hunting lands. Out of that mutual interest came a series of Spanish–Indian
alliances, which infuriated American frontiersmen but slowed American ex-
pansion across much of the region.
At Pensacola, in June 1784, several Spanish officials signed a treaty of al-
liance with “the Creek Nations.” Later that month in Mobile, Spanish offi-
cials signed similar treaties with leaders of the Alabamas and the Choctaws
and in July with Chickasaws. In the fall, Governor Zéspedes smoked “the
peace pipe” with Seminole and Creek leaders at St. Augustine, expressing
hope “that you and all the Indian people will be as good friends of the Span-
ish as you have been of the English.” Born of necessity, these written treaties
signified a shift away from Spain’s sixteenth-century presumption that Indi-
ans owed allegiance to the Crown. As Governor Gayoso explained from
Natchez in 1792, Indians were “free and independent nations . . . under His
Majesty’s protection.” Thus, in the same years that Spain relied on tradi-
tional missions and presidios to Hispanicize California’s coastal peoples, it
responded to different imperatives elsewhere in the borderlands with writ-
ten treaties that promised protection, trade, and tolerance of religious and
cultural differences.
Trade goods and gifts held these Spanish–Indian alliances together. Trade
with non-Indians had become essential to the southern tribes. Easy credit
and access to new markets had transformed them into societies of debt-
ridden commercial hunters in relentless pursuit of deerskins. With the passage
of time, their role in international markets had shifted from that of trading
partners to mere suppliers. Gunpowder and guns had become crucial to sustain
the economies of the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, as had metal tools
that facilitated sewing, cooking, and farming. Finally, many of the southern
tribesmen had also developed an unquenchable thirst for liquor. Unscrupulous
Anglo-American traders, themselves members of a heavy-drinking society,

208
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

were pleased to try to meet Indian demands for alcohol and thus extract the
best terms of exchange from stupefied clients.
Although southern tribes had become more dependent than ever on manu-
factured goods, Spain remained ill-equipped to supply them. Much as Spanish
officials in Louisiana had turned to experienced Frenchmen to maintain
continuity in the Indian trade, Spanish governors in the Floridas turned to
Scotsmen. Governor Zéspedes not only allowed a firm headed by two
British loyalists, William Panton and John Leslie, to continue to monopo-
lize trade with Creeks and Seminoles in St. Augustine as they had in the last
days of British rule, but he took the extraordinary measure of permitting the
two Scotsmen to import British trade goods. His superiors supported his
decision even though it violated Spanish policy. The firm of Panton, Leslie
and Company expanded its operations westward, establishing posts at San
Marcos de Apalachee, Pensacola, Mobile, and finally high on the Mississippi
at Fort San Fernando (present-day Memphis) in 1795. Panton, Leslie flooded
the Floridas with British merchandise, but they helped maintain the alle-
giance of the southern tribes.
Spain’s attempt to use Indians to block American expansion reached its
high-water mark in 1793, when Governor-General Barón de Carondelet of
Louisiana convoked representatives of several tribes, including Cherokees,
Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks, at Fort Nogales in Choctaw territory.
There, Native American representatives signed a document that on paper, if
not in fact, unified the major southeastern tribes into a confederation. This
treaty of mutual assistance obliged the tribes “to contribute on their part
to the preservation of [Spain’s] Dominion throughout all the provinces of
Louisiana and both Floridas.”
The Treaty of Nogales cleared the way for Governor Carondelet to ex-
pand Spain’s military presence deeper into the territory in dispute with the
United States. In Choctaw country, on the Tombigbee River over two hun-
dred miles north of Mobile, the governor built Fort Confederación in 1794—
named for the Indian confederation created by the Treaty of Nogales—and
in 1795 he built Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas on the strategic heights
of Chickasaw Bluffs (present-day Memphis) on the Mississippi, where Pan-
ton and Leslie opened their store.

209
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

No matter how shrewdly officials on the scene worked to improvise poli-

cies to contain the Anglo Americans, Spain’s rapid eclipse in Europe in the
1790s left it unable to sustain its position in North America. On the contrary,
Spain yielded a sizeable part of its North American claims in three major
diplomatic setbacks, as it sought to appease England in 1790, the United
States in 1795, and France in 1800.
The first sign of retreat in North America occurred on the Pacific North-
west coast, where England forced Spain to surrender its exclusive claims
through an episode at Nootka Sound, an obscure spot on Vancouver Island.
Reports of fortunes to be made by marketing the silky pelts of northwest
coast sea otter in Canton, China, had brought merchant vessels from several
nations racing to the coastal waters off present Oregon, Washington, and
British Columbia. Alarmed by this activity, the viceroy of New Spain,
Manuel Antonio Flores, sent Capt. Esteban José Martínez in 1789 to warn
foreigners away from this region that Spain claimed by right of prior discovery
but did not occupy. Flores ordered Martínez to establish a base at Nootka
Sound, on today’s Vancouver Island—then believed to be on the North
American mainland. Flores had evidence that Russians or Englishmen might
try to occupy this spacious harbor. When Martínez arrived at Nootka Sound
in early May of 1789, he found American and British vessels already anchored
there. Martínez seized two British ships and their crews and sent them to
Mexico.
The incident at Nootka grew into an international crisis that ended only
when Spain capitulated to British demands at the Escorial in 1790. In this
so-called Nootka Convention, Spain agreed to share the Pacific Northwest
with Britain, return British property seized at Nootka, and make repara-
tions. Appeasement averted an almost certain and potentially disastrous war
for Spain, but its relinquishment of exclusive sovereignty of a portion of
America’s Pacific coast also marked the beginning of its slow withdrawal
from North America.
Spaniards continued to visit the Pacific Northwest by sea. In 1791 and
1792, teams of Spanish scholars and artists examined the region’s native peo-
ples, topography, flora, and fauna as part of the brilliant five-year, round-the-
world scientific expedition that Alejandro Malaspina had begun from Cádiz
in July 1789. Spain also maintained political interests in the coast north of
California. Although the Nootka Convention granted England rights to the

210
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

Pacific Northwest, it had neither precluded Spain from establishing itself in

the region, nor established a clear northern boundary for Spanish California.
England claimed that the agreement permitted it to range freely down the
coast to San Francisco Bay, the northernmost Spanish settlement. Spain
hoped to place the boundary farther north, at the Straits of Juan de Fuca on
the North American mainland, in order to hold the British at a distance
from California and New Mexico. Toward that end, in 1792 Spain established
a short-lived settlement at Neah Bay, commanding the entrance to the
Straits of Juan de Fuca on what is today the Washington State side. For the
time being, the boundary question remained unresolved.
In the end, Spain lacked the resources and the muscle to extend its towns,
ranches, presidios, and missions north of San Francisco Bay. Possession, as
Spain had discovered elsewhere, did not reside in papal bulls, prior discovery,
or acts of possession. Sovereignty depended on occupancy, and occupancy
depended on economic development. Capable officers close to the scene had
proposed ways to use private companies to compete for a share of the profits
that foreigners reaped from the sea otter trade, but Spain failed to do so.
Bureaucratic obstacles to entrepreneurial activity, an essentially reactive policy,
and ongoing crises in the mother country prevented Spain from competing
with its rivals in the Pacific Northwest—much as Spain would fail in the
Floridas and the Mississippi Valley.
The execution of Louis XVI in 1793 had driven England and Spain into
an alliance, but on July 22, 1795, Spain betrayed its British ally. At Basel, Spain
made a separate peace with the French Republicans, whose army had success-
fully invaded Spain after Godoy provoked a war. For this prudent surrender,
Manuel Godoy received the title Prince of the Peace from Carlos IV and the
enmity of Britain. As Spain resumed its traditional relationship with France,
threat of war with Britain grew, and Godoy concluded that he needed the
friendship or at least the neutrality of the United States. Without it, Spain
would be hard-pressed to defend Mexico or any of its Caribbean possessions
from a likely British assault. To win American favor, then, the Prince of the
Peace reopened negotiations with the United States over the West Florida
boundary and yielded to American demands.
On October 27, 1795, in the Treaty of San Lorenzo del Escorial (best
known to Americans as Pinckney’s Treaty), Spain accepted 31° as the northern
border of West Florida. Spain also granted Americans the right to navigate

211
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

the Mississippi to the sea without paying duties. From Godoy’s vantage
point, the Treaty of San Lorenzo represented a realistic surrender to new de-
mographic and economic realities along the Spanish–U.S. frontier. For the
ever-optimistic Governor Carondelet in Louisiana, the treaty represented
defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. It cost Spain its hard-won alliances
with the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, whose lands now fell squarely
into U.S. territory.
If Spain lost the large southeastern tribes as a potential barrier against
American expansion, the southern tribes lost the political leverage their al-
liances with Spain had given them in their dealings with the United States.
Over the next several decades, American officials bribed, threatened, tricked,
and forced Indian leaders, no matter how assimilated, to sign away their
lands and emigrate beyond the Mississippi.
The Treaty of San Lorenzo marked only the beginning of Spain’s retreat
in the Mississippi Valley. Convinced of the futility of defending Louisiana
from the United States, Godoy offered to trade Louisiana to France, reason-
ing that a friendly and powerful France would serve as a buffer between the
United States and the rich mines of northern Mexico. After years of haggling
over the terms of an agreement with the French Directorate, Godoy struck a
deal with Napoleon Bonaparte in an accord signed secretly at San Ildefonso
in 1800. Anxious to keep Americans at arm’s length from New Spain, Spain
had stipulated in the agreement at San Ildefonso that France not relinquish
Louisiana to a third party. Three years later, Napoleon broke the agreement
by selling Louisiana to the United States.
Spaniards did not abandon Louisiana wholesale, as they had the Floridas
in 1763, but many departed for Texas, West Florida, and other Spanish-held
lands, some probably bearing the sentiments expressed by one Spanish officer
toward “ambitious, restless, lawless, conniving, changeable, and turbulent”
Americans: “I am so disgusted with hearing them that I can hardly wait to
leave them behind me.”

Spain declared the purchase of Louisiana by the United States invalid on

the grounds that Napoleon lacked title—he had not fulfilled his part of the
agreement made at San Ildefonso in 1800 and had no right to alienate
Louisiana to a third party. For the next decade, Spanish officials tried to regain

212
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

Louisiana, but more pressing problems quickly presented themselves. For its
part, the United States not only dismissed Spanish allegations of the illegal-
ity of its new acquisition, but also asserted that its purchase of Louisiana in-
cluded most of West Florida and all of Texas. Those extravagant American
claims, coupled with the same demographic, economic, and political pres-
sures from the United States that had forced Spain to retreat in the lower
Mississippi Valley, continued to keep Spain on the defensive in the opening
decade of the nineteenth century.
Spain and France had never formalized the borders of their North Amer-
ican possessions with precision, and documents transferring Louisiana from
Spain to France in 1800 and from France to the United States in 1803 de-
scribed the boundaries in ambiguous and contradictory language. Spain,
then, had much to negotiate with the new owners of Louisiana, but the
Americans’ expansionist president, Thomas Jefferson, seemed to prefer coer-
cion to negotiation.
East of the Mississippi, the United States insisted that Louisiana extended
to the Perdido River, which had separated Spanish Florida from French
Louisiana prior to 1762. This claim had a murky legal basis. It ignored the
twenty-year existence of British West Florida, and Napoleon’s government
disavowed it. Nonetheless, for strategic and commercial reasons, it would
appear, the Jefferson administration tried to bully Spain into surrendering
West Florida or selling it to the United States (for good measure, the United
States tried to buy East Florida as well). In 1804, Jefferson sent troops to the
edge of West Florida and threatened war.
West of the Mississippi, Spain also faced an aggressive United States. Jef-
ferson claimed that Louisiana stretched to the Rockies, encompassing the
entire watershed of the Mississippi–Missouri and their tributaries, and to
the Rio Grande, including eastern New Mexico, northern Nuevo Santander
between the Rio Grande and the Nueces, and all of Texas. Spain regarded
Louisiana as encompassing little more than present-day Louisiana, eastern
Arkansas, and eastern Missouri.
Because the United States claimed lands that its citizens had yet to explore
and that it dimly understood, Jefferson sent out explorers at government ex-
pense. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark journeyed up the Missouri
River from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River in 1804–06, and
Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis led a group in 1806 up the Red River,

213
Map 16
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

whose source they mistakenly expected to find near Santa Fe. In 1806, in a
closely related enterprise, Gen. James Wilkinson sent Zebulon Pike to seek
the sources of the Arkansas and the Red rivers and to spy on the Spaniards in
New Mexico.
Spanish officials rightly surmised that the American government hoped
to use explorers to win Indians’ friendship and extend American domain.
Although American officials had taken pains to disguise their expeditions as
scientific and to conceal their destinations, Spanish officials learned of these
expeditions through agents, protested them, and tried to intercept them.
Governor Fernando de Chacón of New Mexico, for example, dispatched at
least four parties from Santa Fe between 1804 and 1806 to search for Lewis
and Clark and to firm up Spanish alliances with peoples of the plains.
Meanwhile Spaniards also gathered intelligence. Pretending to go on a
hunting excursion, the marqués de Casa Calvo, the Spanish boundary com-
missioner and a recent governor of Louisiana, set out in 1805 from American
New Orleans. With sixty-three persons, including two engineers, he explored
the bayous and rivers along the historic Louisiana–Texas border and to deter-
mine the site of the old presidio of Los Adaes. After Casa Calvo’s departure,
the American governor at New Orleans became suspicious of the Spaniard’s
purposes and tried but failed to intercept him on the Red River. When Casa
Calvo concluded his mission and returned to New Orleans, the American
governor summarily deported him.
Spaniards, however, had already explored much of the area that Jefferson
claimed as western Louisiana. On the northern plains beginning in the early
1790s, several Spanish trading expeditions had preceded Lewis and Clark far
up the Missouri. On the southern plains between 1786 and 1793, Pedro Vial
had blazed trails from San Antonio to Santa Fe, Santa Fe to Natchitoches
via the Red River, and Santa Fe to St. Louis over what would come to be
called the Santa Fe Trail in the 1820s. The maps, diaries, and documents
generated by these expeditions enabled Spanish officials to build their case
from archival evidence, without further fieldwork.
While both sides gathered geographical information, Jefferson sent troops
toward the disputed Texas–Louisiana border, as he had to the edge of West
Florida. Nemesio Salcedo, commander in chief of the Internal Provinces,
countered by sending troops and militia to defend East Texas. Bloodshed was
narrowly averted in the autumn of 1806 when the respective commanders

215
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

exceeded their orders and agreed to recognize a demilitarized zone between

the Sabine River and the Arroyo Hondo near Natchitoches. This Neutral
Ground Agreement left the border question to await resolution by American
and Spanish negotiators. Meanwhile, the neutral zone became a notorious
home to fugitive slaves, outlaws, smugglers, and squatters from the United
States and a staging ground for filibustering expeditions into Texas.
Texas had clearly resumed its historic position as a buffer province, with
Anglo Americans taking the place of Frenchmen. Officers in charge of the
Internal Provinces, commanded from Chihuahua from 1803 to 1813 by the
firm but gracious Nemesio Salcedo, took defensive measures that resembled
those adopted earlier in Louisiana. They welcomed Indians who wished to
abandon American territory for Texas and hoped that small numbers of
Alabamas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Coushattas, Pascagoulas, and
Shawnees would form an Indian buffer. Officials in Texas also turned to a
trading company run by foreigners in order to make gifts and trade goods
more readily available to Indians. William Barr, an Irishman, and Peter Dav-
enport, an American, performed the function that Panton and Leslie had
earlier in the Floridas. Then, too, Salcedo promoted immigration to East
Texas from New Spain and opened Texas to former Spanish subjects from
Louisiana. Under that dispensation, a few Americans who had become nat-
uralized Spaniards settled in Texas. Some Texas officials welcomed Ameri-
can immigrants from any quarter, pleased to increase the province’s sparse
population. Officially, however, Spain’s traditional policy of excluding for-
eigners and foreign trade remained in force in Texas.

Whatever chance Spanish officials had of protecting New Spain’s northern

perimeter from Anglo-American encroachment vanished after 1808, when
Napoleon forced Carlos IV and his son Fernando VII to renounce their rights
to the crown. Across Spain, popular juntas organized against Napoleon’s
brother, Joseph, the “intruder king,” governing themselves in the name of Fer-
nando VII. The struggle against the French army of occupation left Spain
without a clearly legitimate ruler and threw all of Spain’s new world colonies
into disarray. Fernando’s return in 1814 restored only a semblance of order.
During his absence, a liberal Junta Central had directed operations in his
name, forming a constitutional government at Cádiz with representatives

216
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

from the American provinces—including New Mexico and Texas, both of

whom deplored their underdevelopment and their vulnerability to what the
New Mexico representative called the “aggressions of the United States.”
Fernando’s refusal to recognize the constitution drawn up at Cádiz in 1812 or
the provincial and municipal councils it had legitimized, alienated many of
his supporters, and colonial administration broke down again.
During the tumultuous decade of the 1810s, Spain’s American colonies
began to slip away. In those North American provinces that faced attacks
from without as well as rebellion from within, Spain faced impossible odds—
as it first discovered in West Florida. Many of West Florida’s numerous
Anglo-American residents had taken an oath of allegiance to Spain, and
they responded initially to the chaos in the peninsula by forming a junta to
rule in the name of the deposed Fernando—as popular assemblies in Spain
and elsewhere in Spanish America had begun to do. Quickly, however, some
Anglo-American residents showed their true colors. Encouraged by officials
in Washington, they marched on Baton Rouge on September 23, 1810, and
easily overpowered the dilapidated Spanish fort and its twenty-eight defend-
ers. After declaring West Florida an independent republic, they petitioned
the United States for annexation. President James Madison refused to rec-
ognize the rebel government. Instead, he insisted that West Florida, as far as
the Perdido River, had belonged to the United States since 1803 and sent
troops to occupy Baton Rouge.
West Florida between the Pearl and Perdido rivers was also under siege
by American insurgents, but Vicente Folch, the Catalán-born governor at
Pensacola, effectively directed the defense of Mobile in November 1810. The
victory only delayed the inevitable, as Folch himself understood it would. In
1813, during the English-American War of 1812, U.S. forces captured Mobile
without firing a shot—a preemptive strike aimed at stopping the British
from taking the port from Spain. After the war, the Americans never returned
Mobile.
Echoes of the West Florida rebellion soon reverberated in East Florida and
in Texas, where Spanish insurrectionists, American adventurers, or filibusteros,
and the U.S. government also combined in explosive mixtures that left dev-
astation in their wakes. Meanwhile, American diplomats took advantage of
Spain’s weakened condition to press U.S. claims to the Floridas and the
western border of Louisiana. Negotiations took on special urgency for Spain

217
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

in the spring of 1818, when Gen. Andrew Jackson seized San Marcos de
Apalachee and Pensacola. Jackson had accused Spanish officials of harboring
Indians and bandits who raided in the United States, but by occupying
Spanish territory he had exceeded his instructions, and his government soon
required him to withdraw. Instead of apologizing for Jackson’s violations of
Spanish sovereignty, however, the American secretary of state, John Quincy
Adams, blamed Spain for not keeping better order in the Floridas. The mes-
sage to Spain was clear. Control the Floridas, cede them to the United States
in exchange for some advantage, or lose them. Spain had only one viable
option.
Spanish–American negotiations ended in Washington on February 22, 1819.
John Quincy Adams and the Spanish envoy to Washington, Luis de Onís,
agreed that Spain would cede East Florida to the United States and would
tacitly recognize America’s de facto control of West Florida; the United States
would relinquish its claim to Texas and would pay claims of its citizens against
Spain up to the amount of five million dollars. Adams and Onís also drew a
clear line separating American and Spanish possessions. The boundary began
at the Sabine River, which still separates Texas from Louisiana, then followed
a jagged northwesterly course along the Red and Arkansas rivers, before
moving due west to the Pacific along the 42nd parallel—today, the northern
border of California, Nevada, and Utah.
The Adams–Onís agreement saved Texas for Spain and created a large
buffer zone between Santa Fe and American territory, thus achieving two
Spanish goals. At the same time, it cost Spain the Floridas and its claims to
what would become known as the Oregon country. Texas, though secure on
paper, remained insecure in fact. Angered that the Adams administration
had not delivered Texas to the United States, American westerners talked of
taking it themselves. James Long, a drifter from Natchez, acted as well as
talked. In 1819, professing a wish to free Texas from Spanish despotism, he
invaded Texas and declared it an independent republic; Spanish troops under
Col. Ignacio Pérez pushed him back into Louisiana before the year was out.
In 1820, Long returned and established a new insurgent base on Galveston
Bay, only to see his pretext for invasion vanish. On February 24, 1821, the
Mexican-born officer Agustín de Iturbide launched a successful drive for
Mexican independence. Throughout New Spain, royalist forces melted away,
and the northernmost provinces from California to Texas became part of the

218
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

newly independent nation without firing a shot. James Long had become a
rebel without a cause.
Located well beyond the immediate interest of the United States and its
citizens and isolated from Spanish-American insurgents as well, northern
New Spain from New Mexico to California had experienced little of the vio-
lence that devastated Texas and the Floridas in the 1810s. A French privateer
who purported to represent the insurgent cause had sacked Monterey in 1818,
but from San Francisco to Santa Fe the worst effects of the independence
struggles had been economic. The crisis in Spain and the violent rebellion of
1810 in New Spain had disrupted commerce, cut off supplies for soldiers and
missionaries, diminished the flow of goods for the Indian trade, left unpaid
the salaries of government officials, and made smuggling a necessity rather
than an opportunity. Thus, Iturbide’s declaration of independence had met
no open resistance in California or Texas. Instead, cautious frontier governors
had waited until the insurgents won, and then they swore allegiance to the
new government when news of independence reached them.
The reactions of Hispanics in the interior provinces to Mexican indepen-
dence can never be fully known. Like their counterparts along the gulf coast,
however, many seem to have regarded the end of the Spanish era with am-
bivalence. Some saw prospects for a better tomorrow without Spain; others
regarded the future with trepidation and the past with nostalgia. At Monterey,
an assemblage watched in stony silence as the Spanish flag lowered for the
last time over the plaza, on April 11, 1822. The Spanish-born governor, Vicente
de Sola, toothless, his hair and beard nearly white, stepped forward and
swept the flag into his arms before it fell to the ground, then turned to a rep-
resentative of the new government and explained, “They do not cheer be-
cause they are unused to independence.”
The ceremonies in Monterey in the spring of 1822 marked the end of an
era. Centuries of struggle for the control of a continent had been undone in
a decade that saw Spain lose all of its border provinces in North America,
from Florida to California, as well as New Spain itself. In the old interior
provinces of New Spain, however, the new era resembled the old in impor-
tant ways. Independent Mexico now fell heir to the boundary agreed upon
in the Adams–Onís negotiations, and to Mexico also fell the task of defending
that boundary from an avaricious neighbor. Echoing warnings that Spanish
officials had issued since the 1780s, Mexico’s first minister to Washington

219
 improvisations and re treats: the empire lost

reported in 1822 that “the haughtiness of these Republicans, does not permit
them to look upon us as equals . . . their conceit extends itself in my opinion
to believe that their capital will be that of all the Americas.” Those themes
continued to be heard in Mexican political circles, even after the United
States annexed Texas in 1845 and took possession of the vast region from
California to Texas in the victor’s peace that followed the successful American
invasion of Mexico in 1846–48.

220
 11
Frontiers and Frontier Peoples Transformed

Both from native seeds as well as from those brought over from Europe, the
land produces an incredible quantity. . . . As for our cows, horses, [and] sheep . . .
that have been brought over from Europe already, they breed very profusely.
—fray Alonso de Benavides, 1634, writing about New Mexico

Their religious and civil usages manifest a predilection for the

Spanish customs. There are several Christians among them . . . most of them
speak and understand Spanish.
—William Bartram among Creeks and Seminoles
at Alachua Savanna, Florida, 1770s

Those people, reared in freedom and accustomed to independence,

are no longer inclined to suffer with resignation.
—Bernardo de Gálvez, ca. 1785–86, speaking of frontier soldiers

In 1826, a Pueblo Indian appealed to New Mexico officials to stop non-

Indians from acquiring land belonging to his community. On behalf of the

221
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

“principal citizens of the Pueblo of Pecos,” alcalde Rafael Aguilar reminded

Mexican officials that Pueblo Indians enjoyed the rights of “citizens of the
new republic of Mexico,” that Spain’s law had guaranteed their ownership of
four square leagues of land around their pueblo, and that non-Indians had
violated the law by usurping Pecos lands. Aguilar’s petition, written in pho-
netic Spanish, was one of several formal complaints lodged in the 1820s by
Natives of Pecos to protect their farms and pastures. The petitions paid off.
In 1829 the New Mexico legislature ordered non-Indians to vacate Pecos
Pueblo lands.
Pueblo Indians, like the pecoseños for whom Rafael Aguilar spoke, had re-
tained their language, religion, and cultural identity for over two centuries of
Spanish rule. Nonetheless, exposure to Hispanic neighbors and missionaries
had added new dimensions to the culture of the Pueblos, enabling them
to meet Spaniards on common ground. By the end of the colonial era, Pueblo
leaders such as Aguilar held Hispanic offices, understood how and when to
appeal to Hispanic law, communicated with Hispanics in their language and
on their terms, and identified themselves and their children with a Spanish
surname and with Christian given names. Hispanic influences also extended
to the heart of economic life at Pueblo communities such as Pecos. In addi-
tion to the corn, beans, squash, and cotton they had cultivated for centuries,
Pueblos grew tomatoes, chilies, and new varieties of corn and squash brought
by Spaniards from central Mexico as well as exotic coriander, wine grapes,
cantaloupe, watermelons, wheat, and other imports from the Old World.
Pueblos also tended apricot, apple, cherry, peach, pear, and plum orchards
and raised sheep, goats, cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, oxen, and flocks of
chickens—all previously unknown to them. Eventually, as anthropologist
Richard Ford has noted, the origin of some of the new foods “faded from
memory . . . [and] came to be accepted as ‘Indian food,’ eaten in the kivas and
named in rituals and prayers,” but linguistically and ceremonially Pueblos re-
tained the identity of foods of foreign origin.
In adopting these new crops and livestock, Pueblos had enriched their
economy and diet. Changes introduced by Spaniards, however, also had
deleterious effects. Spanish-introduced diseases and raids by nomads riding
Spanish-introduced horses had taken a toll at all the Pueblo communities.
At Pecos itself, especially hard-hit by raiders from the Great Plains, the
population had dwindled from 1,000 or so in 1700 to fewer than 150 by

222
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

century’s end. By 1829 it hardly mattered that Pecos won a legal victory
against Hispanic encroachers, for the pecoseños were too few to prevent His-
panics from killing their stock, poisoning their water holes, and otherwise
making their lives intolerable. In the late 1830s, the residents of the Pecos,
numbering fewer than twenty, abandoned the town forever and moved far
across the Rio Grande to Jémez Pueblo, which became their permanent
home.
Although the story of Pecos Pueblo exemplifies the Hispanic impact on
the Pueblo world, the details of the story are unique to Pecos. Even among
Indians as seemingly similar as Pueblos, the effects of Hispanic influence
varied greatly. Pueblos such as Abó and Quarai, for example, had become ex-
tinct earlier than Pecos; others, strengthened by their adaptations to the
Hispanic world or isolated from it, have survived to the present day. Pueblos
closest to Spaniards abandoned the tradition of matrilineal ownership of
household and lands, while isolated pueblos came under less pressure to shift
ownership to men in the Spanish fashion. Directly or indirectly, however,
Hispanic influences transformed all of the Pueblo communities irrevocably—

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

28. Iron tools and weapons stood high on the list of European goods adopted
by Indians. “Indian Blacksmith Shop (Pueblo Zuñi).” Lithograph based on a
drawing by Richard H. Kern, 1851. Lorenzo Sitgreaves, Report of an Expedition
down the Zuni and Colorado Rivers (Washington, D.C., 1853).

223
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

even the isolated Hopis, who never resubmitted to Spanish rule after the
great revolt of 1680.

Throughout North America, in ways large and small, Spanish influences

had changed the cultures of all Native Americans who lived within trading
distance of Spanish communities. In 1743, a Jesuit who visited a small group
of Indians at the mouth of the Miami River in South Florida was surprised

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

29. Like many Indian peoples in the Southeast, this Caddo couple depicted
near Nacogdoches about 1830 had adopted European clothing, although the man’s
ruffled shirt collar had long since gone out of vogue. Watercolor by
Lino Sánchez y Tapia. Courtesy, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa.

224
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

to find them speaking Spanish. Far from any Spanish mission or settlement,
those Calusa and Key Indians had learned Spanish from sailors from Havana,
with whom they traded. In 1808, Capt. Francisco Amangual rode into an
isolated Comanche village on the southern plains, where he was greeted by
“well-dressed” chiefs wearing “long red coats with blue collars and cuffs,
white buttons, [and] yellow (imitation gold) galloons.”
Change had been a constant feature of native life before the arrival of Eu-
ropeans, but with their coming the pace of change accelerated throughout
North America. Rapid, profound change began immediately in the wake of
initial Spanish–Indian contact, wherever alien infectious diseases killed high
numbers of Indians and altered the societies of the survivors. The depth, pace,
and quality of Spain’s transforming influence on North American Natives
depended, however, on circumstances unique to time and place. Natives whom
Spaniards had assembled in missions or reduced to slavery came under direct
pressure to change; others felt Spanish influence indirectly, through markets,
trade goods, and Spanish livestock. The extent to which change damaged or
benefited a people also depended on the nature of their cultures, economies,
and polities. The horse, for example, brought about a transportation revolu-
tion for Apaches, Comanches, and other Plains peoples, enabling them to
build more mobile and militarily powerful societies and to maintain a high
degree of independence from Europeans; the horse also helped turn Chero-
kees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and other Natives of the southern
woodlands into commercial hunters, contributing to their utter dependency
on Europeans.
Geographical location itself shaped the direction that change would take.
By the eighteenth century, farming peoples in southwestern America, who
occupied marginal lands distant from strong markets, had a better chance to
strengthen and enlarge their societies through selective adoption of Spanish
introductions than did southeastern Natives. Pimas along the Gila River in
what is today southern Arizona, for example, raised Spanish wheat, employed
Spanish farm implements, increased food production, and sent surpluses to
Hispanic markets. The Pimas’ population grew by 50 percent over the course
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notwithstanding fatalities
from new diseases; their villages increased from seven to eleven. Apalachee
farmers, on the other hand, had adapted remarkably well to Spanish mis-
sion life but were swept into the vortex of European wars and markets and

225
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

annihilated along with other Florida tribes. Thus, while Pimas flourished in
the desert of Arizona in the eighteenth century, Indians had largely disap-
peared from the rich meadows and game-filled forests of Florida.
Spain’s goal had been not to annihilate Indians but to transform them into
tax-paying Christians. The Crown had supported missions for that express
purpose, but those institutions had the inherent limitation of separating In-
dians from the very society that Spanish policy makers wanted Indians to
enter. In the late eighteenth century, Spain abandoned its unworkable plan
to maintain Indians and non-Indians in separate “republics.” In Los Angeles,
for example, pagan Indians, or gentiles—whom Spaniards also termed gente sin
razón, or people without reason—lived and labored alongside the Hispanic
people of reason—the gente de razón. On a sparsely populated frontier with a
shortage of skilled laborers, those non-Christian Indians worked at a variety
of Spanish trades, as masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap makers, tanners,
shoemakers, and blacksmiths. It seems likely that exposure to the work-a-day
world of Spaniards did more than missions to alter Indian society and
culture.
In Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, even some members of warring tribes
such as Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas became partly assimilated into
Spanish society. In one extraordinary case in California, an Apache, Manuel
González, was appointed alcalde of San José! The process of assimilation of
individual Indians (a process quite different from that of the accommodations
made by Pueblos and other tribes) usually began with women and children
whom Spaniards had captured or ransomed and taken into their households
to become Christians and to provide cheap labor. In New Mexico alone,
such people constituted over 10 percent of the Hispanic population by 1750.
Over time many acquired land, skills as artisans, and Hispanic spouses, and
they or their children lived in the Spanish manner and began to blend into
the lower strata of Hispanic society. Nonetheless, the tribal origins of these
detribalized Natives continued to mark them as outsiders, known in Arizona
as nixoras and in New Mexico as genízaros.
In contrast to the English, Spanish policy and practice had made room for
Indians within colonial society, even if on the bottom rung of the social ladder.
There is little evidence, however, that most Indians wished to start up that
ladder. Not all Natives preferred metal implements over sharp-edged flint
tools, wished for crop-trampling Spanish livestock, or abandoned deeply

226
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

held beliefs about the nature of god and man. Most Indians tried to adopt
from Spanish culture only what they found useful, seeking to integrate the
strange without disrupting the familiar. But in the end, whether they chose
innovation or resisted it, they had little control over the direction, scope, and
consequences of change. Some, like the Pueblos, managed to accommodate
themselves to the Spanish system and thereby assure their survival as a dis-
tinctive, if much-changed people; most Natives lived under less fortunate
circumstances and saw their cultures degraded or annihilated. Meanwhile,
some Indian individuals from a variety of backgrounds did take the first steps
up the ladder and slowly blended into the lower strata of Hispanic society,
losing their ethnic identity with the passage of generations.

Whether Indians adopted features of Spanish culture or assimilated into it,

never again would their cultures be the same—nor would the natural world
they inhabited. New characters on the North American stage, Spaniards
had brought with them the means to change the stage itself. The Europeans
had come with distinctive attitudes toward the utilization of the land and
animals, and they had brought a cornucopia of flora and fauna. Never static
or in perfect equilibrium, ecosystems are always in transformation, with or
without human beings, but Indians had altered the natural world before the
arrival of Europeans. Spaniards, however, set into motion ecological changes
as rapid and profound as the modern world has known. The pace, depth, and
qualities of Spanish-induced ecological changes varied depending on local
circumstances, but the main outline of the story seems clear.
Early on, some Spanish-introduced plants established themselves on the
North American continent faster than Spaniards themselves. In 1597, for
example, Spanish explorers found Indians cultivating watermelons on the
Ocmulgee River in Georgia, over one hundred miles beyond any Spanish
outpost; the next year, when Juan de Oñate arrived in New Mexico to begin
permanent settlement he encountered Pueblos growing watermelons.
Like some plants, domestic mammals imported from Iberia also roamed
beyond the Spanish settlements, generally adapting with great ease to those
temperate zones of North America that resembled their homeland. As they
grew more numerous, European grazing animals began to rearrange the
ecological mosaic of North America, especially in the arid and ecologically

227
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

fragile Southwest, from California to Texas. Where sheep, cattle, and horses
gathered in large numbers to graze or water, sharp hooves trampled grasses
to the roots and compacted soils. Along well-worn trails, water followed the
paths of migrating animals. The higher the hills and inclines, the more that
runoff from rain and snow eroded soils that had lost protective vegetation.
Water runoff eventually carved deep gullies, or arroyos, which ran full in
heavy rain but exposed parched, cracked earth in dry weather. Gullying, as
this phenomenon is known, carried water away rapidly, rather than allowing
it to soak into the soil, and so lowered water tables. Lush grasslands dotted
with trees and brimming with deer and other wildlife began to diminish
and, in some places, turned to desert.
The extent to which alien stock degraded the environment in the Spanish
era is impossible to calculate. Sources offer few clues, and cooler climate and
seasonal rainfall patterns in southwestern America may have mitigated the
effects of overgrazing. Nonetheless, by 1820 the effects of overgrazing by
feral animals and domestic herds must have been felt in the neighborhood of
Hispanic and Indian communities alike. In 1818, for example, the mission at
Tumacácori had more stock than could find water in the small, fragile Santa
Cruz Valley—some five thousand cattle, twenty-five hundred sheep, six hun-
dred horses, eighty-nine mules, and fifteen donkeys.
Wherever they went, Old World grazing animals transported Old World
grasses, including Kentucky bluegrass and others we have come to think of
as 100 percent American. Old World grazing animals also contributed to the
thinning of American forests and woodlands in some areas, for they needed
pasture, and Old World draft animals—horses, mules, and donkeys—gave
both Natives and Hispanics the mobility to transport timbers and firewood
over greater distances to their communities. The florescence of European
domestic mammals in North America probably had still other ripple effects
on the natural world, but our knowledge of ecological change in this era
remains rudimentary, and Spanish sources fail to address questions that inter-
est people today. Unburdened by questions about the negative consequences
of ecological change, Spaniards took pride in Europeanizing the natural world
with the “fruits of Spain.”
Anthropocentric like other Europeans, Spaniards regarded the natural
world as existing largely to serve them, and it did serve them well in North
America, thus validating their assumption. Initially, Old World diseases had

228
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

helped clear the continent for Spanish settlers and their domestic animals
and crops, and those animals and crops made it substantially easier for
Spaniards to establish themselves. Where European biota flourished, so did
Spaniards, adapting readily to temperate zones, as along the California coast,
the high country of northern New Mexico, where altitude mimics latitude
and mocks the desert, and the well-watered, fertile, and salubrious Texas
coastal plain. In contrast, the desert Southwest and the semitropical South-
east proved unattractive to many European species and therefore less invit-
ing to immigrants.
In the main, it was geopolitics, not the suitability of the land, that
brought Spaniards to North America. If the continent had held greater
attractions in treasure or Indian labor or if Spaniards had fewer alternatives
in more desirable parts of the empire, they might have peopled North
America in larger numbers and brought about swifter, more profound envi-
ronmental transformations.

In March 1762, as she lay dying in her bed following a sudden illness,
Juana Luján prepared her last will and testament. The pious and prosperous
widow, who owned the sprawling Rancho de San Antonio near Santa Cruz
de la Cañada in New Mexico, affirmed her faith in “everything that is upheld,
believed and preached by our mother, the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic
Church.” She left instructions for her burial in the mission chapel of the In-
dian pueblo of San Ildefonso and for prayers for the repose of her soul. Juana
Luján itemized her property, which she bequeathed to her three children, all
of them illegitimate. The size of her estate, valued at some six thousand pesos,
and the nature of her possessions suggest that she was among the province’s
more affluent residents. She had owned a twenty-four-room home with its
furniture, kitchenware, religious paintings and images, jewelry of gold, silver,
and pearls, clothing made of fabrics imported from Europe, China, and
Mexico, and land with its pastures, planted fields, garden, walled orchard,
stable, corrals, livestock, and farm and ranching implements.
Although they effected remarkable changes in the natural and native
worlds, Spaniards had come to the frontiers of North America hoping to
change little in their lives except to enhance their wealth and status. Like other
Europeans in America, they succeeded remarkably well—they transformed

229
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

their environment far more than it transformed them, and they built new so-
cieties that owed more to inheritance from the Old World than to experience
in the New World. As the will of Juana Luján suggests, Spaniards of means
on the North American frontier lived by Spanish law and custom and sur-
rounded themselves with traditional Spanish amenities. They organized the
North American landscape into familiar shapes and measures, and they be-
stowed recognizable names on the land in order to incorporate it into their
cosmos. They maintained time in familiar modes, marking their days by the
Christian calendar and their hours by the bells of their churches. Within fa-
miliar time and space, they also reconstructed the hierarchical and patriarchal
institutions of their homeland. One of those institutions was the household,
where men held authority over wives and children but where married women
like Luján owned separate private property and could pass it on to their
heirs—a right not enjoyed by English women. Throughout their lives, they en-
gaged in familiar routines of work and play and gave obeisance to the ortho-
doxies that characterized life in Christian communities in Iberia. When they
grew ill, they turned to Iberian medical knowledge and medicines. When they
died, they were buried by tradition, as was Juana Luján, in a simple shroud in
emulation of Christ but in a place in or near the church that corresponded to
their status. Social distinctions followed Spaniards to the grave.
On North American frontiers, however, Spaniards never reconstructed
Spanish culture and institutions in unadulterated forms. First, Spanish civi-
lization crossed the Atlantic in simplified forms that never reflected its full
variety and complexity. Second, many Hispanic settlers did not come to the
frontiers directly from metropolitan Spain, but from peripheral areas such as
Minorca, the Canaries, the Antilles, or New Spain, where Spanish culture
had already been filtered through other distinctive environmental, economic,
and social settings. Then, too, however much they wished to conserve the
familiar, Spaniards’ scanty numbers and resources left them no choice but
to make concessions to their strange new environment and, on occasion, to
learn from Natives, who understood local conditions better than they. Like
Indians and other Europeans, Spaniards resisted change unless it offered
distinct benefits and did not challenge cherished beliefs or offend their sense
of identity. Only when it seemed necessary did they make modest adjust-
ments in their material culture—in dress, diet, medicine, tableware, homes,
and communities, which further transformed Hispanic culture on the frontier.

230
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

30. Wife of a soldier of Monterey, sketched by one of the artists on the Malaspina
expedition, circa 1791. Courtesy, Museo de America, Madrid, and Iris Engstrand.

From the outset Spaniards went to great lengths to maintain appearances,

for dress signified status and distinguished Spaniards from Indians as well as
from one another. Setting off to conquer New Mexico with Juan de Oñate, for
example, Capt. Luis de Velasco packed a wardrobe that included such items
as linen handkerchiefs, numerous Cordovan leather boots and shoes, fancy
hats, and six elegant suits—two of satin, one of silk, and one of “blue Italian
velvet . . . trimmed with wide gold passementerie, consisting of doublet,
breeches, and green silk stockings with blue garters with . . . gold lace.” In
day-to-day life, however, and especially in the more isolated areas, only the
upper and middle strata of society could afford stylish dress. From California
to Florida, when the shoes and boots of ordinary Hispanics wore thin, for
example, they donned locally made, Indian-inspired leather moccasins or
moccasin-like shoes.

231
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

Necessity also drove Spaniards to adopt strange New World foods because
few places in North America proved ideal for cultivating all of the staples of
the Mediterranean diet, and bulky foodstuffs could not be shipped econom-
ically to remote North American outposts. After failing in their attempts to
raise wheat, olives, and grapes at St. Augustine and Santa Elena, Spaniards
turned to indigenous cultigens—maize, beans, and squash—and supple-
mented them with adaptable foods from the Old World like peaches, melons,
and watermelons and New World crops such as squashes, chili peppers, and
lima beans. Because sheep, Spaniards’ preferred source of meat, did not thrive
in their Atlantic colonies, Spaniards depended on fishing and on hunting
deer, birds, and turtles while they husbanded their imported pigs, chickens,
and cattle.
By eating native foods as well as European imports, Hispanics probably
enjoyed a richer, more varied diet than they would have had in Spain.
Nonetheless, with wheat bread, olive oil, wine, and other familiar foods in
short supply across much of the frontier, Spaniards at first believed themselves
deprived—reduced to “herbs, fish and other scum and vermin,” as one
soldier in St. Augustine complained in 1573. As they grew more accustomed
to native foods, however, the colonists’ sense of privation may have dimin-
ished. In the Southeast, Hispanics quaffed the highly caffeinated native black
tea, cacina, to the point of addiction. In the Southwest, chocolate, atole, and
pinole became favored drinks, and other Mesoamerican foods with Nahautl
names and corn as the principal ingredient—elotes, posole, tamales, and tor-
tillas—became mainstays of the Hispanic diet. Hispanics at all social levels
altered the traditional Iberian diet in order to survive, but those at the lowest
level made the greatest adjustments. “There is little difference between the
food of the Indian and that of the common Spaniard,” a German-born Jesuit
noted in Sonora.
Spaniards adopted techniques and implements of food preparation from
Native Americans—most directly from Indian women who worked in His-
panic kitchens as servants, mistresses, or wives—to a much greater extent
than did their English counterparts on the Atlantic coast. It was in “female
activities with low social visibility,” anthropologist Kathleen Deagan has
suggested, that Spaniards allowed themselves to fall most readily under in-
digenous influences, including perhaps the use of Indian-made baskets, mats,
and cloth for work regarded as suitable only for women. In the patriarchal

232
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

Hispanic world, the high status associated with Spanish culture militated
against an easy acceptance of native influences in such visible male activities
as warfare and construction.
In constructing new homes and public or ecclesiastical buildings in North
America, Spaniards may have depended on Indian labor, but beyond some
decorative touches, Indians had little influence on building techniques or the
styles of Hispanic architecture. On the contrary, Spanish churches, government
buildings, and fortifications followed European conventions, and Spanish-
built homes in North America resembled those of different regions of Spain.
Poverty and shortages of skilled artisans and metal tools on the frontier,
however, usually resulted in a simplification of styles for both public and pri-
vate structures. With few exceptions, such as the ensemble of neoclassic res-
idences built by the elite in New Orleans after the fires of 1788 and 1794
destroyed the old French structures, even the homes of the well-to-do seemed
austere compared to those of the aristocracy in Spain or Mexico City. Most
Hispanic frontiersmen lived in small, unadorned, functional houses with a
few multipurpose rooms in which they cooked, ate, entertained, and slept.
Simplification to the point of austerity also characterized the interiors of
most public buildings and private homes. A few churches, such as San Xavier
del Bac with its ornate, gilded baroque altarpiece, had elaborate decor, and
late in the colonial era California mission chapels had bright motifs painted
on their interior walls, but most church interiors seemed plain. As fray Fran-
cisco Atanasio Domínguez wrote of the parish church at Santa Fe in 1776,
“Its furniture, or adornment, is the absence of any.” The twenty-four-room
house owned by the affluent Juana Luján had no moveable wooden furniture
other than her plank bed, a cabinet, a chest, two chairs, two benches, and a
writing desk, and her walls were unadorned except for a mirror and religious
paintings on elk hides. Those less well off than Luján had more spartan fur-
nishings; they slept and sat on mats on the floor, as did the lower classes in
Spain.
Spanish attempts to reorganize urban space also bumped up against fron-
tier realities. More than any other colonial power, Spain attempted to impose
a uniform urban design on newly founded municipalities, which it regarded
as central to colonization. Royal regulations promulgated in 1573 required
officials throughout the empire to lay out new town sites in orderly grids, re-
flecting a rational Renaissance ideal that most of the labyrinthine medieval

233
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

communities in Spain itself never achieved. Municipalities such as St. Au-

gustine, Pensacola, San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and San
José were to reckon their boundaries at four leagues square. At the heart of
each community would stand a principal plaza laid out to the points of the
compass, rectangular in shape to accommodate equestrian events, and faced
by government and ecclesiastical buildings and shops. Beyond the plaza,
surveyors generally divided the town into straight streets, designating uni-
form blocks and lots for houses and gardens. Still farther from the plaza, yet
still within the municipal boundaries, stood private fields, municipal lands,
and common pastures and woodlands.
Wherever Spaniards formed municipalities in the western hemisphere,
they repeated the general principles of this urban template with remarkable
consistency. On the frontier, however, municipalities displayed organic as well
as geometric elements. Indeed, to the dismay of Spanish officials, who regarded
urban life as the ideal, Hispanic frontiersmen from Florida to California
often preferred to live in the countryside, close to herds, watercourses, fields,
and Indian laborers. One traveler in 1754 noted that he had passed through
Albuquerque, “or I might say the site of the villa of Albuquerque, for the set-
tlers, who inhabit it on Sunday, do not live there. They must stay on their
farms to keep watch over their cornfields.”
Spanish municipalities in North America lacked the most basic urban
amenities. The cosmopolitan “new city” of New Orleans, rebuilt in the classic
Spanish mode following the devastating fires of 1788 and 1794, stands as an
exception. As the hub of a prosperous plantation economy and entrepôt for
the Mississippi River trade, New Orleans grew from 3,000 in 1777 to over
8,000 in 1803 and could support sophisticated urban life. Places with more
modest populations at the end of the colonial era, such as Los Angeles (850),
Santa Fe (6,000), San Antonio (1,500), and St. Augustine (1,500), on the other
hand, could not boast of impressive cathedrals or public buildings, convents,
seminaries, universities, libraries, theaters, newspapers, or presses, as one
might have found in Mexico City.
Many Spaniards on the frontier lived not in or near formal municipalities
but at military bases. In contrast to the westward-moving Anglo-American
frontier, where the government usually established military posts to protect
an advancing line of settlers, many of Spain’s North American fortifications
anchored territory so remote that it had little prospect of attracting significant

234
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

31. Plan of Santa Fe, 1766, drawn by José de Urrutia. Courtesy,

British Library and Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 15048.

numbers of Hispanic settlers. Presidial communities such as San Diego,

Santa Barbara, Monterey, San Francisco, Tucson, San Fernando (Memphis),
and Nogales (Vicksburg) took on the characteristics of small villages as
soldiers, their families, and nonmilitary personnel settled around them, but
they did not develop into municipalities until long after the Spanish era
ended. Nor did they enjoy more than the essentials of Hispanic life.
Tucson is a case in point. Ranchers and farmers who lived on the outskirts
of the fort paid no taxes or tithes, but neither did they derive benefits from a
town government or a parish church (they used the military chapel). As a
condition of owning land within a five-mile radius of the presidio, settlers
were obliged to take up their own arms and mounts to campaign against
Apaches. The community, the post commander, José de Zúñiga, reported in
1804, had no weaver, saddlemaker, or hatmaker and “desperately needs a
leather tanner and dresser, a tailor, and a shoemaker.” The artisans who had

235
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

recently completed the monumental baroque church of San Xavier del Bac
just south of the presidio, “out here on the farthest frontier,” as Zúñiga put it,
had received double pay “because of the consequent hazard involved.”

Whether they lived in towns, ranches, farms, or at military posts, Spaniards

had succeeded remarkably in transplanting some of the amenities and arti-
facts of Iberia to the North American frontier. On alien ground and amidst
alien peoples of the new continent, however, Hispanic culture and institu-
tions had taken on simplified or hybrid forms. Spanish society underwent
similar transformations, as Hispanic immigrants to North American frontiers
tried with only partial success to replicate the hierarchical and patriarchal
social structure they had known in Spain or in its more mature American
colonies.
Since the early stages of settlement, American frontiers had offered His-
panics opportunities for upward social mobility—first in the Caribbean, then
in New Spain and Peru, and finally in peripheral areas such as North America.
The followers of Menéndez de Aviles who settled at St. Augustine and Santa
Elena in the 1560s, Oñate’s colonists who pushed into the Pueblo country in
1598, the soldiers and settlers who made their way to Texas in the 1710s and
to New California in the 1760s and 1770s, and the peasants from the Canary
Islands who settled at San Antonio in the 1730s had no difficulty establishing
themselves near the top of the local social ladder. Except for a few transient
government officials, no one occupied the rungs above them. Few Hispanic
pioneers accumulated great wealth on the frontier, but many of the first set-
tlers did acquire titles, land, and Indian servants—hallmarks of the elite in
the Spanish-speaking world.
Throughout the Spanish empire, an individual’s social status, or calidad, was
supposed to correlate with his or her racial and ethnic origins. Peninsulares,
those Spaniards born in Spain, held the key colonial offices and stood at the
apex of colonial society. Criollos, children of Spaniards born in the Americas,
ranked just below them. Both peninsulares and criollos were, of course, ethnic
Spaniards, or españoles, whose ancestry, it was presumed, betrayed no traces
of Indian or black blood. Below the españoles, in descending order of status,
were mestizos, who were part Indian and part español, mulattos, Hispanicized
Indians, and freed or enslaved blacks.

236
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

Españoles scorned mestizos, mulattos, Indians, and blacks, as much for their
presumed social inferiority and behavior as for their race. Viceroy Luis de
Velasco, for example, had warned an adelantado to beware of the “half-breeds,
mulattoes, and Indians” he was taking to Florida because “these will serve only
to set the camp in confusion and eat up the supplies.” But colonizers embark-
ing from New Spain could not be choosy. In addition to its predominantly
Indian population and imported black slaves, Mexico had become home to a
large number of mixed bloods, people of “broken color,” or color quebrado, as
they were called. Mixed bloods, together with blacks and Hispanicized Indi-
ans, composed the vast majority of the population of New Spain and, there-
fore, of immigrants to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California. For
example, only a third of the men and a fourth of the women who founded
San José and San Francisco in 1777 claimed to be ethnically Spanish, or es-
pañoles; of the initial forty-six residents of Los Angeles in 1781, only two
identified themselves as españoles. In contrast, in the Floridas and Louisiana,
the majority of Hispanics had come directly from Andalusia, the Cantabrian
provinces, or other parts of Spain, but there, too, mestizos, mulattos, and
blacks formed significant percentages of the Hispanic population.
Calidad, however, was never fixed solely by race; it was also defined by occu-
pation and wealth as well as by parentage and skin color. On the frontier,
where record keeping could be lax, mestizos, mulattos, and Hispanicized In-
dians found ample opportunity to transcend their official racial categories.
Priests, officers, and civil officials responsible for recording a person’s casta,
or caste, usually took a declaration of racial identity at face value or simply
failed to take note of the caste of persons other than españoles. In the latter
half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, priests and census takers
paid greater attention to classifying people racially, yet still made those identi-
fications casually and inconsistently. Antonio Salazar of Zacatecas, the master
mason who directed work on Mission San José at San Antonio, appears in
four documents between 1789 and 1794 with three ethnic identities—Indian,
mestizo, and Spaniard.
In sparsely populated lands of nearly chronic war, with primitive economies
and little occupational differentiation, the military served as the chief vehicle
for upward mobility. Indeed, having the largest payroll on the North Ameri-
can frontier—and in some places the only payroll—the military enjoyed dis-
proportionate influence. At St. Augustine, three-fourths of the population

237
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

depended on the military payroll as late as 1813, and in California in the early
1810s soldiers on active duty constituted half of the Hispanic adult male pop-
ulation (still more were retired soldiers).
No matter how exploited by their officers, soldiers had access to salaries,
benefits, booty, and pensions. Such sources of income, which few other fron-
tiersmen enjoyed, helped offset their humble family origins and gave soldiers
better prospects on the frontier than they might have enjoyed in Spain or in
central Mexico, where competition was keener.
If a military career might advance a young man’s social and economic po-
sition on the frontier, however, it was not conducive to establishing a family,
the basic unit of Hispanic society. In military posts with few Hispanic women,
soldiers had little prospect of finding ideal marriage partners. Such conditions
existed not only in the initial phases of settlement, as along the California
coast, but also at perennial military bases like San Marcos de Apalachee,
which counted 168 adult males to 3 women as late as 1802. Deprived of His-
panic women, some soldiers found illicit outlets for their libidos, raping Indian
women, consorting with prostitutes, and, judging from the severity of the
punishment, engaging in even more unspeakable crimes. Governor Zéspedes
shipped six soldiers out of St. Augustine in 1789 for having sexual relations
with young boys; if the authorities had found the soldiers guilty they could
have put them to death and burned their bodies. In Santa Barbara, an eigh-
teen-year-old soldier was caught in a compromising position with a mule;
both were executed, their bodies purified by flame.
Some soldiers came to the frontier with their wives, and others married
there, but family life in general deviated from the norms of more settled areas.
In posts with few Hispanic women, for example, even soldiers newly arrived
from Spain were known to marry beneath their station by taking Indian
brides. Because soldiers did dangerous work, more men than women died
prematurely in military communities; the disproportionate deaths of grown
males left unusual numbers of orphans, single widows, remarried widows,
and widows who served as heads of families.
For civilians, too, conditions on the frontier altered what passed for normal
family arrangements in more sophisticated parts of the empire. As their local
societies became more complex and the range of potential marriage partners
widened, as in New Mexico, frontier arrivistes tried to maintain or improve
their position by contracting financially advantageous marriages for themselves

238
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

or their children—a strategy for social advancement common to Spain and its
empire. By marrying oneself or one’s children to a social equal or a social bet-
ter, españoles or putative españoles hoped to create family alliances that would
preserve property, racial purity, honor, and position for the next generation. As
a social and economic arrangement, marriage for the elites had little to do with
romantic love or individual choice. Children, it was understood, could not
marry without their parents’ permission (neither could soldiers and officers
without approval of their superiors). In northernmost New Spain, however,
the use of marriage as a device for maintaining racial purity failed because
there simply were not enough españoles for the elite to perpetuate itself.
Across the frontier, aristocrats and middling groups understood the legal
procedures, both civil and ecclesiastical, for betrothal, marriage, maintaining
women’s property as a separate entity within the marriage, and obtaining
annulments or separations. Nonetheless, all classes of frontiersmen seem to
have ignored inconvenient civil or religious restrictions on marriage to a
greater extent than in Spain or in more settled areas of the Spanish empire.
In Louisiana, for example, both governors Bernardo de Gálvez and Manuel
de Gayoso violated the prohibition against marrying into local families during
their term in office. Church officials, mindful of the shortage on the frontier
of potential spouses of a certain calidad, often waived restrictions against
marriage of close relatives, as in their favorable response to one New Mexican
who begged a dispensation to marry his second cousin “for the lack of pop-
ulation in this miserable kingdom.” Although Church courts resisted grant-
ing separations to married couples for any reason except desertion (divorce
as it is known today did not exist), the mobility and anonymity of the fron-
tier offered spouses an opportunity to begin married life anew, as bigamists.
As elsewhere in Spain and its empire, Hispanics on the frontier did not
limit their expressions of sexuality to the institution of marriage. Hispanic
males, who commonly defined their masculinity by the sexual conquest
of women, made a virtue of adultery, and men of means kept mistresses
quite openly. The captain of the presidio at La Bahía, Texas, lived with four
women in succession—all married or related to soldiers in the presidio under
his command and all mothers of his children.
In a classic example of a double standard, men also sought to shield their
wives, daughters, and sisters from the attentions of other males. A woman
who lost her virtue was believed to have dishonored her family as well as

239
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

herself, and so elites, who had the most honor to lose, went to great lengths
to chaperone their women. Gov. Vicente Folch of Mobile, who caught his
wife and a fellow officer in flagrante delicto, complained that protecting
women from such perils was more difficult on the frontier than in Spain,
where his family would have assisted him. He was probably right. Moreover,
some of the most common occupations on the frontier, from soldier to
herder, required that husbands absent themselves from home for extended
periods of time, thus increasing the vulnerability of their wives to the bland-
ishments of predatory males. Finally, the availability of Indian women servants
who could be sexually exploited by their masters provided opportunities for
adultery on the frontier that had no exact equivalent in Spain. There is no
strong evidence, however, that the incidence of adultery or concubinage was
higher on the frontier than among the upper classes of Spain.
Among the lower strata of frontier society, the gente baja, an uncommonly
high percentage of couples simply ignored the institution of marriage and
lived together out of wedlock in informal unions, or barraganía. Without
property or honor to protect (and without illusions that their children would
ever have the means to hold public office or ecclesiastical positions closed to
illegitimate offspring), the poor saw little advantage in paying a fee to a
priest to legitimize their relationship or their children.
In itself, the frontier milieu did not create these anomalous patterns in
Hispanic society. It was Hispanics themselves who took advantage of the
frontier to alter their lives or to resolve contending values that many of them
had brought to the edges of the empire. Along with a fervent Christianity
and belief in a family-centered, patriarchal, and hierarchical social structure,
some Hispanics had sufficient skills, passions, and hypocrisies to subvert the
constraints of Christianity and of the society of castes. The frontier, espe-
cially in its most insular places, simply afforded greater opportunities for
those individuals who wished to escape societal restraints. “By nature,” as
historian Oscar Martínez has explained, “border zones, especially those that
are far removed from the core, spawn independence, rebellion, cultural devi-
ation, disorder, and even lawlessness.”

On the frontier, then, as in other parts of Spain’s colonial empire, Hispanic

society and culture never fully replicated Iberian models. Instead, material

240
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

culture, institutions, social structure, and family life underwent modest

transformations as tenacious Spaniards contended with native peoples and
with one another to try to rebuild the old order in the New World. Hispanic
colonists owed much more to the influence of Indians than did their English
counterparts along the Atlantic coast, but Hispanic frontier culture and so-
ciety did not represent a true synthesis of elements from native and Iberian
worlds. Sustained by the technological, economic, and political strength of a
large state society, Spanish culture had clearly prevailed over the cultures of
native American tribal groups.
However much Spaniards might eat Indian foods, wear Indian footwear,
take Indian wives or concubines, produce mestizo children, learn Indian lan-
guages, and live beyond the civility of Spanish urban life, the core of His-
panic frontier culture and society had remained recognizably Hispanic and
intact. If Spanish political, economic, cultural, and social institutions seemed
pallid all across the frontier, it was because Hispanic settlers suffered from
isolation, poverty, sparse immigration, low imperial priorities, and Indian re-
sistance, not because they had embraced the ways of native Americans. In
contrast, those Indian societies impinged upon by influences from the more
powerful and complex Spanish state had been deeply transformed—
frequently beyond recognition.
Wherever Hispanic communities developed in North America, they left
an enduring legacy. As Anglo Americans moved into the former Spanish
possessions, they found institutional and cultural patterns so well established
that it made more sense to adapt to them than to change them. From St.
Augustine to San Francisco, not only Spanish names endured (however badly
pronounced), but so too did the Hispanic communities and townspeople.
With changes in transportation, “new towns” grew up at San Diego, Albu-
querque, and San Antonio, but the “old towns” remained. In the countryside
beyond the towns, Spanish private and communal land grants determined
the shape of the land for years to come. Meanwhile, those Hispanics who
remained in the former colonies passed their specialized knowledge on to
Anglo-American newcomers—knowledge of local arts, architecture, foods,
language, literature, laws, music, and the management of water and livestock
in arid lands.
Until the large immigrations from Mexico and the Caribbean in the
twentieth century, the Hispanic legacy in North America remained strong

241
 frontiers and frontier peoples transformed

along the continent’s southern rim less because of the power of Spain’s pres-
ence than because Hispanics had made the initial European imprint on the
region. Cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky has explained this phenome-
non: “The first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of
crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no
matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” But because
Spanish North America never moved beyond the frontier stage in size or
sophistication and because it remained link to a declining Spain, it stood
vulnerable to its modernizing and predatory neighbor. Anglo Americans
enjoyed not only demographic and economic advantages, but also a mercan-
tile ethos and certitude in what they believed to be the superiority of their
race, religion, and political institutions. Those conceits served Americans as
a rationalization for conquering and transforming the lands of their former
Spanish neighbors, much as Spaniards’ ethnocentric values had facilitated
their domination of indigenous Americans several centuries before.

242
 12
The Spanish Legacy and the
Historical Imagination

The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today’s predilections, its
strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges.
—David Lowenthal, 1985

When Spain’s hegemony over the southern rim of North America ended in
1821, its long tenure left an enduring legacy that extended beyond the tangi-
ble transformation of peoples and places. More abstractly, Spain’s legacy also
lingered in American historical memory, where it took on a life of its own.
By its very nature, the past cannot be fully recaptured or replayed, but it can
be partially remembered or reconstructed by individuals or groups who seek
meanings in the past that will serve them in the present. The quest for a us-
able past has produced multiple interpretations of the Spanish experience on
North American frontiers—constructions that have contended with one
another over time to transform our understanding and to become in them-
selves powerful legacies of Spain’s centuries in North America.

243
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Englishmen and

Anglo Americans who wrote about the Spanish past in North America uni-
formly condemned Spanish rule. Implicitly or explicitly, they sought to
vindicate English or American expansion into Spanish territory. Centuries
of Spanish misgovernment, these early writers believed, had enervated all of
Spain’s New World colonies. When these Anglo writers sought the cause of
Spain’s alleged misrule, they found it in the defective character of Spaniards
themselves. From their English forebears and other non-Spanish Europe-
ans, Anglo Americans had inherited the view that Spaniards were unusually
cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, de-
cadent, indolent, and authoritarian—a unique complex of pejoratives that
historians from Spain came to call the Black Legend, la leyenda negra.
It mattered not if Anglo Americans had ever met a Spaniard or visited a
Spanish-American colony. The Black Legend informed Anglo Americans’
judgments about the political, economic, religious, and social forces that had
shaped the Spanish provinces from Florida to California as well as through-
out the hemisphere. The intensity with which Anglos of the late eighteenth
or early nineteenth centuries denigrated the Spanish past in North America,
however, varied according to regional circumstances that distinguished south-
eastern America from southwestern America.
One circumstance that colored Anglo-American attitudes toward His-
panics was racial mixture. In southeastern America, where little Spanish–
Indian blending had occurred, this was a moot issue. From Texas to California,
on the other hand, Anglo Americans were shocked to meet a predominantly
mestizo population. Through much of the nineteenth century, Anglo Amer-
icans generally regarded racial mixture as a violation of the laws of nature.
Many would have subscribed to the views of Thomas Jefferson Farnham, a
New England attorney who toured California in the 1840s and observed that
a child of racially different parents was condemned biologically to “a consti-
tution less robust than that of either race from which he sprang.” Racial
mixture in California, Farnham suggested, had produced “an imbecile, pusil-
lanimous, race of men . . . unfit to control the destinies of that beautiful
country.”
Another circumstance that shaped the depth of Anglo Americans’ His-
panophobia was the degree to which they saw Hispanics as an obstacle to
their ambitions. This issue, too, was of less importance in the Southeast than

244
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

in the Southwest, for the Hispanic population of southeastern America was

so sparse that it presented no threat once Spain withdrew the last of its offi-
cials and troops in 1821. In the years immediately following U.S. acquisition
of Louisiana and Florida, then, it served little purpose for Anglo Americans
to denigrate the local Hispanic population or its history. On the contrary,
compared to many of the fortune-seeking, rough-and-tumble American
frontiersmen who drifted into Louisiana and Florida, the stable Hispanic
community seemed virtuous by comparison. Reporting from Pensacola in
1822, Gov. William P. DuVal told President James Monroe that “the Spanish
inhabitants of this country are the best even among the most quiet and
orderly of our own citizens.”
The way in which Anglo Americans in the Southeast regarded their
Hispanic contemporaries affected their view of local history. In the absence
of bitter contention with racially mixed Hispanics for political or economic
power and having no need to justify further acquisition of Spanish territory
in the Southeast, Anglo-American writers merely repeated the conventional
wisdom of the Black Legend, but without the vitriol that characterized
similar writing about Spaniards in the Southwest. In Florida and Louisiana,
writers condemned the “barbarities” of Hernando de Soto, the “demoniac
malignity” of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and the “jealous and occlusive
system” of the “perfidious Spaniards.”
Southwestern America posed a different problem for Anglo Americans.
The Spanish era had ended in 1821 with newly independent Mexico in control
of the region from California to Texas. There, Hispanics did block American
expansion, at least until the Texans’ successful armed rebellion in 1836 and
the U.S. invasion in 1846 that put New Mexico, Arizona, and California in
American hands.
Americans who wrote about the Southwest in the first half of the nine-
teenth century turned fervently to the past to justify their nation’s expan-
sionist impulses. Their rationalizations combined with Hispanophobia and
racism to produce a more vituperative portrait of Hispanics and their history
in the Southwest than existed in the Southeast.
Hispanophobia found its most strident and enduring rhetoric in Texas.
Writing from the United States in the spring of 1836, where he had gone to
seek aid for the cause of Texas independence, Stephen F. Austin character-
ized the conflict between Texas and Mexico as nothing less than “a war of

245
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to

the print version of this book.

32. “Greasers,” from Frank Triplett’s Conquering the Wilderness (New York, 1883).
Courtesy, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian

and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.” The
subsequent bloodshed in Texas at the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, which
had no parallel elsewhere in the borderlands, hardened attitudes on both
sides and left a deep reservoir of Anglo-American hatred toward Mexicans
and their Hispanic forefathers.
After their victory in 1836, Anglo-American rebels controlled not only
Texas, but the writing of its history. Not content with the role of victors, they
portrayed themselves as heroic—a “superior race of men.” Heroes needed vil-
lains, of course, and Texas’s earliest historians found them in the Hispanic
past. The first detailed history of the Spanish era in Texas to appear in En-
glish, Henry Stuart Foote’s Texas and the Texians (1841), concluded with a

246
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

gloomy scene: “We have herein traced the history of Texas through the dim
records of a hundred and thirty-six years, rarely finding in that long period a
congenial spot for human happiness. Ignorance and despotism have hung
like a dark cloud over her noble forests and luxuriant prairies.”
Painting the Spanish era in dark hues enabled Texas historians to contrast
it with the enlightened Texas rebellion. In essence, the Texas rebellion had
been little more than a struggle for political and economic power, but early
Texas historians elevated the revolt against Mexico to a “sublime collision of
moral influences,” “a moral struggle,” and “a war for principles.” The incon-
venient fact that some Mexicans had joined Anglo-American rebels in Texas
was forgotten, and a repudiation of the Spanish past became an essential
part of Texans’ self-identity. Hispanophobia, with its particularly vitriolic
anti-Mexican variant, also served as a convenient rationale to keep Mexicans
“in their place.” Hispanophobia lasted longer in Texas than in any of Spain’s
former North American provinces. Well into the twentieth century it retarded
the serious study of the state’s lengthy Spanish heritage, leaving the field
open to distortion and caricature.
But with or without the rancor that characterized Texas historiography,
Anglo Americans repudiated the Spanish past all across the borderlands,
judging Spain’s legacy in North America an unmitigated failure and replac-
ing its vestiges with their own institutions and culture. Even much of the
widely respected Spanish civil law was rejected. As the California Senate
concluded in 1850, the Spanish legal system “was based on the crude laws of
a rough, fierce people, whose passion was war and whose lust [was] conquest.”
Crossing America in 1877, an English journalist expressed surprise at the
transformation of the old Spanish provinces. “The effacement of the Spanish
element in New Orleans is enough,” he wrote, “but its disappearance in
California is even more complete. The ‘nombres de Espana [España]’ only re-
main; the ‘cosas’ thereof have entirely vanished.”

Spanish “things,” however, had not vanished entirely. An appreciative view

of Spanish culture had run like a feeble countercurrent through American
thought and letters, represented most conspicuously in the works of Washing-
ton Irving and William H. Prescott. In the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, war with Spain in 1898 notwithstanding, that countercurrent grew

247
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

stronger until it became the mainstream. Indeed, in some areas of the old
Spanish borderlands, things Spanish became not only appreciated, but fash-
ionable, and a new historical sensibility came to rival the old Black Legend.
Walt Whitman caught the spirit in a letter he addressed in 1883 to some of
the leading citizens of Santa Fe. “It is time to realize,” Whitman wrote, “that
there will not be found any more cruelty, tyranny, superstition, &c., in the
résumé of past Spanish history than in the corresponding résumé of Anglo-
Norman history.” Whitman urged an appreciation of the “splendor and ster-
ling value” of Hispanic culture in the Southwest, which he saw as enriching
“the seething materialistic” ethos of the United States.
California, populous and prosperous after the discovery of gold in 1848
changed it from a Hispanic Siberia to an American Mecca, became the center
of a pro-Hispanic movement in America. In the Golden State, the reinterpre-
tation of the Hispanic past became both cause and effect of a growing His-
panophilic sentiment. Whereas an earlier generation of Anglo Americans
had portrayed californianos as indolent, ignorant, and backward, Americans
of the late nineteenth century reimagined them as unhurried, untroubled,
and gracious. The premier historian of California, Hubert Howe Bancroft,
expressed this new sentiment succinctly in 1886: “Never before or since,” he
wrote of Hispanic California, “was there a spot in America where life was a
long happy holiday, where there was less labor, less care or trouble.”
Bancroft’s fictive and condescending simplification of California’s impov-
erished and often turbulent history had a counterpart in the sentimental his-
torical fiction of Bret Harte, Helen Hunt Jackson, Gertrude Atherton, and
others, who portrayed California for a wide readership. The californianos,
wrote Helen Hunt Jackson, had lived “a picturesque life, with more of senti-
ment and gaiety . . . than will ever be seen again on these sunny shores.”
This remarkable turnabout in the understanding of California’s Hispanic
past coincided with changes in Anglo-American society. As the nation be-
came more urbanized and industrialized in the late nineteenth century, many
Americans recoiled from what they saw as excessive commercialism, materi-
alism, vulgarity, and rootlessness and longed for pastoral values they imagined
had existed in a simpler agrarian America. In bustling California, which
enjoyed unprecedented growth in the 1880s, newcomers found themselves
rootless and often alienated. But writers, artists, architects, and scholars, who
gave shape, meaning, and perspective to the historical experience, came to

248
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

the rescue. By sanitizing California’s Hispanic past, they made it an accept-

able source of tradition and continuity for Anglo Americans and a model of
pastoral tranquility for those who wished to escape, at least in memory, to a
less hurried era.
California’s Mediterranean-like shores lent themselves to experimentation
with the implanting of Italian and Greek traditions (as, for example, in the
construction of the community of Venice on the Pacific in 1904–05, with its
renaissance palaces, canals, and gondolas), but only the Spanish past, even in
a fictive reincarnation, had verisimilitude, or as historian Kevin Starr put it,
“had behind it the force of history.” Conveniently, the force of history had
also reduced the influence of California’s Hispanic residents; by the 1880s
californianos comprised only a tiny percentage of the state’s population. It
became possible, then, for Anglo Americans to look back with nostalgia
at the californianos’ past, for the descendants of the californianos posed no
challenge to Anglo dominance of politics, commerce, or social life. Then,
too, by focusing their admiration on historic Spain and premodern Spanish
California, Anglo Americans could simultaneously and without contradiction
have contempt for modern Spain, which they humiliated in the Spanish–
American War.
The nostalgia for the Spanish past also extended to the arts, artifacts, and
architecture of the old californianos, for the objects and monuments of the
vanquished had become, in the words of George Kubler, one of our most
astute cultural historians, “ ‘safe’ to play with in recombinations emptied of
previous vital meanings, as in tourist souvenirs, antiquarian reconstructions,
or archaizing revivals.” Just as they converted the mundane daily lives of the
californianos into the picturesque “days of the dons,” California romanticizers
also reinvented the dwellings and places of worship of Hispanic Californians.
In the Spanish era, californianos had lived in simple one-story adobes, many
with flat, tar-covered roofs; few had wooden floors, glass windows, fireplaces,
or tree-shaded landscaping. Anglo Americans reimagined those modest
structures as elegant two-story, red-tile-roofed structures with carved wood-
work and cantilevered balconies that looked into tree-filled patios where
water played in fountains.
The search for an authentic indigenous architecture led Anglo Americans
to build such structures and also to apply features of the California missions
to domestic and public buildings. This architectural style, which came to be

249
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

called mission revival, had its origins in California in the 1880s, but its
vocabulary of stucco walls, red tiles, arched loggias, and bell towers spoke to
the nation as well as the state after the World Columbian Exposition of 1893
in Chicago gave mission revival a wide audience. By the 1910s, mission-style
railroad depots appeared in communities as far from California as Bismarck,
North Dakota, and Battle Creek, Michigan.
California romanticizers also reimagined the missions and the missionar-
ies. Once despised by many Anglo Americans as bigoted zealots who im-
posed a corrupt Catholicism on recalcitrant Natives, the Franciscans of
Hispanic California came to be remembered as kindly Christians who min-
istered to devoted Indians. The mission structures themselves, most of them
neglected since their secularization in the 1830s and fallen into ruins, came
to be appreciated as picturesque and began to be refurbished. Masquerading
as historical preservationists, the rebuilders of California’s missions often
ignored the realities of archaeological and documentary records to produce
the buildings and grounds that appealed to their imaginations and to the
tastes of local businessmen.

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

33. The crumbling chapel of the neglected mission of San Carlos de

Borromeo de Carmelo, circa 1880. Photograph by Carleton E. Watkins.
Courtesy, California Historical Society, FN-08423.

250
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

34. The restored chapel of San Carlos de Borromeo de Carmelo,

photographed by Dr. Joseph A. Baird Jr. in the 1950s. Courtesy,
California Historical Society, FN-16688.

Ironically, if anticommercialism had provided part of the impetus for the

nostalgic reinvention of the Hispanic past, it was commercialism that gave
the new nostalgia and its adherents high public visibility. Properly laundered
and packaged, California’s picturesque Spanish heritage attracted tourists and
gave its infant cities a patina of permanence and tradition. As Charles Lum-
mis, Southern California’s most exuberant Hispanophile, crassly observed,
“The old missions are worth more money . . . than our oil, our oranges, or
even our climate.”
No other part of America witnessed the enthusiasm for things Spanish
that manifested itself in yeasty Southern California, but many of the same

251
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

ingredients could be found in other parts of southwestern and southeastern

America: the decline of Hispanic economic and political power, the yearn-
ings of newcomers for pastoral traditions, anticommercialism, the ballyhoo
of hucksters and publicists, and visible reminders of the Spanish past, partic-
ularly in the form of buildings and people.
Nowhere outside of California did these elements combine more power-
fully than in New Mexico. There, beginning with the coming of the Santa
Fe Railroad in the 1880s, writers, artists, and the railroad itself appropriated
and marketed the refurbished symbols of a once-reviled people. In their
hands, the tarnished Spanish past gained respectability. Santa Fe, once re-
garded as a miserable collection of mud hovels, came to be regarded as pic-
turesque. New Mexico, these romanticizers discovered, also had picturesque
Hispanics, picturesque Indians (many of them partially Hispanicized), pic-
turesque desert, and a tradition of arts and crafts that surpassed any other
area of the old Spanish borderlands.
Hispanic art in New Mexico had found its most creative expression in the
form of naive but powerfully evocative wood carvings of saints, or santos,
and paintings of saints on pine boards, known as retablos. The earliest foreign
visitors to New Mexico either dismissed these objects as unworthy of mention
or denigrated them as “unmeaning bits of ill-carved wood,” “hideous dolls,”
or “miserable pictures of the saints.” In the twentieth century, the abstract,
simple lines of these works came to be treasured and the saint makers, or
santeros, regarded as heirs to one of the few indigenous artistic traditions in
the United States.
New Mexico’s adobe churches and adobe homes underwent a similar
metamorphosis in historical interpretation. At first, Anglo Americans had
dismissed adobe as an inferior building material, little more than mud. In the
last half of the nineteenth century, Americans and upper-class Hispanos
imported fashionable domestic architecture from the East Coast and the Mid-
dle West—Greek revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, and colonial revival—and
they Gothicized adobe churches with ornate wooden trim. In the early twenti-
eth century, however, Spanish-Pueblo styles were rediscovered, and the so-
called Santa Fe style slowly came into vogue. Churches began to be
de-Gothicized and re-restored to approximate their original appearance.
New Mexico’s admiration for things Hispanic did not manifest itself
entirely in refurbishing the old. New Mexicans also invented new historical

252
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

35. Beginning in the 1890s, a French priest, Antonine Docher, slowly

transformed the church at Isleta Pueblo, adding a covered balcony, replacing its
flat roof with a pitched one of corrugated iron, and topping it all with wooden
belfries, gables, and a dozen crosses. As photographed ca. 1922. Elsa
Brumm Collection, Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 2669.

traditions, including the now-famous Santa Fe Fiesta, an Anglo-American cre-

ation of the early twentieth century that celebrated the “Day of . . . Franciscan
Missionaries and Martyrs,” the “Day of the Conquerors,” and the “Day of
Spanish Romance.”
In parts of southeastern America, the romanticization of the Hispanic
past began earlier than in the Southwest. With the end of the Civil War, the
completion of railroad lines into the South, and the beginnings of Yankee
tourism, the Hispanic past became, if not a heritage to cherish, a commod-
ity to market. Histories and guidebooks sentimentalized local history and
deemphasized or abandoned the Black Legend. George Fairbanks’s History
of Florida, published in 1871, helped set the new tone. For example, instead
of lingering on Hernando de Soto’s harsh treatment of Indians, as earlier
writers had tended to do, Fairbanks explained it away as “a measure of policy”
and presented De Soto as a “gallant adventurer.” Fairbanks asked his readers
to admire “the perseverance and hardihood” of De Soto’s band: “three hun-
dred mounted men, on noble Andalusian steeds, richly caparisoned . . . all
gentlemen and noble cavaliers, hidalgos of rank and scions of the noblest
families of Spain.”

253
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

36. Diego de Vargas and the Franciscans, Santa Fe Fiesta, 1919. Photograph
by T. Harmon Parkhurst. Courtesy, Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 52375.

No southern community celebrated its Spanish past more enthusiastically

than St. Augustine, which played upon its position as America’s oldest
continuously occupied European community. In 1885, for the benefit of
wealthy winter tourists, the city’s boosters invented a tradition of celebrating
Ponce de León’s “romantic” discovery of Florida with historic reenactments,
parades, concerts, fireworks, and yacht races. But being first was not enough.
St. Augustine, along with the rest of the Southeast, lacked two of the essential
ingredients for a full-course Spanish revival such as the oldest communities
in California, Arizona, and New Mexico enjoyed. First, descendants of the
earliest Hispanic settlers had long since vanished across much of the South,
as had Hispanicized Indians. “Most tourists expect to find here a Spanish
population,” one guidebook to St. Augustine explained in 1892, but “the
swarthy Spaniard stalks through the streets no longer.”
Second, throughout the South, Spanish architecture, the most potent vi-
sual reminder of continuity with the Hispanic past, had also disappeared in

254
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

37. Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida, as portrayed romantically in a brochure

published for tourists by the Cincinnati Southern Railway, Winter Cities in a
Summer Land: A Tour through Florida and the Winter Resorts of the South (1881).
Courtesy, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

large measure by the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast to the Southwest,

the region had no ruins of Spanish missions to stir the souls of tourists. Some
overzealous historians and amateurs tried to fill the region’s void in mission
architecture by portraying the remnants of prosaic nineteenth-century Georgia
sugar mills as the romantic ruins of seventeenth-century Spanish missions.
That idea gained momentum during the first three decades of the twentieth
century, before it ran squarely into a competing vision of Georgia’s colonial
origins. In the 1930s, the Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America

255
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

sponsored an investigation that effectively debunked the stories of Spanish

mission ruins in Georgia.
In the South, some domestic and public architecture did survive from the
Spanish era, but it lacked the clear associations with Spain that characterized
the Southwest’s adobe ranchos, homes, and public buildings. New Orleans
held the Southeast’s most impressive ensemble of urban structures from the
Spanish era, but like that city’s culture and people, the Spanish buildings
that dominated the French Quarter came to be remembered as French. In
Pensacola and St. Augustine, some early Spanish structures have remained,
even though most were either destroyed or modified during the English occu-
pation, from 1763 to 1783. Although Spaniards had reoccupied both cities in
1784, Spanish architectural styles did not return with them. Americans who
took possession of the two towns in 1821 found eclectic structures that could
not be described as distinctively Spanish. In St. Augustine, buildings from
the Spanish era continued to disappear unmourned throughout the nine-
teenth century, replaced by styles current in the Northeast. Not until the 1930s
did serious efforts get under way to preserve the city’s Spanish architectural
heritage.
Late in the century a presumed Spanish style swept into Florida, but it
owed less to continuity with the local past than to new influences from Spain,
Mexico, and California. Henry Flagler, a petroleum tycoon and Florida’s
most visionary developer, introduced “Spanish Renaissance” architecture to
Florida in the late 1880s when he built resort hotels at St. Augustine in an
eclectic, theatrical style. When Flagler moved farther south to Palm Beach
in the 1890s, he abandoned not only St. Augustine but the faux Spanish style
as well. Floridians largely ignored the Spanish style until 1919, when an ar-
chitect from California named Addison Mizner rediscovered that in Florida
“the history, the romance and the setting were all Spanish.” Mizner built the
Everglades Club at Palm Beach—the first major structure in South Florida
done in a style identified as Spanish—and his masterpiece, the community
of Boca Raton.
Addison Mizner’s conception of Florida’s past, however, was as fictitious
as Henry Flagler’s and represented little more than a local elaboration of
mission revival. Also called Spanish colonial, Spanish revival captured national
attention with a dazzling display at the Panama–California Exposition in San
Diego’s Balboa Park in 1915. Spanish revival, which ranged from Renaissance

256
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

38. Henry Flagler’s first hotel in St. Augustine, name Hotel De León,
began taking guests in 1888. Today it is the home of Flagler College.
Courtesy, St. Augustine Historical Society.

to baroque and contained a generous admixture of influences from throughout

the Mediterranean and Mexico, had few genuine antecedents in America
north of Mexico. Unable to find, much less revive, significant numbers of
elaborate and decorative models in the nation’s Hispanic past, American
architects manufactured their own indigenous Hispanic architecture.
However removed from historical realities its allusions to the past may
have been, Spanish revival’s evocation of sense of place beguiled many Amer-
icans. In the 1920s and 1930s, Spanish-influenced churches, schools, banks,
hotels, railroad stations, shopping centers, and assorted public buildings,
many of them with Spanish names as well as Spanish styles, arose across the
land—even in places like Kansas City and Dallas that had no significant link
to the Spanish era. By the 1920s, then, Americans had reimagined the Span-
ish past in the vocabulary of architecture as well as in prose, and the two
forms of expression aided and abetted one another. Revivals of Spanish revival

257
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

have continued to occur up to the present day. Some cynics dismiss the worst
of the current mode as Taco Deco or Mariachi Moderne.

The Hispanophobia of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century has

endured to the present day, but among American writers of history the pro-
Spanish and often sentimentalized view of America’s Hispanic past that
emerged in the late nineteenth century has prevailed through most of the
twentieth century. This viewpoint found its most authoritative voices in
Herbert Eugene Bolton and the large cadre of doctoral candidates that he
trained while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, between
his arrival there in 1911 and his death in 1953. That Bolton did his own prodi-
gious research and writing in California and produced a bumper crop of 104
Ph.D.s and 323 M.A.s there is not surprising. The seedbed of the mission
and Spanish revivals in America, California was also the most affluent state
along the continent’s southern rim. It could support libraries, researchers,
writers, and readers as no other state in the Southwest or the Southeast
could, and it had nourished vigorous historical writing on Hispanic North
America even before Bolton entered the scene.

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

39. Spanish revival came to Kansas City in 1923 with the construction of
Country Club Plaza. Courtesy, Missouri Valley Special Collections,
Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri.

258
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

From his first days at Berkeley, Bolton’s explicit goal was to enlarge the
scope of American history beyond its well-known English, Dutch, and French
antecedents to include the nation’s Hispanic origins—a story he regarded as
important but little understood. As he promoted that story, Bolton tried to
compensate for what he regarded as the distortions of the Black Legend. He
emphasized the heroic achievements of individual Spaniards and the posi-
tive contributions of Hispanic institutions and culture, often to a fault.
Through his solid scholarship ran an unabashed strain of sentimentality, as
when he characterized the history of the borderlands as picturesque and
romantic and when he uncritically endorsed the idea that the remnants of
sugar mills in Georgia were ruins of seventeenth-century missions.
The Bolton school dominated American historical scholarship on the
borderlands until the 1960s. His disciples and other like-minded historians
reexamined Spain’s frontier institutions and culture and found positive
Spanish influences on many aspects of American life, including agriculture,
mining, ranching, architecture, art, law, language, literature, and music. Bolton
himself had so celebrated Spain’s contributions to America that he had written
of “Spain’s frontiering genius.” Implicitly or explicitly, many of his disciples
echoed him. For example, Alfred Barnaby Thomas, a Bolton protégé who
translated documents that revealed serious weaknesses in Spain’s governance
of its empire, lauded “the genius of Spanish civilization.”

Beginning in the 1950s, historians began to chip away at Bolton’s historical

construction from several directions. Some struck at the very foundation of
the Bolton school by challenging the claim that the Spanish past was relevant
to explaining the history of the United States. In an influential essay pub-
lished in 1955, Earl Pomeroy argued that scholars had exaggerated the roles
of Hispanics and other “local foreign groups” in respect to their relative
importance. “Actually,” Pomeroy wrote, “the native Spanish and Mexican
elements in many parts of the West—particularly California where they are
revered today—were small and uninfluential.” American historians seldom
took this position in print, but they implicitly regarded the activities of
Spaniards as inconsequential to understanding the nation’s history. Many
studies, as historian John Caughey pointed out in 1965, treated the old Spanish
provinces “as though they were an exotic prior figuration extraneous to all

259
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

that developed later,” and textbooks in American history gave the Spanish
era short shrift.
Other critics granted the relevance of the Hispanic past but accused the
Bolton school of misinterpreting it. From within the ranks of historians in-
volved in the study of colonial Latin America came charges that the Boltoni-
ans had idealized the past. From another direction, some historians criticized
the Boltonians for overemphasizing Spaniards and losing sight of the fact that
culturally and genetically the society of northern New Spain was essentially
Mexican. Carey McWilliams, the most vocal of this latter group of critics, had
argued in 1948 that southwestern America had fallen under the spell of what
he called “a fantasy heritage”—“an absurd dichotomy between things Spanish
and things Mexican.” Those Anglo Americans who glorified the region’s
Spanish heritage while ignoring or discriminating against living Mexicans,
McWilliams charged, were deluded by this fantasy. So, too, were those Mexi-
can Americans who preferred to identify themselves as Spanish in order to
disassociate themselves from more recent immigrants from Mexico. This phe-
nomenon had its counterpart in St. Augustine, where descendants of Minor-
cans began, in the 1950s, to suggest their lineage to Spanish nobility.
The world of scholars had mirrored the schizoid view of Hispanics in
southwestern America that McWilliams described. Bolton himself simulta-
neously celebrated “Spain’s frontiering genius” while suggesting that Mexican
“half-breeds—mestizoes [sic] or mulattoes” were naturally vicious and unruly.
In Bolton’s day, social scientists who studied living Mexican Americans
explained the group’s relative poverty as a pathological condition caused by
cultural deficiencies, including passivity, laziness, and an inability to look
beyond the present. At best, the “fantasy heritage” split the history of His-
panics in the Southwest into two disconnected parts, tacitly denying Mexican
Americans their historic roots in the region. At worst, it implied that long-
time residents with strong Indian features or immigrants from Mexico were
inferior aliens in a new land. “Pure Spaniards,” the eminent historian Walter
Prescott Webb opined in 1931, had pushed the Spanish frontier northward,
cutting “like a blade of Damascus steel,” but as the frontier advanced and
Spaniards mingled with “sedentary Indian stock, whose blood . . . was as
ditch water,” the steel lost its temper.
Although a few specialists deplored the “fantasy heritage,” their objections
went largely unheeded until the late 1960s, when a small number of Chicano

260
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

scholars set out to recapture the past for Mexican Americans. They had to
start from scratch. Unlike other peoples who invented enduring myths about
themselves in their own lifetimes, Hispanic elites on the impoverished frontiers
of North America had produced a meager literature of self-glorification—
one that most Chicano historians quickly rejected. Sympathizing with the
exploited rather than the exploiters, Chicano historians (like some of their
Mexican counterparts of that era) tended to identify themselves more closely
with their Indian or mestizo ancestors than with Spaniards. Indeed, some of
the most influential Chicano scholars adopted a long-range Indian perspec-
tive that reduced the three-century Spanish era to a relatively brief interlude.
At the heart of that indigenous perspective was the powerful idea of a Chicano
homeland called Aztlán.
Metaphorically, if not in fact, some Chicano intellectuals embraced the
idea that the American Southwest was Aztlán, the mythic ancestral home of
the Aztecs. The Southwest, these scholars argued, had been the homeland
of the Aztec or Mexica peoples before they migrated southward to achieve
greatness in central Mexico in the fourteenth century. Thus, the descendants
of the Aztecs, Mexicans who had immigrated to the United States in the
twentieth century, had simply returned home to the cradle of Mexican civi-
lization when they crossed the border. This vision of the past contained
more poetry than prose and offended a number of historians, Mexican
Americans among them. It did, nonetheless, extend Chicano claims to the
Southwest farther back in time than those of Spaniards or Anglo Americans
and it established Chicanos as natives rather than immigrants in the region.
The myth of Aztlán, which became a powerful symbol for the Chicano
movement, provided a semblance of historical unity for the distinct historical
experiences of californianos, arizonenses, nuevomexicanos, and tejanos but could
not serve to unify all Hispanos in America in the late twentieth century. The
two other largest Hispanic groups, portoriqueños and cubanos, had their own
homelands offshore, and the diversity of America’s Hispanic population
made unity elusive, if not impossible. Indeed, no unified history of Hispanics
in America emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, but there appeared instead his-
tories of Hispanic groups, organized on the basis of national origin.
The value of Aztlán as a symbol faded by the 1980s, but the solid historical
scholarship that emerged from the Chicano movement endured. Although
some students of Mexican-American history have dismissed the Spanish era

261
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

40. Protesting the Vietnam War, these students marched behind the
banner of Aztlán in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, the day of the
Chicano National Moratorium. Courtesy, Devra Anne Weber.

as irrelevant, others have plumbed the Spanish past to illuminate the present.
In particular, a number of Chicano historians have explored themes that res-
onate with problems of Mexicans in America as well as with concerns of
contemporary social historians: migration, exploitation of labor and women,
class struggle, racism, acculturation, accommodation, urban life, crime, pun-
ishment, family, faith, and the fortitude and adaptability of common folk
who endure in times of rapid change and stress. In so doing, they have tran-
scended the view of New Spain’s northern frontier as romantic or picturesque
and have gone beyond seeing events solely through the eyes of explorers,
missionaries, soldiers, or government officials.
Like the myth of Aztlán, this new construction provides historical continu-
ity for Mexicans that the romantic view denied them. Descendants of those
Mexicans who remained in the region after the United States seized it in
1848 or who have entered it since need no longer regard themselves as outsiders

262
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

in a new land, but rather as residents of a “lost land.” Moreover, possession of

a homeland with a history that is their own further empowered Mexicans in
America to demand political and social justice and self-determination.
Nowhere was this clearer than among the Hispano villagers of northern New
Mexico. There, an expanded historical identity for a people whose ethnicity
has long been marketed as a commodity for tourists provided collective
strength and converted lost rural land into a powerful symbol of ethnic resis-
tance. In southeastern America, conversely, no such symbol emerged.
At the same time Chicano historians attacked the Boltonians for elitism
and romanticism, a growing group of scholars challenged the Bolton school
for its failure to tell fully the Indian side of the story. Bolton and his fol-
lowers had by no means overlooked the impact of Spanish colonization on
American Indians (and were more attentive to Indian history than their
counterparts who studied Anglo-American frontiers), but they had slighted
it. In some of their more exuberant efforts to whitewash the Black Legend,
some traditional borderlands historians neglected to question stereotypical
views that portrayed Indians as benighted, if not bedeviled and malevolent
“untamed savages.” In their desire to find Spanish heroes, the Boltonians
had often neglected to give Indians their due as rational historical actors
who made choices that circumscribed the scope of Spaniards’ actions. As
they sought to demonstrate the lasting contributions that Spain made to
America, borderlands scholars had frequently failed to make clear that
Spaniards achieved many of their successes at agonizing cost to Indians. In
the late twentieth century, ethnohistorians, who sought to reconstruct the
past of North American Indian groups, deconstructed the traditional Euro-
centric, triumphalist vision of the past and offered in its place a multisided
historical reality. Ethnohistorians were especially effective at penetrating In-
dian societies to reveal how and why they and their individual members ar-
ticulated with Spanish society and its members.
By the end of the twentieth century there were a variety of ways to under-
stand the Spanish colonial era in American history. Evidence of the His-
panophilic view of the Spanish borderlands promoted by the Boltonians could
still be found, but it had fallen from fashion. Hispanophobia and the Black
Legend also continued to have adherents in some circles. Indeed, in a well-
nuanced work a single historian might portray Spaniards from opposing view-
points, as both conquerors and conquered, victors and victims. Whether

263
 spanish legacy and historical imagination

historians deplored Spain, applauded Spain, or merely explained Spain,

most insisted that the Spanish past needed to be more fully integrated into
the modern understanding of American history and that it needs to be revis-
ited from new approaches, such as the environment, gender, and the analysis
of discourse, and placed into larger comparative perspectives.

There have been many ways to comprehend the meaning of the Spanish
frontier in North America, some of them contradictory and all of them valid,
even if not of equal merit. This is not to deny the existence of an objective
past or historians’ ability to ferret out data and documents about the past. The
past itself, however, has ceased to exist. What remains of importance is only
our understanding of it, and that understanding, as historian Peter Novick
has squarely put it, “is in the mind of a human being or it is nowhere.” Lack-
ing omniscience and possessing only a partial record of the past, we humans
reconstruct time and place in highly imperfect ways, fashioning stories that
often tell us more about the teller than the tale. The Spanish past in North
America, then, is not only what we have imagined it to be, but what we will
continue to make of it. Like all historical terrain, the Spanish frontier seems
destined to remain contested ground, transformed repeatedly in the historical
imaginations of succeeding generations—much as the actual Spanish frontier
and its peoples were transformed by several centuries of contention with the
land and with one another, from the first landing of Ponce de León in 1513 to
the end of the Spanish empire in North America in 1821.

264
 For Further Reading

The unabridged version of The Spanish Frontier in North America, which is readily
available in libraries, bookstores, and on-line as an e-book, contains an extensive
bibliography of works published prior to its publication in 1992. The selective bibli-
ography that follows aims to guide readers and researchers to the surprisingly large
number of books that have appeared between 1992 and 2007. Reflecting a shift in
scholarly sensibilities, many of these titles look at events and processes in the region
from the viewpoints of Native Americans rather than through Spanish eyes, as ear-
lier historians tended to do. Neither have I included all of the growing number of
fine books on today’s north Mexican states, from Baja California to Nuevo San-
tander. Those books explore themes related to developments north of the present
border, but the north Mexican states do not fall squarely within the geographical
framework of The Spanish Frontier in North America. The list would be longer, too,
if I included articles in scholarly journals and chapters in collections of essays. Re-
searchers can find guidance to that literature in the books cited below and in the rich
electronic database America, History and Life.

Alonzo, Armando C. Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

265
 for further reading

Anderson, Gary Clayton. The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Rein-
vention. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Arnold, Morris S. The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World New-
comers, 1673–1804. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.
Atkinson, James R. Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Re-
moval. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Axtell, James. The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast. Ba-
ton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997.
Baker, Brenda J., and Lisa Kealhofer, eds. Bioarchaeology of Native American Adapta-
tion in the Spanish Borderlands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas
Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Barrett, Elinore M. Conquest and Catastrophe: Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement
Patterns in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2002.
Baxter, John O. Dividing New Mexico’s Waters, 1700–1912. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz, eds. Lands of Promise and Despair:
Chronicles of Early California, 1535–1846. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001.
Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz, trans. and eds. Testimonios: Early
California through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848. Berkeley: Heyday Books. The
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2006.
Beeson, Kenneth H. Fromajadas and Indigo: The Minorcan Colony in Florida.
Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2006.
Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American
West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Blakeslee, Donald J. Along Ancient Trails: The Mallet Expedition of 1739. Niwot: Uni-
versity Press of Colorado, 1995.
Bouvier, Virginia. Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840. Tucson: Univer-
sity of Arizona Press, 2001.
Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-
America, 1685–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the South-
west Borderlands . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omo-
hundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002.
Bushnell, Amy Turner. Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and
Mission Provinces of Florida. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum
of Natural History, no. 74. New York: American Museum of Natural History,
1994.

266
 for further reading

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. Edited and trans-
lated by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz. Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 2003.
Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The American West Before Lewis and
Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from
Prehistory to Removal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Cebrián González, Carmen. Cambio y permanencia: La Florida española, 1783–1821.
Cádiz: Diputación de Cádiz, 1999.
Chapa, Juan Bautista. Texas and Northeastern Mexico, 1630–1690. Edited by William
C. Foster. Translated by Ned F. Brierley. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Chávez García, Miroslava. Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California,
1770s–1880s. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.
Chávez, Thomas E. Spain and the Independence of the United States: An Intrinsic Gift.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Chipman, Donald E. Spanish Texas, 1519–1821. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Chipman, Donald E., and Harriett Denise Joseph. Explorers and Settlers of Spanish
Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
———. Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1999.
Clayton, Lawrence, Vernon James Knight, and Edward C. Moore, eds. The De Soto
Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North America, 1539–1543. 2 vols.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Clayton, Lawrence A., ed. The Hispanic Experience in North America: Sources for Study
in the United States. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992.
Covington, James W. The Seminoles of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida , 1993.
Craddock, Jerry R., ed. Zaldívar and the Cattle of Cíbola: Vicente de Zaldívar’s Report
of His Expedition to the Buffalo Plains in 1598. Translated by John H. R. Polt. Dal-
las: William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, 2000.
Crespí, Juan. Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition
into California, 1769–1770. Edited and translated by Alan K. Brown. San Diego:
San Diego State University Press, 2002.
Cusick, James G. The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of
Spanish East Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Cutter, Charles R. The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Cutter, Donald C., ed. and trans. Writings of Mariano Payeras. Santa Barbara:
Bellerophon Books, 1995.

267
 for further reading

Cutter, Donald C., and Iris Engstrand. Quest for Empire: Spanish Settlement in the
Southwest. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1996.
De la Teja, Jesús F. San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern
Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
De la Teja, Jesús F., and Ross Frank, eds. Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Con-
trol on Spain’s North American Frontiers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2005.
Deeds, Susan M. Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians Under
Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Deverell, William. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its
Mexican Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Din, Gilbert C. Francisco Bouligny: A Bourbon Soldier in Spanish Louisiana. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.
———. Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in
Louisiana, 1763–1803. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.
Din, Gilbert C., ed. The Spanish Presence in Louisiana, 1763–1803. Lafayette: Center
for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 1996.
Din, Gilbert C., and John E. Harkins. The New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana’s
First City Government, 1769–1803. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996.
Duggan, Marie Christine. The Chumash and the Presidio of Santa Barbara: Evolution
of a Relationship, 1782–1823. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Trust for Historic
Preservation, 2004.
Duncan, David Ewing. Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. New York:
Crown, 1996.
Dunmire, William W. Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods
Changed America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Conti-
nent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Early, James. Presidio, Mission, and Pueblo: Spanish Architecture and Urbanism in the
United States. Dallas: SMU Press, 2003.
Ebright, Malcolm. Land Grants and Lawsuits in Northern New Mexico. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Ebright, Malcolm, and Rick Hendricks. The Witches of Abiquiu: The Governor, the
Priest, the Genízaro Indians, and the Devil. Albuquerque: University of New Mex-
ico Press, 2006.
Ekberg, Carl J. Francois Vallé and His World: Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Ethridge, Robbie. Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

268
 for further reading

Ethridge, Robbie, and Charles Hudson, eds. The Transformation of the Southeastern
Indians, 1540–1760. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
Fenn, Elizabeth Anne. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New
York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Fisher, Vivian C., ed. and trans. Esteban José Martínez: His Voyage in 1779 to Supply
Alta California. Berkeley: Bancroft Library, 2002.
Flagler, Edward K. Defensores de la madre tierra. Relaciones interétnicas: Los españoles y
los indios de Nuevo México. Palma de Mallorca: Hesperus, 1997.
Flint, Richard. Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coro-
nado Expedition. Dallas: SMU Press, 2002.
Flint, Richard, and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds. The Coronado Expedition from the
Distance of 460 Years. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.
———, eds. The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1540–1542 Route Across the
Southwest. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997.
———, eds. and trans. Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539–1542. ‘They Were
Not Familiar with His Majesty, nor Did They Wish to Be His Subjects’. Dallas: SMU
Press, 2005.
Fontana, Bernard L. Entrada: The Legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States.
Tucson and Albuquerque: Southwest Parks and Monuments Association and the
University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Foster, William C. Spanish Expeditions into Texas, 1689–1768. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1995.
Francaviglia, Richard V. Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin: A Cartographic
History. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005.
Frank, Andrew. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Frank, Larry, and Skip Miller. A Land So Remote. 3 vols. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books,
2001.
Frank, Ross. From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Cre-
ation of a Vecino Society, 1750–1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Galgano, Robert. Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century
Missions of Florida and New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2005.
Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade and the Rise of the English Empire in the Ameri-
can South, 1670–1717. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Galloway, Patricia. Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1995.
———, ed. The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery”
in the Southeast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

269
 for further reading

Garate, Donald T. Juan Bautista de Anza: Basque Explorer in the New World,
1693–1740. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003.
Glantz, Margo, ed. Notas y comentarios sobre Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Mexico:
Editorial Grijalbo, 1993.
Gordon, Elsbeth K. Florida’s Colonial Architectual Heritage. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2002.
Guerrero, Vladimir. The Anza Trail and the Settling of California. Santa Clara and
Berkeley: Santa Clara University and Heydey Books, 2006.
Guest, Francis F. Hispanic California Revisited: Essays by Francis F. Guest, O.F.M.
Edited by Doyce B., Nunis, Jr. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Mission Archive Li-
brary, 1996.
Gutiérrez, Ramón A., and Richard J. Orsi, eds. Contested Eden: California Before the
Gold Rush. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Guy, Donna, and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds. Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers
on the Edges of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest and the Rio de la Plata.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press , 1998.
Haas, Lisbeth. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.
Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian–Spanish Rela-
tions in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005.
Hadley, Diana, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, eds. The Presidio
and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History. Vol-
ume 2, Part 2: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1700–1765. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1997.
Hahn, Stephen C. The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1763. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-
Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity, 1992.
Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains
Indian Trade System.” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998): 485–513.
Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial
New Orleans, 1769–1803. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Hann, John H. A History of the Timucua Indians and the Missions. Gainesville: Uni-
versity of Florida Press, 1996.
———. The Native American World Beyond Apalachee: West Florida and the Chatta-
hoochee Valley . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
Hann, John H., ed. Missions to the Calusa. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1991.

270
 for further reading

Hann, John H., and Bonnie G. McEwan. The Apalachee Indians and Mission San
Luis. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998.
Hendricks, Rick, and W. H. Timmons. San Elizario: Spanish Presidio to Texas County
Seat. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1998.
Hickerson, Nancy Parrott. The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Hoffman, Paul E. Florida’s Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Hoffman, Paul E. Luisiana. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.
Hordes, Stanley M. To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mex-
ico. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Howard, David A. Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the
Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.
Hudson, Charles. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the
South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
Hudson, Charles, and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds. The Forgotten Centuries: Indians
and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1994.
Hurtado, Albert L. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Al-
buquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
Imhoff, Brian, ed. The Diary of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza’s Expedition into Texas,
1683–1684: A Spanish Language Critical Edition with Facsimile. Dallas: Clements
Center for Southwest Studies, 2002.
Jackman, Jarrell C. Felipe de Goicoechea: Santa Barbara Presidio Comandante. Santa
Barbara: Anson Luman Press, 1993.
Jackson, Jack, and William C. Foster, eds. Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the
Rivera and Rubi Military Expeditions, 1727 and 1767. Austin: Texas State Histori-
cal Association, 1995.
Jackson, Robert H. From Savages to Subjects: Missions in the History of the American
Southwest. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2000.
Jackson, Robert H., ed. New Views of Borderlands History. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1998.
Jackson, Robert H., and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Coloniza-
tion: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: Univer-
sity of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Jiménez, Alfredo. El Gran Norte de México: Una frontera imperial en la Nueva España,
1540–1820. Madrid: Editorial Tébar, 2006.
Joutel, Henri. The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 168–1687.
Edited by William C. Foster. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
Kapitzke, Robert L. Religion, Power, and Politics in Colonial St. Augustine. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2001.

271
 for further reading

Kastor, Peter J. The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of
America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Kavanagh, Thomas W. Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective,
1706–1875. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Kendrick, John. Alejandro Malaspina: Portrait of a Visionary. Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1999.
Kessell, John L. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico,
Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Kessell, John L., and Rick Hendricks, eds. and trans. By Force of Arms: The Journals of
Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691–93. Albuquerque: University of New Mex-
ico Press, 1992.
Kessell, John L., Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds. and trans. Blood on
the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1694–1697. 2 vols.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
———, eds. and trans. Letters from the New World: Selected Correspondence of don
Diego de Vargas to His Family, 1675–1706. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1992.
———, eds. and trans. To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of don Diego de Var-
gas, New Mexico, 1692–1694. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Kessell, John L., and others, eds. and trans. That Disturbances Cease: The Journals of
don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1697–1700. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2000.
———, eds. and trans. A Settling of Accounts: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas,
New Mexico, 1700–1704. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-
Century New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Krieger, Alex D. We Came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Across
North America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.
Kukla, Jon. A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of Amer-
ica. New York: Knopf, 2003.
La Vere, David. The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700–1835. Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
———. The Texas Indians. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Landers, Jane G., ed. Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida. Gainesville: Uni-
versity Press of Florida, 2000.
Langellier, John Phillip, and Daniel B. Rosen. El Presidio de San Francisco: A History
Under Spain and Mexico, 1776–1846. Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1996.
Langer, Erick, and Robert Jackson, eds. The New Latin American Mission History.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

272
 for further reading

Lemmon, Alfred E., and others, eds. Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of
Maps. New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 2003.
Lewis, James E., Jr. The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United
States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998.
Lightfoot, Kent G. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial En-
counters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Longinos, José. Diario de las expediciones a las Californias. Edited by Salvador Bern-
abéu. Madrid: Doce Calles, 1994.
Madrid, Roque. The Navajos in 1705: Roque Madrid’s Campaign Journal. Edited and
translated by Rick Hendricks and John P. Wilson. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1996.
Magnaghi, Russell M. Herbert E. Bolton and the Historiography of the Americas. West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.
McCollough, Martha. Three Nations, One Place: A Comparative Ethnohistory of Social
Change Among the Comanches and Hasinais During Spain’s Colonial Era, 1689–1821.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
McDowell, Jim. José Narvaez, the Forgotten Explorer: Including His Narrative of a Voy-
age on the Northwest Coast in 1788. Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1998.
McGrath, John T. The French in Early Florida: In the Eye of the Hurricane.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Milanich, Jerald T. Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe. Gainesville: Univer-
sity Press of Florida, 1995.
———. Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.
Milanich, Jerald T., and Charles Hudson. Hernando de Soto and the Indians of
Florida. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993.
Milliken, Randall. A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture
in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769–1810. Menlo Park, Calif.: Ballena Press,
1995.
Montgomery, Charles H. The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New
Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Murphree, Daniel S. Constructing Floridians: Natives and Europeans in the Colonial
Floridas, 1513–1783. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
Nieto-Phillips, John M. The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American
Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2004.
Norris, Jim. After the Year Eighty: The Demise of Franciscan Power in Spanish New
Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press and Academy of Ameri-
can Franciscan History, 2000.

273
 for further reading

Nunis, Jr., Doyce B., ed. The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition.
Los Angeles: Historical Society of Southern California and the Zamorano Club
of Los Angeles, 2004.
O’Brien, Greg. Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002.
O’Conor, Hugo. The Defenses of Northern New Spain: Hugo O’Conor’s Report to
Teodoro de Croix, July 22, 1777. Edited and translated by Donald C. Cutter. Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press/DeGolyer Library, 1994.
Ortega Soto, Martha. Alta California: una frontera olvidada del noroeste de México,
1769–1846. Mexico: UNAM, 2001.
Padilla, Carmella, ed. Conexiones: Connections in Spanish Colonial Art. Santa Fe: Mu-
seum of Spanish Colonial Art, 2002.
Pauley, Kenneth E., and Carol M. Pauley, eds. San Fernando, Rey de España: An Il-
lustrated History. Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 2005.
Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar. Historia de la Nueva México, 1610: A Critical and Annotated
Spanish/English Edition. Edited and translated by Miguel Encinias and others.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.
Perissinotto, Giorgio, ed. Documenting Everyday Life in Early California: The Santa
Barbara Presidio Memorias y Facturas, 1779–1810. Santa Barbara: Trust for Historic
Preservation, 1998.
Perttula, Timothy K. “The Caddo Nation”: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspec-
tives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Phillips, George Harwood. Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769–1849.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
Pierce, Donna, and Marta Weigle, eds. Spanish New Mexico: The Spanish Colonial
Arts Society Collection. 2 vols. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Piker, Joshua. Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America. Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2004.
Polzer, Charles W., and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds. The Presidio and Militia on the
Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History. Volume 2, Part 1: The
Californias and Sinaloa-Sonora, 1700–1765. Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1997.
Poyo, Gerald E., ed. Tejano Journey, 1770–1850. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Preston, Douglas. Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of
Coronado. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Preucel, Robert W., ed. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Re-
newal in the Pueblo World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Rabasa, José. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of
Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000.

274
 for further reading

Radding, Cynthia. Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological

Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850. Durham: Duke University Press,
1997.
Reff, Daniel T. Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New
Spain, 1518–1764. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991.
———. Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in
the Old World and the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Reinhartz, Dennis, and Gerald D. Saxon, eds. The Mapping of the Entradas into the
Greater Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Riley, Carroll L. Rio del Norte: People of the Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to
the Pueblo Revolt. Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1995.
Roberts, David. The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spaniards Out
of the Southwest. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Rodríguez-Sala, María Luisa, Ignacio Gómezgil R.S., and María Eugenia Cué. Ex-
ploradores en el septentrión novohispano. Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrúa , 1995.
———. Navegantes, exploradores, y misioneros en el septentrión novohispano en el siglo
XVI. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, 1993.
Rollings, Willard H. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-
Plains. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.
———. Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance to the Christian Invasion (1673–1906),
A Cultural Victory. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2004.
Sánchez, Joseph P. Explorers, Traders, and Slavers: Forging the Old Spanish Trail,
1678–1850. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997.
Sandos, James A. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions,
1769–1836. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Santiago, Mark. Massacre at the Yuma Crossing: Spanish Relations with the Quechans,
1779–1782. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998.
———. The Red Captain: The Life of Hugo O’Conor, Commandant Inspector of the In-
terior Provinces of New Spain. Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1994.
Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the
Creek Indians, 1733–1816. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Sheridan, Cecilia. El “yugo suave del evangelico”: Las misiones franciscanas de Río
Grande en el período colonial. Saltillo, Coahuila: Centro de Estudios Sociales y
Humanísticos, 1999.
Sheridan, Thomas E. Empire of Sand: The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish
Sonora, 1645–1803. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.
Simmons, Marc. Coronado’s Land: Essays on Daily Life in Colonial New Mexico. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.
Simmons, Marc. Spanish Pathways: Readings in the History of Hispanic New Mexico.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

275
 for further reading

Smith, F. Todd. The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542–1854.
College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995.
———. From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near South-
west, 1786–1859. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
———. The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540–1845. Col-
lege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
Smith, Marvin T. Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom.
Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000.
Street, Richard Steven. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative of California Farmworkers,
1769–1913. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Stuntz, Jean A. Hers, His, and Theirs: Community Property Law in Spain and Early
Texas. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2005.
Taylor, Alan. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Viking, 2001.
Trigg, Heather B. From Household to Empire: Society and Economy in Early Colonial
New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005.
Usner, Daniel H., Jr. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Eco-
nomic Histories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
———. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mis-
sissippi Valley Before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Vecsey, Christopher. On the Padres’ Trail. American Indian Catholics. Volume 1.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.
Vigil, Ralph H., Frances W. Kaye, and John R. Wunder, eds. Spain and the Plains:
Myths and Realities of Spanish Exploration and Settlement on the Great Plains.
Niwot: University of Colorado Press, 1994.
Wade, Maria F. The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582–1799.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Waselkov, Gregory A. A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of
1813–1814. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
Weber, David J. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
———, ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
1999.
Whitehead, Richard S. Citadel on the Channel: The Royal Presidio of Santa Barbara, Its
Founding and Construction, 1782–1798. Edited by Donald Cutter. Spokane: Santa
Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation and Arthur H. Clark, 1996.
Will de Chaparro, Martina. Death and Dying in New Mexico. Albuquerque: Univer-
sity of New Mexico Press, 2007.
Williams, Patrick G., S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds. A Whole
Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest. Fayet-
teville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005.

276
 for further reading

Wilson, Chris. The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Worth, John E. The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish
Retrospective on Guale and Mocama. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
———. Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida. Vol. 1, Assimilation; Vol. 2, Resistance
and Destruction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

277
This page intentionally left blank
 Index

Note: Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations.

Abó Pueblo (New Mexico), 73, 223 Aguayo, marqués de San Miguel de,
Acculturation (of Indians), 11, 45, 191. 124–25, 128, 144, 145
See also Assimilation (of Indians) Aguilar, Rafael, 222
Ácoma Pueblo, 63–64, 73, 104 Ais Indians, 29, 51, 56
Adams, John Quincy, 218 Alabama, 29, 42, 74, 118, 140, 205, 208
Adams-Onís agreement, 218, 219 Alabama Indians, 118, 139, 205, 216
Adelantados: Ayllón as, 31; benefits for Alamo (San Antonio), 2, 121, 246
successful, 21, 25; Menéndez de Alarcón, Martín de, 121, 124, 144
Avilés as, 49, 53–54, 56, 61, 65–68; Alaska, 177, 184, 194
Oñate as, 57–68; warnings to, 237 Albuquerque (New Mexico), 58, 67, 146,
Africa, 20, 25 234, 241
Agriculture: Indian, 16, 17, 40, 60, 75, 85, Alcohol, 135, 208–9
100, 113, 232; irrigated, 17, 38, 144–45; Alexander VI (Pope), 19, 20, 53, 81, 112
at missions, 91; Spanish contributions Allende, Pedro de, 157
to New World, 77, 85, 101–2, 222, Altar presidio, 155, 160, 185
228–29, 232. See also Domesticated Álvarez de Pineda, Alonso, 29–30, 30,
animals; Food; Specific crops 111

279
 index

Amangual, Francisco, 225 2, 4, 132, 165, 185, 187–90, 192, 233, 236;
America (defined), 6. See also New presidios in, 158, 164–65; United
World States seizes, from Mexico, 245
American Revolution, 145, 169, 195–98, Arkansas, 43, 140, 213
196, 201–3, 206 Asia, 16, 33; North America as separate
American Treaty, 135 continent from, 35, 44; Spain’s search
Anazasi peoples, 17–18 for new way to, 28, 32, 33–35, 44, 54, 92
Anglo-Americans: attacks on Texas by, Assimilation (of Indians), 11, 207, 212,
218–20, 245–46, 262–63; as encroach- 221–27. See also Indians: “civilizing”
ing on Spanish territory, 200–202, (Hispanicizing) of
206–9; exclusion of Indians from set- Atherton, Gertrude, 248
tlements of, 10, 226, 241; frontier leg- Atlantic Coast, 30–32, 33, 44, 61, 74–77
ends of, 10; Indian relations with, 175, Aubrey, Charles, 150
208–9, 212; racial superiority alleged Austin, Stephen F., 245–46
by, 245–47; seek alliance with Spain, Ayllón, Lucas Vázquez de, 31, 32, 41
196; on Spain’s North American past, Aztecs, 25, 33, 41, 70–71, 261
244–50 Aztlán, 261, 262
Antilia, 22, 44
Antilles, 30, 74, 230 Bahama Channel, 54, 62, 65, 200
Anza, Juan Bautista de, 171, 184, 185, Bahía de Santa María (Chesapeake
187–90, 194 Bay), 54
Apache Indians: horses’ impact on, 225; Baja California, 34, 44, 66, 180
raids by, 86, 91, 99, 100, 105, 146; on Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 32
reservations, 173–74; Spanish efforts Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 248
to convert, 84, 142–43; Spanish influ- Barr, William, 216
ence on, 94, 226; Spanish plans to Barrancas fort (Pensacola), 1
exterminate, 163, 168, 170–73; warfare Barranganía, 240
on Spaniards by, 155–58, 161–64, 166, Bartram, William, 221
235; weapons of, 126, 165 Baton Rouge fort, 197, 217
Apalachee Indians, 41, 107, 225–26 Beans, 16, 17, 40, 63, 75, 113, 131, 232
Apalachee mission (Florida), 74, 100, Benavides, Alonso de, 221
106, 107, 118, 123, 129, 203 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne de,
Apalachicola Indians, 123 116
Apalachicola mission (Florida), 74, 100 Black Legend, 6, 244–48, 253, 259, 263
L’Archevêque, Jean, 112, 126 Blacks: as ex-slaves, 16, 36, 205; as
Archibald, Robert, 88 slaves, 16, 31, 67, 95, 135–37, 139, 198,
Architecture, 1–4, 233–35, 249–52, 253, 201; social status of, 236–37
254–58 Boca Raton (Florida), 256
Arizona: farming and ranching in, 175; Bolton, Herbert Eugene, 88, 258–60,
Indian resistance in, 107; missions in, 263

280
 index

Bourbon monarchs, 108, 118, 138, 155, 159–61, 163, 164, 166–67, 176, 177, 180,
167, 177, 196. See also Specific monarchs 200, 202, 203
Branciforte (California), 194 Carlos IV (King of Spain), 202, 203,
Bucareli, Antonio de, 165–66, 184, 187, 211, 216
188 Carlos V (King of Spain), 33, 49, 93
Buenaventura River, 188 Carolina. See South Carolina
Carondelet, Barón de, 209, 212
Cabecera-visita system, 78 Carrizal presidio (Mexico), 164
Cabello, Domingo, 171 Casa Calvo, marqués de, 215
Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez, 26, Casañas, Francisco Jesús María (fray), 115
35–36, 40, 43, 44–45, 107 Castilian. See Spanish language
Cabildos (town councils), 138, 144 Catholic Church: in Ireland, 164; power
Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez, 34–35, 62 of, 77, 81; and Spain, 81, 97–99, 180;
Caddo Indians, 40, 113, 115, 118, 119, 121, Spanish frontiersmen as defying,
124, 131, 141, 224 238–40. See also Catholicism;
Cadillac, Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur Conversions; Missionaries; Missions;
de, 119, 120–21 Specific popes
California: memories of Hispanic past Catholicism: benefits to Indians
in, 247–52; missions in, 179–80, of converting to, 58, 70; Indians’
182–85, 187, 190–94, 193, 208, 233, 237, adaptation of, 85–86; Indians’ resis-
250–51; naming of, 34; overland route tance to, 10, 87, 102, 120, 141–43, 192;
to, 107, 165, 184, 185, 186, 187; presidios Juana Luján’s, 229–30; requerimientos
in, 164, 179–83, 187–91, 194, 208, 235, as requiring Indians to accept, 15, 20,
238; Spanish exploration of, 34–35, 56; as Spain’s only enticement with
186, 236; Spanish settlement of, 50, Indians, 106; Spanish crusade to
62–63, 66, 178, 190, 191, 194, 198, 200; spread, 15, 19–20, 25, 54, 56, 59, 70–71,
United States seizes, 245. See also 81, 191, 192, 226. See also Catholic
Specific places in Church; Conversions; Missionaries;
Californios, 194, 248–49 Missions; Pagans
Calleja, Félix, 199 Cattle, 5, 23–24, 77, 157, 159, 190, 222,
Calusa Indians, 29, 51, 56, 225 228, 232
Camino real, 148, 155 Caughey, John, 259
Canada, 53, 65, 110–12, 116, 117, 139, 149, Chacón, Fernando de, 215
198 Chapa, Juan Bautista, 112
Canary Islanders, 144, 152, 196, 230, Charlesfort (South Carolina), 53, 54
236 Charleston (South Carolina), 105–6
Caribbean islands, 28, 92, 95, 236. See Cherokee Indians, 136, 209, 216, 225
also Specific islands Chesapeake Bay, 54
Carlos II (King of Spain), 111, 117–18 Chiaha kingdom, 41–42
Carlos III (King of Spain), 149, 153, 155, Chicano historians, 261–63

281
 index

Chickasaw Indians, 43, 46, 118, 136, 205, 134–42, 147, 168–71, 174, 175, 200, 205,
208, 209, 212, 216, 225 216, 225; among Spaniards over
Chickens, 77, 222, 232 Indian labor, 77, 88, 90–108
Chicora, Francisco de, 31 Contraband. See Trade: illegal
Chihuahua (Mexico), 59, 147, 148, 155, Conventos, 73, 78
175, 216 Conversions: of children, 79; Franciscan
Chisca Indians, 84 tactics for, 71, 78–79, 80, 81–82, 192;
Choctaw Indians, 42, 46, 118, 205, 208, Indians’ resistance to, 10, 87, 120,
209, 212, 216, 225 141–43, 192; as one of Spain’s goals in
Christianity. See Catholicism; New World, 15, 19–20, 54, 56, 59,
Protestants 70–71, 81, 191, 192, 226; rules regard-
Chumash Indians, 191 ing, 82, 87, 207. See also Pagans
Cíbola, 14–17, 15, 20–23, 35–38, 51, 59 Córcoles y Martínez, Francisco, 118
Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), 68, 73, 102 Corn (maize): in Indian religions, 14,
Clark, William, 213, 215 16; Indians’ cultivation of, 16, 17, 40,
Clothing: of Indians, 14, 17, 36, 39, 60, 60, 63, 75, 113, 232; trade in, 131, 145; as
102, 224; Spanish, 10, 84, 224, 231, 231; tribute, 92, 93
Spanish gifts of, to Indians, 171; of Coronado, Francisco Vázquez de, 13–17,
Spanish soldiers, 13, 14, 16, 161, 162, 20–23, 35–40, 44, 45, 59
167, 195; stealing of, 39, 63; as tribute Cortés, Hernán, 21, 22, 25, 33–34, 36
to encomenderos, 93 Cortés, José, 199
Coahuiltecan people, 113, 143 Costansó, Miguel, 183
Cofitachequi, 41, 42 Cotton, 17, 60, 93, 147, 207, 222
Colorado River, 17, 35, 62, 63, 107, 179, Council of the Indies, 65, 177
185, 187–90 Creek Indians (Seminoles), 40, 106, 113,
Columbus, Christopher, 7, 23, 28 116, 123, 135, 136, 139, 205, 208, 209,
Comanche Indians, 126, 143, 146, 148, 212, 221, 225
156, 158, 161, 165, 189; clothing of, 225; Criados, 94
as Spaniards’ allies against Apaches, Criollos, 236
142, 163, 168, 171–73, 175; Spanish Croix, marqués de (former Viceroy), 167
influence on, 225, 226 Croix, Teodoro de (comandancia general),
Concha, Fernando de la, 172–73 167–68, 174, 189, 191
Confederación fort, 209 Cuba, 28, 29, 136, 138, 149, 150, 155, 173,
Congregaciones, 78 203, 225; Florida and Louisiana
Contention: in frontier zones, 11, 88; administered from, 138, 151, 156, 158, 165
between imperial rivals, 10, 49, 50, 53, Cuerno Verde (Apache war chief ), 171
55, 57, 65, 67, 91, 105–12, 115–19, 123–39, Custis, Peter, 213
148–52, 155, 156, 166, 177, 179, 181–83,
185, 199, 201, 210–11, 242; over Indian Davenport, Peter, 216
trade between imperial rivals, 130–31, Deegan, Kathleen, 232

282
 index

De Soto, Hernando, 17, 29, 35–36, New World explorers from, 30;
40–46, 107, 110, 111, 245, 253 raiders from, in Florida, 105, 105–7,
Detroit (Michigan), 119, 139 118, 123; relations of, with Indians, 10,
Díaz, Bernal, 21–22 86, 91, 92, 106, 109, 118, 134, 136, 139;
Diseases: Indians killed by, 5, 8–9, Spain briefly loses to Florida to, 137,
24–25, 28, 46, 71, 86–88, 115, 143, 192, 148, 149–50, 155; Spain offers to swap
222–23, 225, 228–29; missionaries per- Florida to, for Gibralter, 133; as
ceived as being spared from, 84, 115; Spain’s imperial rival, 10, 53, 57, 65,
Spanish introduction of, 5, 8–9, 67, 91, 92, 105–9, 115, 118, 129, 133–38,
24–25, 46, 222 148–52, 155, 156, 166, 177, 201, 210–11;
Doctrinas, 72, 78 on Spain’s North American past, 244;
Dogs, 23, 24, 40, 41 war of, with Spain, 168, 189, 194,
Dolores de los Ais mission (Louisiana), 195–97, 202–3. See also Anglo-
120 Americans; Trade; Specific colonies of
Domesticated animals, 84, 85, 91, 100, Environment, 5, 8, 86, 91, 93, 100,
102, 190, 221, 222, 225–29. See also 228–30. See also Agriculture;
Ranching; Specific animals Domesticated animals
Domínguez, Francisco Atanasio, 188, Escambia River, 116
194, 233 Española, 28, 31
Drake, Francis, 57, 62 Españoles, 236–37, 239
DuVal, William P., 245 Esteban (black scout), 16, 36–37
Eulate, Juan de, 97–98
Ecueracapa (Comanche), 171 Everglades Club (Palm Beach, Florida),
Elcano, Sebastián, 33 256
Elias, Norbert, 7 Excommunications, 98
El Morro, 62 Explorers (Spanish), 26–47, 27, 236
El Paso del Norte (Texas), 67–68, 74, Extermination (of Indians), 56–57, 163,
234; Oñate claims, for Spain, 57–58; 168, 170–73
population of, 145, 146; presidio at,
155, 156, 158, 164; Pueblo Revolt Fages, Pedro, 183
refugees in, 90, 101, 102, 158 Fairbanks, George, 253
Encomenderos, 92–93, 158 “Family Compacts” (among Bourbon
Encomienda system, 92–93, 95, 96, 104, monarchs), 138, 196
158. See also Tribute (from Indians) Farnham, Thomas Jefferson, 244
England: commercial activities of, in Felipe II (King of Spain), 48–50, 51, 53,
New World, 131, 133–36, 165–66, 207, 56, 59, 60, 93, 124
209; early settlements established by, Felipe V (King of Spain), 118
61, 64, 65, 74, 92; France’s relations Fernando II (King of Spain), 18–20, 26
with, 118, 123, 138, 202–3; New World Fernando VII (King of Spain), 203,
colonies of, as expanding, 134–38, 201; 216–17

283
 index

Ferrer, Bartolomé, 35 labor and, 92, 119; lack of, as driving

Fishing, 17, 75, 85, 232 Indians into missions, 143; for sol-
Flagler, Henry, 256, 257 diers, 39, 40, 63, 162, 183; of southeast-
Flores, Manuel Antonio, 210 ern Indians, 75, 85; Spanish adoption
Florida: Anglo-Americans in, 199–201, of Indian, 232; Spanish destruction of
217, 245; boundary issues regarding, Pueblo Indians’, 104; Spanish intro-
211–13, 218; as colony of the Crown, 65, duction of new, 77, 85, 101–2, 222,
68; as consuming Spanish revenue, 228–29, 232. See also Agriculture;
65–66, 81, 133, 137, 149; East vs. West, Domesticated animals; Hunting, fish-
149, 197–98, 203, 205–6, 211–13, 215, ing, and gathering
217–18; encomiendas not employed in, Foote, Henry Stuart, 246–47
93–94; English challenges to Spanish Ford, Lawrence, 118
control of, 105–7, 109, 118, 129, 131, Ford, Richard, 222
135–38, 137; extent of, in sixteenth cen- Fort Caroline (Florida), 49, 53–54, 92
tury, 74; forts in, 1, 2, 49, 90–91, 106, Fort George (Florida), 136
117, 118, 123, 136, 137–38, 158, 200, 205, Fort Maurepas (Mississippi), 116
209, 218, 237–38; French as threat to Fort Mississippi, 116
Spanish, 110, 123–24, 126, 128–29; Forts (Spanish). See Presidios
Indian labor in, 91, 93–94, 96; Indian Fort St. Louis (Texas), 110–13, 124–25, 236
resistance in, 100, 105–7; Indians’ dis- Fort Toulouse (Alabama), 139
appearance from, 226; memories of Foster, George, 13
Spanish past in, 254; missions and France: commercial activities of, in New
missionaries in, 66, 74–77, 75, 82–85, World, 107, 108, 119, 121, 126–27, 130–31,
87, 97, 99, 100, 106, 107, 109, 118, 123, 133–35, 138–43, 147–48, 150, 169, 206–7;
129, 135, 136, 157, 203, 225; population England’s relations with, 118, 123, 138,
of, in 1700, 135; slavery in, 95; Spain 202–3; and Jesuits, 180; Mississippi
loses to Britain, 137, 148, 149–50, 155; River interest of, 110–12, 116–17; people
Spain offers to swap, to England for from, in Louisiana, 117–21, 130–31,
Gibralter, 133; Spain regains, 176–77, 138–41, 150–52, 169, 202, 212; relations
195–98, 200, 203, 205–6; Spanish of, with Indians, 110, 111–12, 118, 134,
claims to, 48–49; Spanish colonies’ 139; revolution in, 202, 203, 207; as
stagnation and demise in, 90–91, Spain’s ally, 196, 202–3, 211; as Spain’s
99–100, 105–7, 118, 135, 137, 212; Spanish imperial rival, 10, 49, 50, 53, 55, 65, 67,
discovery and exploration of, 28–30, 108, 109–12, 115–21, 123–35, 148–52, 201;
36, 40–41; Spanish settlement of, 50, war against Spain by, 202–3, 216
53–57, 61, 65, 67, 237; trade in, 206–7 Franciscans, 59, 61, 63, 173; in
Folch, Vicente, 217, 240 California, 180–81, 185, 189, 191–94;
Food: California missions and presidios conversion tactics of, 71, 78–79, 80,
dependent on reinforcements of, 183, 81–82; Crown’s support for, 81; dioce-
191; colonists’ dependence on Indians’ san clergy replacing, 72; in Florida,

284
 index

66, 74–77, 82–85, 87, 97, 99, 100, 136, Fuentes, Francisco de, 99
157, 225; in historical memory, 250, Fur trade, 106, 134, 137–39, 141, 147, 151,
253; and Indian labor, 97–99, 145; 188, 206, 207, 210
Indian resistance to, 99–107, 141–43;
Indians’ perceptions of, 83–87; in Gálvez, Bernardo de, 153, 169, 170, 174,
New Mexico, 66–68, 70–74, 77, 79, 196–97, 221, 239
81–85, 87, 146; seek French help for Gálvez, José de, 163, 167–71, 174, 177,
Texas missions, 119–20 180–82, 184, 189, 191, 194, 196, 202
Francis I (King of France), 32, 53 Garcés, Francisco (fray), 185, 187–90, 194
Freeman, Thomas, 213 Gassiot, Juan, 199
Freitas, Nicolás de (fray), 69 Gayoso, Manuel de, 208, 239
French and Indian War. See Seven Genízaros, 226
Years’ War Georgia: English in, 135–37, 137; Indians
Fronteras presidio, 155 in, 205; memories of Spanish past in,
Frontier (Spanish North American), 52; 254–56, 259; Spaniards in, 31–32, 41,
control of, as subject to European 74, 75
events, 148–52, 168, 202–3, 210–12, Gibraltar, 133, 195, 198
216–17; cultural transformation along, Gifts, 41; to Indians from Spaniards, 78,
11, 85, 110, 221–42; different official 83, 86, 121, 169–71, 173–75, 187, 208,
policies for different parts of, 208; hin- 216. See also Trade goods
drances to expansion of, 55–56, 131, Godoy, Manuel, 202, 211, 212
141–43, 146, 194, 263; in historical Gold, 14, 21–22, 28–29, 41, 44, 92, 132,
memory, 243–64; Indian labor as foun- 144; absence of, as deterrent to
dation of colonies on, 91; military con- Spanish expansion, 55, 133, 134
quest of, prohibited by monarchs, 82; Goliad (Texas), 246
missionaries as primary agents for Gomes, Estevâo, 32
exploration and pacification on, 60, 61, González, Manuel, 226
72, 81–83, 113, 191, 206, 226; official cor- Grand Canyon, 37–38
ruption on, 96–97, 162; as opportunity Great Northern Revolt, 102
for social mobility, 236–39; as a place Greene, Jack, 202
of contention for power and resources, Grimaldi, marqués de, 179
11; presidios’ ascendency over missions Guale mission (Florida), 74, 75, 85, 100,
on, 157–59, 166, 174, 177; as a process of 106, 107, 109, 135
expansion and contraction, 9–10, 137, Guns. See Weapons
148–51, 155, 163, 165, 175, 177, 196–97, Gutiérrez, Ramón, 7, 84
200, 210–12; sovereignty over, only
guaranteed by occupation, 211; as Haiti. See Santo Domingo island
transcontinental, 176–98. See also Hapsburg monarchy, 108, 117. See also
Contention; Indian labor; Indians; Specific monarchs
Missionaries; Settlements; Soldiers Harte, Bret, 248

285
 index

Hasinai people, 113, 115, 119–21, 141, 142 threat to, 208, 212; Cabeza de Vaca
Havana. See Cuba among, 36; in California, 183, 192,
Havasupai Indians, 187 226; captive, 28, 41, 94–95; “civilizing”
Hawikku, 13–16, 15, 23, 37 (Hispanicizing) of, 76–78, 81, 88, 94;
Henry, Patrick, 197 converted, as Spain’s responsibility,
Hezeta, Bruno de, 194 66; disease as killing, 5, 8–9, 24–25,
Hidalgo, Francisco fray, 109, 119, 120 28, 46, 71, 86–88, 115, 143, 192, 222–23,
Hispanophobia, 6, 244–47, 258, 263 225, 228–29; efforts to re-make, as
History: recreating, on its own terms, tax-paying town-dwellers, 72, 78, 81,
7–9; versions of Spain’s New World, 189, 226; English relations with, 10,
243–64 86, 91, 92, 106, 109, 118, 134, 136, 139;
History of Florida (Fairbanks), 253 European trade with, as key to New
Hohokam peoples, 17–18 World control, 131, 135, 141; French
Holland, 118, 123, 177 relations with, 110, 111–12, 118, 134, 139;
Hopi Pueblo, 37, 73, 104, 187, 224 humane treatment of, urged by
Horses: in California, 190; Indians’ Spanish monarchs, 7, 56, 59–60, 63,
raids on, 157, 161; Indians’ uses of, 82, 72, 92, 95–96, 159; as influence on
158, 222, 225; Spanish, as trade item, Spanish institutions, 10–11, 241;
131, 147; Spanish introduction of, 5, memory of historical past of, 261,
10, 23–24, 37, 40, 46, 77, 222, 228 263; as outnumbering Spaniards in
Hoxie, Frederick, 18 North America, 70, 200–201, 205;
Huguenots. See Protestants relations of, with other tribes, 84–86,
Hunting, fishing, and gathering, 17, 75, 91, 93, 94, 100, 105, 106, 126–27, 142 ,
85, 232 146, 156–58, 163, 168, 170–75, 208–9,
212, 215–16; relations with Spaniards,
I’berville, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’, 116 as deterrent to Spanish expansion,
Illinois country, 139, 147, 151, 197 55–56, 141–43, 194, 263; as resisting
Immigration policies (Spanish), 206, English colonists, 92; as resisting
207–8, 216 Spanish missionaries and soldiers, 10,
Indian labor, 10–11, 28, 45, 66, 234; and 12, 15, 16, 39, 41, 47, 54–57, 55, 63–64,
assimilation, 94, 226; difficulty of 74, 77, 83–89, 99–105, 115, 120, 137,
exploiting, 56, 97, 131, 133, 137; English 141–43, 157, 158, 179, 183–84, 189; as
rationalization of, 107; Indian resis- slaves, 56, 57, 94–97, 106, 107, 157,
tance linked to, 90, 91, 99–105; and 225; Spain’s attempts to win over,
missionaries, 67, 71, 86, 90–99, 107, through trade, 168–71, 196, 200;
165; Spanish colonies’ dependence Spain’s authorization of force against,
on, 91–94, 97–99, 233. See also 56–57, 159–63, 166, 167–68, 170–73;
Slavery; Slaves Spaniards’ early dependence on,
Indians: alleged benefits of submission 10–12, 39–40, 49, 58–59, 63, 74, 76, 78,
to Spain by, 58; Anglo-Americans as 91–94, 97–99, 119, 131, 183, 233;

286
 index

Spanish gifts to, 78, 83, 86, 121, Kadohadacho confederacy, 113
169–71, 173–75, 187, 208, 216; Spanish Kansas City, 257, 258
hunters of slaves among, 16, 28–32, Karankawa Indians, 111–12, 115
36, 41, 95, 157, 188; Spanish influence Kentucky, 201, 206
on, 5, 10, 75–77, 221–24; in Spanish Key Indians, 225
social order, 236–37; Spanish treat- Key West (Florida), 5
ment of, 6–8, 16, 39, 41, 56, 59, 63–64, King George’s War, 136
83, 90–99, 157, 163, 173, 174, 183–84, King William’s War, 115
189, 192, 238–40, 253; at their initial Kiowa Indians, 226
encounters with Spaniards, 16–18. See Kubler, George, 249
also Agriculture; Indian labor; Land;
Languages; Missionaries; Missions; Lafora, Nicolás de, 155, 156, 161
Pagans; Population; Soldiers; Land: Anglo-Americans’ threats to
Women (Indian); Specific Indian Spanish, 199–203, 211–19; availability
groups of, to Europeans due to Indians’ dis-
Indies, 65, 81, 112, 177, 179, 191 eases, 47, 228–29; encomenderos’
Indios bárbaros, 158, 159, 168, 173. See seizure of Indians’, 93, 236; European
also Apache Indians; Comanche rituals for claiming, 29, 58; Indian
Indians views of, 17; missionaries’, 98; ques-
Indios de depósito, 94–95 tion of pope’s authority to distribute,
Inquisition, 99 53; royal permission needed to
Instructions of 1786, 168 explore and settle, 59–60; Spain’s
Ipai Indians, 184 acquisition of New World, compared
Irving, Washington, 247 to imperial rivals’, 134; Spanish
Isabel (Queen of Spain), 18–20 impact on New World’s, 227–29, 241;
Iturbide, Agustín de, 218, 219 threats to Indian, 212, 221–23. See also
Environment; Indians; Missionaries;
Jackson, Andew, 218 Settlements; Soldiers
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 248 Languages: Spaniards’ learning of
Jamaica, 28 Indian, 44–45, 79, 120; variety of, in
Jamestown (Virginia), 64, 65, 74, 92 Spain, 18; variety of Indian, 17, 74,
Jefferson, Thomas, 213, 215 100, 101. See also Spanish language
Jekyll Island, 106 Laredo (Texas), 145
Jémez Pueblo, 100, 223 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur
Jesuits, 54, 55, 74, 132, 224, 232; expulsion de, 29, 110–13, 115, 124–26
of, 180, 181, 185 León, Alonso de, 111–13, 115
Jiménez, Fortún, 34 Leslie, John, 209, 216
José (King of Spain: Joseph Bonaparte), Leturiondo, Alonso de, 130
203, 216 Lewis, Meriwether, 213, 215
Juárez (Mexico). See Ciudad Juárez Linares, duque de, 120

287
 index

Little Ice Age, 8 Manso Indians, 67–68

Livestock. See Domesticated animals Maps: lack of Spanish, 44, 62, 111
Long, James, 218–19 María Luisa (Queen of Spain), 202
López de Cárdenas, García, 37–39 Marques Cabrera, Juan, 98
López de Mendizábal, Bernardo, 90 Marriage, 238–40. See also Sexual
Loreto (California), 191 behavior
Los Adaes. See Nuestra Señora del Martínez, Esteban José, 210
Pilar de Los Adaes presidio Martínez, Oscar, 240
(Louisiana) Martyr, Peter, 32
Los Angeles (California), 34, 188, 190, Matagorda Bay, 111, 115, 124
191, 194, 226, 234, 237 Matanzas (Florida), 49
Louisiana, 140; Anglo-Americans in, Mazanet, Damián, 113, 115, 119
207, 245; boundary issues concerning, McWilliams, Carey, 260
213, 215–16; as consuming revenue Melons, 10, 77, 113, 222, 227, 232
from Spain, 151; France’s ownership Mendoza, Antonio de, 13, 34, 36–37,
of, 212; French in, 117, 118–21, 124, 129, 83–84
130–31, 138–41, 150–52, 169; missions Menéndez de Avilés, Pedro, 48–50, 50,
in, 120, 124; population in, 139, 151–52, 53–58, 60, 61, 64–66, 68, 74, 79, 92,
202, 207; presidios in, 120, 124, 125, 236, 245
130–33, 145, 146, 155–56, 165, 215; Mercantilism. See Trade
Spain’s efforts to reclaim, 212–13; Mestizos, 5–6, 46, 81, 236–37, 244, 260
Spanish claims to, 110, 138; Spanish Metal (Spanish): chains of, 41; clothing
in, 29, 113, 124, 196, 215, 237; Spanish of, 13, 14, 16; introduction of, to
ownership of, 148–51, 165, 196–97, Indians, 10, 77, 223; tools of, 208, 226;
200; United States buys, from weapons of, 13, 14, 23, 28. See also
France, 212. See also Mississippi Gold; Silver
River; New Orleans Mexican Americans, 260–63, 262
Louis XIV (King of France), 110, 118, 119 Mexican-American War, 220, 245–46,
Louis XVI (King of France), 202, 211 262–63
Lowenthal, David, 7, 243 Mexico: civilizations in, 25, 33, 35, 41;
Luján, Juana, 228, 229, 233 Franciscans in, 70–71; French rela-
Lummis, Charles, 251 tions with, 110, 119; independence of,
from Spain, 3, 218–20, 245; Indian
Madison, James, 217 rebellions in, 102; Indians in, 56; roads
Magellan, Ferdinand, 33 from North America to, 54; Spanish
Maine, 30, 32 exploration from, 32–35, 39; U.S. inva-
Malaspina, Alejandro, 210 sion of, 220, 245–46, 262, 263. See also
Mallet, Pierre and Paul, 147–48 New Spain; Specific places in
Manchac fort, 197 Mexico City, 36, 37, 39, 54, 61, 123, 132,
Manifest destiny, 201, 242 146, 185, 187

288
 index

Mining, 124, 157, 175; in New Spain, 59, Mexico, 66–74, 77, 79, 81–85, 87, 98,
95, 110, 111, 116, 144–45, 202; in South 99, 146, 157; plans to extend, into cen-
America, 67, 133, 175. See also Gold; tral Arizona, 190; presidios’ ascenden-
Silver cy over, on Spain’s North American
Minorca, 194, 230, 260 frontier, 157–59; as saving Indians from
Miró, Esteban, 203, 206, 207 Spanish soldiers and settlers, 88; secu-
Miscegenation, 46. See also Mestizos larization of, 72, 192; in Texas, 115, 121,
Missionaries (Spanish): California 122, 124, 132, 138, 141–43, 192, 237. See
Indian asks for, 189; conditions of, in also Conversions; Indian labor;
New World, 70, 77; death of, by Indians; Missionaries; Specific missions
Indians, 77, 87, 100, 102, 104, 184, 189; Mississippi, 29, 43, 140, 200, 205, 235
efforts of, to convert Indians, 10, Mississippian peoples, 18, 40
54–56, 70, 72, 77–83, 134, 141–43; efforts Mississippi River (Espíritu Santo River):
of, to discredit Indians’ religion, 70, French interest in, 110–12, 116–17; as
79, 82–83, 87, 88, 99, 100–101, 104, 134; fur trade route, 139; Spain regulates
harsh treatment of Indians by, 82–83, shipping on, 206, 212; Spaniards’ dis-
90–99, 130, 143; as primary agents for covery and exploration of, 29, 30, 43,
exploration and pacification, 60, 61, 111; Spaniards’ lack of interest in, 115
72, 81–83, 113, 191, 206, 226; and sol- Missouri, 148, 213
diers, 81–84, 115, 180; in Texas, 113, 115, Missouri Indians, 126
119–20, 141–43, 158. See also Catholic Mizner, Addison, 256
Church; Conversions; Franciscans; Mobile (Alabama), 118–20, 131, 139, 141,
Indian labor; Indians; Jesuits; Specific 197, 205, 208, 209, 217, 240
individuals Moctezuma, 21
Missions: architectural influence of, 2, 4, Mojave Indians, 187
249–52, 253, 254–56; in Arizona, 2, 4, Monroe, James, 245
132, 165, 185, 187–90, 192, 233, 236; as Monterey (California), 164, 179–84,
based on Indian labor, 91, 95, 145, 165; 187–91, 194, 219, 235
building of, 72, 73; in California, Monterrey, conde de, 62, 63
179–80, 182–85, 187, 190–94, 193, 208, Montesclaros, marqués de, 63, 64, 66
233, 237, 250–51; destruction of, by Moore, James, 106, 118
Indian resisters, 88, 90–91, 100–107, Mora, Alejandro, 95
142, 157, 162; in Florida, 66, 74–77, 75, Moraga, José Joaquín, 190
82–85, 87, 97, 99, 100, 106, 107, 109, 118, Moscoso, Luis de, 43
123, 129, 135, 136, 157, 203, 225; in Mules, 40, 157, 222, 228, 238
Georgia, 74, 75; as increasing Spanish Muslims, 19, 21, 22
influence on Indians, 225, 226; Indians’
refusal to participate in, 141, 189, 192; Nacagdoches (Texas), 145, 165
lack of food as driving Indians into, Napoleon Bonaparte, 203, 212, 213, 216
143; in Louisiana, 120, 124; in New Natchez (Mississippi), 139, 197

289
 index

Natchez Indians, 113 230; mining in, 59, 95, 110, 111, 116,
Natchitoches, 113, 119, 120–21, 124, 130, 144–45, 202; northern boundary dis-
138, 139 putes of, 211–13, 214, 215–16, 218,
Nations of the North, 157, 163, 165, 168, 219–20; population of, 146, 201; pro-
171 posals to exterminate Indians in, 56;
Navajo Indians, 10, 94, 100, 105, 146, as prosperous Spanish colony, 202;
171–73, 175 1810 rebellion in, 219; repartimiento
Neah Bay (Washington), 211 in, 94; Spanish opportunities in, 236;
Neutral Ground Agreement, 216 trade goods for, 132
Neve, Felipe de, 168, 191–92 New World: first encounters in, 26–47;
New Mexico: Anglo-American explo- missionaries as primary agents for
ration of, 215; as colony of the exploration and pacification in, 60,
Crown, 65, 68; as consuming Spanish 61, 72, 81–83, 113, 191, 206, 226; social
revenue, 65–66, 81, 133, 155; efforts to status in Spanish, 236–40; Spain’s
reconquer Pueblos in, 102–5, 115, 126; claims to, 10, 18–20, 44, 53, 81, 106,
farming and ranching in, 175; French 112; Spanish influence on, 221–24, 259.
as threat to Spanish, 110, 125–28; See also Frontier; North America
Indian labor in, 91–99; Indian land Nixoras, 226
in, 221–22; Indian resistance in, Niza, Marcos de (fray), 36–37
100–105, 109; memories of Spanish Nogales presidio (Vicksburg), 235
past in, 252–53; missions and mis- Nootka Convention, 210–11
sionaries in, 66–74, 77, 79, 81–85, 87, Nootka Sound, 185, 210
98, 99, 146, 157; presidios in, 67, North America: defined, 6; Spain’s
153–57, 154, 155, 158, 160, 161, 164; slav- empire in, 3, 243. See also Explorers;
ery in, 95, 98; Spanish colonies’ Frontier; Indians; Missionaries; New
demise in, 90–91, 99–105; Spanish World; Soldiers; Specific places in
exploration of, 14, 17, 39; Spanish set- Northwest Passage, 54. See also Asia:
tlement of, 50, 57–64, 67, 158; trade Spain’s search for new way to
in, 147–48; United States seizes, from Novick, Peter, 264
Mexico, 245. See also Pueblo Indians Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe mission
New Orleans (Louisiana), 2, 131, 139; (Ciudad Juárez), 68, 73, 102
Spanish landmarks in, 1–2, 233, 234, Nuestra Señora de la Bahía de Espíritu
247, 256; Spanish ownership of, Santo presidio (Texas), 125, 145, 146,
149–51, 196, 198 160, 164, 239
New Spain: and administration of inte- Nuestra Señora de la Luz de
rior provinces of North America, 65, Orcoquisac mission (Texas), 138
156, 157, 163, 166–68, 174, 177, 189, 200, Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes
219–20; defenses of, 155–57, 212, 216; presidio (Louisiana), 124, 125, 130–33,
explorations from, 60; French inter- 145, 146, 155–56, 165, 215
est in, 110, 116, 120; immigrants from, Nuevo Santander, 145

290
 index

Obregón, Baltasar, 69 128–29; Indians in, 123; population of,

O’Conor, Hugo, 164–68 145; presidios in, 158; Spaniards in, 1,
Oglethorpe, James, 136 112, 115–17, 117, 118, 129, 197, 197, 205,
Oklahoma, 140 256; trade in, 133, 209; United States
Oñate, Juan de, 48, 50, 57–66, 68, 70, 92, takes, 218; West Florida governed
227, 231, 236 from, 203, 205, 208
O’Neill, Arturo, 203 Peralta, Pedro de, 67
Onís, Luis de, 218 Perea, Estevan de (fray), 69–70, 72, 82
O’odham Indians. See Pima Indians Pérez, Ignacio, 218
Opata Indians, 173 Pérez, Juan, 184, 185
Oraibi, 187, 188 Peru, 35, 44, 236
Orders for New Discoveries (1573), 59, Philippines, 33, 62–63, 66, 149
60, 63, 72, 78, 82, 159, 233–34 Pigs, 24, 40, 46, 77, 232
Ordóñez de Montalvo, García, 34 Pike, Zebulon, 215
Oregon country, 218 Pima Indians (O’odham Indians), 2,
O’Reilly, Alejandro, 150–51, 164 107, 158, 165, 173, 179, 225–26
Orista Indians, 57 Pimería Alta (Arizona), 132, 185, 192
Ortiz Parrilla, Diego, 130, 142–43 Pinckney’s Treaty, 211–12
Otermín, Antonio de, 102, 104 Pirates, 50, 60, 62, 66, 123, 131
Oto Indians, 127 Pius V (Pope), 79
Pizarro, Francisco, 22
Pacific Coast: California presidios for Polygamy, 54, 87
protection of, 164; Oñate’s efforts to Pomeroy, Earl, 259
reach, 62–63; Spanish claims to, 177, Ponce de León, Antonio, 90
194, 210; Spanish exploration of, Ponce de León, Juan, 3, 28–29, 35, 43,
32–36, 44, 210–11 254, 255, 264
Pagans: Spanish view of, as inferior Popé, 101
beings, 19, 20, 70, 76–77, 159, 192. See Popes, 15, 19, 20, 53, 70, 79, 81, 112
also Indians Population: in California, 194; English,
Palma, Salvador, 189 in the New World, 135, 137, 201; in
Panama-California Exposition (1915), 256 Florida, 136–37; Indian, compared to
Panton, William, 209, 216 Spanish, 70, 200–201, 205; Indian, in
Pardo, Juan, 54 New Spain, 201; in Louisiana, 139,
Paul III (Pope), 70 151–52, 202, 207; of mission Indians,
Pawnee Indians, 126, 127 143, 192–93; in New Mexico, 145, 146;
Pearls, 41, 42 in Nuevo Santander, 145; of Pima
Pecos Pueblo, 38, 39, 73, 104, 221–23 Indians, 225; of Pueblo Indians, 86,
Peninsulares, 236 104, 222–23; in Texas, 144, 145; of
Pensacola (Florida): founding of, 67, United States, 201
234; French attack on, 123–24, 126, Portolá, Gaspar de, 180–84

291
 index

Portugal, 19, 180 Quebec (Canada), 65, 111

Posada, Alfonso de (fray), 153 Quechan Indians. See Yuma Indians
Powhatan (Indian chief ), 54 Queen Anne’s War, 106, 118
Prescott, William H., 247 Quivera, 39, 59, 61, 64
Presidios, 4; in Arizona, 158, 164–65;
ascendency of, over missions on Ramón, Domingo, 119, 120–21, 124, 144
Spain’s North American frontier, Ranching, 144–45, 157, 173, 228
157–63, 166, 174, 177; in California, 164, Rancho de San Antonio (New
179–83, 187, 189–91, 194, 208, 235, 238; Mexico), 229
financial support for, 98; in Florida, 1, Rebolledo, Diego de, 98
2, 49, 90–91, 106, 117, 118, 123, 136, Reconquista, 19, 20, 22
137–38, 158, 200, 205, 209, 218, 237–38; Regulations of 1729, 159
haphazard development of, 12, 157, Regulations of 1772, 159–68, 170, 191
158–59, 234–35; impracticality of, 206; Religion: of Indians, 17, 20–21, 227; mis-
in Louisiana, 120, 124, 125, 130–33, 145, sionaries’ disparaging of Indians’, 70,
146, 155–56, 215; in New Mexico, 67, 79, 82–83, 87, 88, 99, 100–101, 104, 134;
153–57, 154, 155, 158, 160, 161, 164; new of Spaniards, 14–15, 19; tolerance of
regulations for, 159–63; in Texas, 107, differences in, 208. See also
121, 122, 124–25, 125, 138, 142–43, 145, Catholicism; Protestants
146, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164–66, 189, Rengel, José Antonio, 168
239. See also Soldiers Repartimiento de indios, 94–96
Protector of Indians Office (Spain), 96 Requerimiento, 5, 16, 20, 58
Protestants, 49–50, 53, 54, 207 Rescate, 94, 95
Pueblo Indians: and Coronado, 16–17, 37, Reservations, 173–74
38–39; and Franciscans, 66, 67, 72–73, Residencias, 96–97
76, 81, 84, 87, 88, 99–100; locations of, Revillagigedo (Viceroy), 159
71, 72–73; and Oñate, 58–59, 62, 63–64, Ribero, Diego, 32, 33
236; population of, 46, 86, 104, 222–23; Ricard, Robert, 72
and Rodríguez, 60; sexual views of, 84, Rivera, Pedro de, 159
87; as Spanish allies, 126–27, 146, 171; Rivera y Moncada, Fernando, 189–91
Spanish efforts to reconquer, 102–5, Roanoke (Virginia), 61, 92
115; Spanish influence on, 73, 221–23, Rodríguez, Agustín, 59–60
227; tribute collected from, 92–93. See Romances (novels), 22, 34
also Pueblo Revolt; Specific pueblos Rosas, Luis de, 99
Pueblo Revolt, 90, 100–102, 104–5, 109, Rubí, Marqués de, 153, 155, 156–61,
146, 158, 187 163–68, 177, 179
Puerto Rico, 28, 29 Russia, 10, 108, 177, 179, 181–83

Quapaw Indians, 139 St. Augustine (Florida), 129, 198; Anglo-

Quarai Pueblo, 223 Americans in, 200–201; East Florida

292
 index

governed from, 203; English attacks San Fernando de las Barrancas fort, 209
on, 106, 107, 118, 123; Indians in, 123, San Fernando presidio (Memphis),
208; memories of Spanish past in, 254, 209, 235
260; population of, in 18th century, San Francisco (California), 62, 177, 182,
145, 191; Spanish landmarks in, 1, 200, 237; presidio at, 187, 190, 191, 194, 235
256; Spanish settlement of, 48–50, San Francisco de Asís mission (San
53–55, 57, 67, 68, 81, 136, 137–38, 158, 232, Francisco, California), 190
234, 236–38; trade in, 109, 131, 133, San Francisco de los Dolores presidio
206–7. See also San Marcos castillo (Louisiana), 120
Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de, San Gabriel (New Mexico), 59, 64, 67
119–20, 138, 139, 141 San Gabriel mission (California), 185,
Ste. Genevieve, 139, 151 187, 190
St. Louis (Missouri), 139, 151, 197 San Ildefonso Pueblo, 229
Salazar, Antonio, 237 San Ildefonso Treaty, 212
Salcedo, Nemesio, 215–16 San Jacinto (Texas), 246
San Agustín de Ahumada presidio San José (California), 190, 191, 194, 226,
(Texas), 138, 165 234, 237
San Antonio (brigantine), 181, 182, 184 San José (ship), 181–82, 184
San Antonio (Texas), 2, 142, 143, 165, 175, San José mission (San Antonio), 237
234, 241; Canary Islanders in, 144–45, San Juan Bautista (Mexico), 119, 120,
236; missions near, 115, 121, 122, 124, 124
132, 141–43; names for, 144; presidio San Juan Pueblo (New Mexico), 58–59,
near, 121, 122, 124, 146, 160, 164 62
San Antonio de Béjar presidio (San San Luis de Amarillas presidio (Texas),
Antonio), 121, 122, 124, 146, 160, 164 142
San Antonio de Valero mission (San San Marcos castillo (near St.
Antonio), 121, 122, 143 Augustine), 1, 2, 90–91, 106, 118, 136,
San Carlos (brigantine), 181, 184 158, 200, 205
San Carlos de Borromeo de Carmelo San Marcos de Apalachee fort
mission (California), 250–51 (Florida), 123, 205, 209, 218, 238
San Carlos mission (Monterey, San Mateo fort (Florida), 49
California), 182 San Miguel de Gualdape (Georgia),
Sánchez Navarro, Manuela, 120 31–32
San Diego (California), 34, 62–63, 179, San Miguel de los Adaes mission
181, 182; presidio at, 164, 181, 183, 190, (Louisiana), 120, 124
191, 194, 235; Spanish settlements at, San Sabá presidio (Texas), 107, 142–43,
177, 241 160, 162, 166, 189
San Diego de Alcalá mission (San Santa Bárbara (Mexico), 59
Diego, California), 182, 184 Santa Barbara presidio (California),
San Felipe fort (South Carolina), 54 190–91, 194, 235, 238

293
 index

Santa Catalina Island, 34, 106 into dwellers of, 173; transformation
Santa Cruz de la Cañada (New of Indian, due to disease, 46–47, 83.
Mexico), 146, 229 See also Missions; Villa(s); Specific
Santa Cruz de San Sabá mission towns and pueblos
(Texas), 142–43 Seven Years’ War, 149, 155, 159, 195, 200
Santa Cruz mission (California), 194 Sexual behavior: of Indians, 54, 69, 79,
Santa Elena (South Carolina), 53–55, 57, 84, 87; of missionaries, 70, 79, 84, 87,
67, 232, 236 99; of soldiers, 82, 142, 183, 192,
Santa Fe (New Mexico), 215, 248; 238–40
French traders near, 126–27; Indians Shawnee Indians, 205, 216
in, 102, 104; missionaries in, 69–72, Sheep, 5, 10, 77, 222, 228, 232
81, 98; presidio at, 155, 158, 160, 161, Ships and boats: American, 207; bounty
164; Spanish landmarks in, 2, 3, 233, from sunken, 51, 53; California as use-
252; Spanish settlement of, 59, 67, 68, ful to, from Philippines, 62; French,
146, 235; trade in, 132, 147–48; trails to, 49; pirate attacks on, 51, 62; Spanish,
61, 148, 175, 187–88, 215 23, 24, 31, 33–35, 40, 43, 61, 65, 110, 118,
Santa Fe Festival, 253, 254 132, 133, 181–82, 194, 206; Spanish,
Santa Fe Railroad, 252 forbidden to land in Gulf ports, 132,
Santa Fe Trail, 61, 148, 175, 215 141
Santo Domingo island (later, Haiti), Silver, 14, 21–22, 41, 54, 59, 92, 110, 133,
111, 116, 152 134, 144, 147
Santo Domingo Pueblo (New Mexico), Slavery, 8, 20, 91, 95. See also Indian
58 labor; Slaves
San Xavier del Bac mission (Arizona), Slaves: black, 16, 31, 67, 95, 135–37, 139,
2, 4, 185, 233, 236 198, 201; English hunters of Indian,
Seloy (Florida Indian village), 49 86, 106; Esteban as, 16, 36; European,
Seminole Indians. See Creek Indians 36; fugitive, 205, 216; Indians as,
Las Serges de Esplandián (Ordóñez de 94–96, 107, 157, 225; Indians’ use of,
Montalvo), 34 95; selling of Indians as, 56, 57, 95, 97,
Seri Indians, 179 106; Spanish hunters of Indian, 16,
Serra, Junípero (fray), 181–83, 192 28–32, 36, 41, 95, 157, 188; trade in, in
Settlements (towns): in California, 190, New Mexico, 147. See also Indian
193; civilian, and Indian labor, 11–12; labor
French trading posts in Indian, 139; Smallpox, 24, 25, 86, 115
Indian, 13–17, 40, 48–49, 58–59, 70, Smuggling. See Trade: illegal
74–76, 76, 113; segregation in Spanish, Sola, Vicente, 219
81, 142, 191–92, 226; Spaniards as Soldados de cuera, 161, 162, 167, 195
moving into Indian, 49, 58–59, 74, 76, Soldiers (Spanish): in California, 190;
78, 92; Spanish, 10–12, 31–32, 121, 131, clothing of, 13, 14, 16, 161, 162, 167,
233–34; transformation of Apaches 195; dissatisfaction among, 63, 66–67,

294
 index

162; in Florida, 93, 116–17, 158, 205, 257; Indian policies of, 7, 15, 19–20, 54,
237–38; as helpless against Apaches, 56–57, 63, 70–72, 81, 82, 92, 95–96,
155; about horses, 24; Indians as 159–63, 166–73, 191, 192, 196, 200,
resisting missionaries and, 10, 12, 15, 208–9, 222, 226; Indian visitors to, 31,
16, 39, 41, 47, 54–57, 55, 63–64, 74, 77, 54; influence of, on Indians, 5, 10, 73,
83–89, 99–105, 115, 120, 137, 141–43, 75–77, 94, 221–27; legacy of, as linger-
157, 158, 179, 183–84, 189; inefficiency ing in American historical memory,
and reform of, 158–59, 162, 164, 243–64; length of time and extent of
167–68, 174, 177, 179, 202; missionaries its North American empire, 3; loss of
and, 81–84, 115, 180; in New Mexico, North American empire by, 3,
147; requests for more, 167, 168; social 199–220, 264; maps of exploration by,
mobility of, 237–38; in Texas, 146; 44, 62, 111; policies of, toward imperi-
treatment of Indians by, 10, 16, 39, 41, al rivals, 112–17; religious conversion
56, 59, 63–64, 99, 157, 163, 173, 174, as a New World goal of, 15, 19–20, 54,
183–84, 192, 253. See also Presidios 56, 59, 70–71, 81, 191, 192, 226; as
South Carolina, 139; English raiders on requiring missionaries to learn
Florida from, 105–7, 109, 118, 129, 131; Indian languages, 79; restrictive com-
expansion of, 108, 135, 137; French set- mercial policies of, 131–33, 141, 145,
tlements in, 53, 54; Indian attacks on, 150, 151, 202, 211, 216; as seeking to
123; missions and missionaries in, 74, include Indians in settlements estab-
75; Spanish exploration of, 31, 41; lished by, 10; strengthening of North
Spanish settlement of, 53–55, 57, 67, American presidios by, 153–75; trials
232, 236 in, for crimes against Indians, 39, 98;
Spain: animals, grasses, and diseases unification of, 18–19; war of, with
introduced by, 5, 10, 23–25, 86; archi- England, 168, 189, 194, 195–97, 202–3;
tectural evidence of, in North war of, with United States, 247, 249.
America, 1–4, 233–35, 249–52, 253, See also England; Explorers; France;
254–56; benefits to Indians of sub- Missionaries; New Spain; New
mitting to, 58; and Catholic Church, World; Soldiers; Spaniards; Specific
15, 81, 97–99, 180; claims of, to North monarchs and representatives of
America, 10, 18–20, 44, 53, 65, 81, 106, Spaniards: alleged racial superiority of,
112; considers abandoning its colo- 19, 20, 70, 76–77, 159, 192, 237; as bad
nization efforts, 65, 66; Crown of, as influence on Indians, 79, 81, 82, 87, 99,
administering interior provinces of 142, 173, 183, 192, 238; culture of, at
New Spain, 167–68, 174; different their first encounter with Indians,
policies of, for different North 18–22, 24; English and Anglo-
American regions, 166; expenses of American views of, 244; Indian influ-
North American empire of, 65, 81, ence on, 229–36; as a term, 5. See also
133, 135, 137, 144, 146, 149, 151; geo- Catholicism; Explorers; Missionaries;
graphic names from, 4–5, 241, 247, Soldiers; Specific individuals

295
 index

Spanish-American War (1898), 247, 249 Tovar, Pedro de, 37

Spanish language (Castilian), 15, 16, 79, Towns. See Settlements
101, 120, 151, 221, 222, 225 Trade: Anglo-American, 202, 242; con-
Spanish revival architecture, 256–58 trol of, as more important than terri-
Squash (gourds), 17, 40, 63, 113, 232 tory, 134; English, in New World, 131,
Strait of Anián, 54 133–36, 165–66, 207, 209; French, in
New World, 107, 108, 119, 121, 126–27,
Taos Pueblo, 67, 100, 101, 132 130–31, 133–35, 138–43, 147–48, 206–7;
Taovaya Indians, 143 illegal, 66, 119, 131–33, 147, 150, 151,
Tarabal, Sebastián, 185, 187 165, 196, 206–7, 216, 219; with Indians
Tascaloosa (Choctaw chief ), 42 as key to New World control, during
Technology, 22–23. See also Metal; 18th century, 131, 135, 141; Spanish,
Weapons with French, 206–7; Spanish, with
Tennessee, 41, 206 Indians, 135, 147, 168–71, 174, 175, 196,
Tenochtitlán, 25, 33 200, 205, 216, 225; Spanish restric-
Terrenate presidio, 155, 164–65 tions on, 131–33, 141, 145, 150, 151, 202,
Tewa villages (New Mexico), 100 211, 216. See also Fur trade; Trade
Texas, 140; as failing to attract Spanish goods
colonists, 144; farming and ranching’s Trade goods: English use of, with
expansion in, 175; French in, 109–12, Indians, 106–8, 130; French use of,
124–26, 130–31, 141; memories of with Indians, 107, 108, 121, 126, 130,
Spanish past in, 244–47; missionaries 131, 134, 141–43, 148; Spain’s lack of,
in, 113, 115, 119–20, 141–43, 158; missions 131–33, 141, 175; Spain’s use of, with
in, 115, 121, 122, 124, 132, 138, 141–43, 192, Indians, 172, 208–9. See also Gifts;
237; naming of, 113; presidios in, 107, Specific trade goods
121, 122, 124–25, 125, 138, 142–43, 145, Trade routes: to California, 107, 165,
146, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164–66, 189, 184, 185, 186, 187; development of new,
239; Spanish explorers in, 26, 30, 36, 175; of fur trade, 139, 141; Indian, 17,
39, 43, 236; Spanish outposts in, 112–13, 23; official Spanish overland, 132, 141,
114, 119–21; Spanish reclaiming of, 124; 148, 155. See also Santa Fe Trail
and Spanish trade, 132; United States’ Treaties: as cornerstone of new Indian
claims to, 213, 215–16, 218–19, 245–47. policy, 170–71, 208, 209
See also Specific places in Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 136
Texas and the Texians (Foote), 246–47 Treaty of Fontainebleau, 148–49
Thomas, Alfred Barnaby, 259 Treaty of Nogales, 209
Timucuan Indians, 41, 42, 49, 56, 74, 75, Treaty of Paris (1763), 149, 150, 205
76, 80, 86, 100 Treaty of Paris (1783), 205
Timucuan mission (Florida), 74, 100, Treaty of Ryswick, 115–16
106, 107 Treaty of San Lorenzo del Escorial,
Tonkawa Indians, 142 211–12

296
 index

Tribute (from Indians), 92–94, 97, 98, Velasco, Luis de (Viceroy), 60, 61, 91,
101. See also Encomienda system 237
Tubac presidio, 155, 158, 160, 165, 185 Vélez Cachupín, Tomás, 169
Tucson (Arizona), 2, 157, 165, 175, 235–36 Vélez de Escalante, Silvestre (fray), 188,
Tumacácori mission, 228 194
“The Turk,” 39 Venice (California), 249
Turkeys, 16 Veracruz (Mexico), 132, 167
Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 32
Ugarte, Jacobo de, 169, 173 Vial, Pedro, 175, 215
Ulloa, Antonio de, 150, 151, 155 Villa(s), 121, 144, 146, 194, 234
Ulloa, Francisco de, 34, 36 Villasur, Pedro de, 126–27, 128
United States: acquires Louisiana and Virginia, 65, 74
Florida, 207–8, 212–13; advantages of, Visitas, 78
over Spain as imperial power, 242; Vizcaíno, Sebastián, 62–63, 179, 182
annexes Texas and California, 220;
frontier linked to national identity of, War of 1812, 217
10; Indian reservations of, 174; inva- War of Austrian Succession, 136
sion of Mexico by, 220, 245–46, War of Jenkins’ Ear, 136, 137, 138
262–63; Spain’s disputed boundary War of the Quadruple Alliance, 123, 125,
with, 204, 211–16, 218; as Spain’s impe- 126, 128, 133, 138
rial rival, 10, 108, 199, 201, 242; War of the Spanish Succession, 118, 119,
Spanish forts strengthened against, 123
156; Spanish Louisiana and Florida as Weapons: of Indians, 15, 82, 134, 152, 157,
dependent on, 207; takes Mobile, 217; 158, 165–66, 208, 223, 226; missionaries
Texas and Florida ceded to, 213, as not having, 70, 141; selling of, to
217–18; as threat to Indians, 208, Indians by English, 106–8, 134, 135,
212. See also American Revolution; 165–66; selling of, to Indians by
Anglo-Americans; Atlantic Coast; French, 126, 131, 134, 141, 142–43, 148;
Pacific Coast; Spanish-American Spain’s allowing, to be sold to
War Indians, 169, 170, 172; of Spaniards,
University of California (Berkeley), 258 15–16, 23, 28, 68, 131; Spaniards as sell-
Urdaneta, Andrés de, 62 ing, to Indians, 135, 147, 165–66, 169,
Utah, 188 170, 172, 189; Spanish policy of not
Ute Indians, 94, 105, 126, 146 selling, to Indians, 134; Spanish
smuggling of, to Anglo-Americans,
Valero, marqués de (Viceroy), 121, 126 196. See also Metal
Valverde y Cosío, Antonio, 126 Webb, Walter Prescott, 260
Vargas, Diego de, 102–4, 103, 126, 158 White Legend, 6
Velasco, Luis de (Algonquian), 54 Whitman, Walt, 1, 248
Velasco, Luis de (Captain), 231 Wichita Indians, 39, 61, 143, 157

297
 index

“Wild Geese,” 164 Yuchi Indians, 205

Wilkinson, James, 215 Yuma Indians (Quechan Indians), 17,
Winyah Bay (South Carolina), 31 107, 185, 188–90
Wolf, Eric, 10 Yuma rebellion (1781), 188–90, 194
Women (Indian): assimilation of, into Yúngé Pueblo, 59
Spanish society, 226, 238; Spaniards’ Yupe Indians, 171
treatment of, 16, 39, 41, 42, 93, 95, 99,
163, 183, 192, 238–40; in Spanish Zacatecas (Mexico), 54, 59, 60
romance, 34; work done by, 72, 226, Zaldívar, Juan de, 63
232 Zaldívar, Vicente, 63
Women (Spanish): property of, 229–30, Zelinsky, Wilbur, 241
239; with Spanish explorers, 37, 40, Zéspedes, Vicente Manuel de, 199–200,
43; with Spanish settlers, 61, 231, 203, 208, 209, 238
238 Zúñiga, José de, 175, 235–36
World Columbian Exposition (1893), 250 Zúñiga y Cerda, Joseph de, 109, 129
Zuni Pueblo: initial encounters
Yamasee Indians, 106, 123, 135, 205 between Indians and Spaniards at,
Yamasee War, 123, 135 13–16, 20, 21, 37, 38; missions among,
Yamparika Indians, 171 73, 73, 100, 188; and Pueblo rebel-
Yavapai Indians, 187 lions, 104

298