Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment 9780300127676

Citation preview

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment     .     

                        

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. Copyright © 2005 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. Set in Monotype Janson type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Hamilton Printing Company, Castleton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weber, David J. Bárbaros: Spaniards and their savages in the Age of Enlightenment / David J. Weber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-10501-0 (alk. paper) 1. Indians—Colonization. 2. Indians—Missions. 3. Indians—Government relations. 4. Spain— Colonies—America—Administration. 5. New Spain—Colonization. 6. America—Discovery and exploration. 7. America—History—To 1810. I. Title. E59.C58W43 2005 323.1197′0171246′09033—dc22 2004030553 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Only with kindness, impartiality, and good faith can we achieve peace and commerce with the fiercest and most valiant Indians. Miguel Lastarria Río de la Plata, 1804

So much blood, so much fear, so much weeping. An Indian woman, remembering Nuevo Santander, ca. 1795

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

Contents

List of Illustrations ix List of Maps xi Acknowledgments xiii A Note on Translation xviii Introduction 1 1 • Savants, Savages, and New Sensibilities 19 2 • Savages and Spaniards: Natives Transformed 52 3 • The Science of Creating Men 91 4 • A Good War or a Bad Peace? 138 5 • Trading, Gifting, and Treating 178

viii

CONTENTS

6 • Crossing Borders 221 Epilogue: Insurgents and Savages, from Inclusion to Exclusion 257 Notes 279 Bibliography 371 Index 441

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Carlos III, 1784. Yndios Bárbaros/Savage Indians. Alejandro Malaspina. Vista del Puerto Deseado. José del Pozo painting a Patagonian girl. El Cacique Juncan. The son of Catiguala. Nootkas dancing at Friendly Cove. Maquinna, principal chief of the Nootkas. Patagonian man. Spaniards as savages. Patagonians on the banks of the Río Negro. Araucanians. A surprise attack, or malón. Araucanians of the pampa. Cangapol and his wife, Huennee. “Yes, I believe.” Martyrs. Mission San José, Chiquitos. Mission of San Javier of the Mocobíes. Jesuits crossing the Río Laja. Fort at Pergamino. Fort at Arauco. Carmen de Patagones. Medal with the bust of Carlos III. A citation to “Little Bird.” Conference at Negrete, 1793. ix

4 13 22 23 24 25 26 28 30 42 48 53 57 63 66 67 94 98 115 121 127 168 170 171 187 188 190

x

I L LU S T R AT I O N S

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Pampas in Buenos Aires. Spanish camp on the Bermejo River, 1774. The game of chueca. A Chilean huaso. Charrúas, 1833. Return from the raid/La vuelta del malón.

198 212 225 251 272 276

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

Maps

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Spanish America, 1783. Disputed Spanish-American borderlands, 1783–95. Malaspina in America, 1789–91. The Araucanía, the pampa, and Patagonia, 1781. The Chaco, Paraguay, and Upper Peru, 1794. Northern New Spain, 1776. Central America and the Caribbean coast of South America, 1777. 8. Jesuit missions in Spanish America, 1767. 9. The Guajira Peninsula, 1775.

xi

7 10 21 60 69 73 88 111 175

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

Acknowledgments

Impetus for this book came from John Lynch, a distinguished historian of Latin American history whom I have never met. In a review of my book The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992) Professor Lynch gently chided me in the Times Literary Supplement for failing to compare Spain’s North American frontiers with its Central and South American counterparts. His criticism struck a chord. While working on The Spanish Frontier I had wondered how some of the Spanish policies and practices that I saw on the northern frontiers of the empire played out on other Spanish frontiers. Seen from a distance, Spain’s imperial system appears to have been a monolith, applying its policies equally throughout the Americas. Closer inspection, however, suggested that local forces shaped implementation of imperial policies. That being the case, were practices that I saw on North American frontiers commonplace to the frontiers of the empire? or anomalous? If local conditions on Spanish-American frontiers shaped the implementation of imperial policies, did they also influence the o‹cials who crafted them in Spain’s Iberian center of power? Could Spanish policy be understood adequately by looking at its parts? or did one have to see it whole? Such questions had aroused my curiosity, but I yielded to the realities of time and space, kept my focus squarely on North America, and finished the book. Then came Professor Lynch’s review, which reminded me that the bigger picture of Spain’s American frontiers still needed exploring and assured me that someone other than myself would be interested in the journey. As I looked at the large literature on Spain’s many American xiii

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

frontiers, it quickly became clear I would have to narrow my focus to a single subject. I chose Spanish relations with unconquered Indians, or savages, as the Spaniards called them—the most consistently vexing challenge Spain faced on the frontiers of America. It also became evident I would have to narrow my subject chronologically if I was to expand it geographically. I settled on the late eighteenth century, from 1759, the year Carlos III acceded to the Spanish throne, to the 1810s, when the Spanish-American colonies began to break away. Those years saw the e¤ects of the Spanish Enlightenment come to full flower in Spanish America. During that time of enlightened despots, I supposed that Spain would both pursue and practice a kinder, gentler Indian policy and implement it with some uniformity throughout its American empire. Even by limiting my story to a specific subject and half a century, I could not hope to do comprehensive archival research. Luckily for me, several generations of scholars in Europe and the Americas have studied Spanish relations with Indians. Those scholars have edited and published volumes of original documents and quoted from them extensively in monographs and articles in scholarly journals. Along with their interpretive pieces, then, they have brought a large number of primary sources into print, facilitating the work of those of us who have followed them. In my quest for sources, I have profited from the unfailingly kind assistance of scholars, archivists, and librarians. In Argentina, I am especially grateful to my colleague and friend Professor Raúl Mandrini, Director of the Instituto de Estudios Históricos, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires in Tandil, who introduced me to Argentine institutions and scholars, including his a¤able, helpful, and informed protégés, Sarah Ortelli and Carlos Paz. In Buenos Aires, the extraordinarily knowledgeable and generous sta¤ of the library of the Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani,” especially Marcelina Jarma and Abel Roth, gave me convenient access to regional journals. The remarkably prolific legal historian Abelardo Levaggi of the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas y Sociales in Buenos Aires kindly shared much of his work on treaties with Indians prior to its publication. When I began this project, I intended to devote more space to those treaties, but don Abelardo has covered the field. In Buenos Aires, Silvia Ratto and Jorge Gelman have also graciously shared their work. In Jujuy, Marcelo Lagos, Ana Teruel, and Daniel Santamaría introduced me to regional historiography and welcomed my wife and me to their homes. Don Daniel guided us into the Quebrada de Humahuaca on a memorable day. At the Universidad del Sur in Bahía Blanca, Juan Francisco Jiménez and Daniel Villar have been the most gracious of collaborators, and the Argentine historian Florencia Roulet has shared her work with me from her distant post at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In Bolivia, I owe a debt to the hospitable Josep Barnadas, the former director of the Archivo Nacional de Bolivia in Sucre, and to two erudite, hospitable historians in Santa Cruz, Alcides Parejas Moreno and Gustavo Prado Robles. In Chile, Jorge Pinto received me graciously at the Universidad de la Frontera in Temuco, introducing me to the latest scholarship, including his own, and patiently dis-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv

abusing me of misconceptions. Leonardo León Solís of the Universidad de Valparaíso gave me copies of his remarkable publications that would have been di‹cult for me to find in other ways. From the Université d’Angers in France, the Chilean historian Fernando Casanueva generously shared ideas and o¤prints of his publications with me. In Mexico, Ignacio del Río at the UNAM and the accomplished Argentine scholar Sara Ortelli, who recently completed her doctorate at the Colegio de México, located key documents for me. In Venezuela, I received a warm welcome in Caracas from Vilma Lehmann and other members of the fine sta¤ of the Biblioteca Nacional, Rafael Fernández Heres, Director of the Academia Nacional de la Historia, and Guillermo Briceño Porras, Director of the Archivo General de la Nación. For extraordinary help I am especially indebted to Susan Berglund, professor of history at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. In Spain, Douglas Inglis, one of the preeminent ratones del archivo, oriented me both in and beyond the Archivo General de Indias, and Alfredo Jiménez Nuñez, that courtly polymath in the Departamento de Historia de América at the Universidad de Sevilla, o¤ered wisdom and friendship. In Madrid, I continue to be grateful to the dynamic Sylvia L. Hilton of the Departamento de Historia de América at the Universidad Complutense, with whom I have enjoyed a long collaboration, and to the irrepressible Salvador Bernabéu, who has since moved from the Consejo Superior in Madrid to the Consejo Superior’s Escuela de Estudios Hispano Americanos in Seville. The Argentine expatriate Beatriz Vitar, whom I first encountered in Madrid, has generously shared her knowledge of the Chaco. Finally, I owe much to a member of our family in Madrid, el sabio Federico Jiménez García. In the United States, a number of scholars generously introduced me to their SpanishAmerican counterparts, oriented me to archives and bookstores in the areas of their specialties, and answered a myriad of questions: Arnold Bauer (University of California at Davis), Charles Cutter (Purdue), Judy Ewell (William and Mary), Donna Guy (Ohio State), Kristine Jones (Associate Director, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Chicago), Erick Langer (Georgetown), Michael Perri (Emory), Cynthia Radding (University of New Mexico), and Jane Rausch (University of Massachusetts). James Saeger (Lehigh) not only guided me into the literature of the Chaco, but also shared notes from archival sources. In the United States I profited from the collections of several libraries, including the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico, whose riches and convenience I have enjoyed since the early 1960s. I especially appreciate the kindness of Walter Brem at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and of Adán Benavides at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. A Times Mirror Fellowship from the Huntington Library for 2000–01 enabled me to extend a one-semester university leave into a year-long residence in San Marino, California. In that nirvana I enjoyed uninterrupted time to write under the watchful but benign eye of the Director of Research, Roy Ritchie, and the Huntington’s ever-attentive sta¤. A semester of teaching as a visiting

xvi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

professor at Harvard in the autumn of 2002 gave me access to its incomparable library, allowing me to scour publications from Latin America that I could not have found so readily at any other location in the United States. There, for many favors, I am grateful to John Coatsworth and Aaron Navarro, but particularly to Brian De Lay and Diliana Angelova for reasons they know best. My own institution has facilitated my work in many ways. I could not have written this book without the broad collection of our Fondren Library, the deep holdings of the DeGolyer Library, directed with unfailing good cheer by David Farmer and now Russell Martin, and our fine interlibrary loan department, run so e‹ciently by Billie Stovall. I would not have undertaken a project of this scope without the generous resources of the Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History, which supported my research travel and a part-time research assistant—Jane Elder in the early stages of the book, Andrea Boardman in the middle phase, and Dionne Procell and Ruth Ann Elmore toward the end. I am indebted to each of them. The Dedman Chair in History has also provided me with essential research leaves. Two colleagues who presided over Southern Methodist University’s Clements Department of History while I wrote this book, Daniel Orlovsky and James Hopkins, have given me their friendship as well as departmental support. Midway through this project I tested one of its themes at a conference organized by Amy Turner Bushnell and Jack P. Greene at Michigan State University in 1997. That essay appeared first in Spanish, published in Tandil, Argentina, as “Borbones y bárbaros: Centro y periferia en la reformulación de la política de España hacia los indígenas no sometidos,” Anuario del IEHS 13 (1998): 147–71; it appeared several years later in English as “Bourbons and Bárbaros: Center and Periphery in the Reshaping of Spanish Indian Policy,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500–1800, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 79–103 (prose and ideas from that essay are reproduced here with permission of the Anuario del IEHS and Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.). As the work moved toward completion, I had the privilege and honor of trying out other ideas on other university campuses, most memorably at Cornell, where I gave the three-part Carl Becker Lectures in 2003, and at Baylor in 2004, where I gave the two Edmondson lectures. The latter were published as Spanish Bourbons and Wild Indians (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004). (Parts of these lectures have found their way into Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages and appear here with permission of the publisher.) I am beholden to generous colleagues who have read portions of the manuscript for me: Gary Anderson (University of Oklahoma), Stephen Hackel (Oregon State), Pekka Hämäläinen (University of California, Santa Barbara), Robert Lane Kau¤mann (Rice University), Florencia Roulet (University of Lausanne), James Sandos (University of Redlands), Refugio de la Torre (University of California, Berkeley and the Colegio de Michoacán), Sam Truett (University of New Mexico), and members of my own department, particularly Peter Bakewell, Edward Countryman, and Kathleen Wellman. Several stalwarts read the entire manuscript: Matt Babcock (a superb Ph.D. candidate

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xvii

and ethnohistorian at SMU), James F. Brooks (School of American Research), Amy Bushnell (retired at an early age and now associated with the John Carter Brown Library), James Hopkins (SMU), Peter Onuf (University of Virginia), Cynthia Radding (University of New Mexico), James Saeger (Lehigh University), Stuart Schwartz (Yale), and William Taylor (my former colleague at SMU now at the University of California, Berkeley, who encouraged this project from the beginning). Each has saved me from errors of commission and omission, forced me to question assumptions, and earned my deep gratitude. I have only myself to blame, of course, for the errors and oversights that remain. Over a decade ago, my editor Chuck Grench, now at the University of North Carolina Press, introduced me to the pleasures of working with the extraordinary sta¤ at Yale University Press, from the designer Nancy Ovedovitz to the head of marketing, Tina Weiner. It is a privilege to have them turn another of my manuscripts into a book and get it into readers’ hands, and it has been a distinct pleasure to work with Chuck’s smart, buoyant successor, Lara Heimert, and with the astute Lawrence Kenney, whose copyediting saved me from errors in two languages. Jerome N. Cookson of Pensacola, Florida, made the maps with a sharp eye toward contradictions and ambiguities. Laura Moss Gottlieb of Madison, Wisconsin, who produced a spectacular index for my Spanish Frontier in North America, has repeated her performance with Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages. As she has with all of my previous books, my best friend, Carol Bryant Weber, read the final version of the manuscript. It has benefited from the sensibilities she has acquired over the years as a former English teacher, editor, and now attorney. But however much the manuscript has profited from her critical eye, I have gained infinitely more from her love, her intelligence, and her sunny disposition.

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

A Note on Translation

Translations of quotations in the text are my own, except where the citation is to an English-language source (some Spanishlanguage documents are available in print only in English). I have tried to translate passages into clear and graceful English without sacrificing what I took to be the author’s intention. In so doing, I have taken liberties with individual words and phrases. Those who wish to consult the original Spanish wording can find it in my notes. In general I have modernized spellings and diacritical markings in Spanish-language quotations, although in some cases I have left infelicities in the original Spanish to retain its flavor— as in the words of Alejandro Malaspina, whose native language was not Spanish.

xviii

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment

✥ ✥ ✥ ✥ ✥

Introduction

I want to know, and to write, about the places where disparate points of view rub together—the spaces between. Barbara Kingsolver, writer, 1995 In 1794, as he prepared to retire after a decade in o‹ce, America’s first secretary of war, Henry Knox, deplored the catastrophic results of his countrymen’s treatment of Indians. Westward-moving Americans, he said, had brought about “the utter extirpation of nearly all the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union.” Along the nation’s western borders, Americans continued to encroach on Indian lands, inciting “savages” to retaliate and dragging the United States into wars. His fellow Americans, Knox declared, “have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the . . . conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”¹ Under Knox’s direction, the United States had tried to fashion an Indian policy based on conciliation rather than confrontation. Knox believed that Indians themselves, if given the opportunity, would eventually “see the desirability of an end to savagery and their acceptance of civilization.”² Conciliation had two other advantages over war: it cost less and it would not sully the nation’s honor.³ On the other hand, Knox told one of his generals, if Americans continued to “destroy the tribes, posterity will be apt to class the e¤ects of our Conduct and that of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru together.”⁴ Knox’s countrymen would have readily understood his allusion to the Spain of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. Like their English and English-American forebears, citizens of the young 1

2

INTRODUCTION

United States deplored what one Anglophone writer described as the Spaniards’ “unparalleled inhumanity to the unhappy Indian nations they conquered, their extirpation of the inhabitants of whole kingdoms, and other horrid excesses.”⁵ Spain, then, had long served English speakers as a model to avoid rather than to emulate, but the Spain of the conquistadors had ceased to exist. Throughout the Spanish-American mainland by the 1790s, numerous indigenous peoples had been incorporated rather than eliminated, and most of the Natives who still lived independently along the borders of Spain’s American empire had come to some form of accommodation with the Hispanic world, and it with them. In Knox’s day, men imbued with the learning and sensibilities of the Enlightenment governed Spain as they did the United States. Early in the century the tired dynasty of the Habsburgs had yielded to dynamic Bourbons. Beginning with the reign of Felipe V (r. 1700–46), the Bourbons brought fresh ideas from France to make Spain a more unified and prosperous state. To reform public administration they preferred men of ability and knowledge over nobles with pedigrees. Many members of the new governing class had training in the law and deep learning in other disciplines.⁶ The economist Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, the conde de Campomanes (1723–1802), studied Greek, Latin, and Arabic as well as the law. He published works in ancient history, modern history, archaeology, and empirical science and won membership in scholarly academies in Spain and France and in Benjamin Franklin’s Philosophical Society of America. Like other Spanish intellectuals of his day, Campomanes knew the influential European books of his era and found good conversation in the salons of Madrid, eventually establishing one of his own.⁷ The brilliant, dynamic José de Gálvez, who presided over Spain’s American empire as minister of the Indies from 1776 to 1787, overcame his humble birth by distinguishing himself in the law and immersing himself in a¤airs of state. Although not Campomanes’s equal as a scholar, Gálvez possessed an impressive library for his day. It included titles in history, geography, and science. Gálvez’s command of French allowed him to read the works of René Descartes and the French encyclopedists in the original and gave him access to works translated into that language, like William Robertson’s History of America (1777). Harshly critical of Spain as a colonial power, Robertson’s History occupied a place on the Bourbons’ list of prohibited reading, as did some of the other titles in Gálvez’s library.⁸ Spain’s Bourbon reformers, like their enlightened counterparts elsewhere in Europe and America, hoped to bring about progress by applying the methods of science to society. They streamlined administrative structures, sought ways to promote economic growth, and gathered and analyzed data. Some, like Campomanes and Gálvez, took selfconscious pride in the rationality and spirit of reform of their age. The jurist Victorián Villava understood that he lived “in the most enlightened century” and was informed by “the philosophy . . . of its brilliant writing.”⁹ Others, like Eugenio Espejo, regretted the limited impact of enlightened ideas. Born in Quito in 1747 to an Indian father and a mulatto mother, Espejo earned degrees in the law and medicine and steeped himself

INTRODUCTION

3

in the ideas of enlightened thinkers, including foreigners like Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles de Secondat, the baron de Montesquieu, and Spaniards such as Benito Jerónimo Feijóo and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Bitterly disappointed by the slow pace of reform in Spanish America, Espejo turned to writing satire. One of his characters thought it paradoxical to live in what he called “the era of idiocy and . . . the century of ignorance” and yet refer to it as the Age of Enlightenment.¹⁰ As in other eras, the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason was riven by intellectual crosscurrents. Then as now, data gathered through the use of empirical methods could be read in di¤erent ways, and ends could be achieved by di¤erent means. One man’s rationality might be another’s “idiocy.” Gálvez, for example, defined Spain’s American provinces as “colonies.” In 1768, he apparently became the first Spaniard to use the word in an o‹cial document. Campomanes, on the other hand, wished to put Spain and its American provinces on an equal footing, erasing the distinction between metropolis and colony. Each man championed a di¤erent means toward the same end. Each saw his strategy as the best way to serve Spain’s absolutist monarchy and to preserve Spain’s position in America.¹¹ At the same time that they di¤ered over ideas, Spain’s enlightened government ministers jockeyed for political influence for themselves, their regions, and their class. They formed political factions that coalesced and split and rose and fell from power within the enlightened regimes of King Carlos III (r. 1759–88) and his less than able son Carlos IV (r. 1788–1808). Whatever their intellectual and political divergences, however, enlightened Spaniards, like their opposite numbers in Europe and America, shared a belief in the application of reason to society. Nothing was to be taken on faith, except perhaps the faith that rational testing of old assumptions about politics, economics, and society would result in the further progress of humankind.¹² As they sought to promote progress through reason, enlightened Spanish o‹cials debated the status of the crown’s impoverished Indian vassals. Were subjected Indians naturally degraded? or degraded because Spaniards had exploited them? Were Indian vassals naturally inferior and resistant to progress? or inferior and unprogressive because they lacked opportunities? The answers to those questions determined the answers to others. Should Spain’s Indian vassals be maintained as a separate class that would provide cheap labor and pay tribute? Or would Indians be more productive if they were integrated into Spanish society and enjoyed the same opportunities and incentives as Spaniards? Each path promised to lead to greater economic progress for Spanish America and Spain, and each path had influential supporters among enlightened bureaucrats. Neither proponents of integration nor supporters of segregation, however, could translate their principles into enduring policy. The crown had the authority to end the impasse but vacillated and left the question unresolved. In the end, pragmatism and power usually prevailed over ideas. Spanish o‹cials were no more consistent in acting on their convictions than Virginia planters who deplored slavery but held onto their own slaves.¹³ Although they disagreed about the best way to incorporate Indians, enlightened

4

INTRODUCTION

1. Carlos III, 1784. Retrato de S.M. el Rey Carlos III, oil by Mariano Salvador Maella. Courtesy, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid.

Spaniards like Victorián Villava believed they lived in an age of “equality and fraternity” that required humane treatment of Indians.¹⁴ Spaniards could not “impose respect with force, nor achieve it with fear,” Miguel Lastarria wrote in 1804. A Peruvian-born doctor of sacred law and legal advisor to the viceroy of the Río de la Plata, the marqués de Avilés, Lastarria rejected the past use of force against Indians as counterproductive: “Only with kindness, impartiality, and good faith can we achieve peace and commerce with the fiercest and most valiant Indians . . . and conduct to the contrary will change the most languid and timid . . . into ferocious Indians.”¹⁵ Enlightened Spaniards resented outdated depictions of their cruel, dagger-carrying countrymen conquering Indians with dogs in a “sea of blood” (as they were represented in a book written at the time of the American Revolution by an anonymous author pretending to be an aggrieved Iroquois Indian).¹⁶ In the late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown and the Inquisition launched a countero¤ensive against writers who disparaged

INTRODUCTION

5

Spain’s sixteenth-century conquest of America, suggesting that the Indian population of America was low and denying that a holocaust had occurred. The Spanish polymath Félix de Azara, who candidly described the age of Cortés and Pizarro as a “backward time,” wondered why other countries continued to vilify Spain for its treatment of Indians. Among European powers, Azara observed, only Spain had embraced “millions of civilized and savage Indians” within its colonial society, transformed an “infinity” of Indians into Spaniards through racial mixture, and adopted “a voluminous code of laws in which every sentence and every word breathe an admirable humanity and grant Indians full protection.”¹⁷ Other European nations had driven Natives o¤ their lands, the conde de Campomanes noted, but Spain had transformed them into useful subjects.¹⁸ If Campomanes intended to draw an unfavorable comparison with the British colonies, he was on the mark. Incorporated Indians constituted over half of the population of the colonized areas of Spanish America, but Indians amounted to less than 6 percent of the population of English America east of the Mississippi in 1770.¹⁹ The nature and numbers of Indians that Englishmen and Spaniards encountered in their respective parts of America help explain this stark contrast, but so too does the behavior of the colonists themselves. Initially, all the colonial powers intended to turn Indians into Europeans and incorporate them peacefully. In practice, however, Englishmen proved less interested than Spaniards in converting or intermarrying with Indians. Englishmen tended to exclude Indians from their society; Spaniards to include them.²⁰ Prior to 1700, the Habsburg dynasty had enforced Spain’s humane and paternalistic laws unevenly, never resolving the tension between its wish to protect Indians and its interest in exploiting Indian labor. After 1700, Bourbon Spain narrowed, but never closed, the still sizable gap between policy and practice. During the reign of the most Americanoriented of Spain’s enlightened despots, Carlos III, the Bourbons’ administrative reforms began to be felt intensely in Spanish America. Carlos III filled the Council of the Indies, which governed American a¤airs, with men who had firsthand knowledge of America.²¹ Like their British counterparts of the 1760s and 1770s, Bourbon o‹cials took measures to strengthen the colonial system and make it more e‹cient, secure, and profitable for the mother country. In Spanish America, however, the Bourbon reformers continued their work until the 1810s, when Spain’s American colonies began to slip away—a generation after England had lost most of hers. The Bourbon reforms reached to the very edges of Spain’s colonies, a¤ecting even Indians who lived beyond Spanish political control. In the late eighteenth century, the borderlands of the Spanish Empire acquired heightened strategic importance as they gained the attention of Spain’s European rivals or, in the case of North America after 1783, the young United States. Bourbon o‹cials hoped to consolidate political control over some of those strategic frontiers, secure them from Indian raiders and foreign interlopers, and make them more productive.²² Accordingly, Carlos III sent a wave of trained scientists and explorers to gather intelligence about resources, geography, and peoples

6

INTRODUCTION

in the poorly understood spaces beyond the edges of the empire. He also sent professional bureaucrats to reform the two traditional frontier institutions—the military and the missions—promote civilian settlements, foster economic development, and forge alliances with Native leaders who wielded local power. To oversee frontier defense and development, the Bourbons established new administrative structures. In the single year of 1776, New Spain’s northern frontier, once governed entirely by the viceroy in Mexico City, became a semiautonomous comandancia general under the authority of a military commander; much of today’s Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and the mineral rich area of Upper Peru (in today’s Bolivia) were separated administratively from Lima and placed under a new viceroyalty, with its seat in Buenos Aires on the Río de la Plata. In that same year a half dozen provinces along the northern coast of South America were consolidated fiscally into the intendencia of Venezuela, with its headquarters in Caracas, and then refashioned politically and militarily as the capitanía general of Venezuela in 1777. Chile, governed from distant Lima by the viceroy of Peru, acquired greater autonomy as a capitanía general in 1778. These e¤orts to consolidate control over peripheral areas support the contention of some scholars that the Bourbon reforms represented a “revolution in government” that led to the “second conquest of America” and may better exemplify an e¤ective “reconquest” than did reforms in the empire’s heartlands.²³ In the unconquered lands beyond the edges of empire, however, there could be no reconquest. Autonomous Indians inhabited those lands and had embarked on their own experiments at political, economic, and military reorganization. Some societies of independent Indians had forged commercial relations with Spaniards, thus obtaining European goods through peaceful means. Other Natives societies, each for their own reasons, favored the use of force. The latter raided Spanish farms and ranches, destroyed Spanish property, took Spanish lives, and blocked the arteries of commerce that kept the empire alive. In the area of the Río de la Plata alone, the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville observed in 1767, “wild Indians” were so numerous that Spaniards could not subjugate them. They stole Spanish livestock and attacked haciendas and caravans, capturing those Spaniards they did not kill. “These Indians are brave, warlike, and the time has passed,” Bougainville observed, “when a single Spaniard can make a thousand Indians flee.”²⁴ But Spaniards did retaliate or launch provocative sorties of their own into Indian territories. By the mid-1700s, many of Spain’s American frontiers had become the scene of endless raids and counterraids. Periods of conflict alternated with times of peace and accommodation, to be sure, but as in other empires around the globe, the edges of the Spanish-American empire were more violent than its heartlands. Violence, one historian has reminded us, characterizes frontiers “where rival groups, tribes, nations, and states meet and compete for resources and space.”²⁵ The most progressive Bourbon o‹cials hoped to bring peace to the ragged edges of empire by replacing war with commerce, colonists, and diplomacy. Like Henry Knox,

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA 40˚

San Francisco

Azores

COMANDANCIA GENERAL of the San INTERIOR PROVINCES Antonio of NEW SPAIN

Pensacola OCEAN St. Augustine New Saltillo Orleans ANCER PRESIDENCY Gulf of Mexico TROPIC OF C Havana (AUDIENCIA) of GUADALAJARA Cuba Veracruz Mexico City AUDIENCIA Jamaica Acapulco of MEXICO Santo Domingo Guatemala San Salvador C a r i b b e a n S e a ´ GENERAL CAPITANIA La Trinidad (AUDIENCIA) of GUATEMALA Granada Guaira Cartagena CLAIMED BY BRITAIN Santa San José Caracas DUTCH GUIANA Marta Panamá EQUAT OR

Bogotá gotá got á AUDIENCIA of SANTA FE

´ CAPITANIA GENERAL of VENEZUELA

Callao

OCEAN

Lima

PRESIDENCY (AUDIENCIA) of CUZCO T R O P IC OF C APRICORN

´ CAPITANIA GENERAL (AUDIENCIA) of CHILE

0 2000 km

Cuzcoo PRESIDENCY

Treaty of San Ildefonso

(AUDIENCIA)

Line (1777) La Pazz of CHARCAS La Plata Potosí tosí tosí (Today's Sucre)

Salta

Asuncióón Asunci Tucumán Tucumán Asunción Tucumá Santa BANDA Córdoba Córdoba Fe ORIENTAL 2000 mi Valparaíso Mendoza Montevideo Santiago AUDIENCIA Buenos Concepción of BUENOS Aires AIRES Valdivia

20˚S

Rio de Janeiro

40˚

on

ia

Viceroyalty of La Plata

Salvador

494 Line of 1

P OR TUGUES E V I C ER OYALTY of BR AZI L

São Luís Recife

Tordesillas

AUDIENCIA of LIMA

0˚

Belém Bel

Trujillo

PACIFIC

20˚N

FRENCH GUIANA

Quito PRESIDENCY (AUDIENCIA) Guayaquil of QUITO

Galápagos Is.

0

AT L A N T I C

DISPUTED UNTIL 1795

Pat

ag

Viceroyalty of New Granada Viceroyalty of New Spain

Islas Malvinas (Falkland Is.)

40˚W

120˚

San Diego

UNITED STATES

St. Louis

Santa Fe

Cape Horn

60˚

80˚

Viceroyalty of Peru

Map 1. Spanish America, 1783. Although independent Indians controlled most of the Americas, state societies created political jurisdictions and drew boundaries through their territories as if they did not exist. In the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1777, Spanish and Portuguese negotiators recognized the irrelevancy of the last great Spanish-Portuguese division of America in 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas. In North America, the Mississippi became Spain’s boundary with the newly independent United States by terms of the treaties of Paris of 1783, but Spain also emerged from those negotiations with both of the Floridas, thus giving it control of both sides of the lower Mississippi. Adapted from Brading, 1984, 398.

8

INTRODUCTION

these Spanish o‹cials believed that peaceful means of neutralizing peoples they called savages would be less costly than war and, in the long run, more e¤ective and humane. Also like Knox, however, they could not fully control their more aggressive countrymen, some of them military o‹cers, who preferred war to peace. Following Spain’s initial military conquests of the early 1500s, the task of moving into new Indian territory and bringing Natives under Spanish control had fallen heavily on missionaries. The Bourbons continued the Habsburg policy of relying on missionaries to pacify Indians, but where Indians proved especially resistant to missionaries’ initiatives, liberal policymakers believed that merchandise would be more likely to win Natives’ allegiance than would promises of salvation. In some places, Spain turned to private merchants to control Indians through trade. In other areas, it relied on military o‹cers to serve as Indian agents and to enter into treaties of friendship and commerce with Indians. Trade and treaties do not fit the image Knox and his contemporaries had of Spanish policy toward so-called savages. Neither do they fit the image still projected by some North American scholars who tend to regard Spanish policy toward Indians as timeless. “To a large extent, the major outlines of the Spanish program for civilizing the Indians remained the same from the early 1600’s to the early 1800’s,” one respected specialist has observed.²⁶ “Despite tactical shifts,” another scholar has noted, “Spanish grand strategy on the frontier ossified during the colonial period. . . . Over the centuries, Spanish o‹cials seemingly forgot little and learned little.”²⁷ These and other familiar oversimplifications resonate through our literature: the idea that the Indian policy of England and France “was based on trade . . . and Spain’s was based on the vain hope of mass conversion to Catholicism”;²⁸ the generalization that “a logic of territorial conquest rather than economic exploitation underpinned the subjection of frontier indigenes and posited their social exclusion, that is, their extermination or segregation”;²⁹ the notion that “there were no Spanish-Indian treaties”;³⁰ and the commonplace comparison that “while the French sought a consensual ‘alliance’ with the natives, Spaniards sought submission. Even the most benevolent methods of enacting Spanish authority never sought consent from natives.”³¹ Spanish policymakers of the late colonial period did in fact seek consent from Natives. Following the enlightened formula of the late 1700s, military o‹cers who governed frontier zones often courted autonomous Indians with gifts, generous terms of trade, and friendly alliances even as they strengthened their own military position. In some documents of the era, discussions of trade, diplomacy, and gentle treatment of Indians are so pervasive that one might conclude, as did one historian, that Bourbon policy represented a “rea‹rmation of the [crown’s] policy of peaceful conquest.”³² It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the Bourbons embraced a single Indian policy. In hawkish military circles the newly popular discourse of trade and diplomacy did not replace the language of all-out war. Thus, even as some Bourbon o‹cers extended the olive branch, others moved vigorously to meet violence with violence and to end

INTRODUCTION

9

Indian raids by killing or exiling Indian raiders. In the Age of Reason even the hierarchical and professionalized Spanish military spoke with many voices. The Spanish military represented one of several competing interest groups, each divided into reformers and defenders of the status quo, who shaped and reshaped Indian policy into the twilight years of the Spanish Empire.³³ Spain’s enlightened despots, operating from the empire’s peninsular center and possessed of unprecedented regal power, did not so much dictate policies as negotiate them in ongoing dialogues with their own colonial subjects—ecclesiastics, military o‹cers, bureaucrats, common folk, and elites. Indeed, local oligarchs and o‹cers close to the scene often had a greater impact on policy than did Bourbon o‹cials in Madrid. A Franciscan in Chile, Francisco Javier Alday, discovered this to his sorrow in 1804 when he tried to forward a petition to Spain to reverse a series of local decisions that had gone against him. Fray Francisco had hoped government o‹cials would force obdurate Araucanians into missions, but the governor of Valdivia, the intendant of Concepción, and the audiencia of Santiago all denied his request. Fray Francisco then asked a royal inspector to send his petition on to Spain. The inspector replied that it would not be wise “because the Council of the Indies cannot make any determination without asking for a report from the government of Chile, which will have to defend its decisions, and what will come of that? More damage than advantage. . . . With patience, that which cannot be done in one year can be done in another, and that which cannot be done during one administration can be done during another.”³⁴ The Spanish crown itself, then, was just one of several players in the formulation and implementation of Indian policy. In this respect, absolutist Spain resembled other early modern states, including the United States, whose governments could not control the actions of local o‹cials or individual frontiersmen.³⁵ When it came to dictating the way a society would relate to independent Indians, enlightened despots were no more successful than republicans. If a variety of Spanish interest groups remained in lively and often tense conversation about the nature of Indian policy, independent Indians shaped their conversation in a number of ways. Some Indians succumbed to a handful of soldiers and a few missionaries, suggesting the e‹cacy of peaceful conquests. Some had su‹cient power to force Spaniards to abandon all e¤orts to conquer them. Some independent Natives, particularly those with access to guns and ammunition from Spain’s rivals, could make Spaniards pay tribute to them and to recognize their autonomy—that is, to invert the relationship that Europeans imagined as proper and normal. The policies Spaniards employed toward independent Indians depended as much on Indian responses as on Spanish initiatives, and Indians often took the initiative, forcing Spaniards to respond. In places where independent Indians found it in their interest to cooperate with Spaniards and where Spaniards found peaceful relations more valuable than conquests, conciliation prevailed over conflict. One such place was the broad region where Spain’s colonial empire bordered the young United States. After 1783, Spain and the United

INDIANA

MISSOURI

Town Fort Present-day state boundary Area in dispute between the U.S. and Spain

i ipp

St. Louis Mi ssi ILLINOIS ss

Oh io

Missouri

KENTUCKY NEW MADRID

Upper Louisiana

TENNESSEE

(Spain)

ARKANSAS Quapaws Ar

ka

FORT SAN FERNANDO

Cherokees Tennessee

Chickasaws nsa

AP

s

nah an

32˚28'N

i FORT NOGALES (TODAY'S VICKSBURG)

t Flin

p

NORTH CAROLINA

SOUTH CAROLINA

GEORGIA ttahoochee Cha

Mis siss ip

N

S

Sa v

ALABAMA FORT CONFEDERACIÓN

Natchez

Savannah

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Lower Creeks (Apalachicolas)

31st Parallel

Baton Rouge

Mobile New Orleans

Louisiana

St. Marys River

West Florida(Spain) Pensacola

Seminoles

SAN MARCOS DE APALACHEE

East Florida

FORT SAN FERNANDO DE LAS BARRANCAS

(Spain)

200 mi

Gulf of Mexico

Seminoles

St. Augustine

ns Joh

Apalachicola River

0

CASTILLO DE SAN MARCOS

St.

(Spain)

0

CH

M

U

IN

Upper Creeks

b ee

Yaz oo

g Tombi

Choctaws

MISSISSIPPI

P

A AL

N IA

O

TA

FLORIDA

200 km

Map 2. Disputed Spanish-American borderlands, 1783–95. Spain acquired the Floridas from Britain in the treaties of Paris of 1783, but the treaties failed to specify West Florida’s northern boundary. Spain claimed that it extended at least to 32° 28′, at present Vicksburg. Spain also asserted that East Florida extended to the Ohio and Tennessee rivers by virtue of Spain’s successful military operations against the British in that region during the American Revolution. The United States, heir to British claims, put the border at the 31st parallel, which had once separated British West Florida from Indian territory. The dispute ended in 1795 when Spain abandoned its claims to the area north of the 31st parallel. Map adapted from Weber, 1992, 277.

INTRODUCTION

11

States vied with one another for control over a large zone that stretched across presentday Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. In that disputed territory each tried to win the allegiance of Indian leaders, and Indian leaders tried to profit from their rivalry. As Spaniards understood it, the southeastern tribes had developed an “irreconcilable hatred” toward Anglo-Americans, who were “waging a cruel and continual war [against the Indians] in order to penetrate the country and advance their settlements.”³⁶ The high point of Spanish–Indian diplomacy in this region came in the fall of 1793, when Spanish agents brought representatives of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks to the Spanish fort of Nogales (today’s Vicksburg, Mississippi). There the tribal leaders formed an alliance and swore “to contribute . . . to the preservation of [Spain’s] dominion throughout all the provinces of Louisiana and both Floridas.”³⁷ Spain, however, quickly lost the advantage. Struggles with France (1793–96) and Britain (1796–1802 and 1804–8) diverted Spain’s attention and resources to Europe, left its navy in shambles, and crippled its ability to govern its American colonies. Before things fell apart, Spain’s influence over independent Indians had caused Henry Knox considerable concern during his tenure as secretary of war, but he probably knew little about the policies or practices of his Spanish counterparts anywhere in the hemisphere except in North America. Americans of his day had scanty information about the internal workings of the Spanish Empire. Indeed, what most Americans knew about Spanish relations with Indians began and ended with the conquistadors. Stories of Columbus’s discoveries and the sensational conquests of Mexico and Peru captured the American imagination and reinforced a strong anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic strain in American thought. Over the intervening centuries, however, Spain and Spanish Americans seemed to have taken a long siesta. “Naturally weak and e¤eminate,” one popular American schoolbook of the 1790s observed, “[Spaniards] dedicate the greatest part of their lives to loitering and inactive pleasures.”³⁸ Today, although American scholars have moved beyond such caricatures, and their knowledge of the Spanish Empire runs broad and deep, most historians of Spanish– Indian relations have overlooked the impact on Indians of Bourbon Spain’s enlightened reforms. The most important exceptions are studies of two dramatic episodes that involved Indians living under Spanish control: the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and the great Andean revolts of Tupac Amaru and others in the early 1780s.³⁹ Instead, students of Spanish–Indian relations have focused on the Habsburg era and have sought to explain how a small number of Europeans prevailed over numerous Native Americans. These historians have described the roles of disease, of weaponry, and the articulations of European and Indian political, economic, and cultural systems; they have demonstrated how Europeans and incorporated Indians came to understand and misunderstand each other; they have examined relations of power and the variety of ways in which conquered Indians responded to the exigencies of Spanish rule.⁴⁰ This book looks at the late Bourbon era and draws from a di¤erent historical literature,

12

INTRODUCTION

much of it written by Latin Americans in the past few decades.⁴¹ It leaves behind the familiar worlds of conquered and incorporated Indians and their descendants—those Indians whom Spaniards knew as indios sometidos, reducidos, tributarios, or domésticos. It directs our gaze beyond the roads that connected Spanish towns, villages, missions, and haciendas to the less explored terrain where Spaniards met unconquered Indians: indios no sometidos. These frontiers, it would appear, had more in common with one another than with the colonial core regions with which one usually associates them.⁴² Although Spaniards had annihilated Indians on the major Caribbean islands, replacing them with laborers from black Africa, in the late 1700s independent Indians still held e¤ective dominion over at least half of the actual land mass of what is today continental Latin America, from Tierra del Fuego to present-day Mexico.⁴³ North of Mexico, in the vast expanses claimed by Spain but now in the United States, independent Indians also held substantial territory. Comanches alone dominated most of the southern plains, a region of some 240,000 square miles, larger than all of Central America (see map 6).⁴⁴ The number of Indians who lived independently within territories claimed by Spain remained substantial two centuries after Spain’s conquest of America.⁴⁵ Initially, European diseases, particularly smallpox, had penetrated far beyond areas visited by Spaniards and had carried away high percentages of Natives on the peripheries of the empire— perhaps as high as 90 percent in areas of sustained contact. During the eighteenth century, however, Indian populations began to stabilize or rise, partly because Indians acquired greater immunities to disease. One scholar estimates that by the late eighteenth century independent Indians numbered perhaps 2,700,000, which would represent nearly 22 percent of the total population of what was then the Spanish-American mainland.⁴⁶ His estimate is low, however, for it does not include independent Indians living in Chile, along the Caribbean coast of Central America from Darién to Honduras, and in the area of the present-day United States that then lay within the Spanish Empire. In comparison, the number of Indians who resided along the western borders of the United States in the late 1700s seems paltry. Knox estimated their fighting force at 15,000 to 16,000.⁴⁷ Clearly, Spain had not completed the conquest of America in the Age of Conquest. Two and a half centuries after Columbus’s discovery, Spain continued to claim dominion over peoples it neither conquered nor knew, basing those claims on the so-called papal donation of 1493 that divided the non-European world between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The Spanish author of the impressive Atlas geográphico de la América (1758), for example, described the district of Mainas, on the eastern slope of the Andes in the Audiencia of Quito, in these terms: “The extent of this jurisdiction is not presently known because it borders upon various undiscovered lands inhabited by wild Indians.” Nonetheless, “savages,” “wild Indians,” and “ferocious and indomitable [Indian] nations” appear in this atlas as residents of virtual Spanish territories, together with lions, tigers, and crocodiles.⁴⁸ Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages has nothing to say about lions, tigers, and crocodiles, but it does try to explain Spaniards’ attitudes toward and relations with “wild In-

INTRODUCTION

13

2. In the late eighteenth century, Spanish artists produced stylized representations of the hierarchy in the racially mixed colonial society. These “casta paintings” usually presented races and racial mixtures in sixteen panels, with “pure-blooded” Spaniards occupying the highest position and “savages,” or indios bárbaros, at the bottom. The artists included “savages” within the sociedad de castas, but by depicting them as semiclothed and with few material possessions, the artists made clear that savages inhabited a world apart (Katzew, 2004, 136–37, 146–47). Yndios Bárbaros/ Savage Indians. From O’Crouley, 1972 (first published in 1774), opposite page 115.

dians” throughout the Americas in the late eighteenth century. The book includes a variety of people and places, from Araucanians in southern Chile to Tlingits in the Pacific Northwest, and from Chiriguanos on the western edge of the Gran Chaco to Comanches on North America’s southern plains. Yet it cannot be comprehensive. Like o‹cials in Spain who were overwhelmed by reports from America, I focus on the groups that seem to have had the greatest strategic or economic value for the empire. Some Native peoples inevitably receive short shrift. In North America, for example, I have more to say about Apaches and Comanches than about Osages and Utes. In South America, Araucanians and Pampas have drawn my attention more than Matacos and Mataguayos. In this panoramic view, then, some people are less sharply drawn than others, but whatever its limitations the larger perspective e¤ectively suggests the immensity and complexity of the frontiers where Spaniards and independent Indians came together in late eighteenth-century America. Historians who have examined Spanish–Indian relations from a purely local perspective have often failed to appreciate the scope and variety of

14

INTRODUCTION

the challenges that independent Indians posed for Spain’s Bourbon rulers, who continued to hold their American empire for two generations after first France and then England had lost most of theirs. One American writer, for example, concluded from his understanding of Spain’s e¤orts in North America that Spaniards seemed “flummoxed by practical tasks” and that Spain “never understood” that sovereignty required the occupation of land. Spain, he said, represented “a complete failure.”⁴⁹ Had he placed North America in the context of Spain’s entire empire, with its priorities and exigencies, his picture might have been less bleak.⁵⁰ From Madrid the king and his Council of the Indies looked out over a vast American empire. From their vantage point, Indians who remained independent in the 1700s often held the lands with the least economic value, some of it ruggedly mountainous and much of it drylands and tropical forest, including the present-day American Southwest and northern Mexico, the Central American lowlands, the Amazon and Orinoco basins, the Gran Chaco, the pampa, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego. As a viceroy of Peru, the conde de Superunda, explained in the mid-1700s, “The unconquered country is jungle and mountains, di‹cult to traverse, and plains are humid, swampy, and hot, and so Spaniards cannot support themselves.”⁵¹ Yet ecology, topography, and climate do not fully explain Spain’s failure to conquer these areas. With the right enticements, Spaniards pushed into forbidding terrain and lived under inhospitable conditions, as in high-altitude Potosí with its thin, cold air and rich silver mines. The absence of readily exploitable gold, silver, or other valuable resources, then, as much as the physical environment, dissuaded Spaniards from taking control of some areas.⁵² The nature of Native societies in lowland regions and in arid, rugged mountains also discouraged Spaniards from subduing them, just as it had deterred Native imperialists, Incas and Aztecs, before the arrival of Europeans. With notable exceptions—such as the cacao-producing area of Venezuela, the Cauca and Magdalena river valleys in presentday Colombia, parts of Paraguay, and central Chile south to the Río Biobío—Spaniards settled for subjugating prosperous highland farmers, whose labor they could exploit and whose hierarchical governments they could control. Indians who farmed, hunted, or gathered in marginal lands had little surplus production to exploit, and their small-scale political organization, usually centering on the family, a¤orded Spaniards no leaders through whom they could exercise control. Harsh, sparsely populated lands also contained vast spaces where Indians could often take refuge from Spaniards. The conde de Superunda expressed a common Spanish view when he described the inhabitants of such lands as people who “do not cover their nakedness, and their houses are so poor they lose nothing when they leave them. . . . To conquer them by force always has been impossible.”⁵³ His judgment, minus the hyperbole, has echoed in the work of modern social scientists, one of whom has observed that “the simpler and poorer the native sociocultural system, the more di‹cult it can be [for Europeans] to dominate them e¤ectively without exterminating them.”⁵⁴ To Spaniards of the eighteenth century, Indians who remained unconquered were

INTRODUCTION

15

not simply Indians, or indios. Instead, Spaniards described them as wild Indians (indios bravos), wild and ignorant Indians (indios bozales), heathen Indians (indios infieles or gentiles), and savage Indians (indios salvajes or indios bárbaros).⁵⁵ These adjectives held diverse meanings for Spaniards, and the meaning of “savage” changed over time.⁵⁶ Close observers of Indians, such as the learned Miguel Lastarria, understood that not all salvajes were alike. They di¤ered not only in language and culture, but in what he imagined to be their stages of development. In 1804, drawing examples from the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, he divided Indians into fourteen degrees of progress toward what he called the “adult stage of civilization.” Spaniards, of course, occupied the top position, number fifteen. At “the lowest level of rationality” Lastarria put “savages from the lands we have not conquered”: Tupis, Charrúas, and Chiriguanos. Wandering Mocobíes and Tobas from the Chaco, who had some dealings with Spaniards, occupied the next highest step. Mbayás, Guanás, and Payaguás, who emerged from the Chaco to work occasionally for Spaniards, stood on the third rung, and Indians whom he termed “savage merchants”— Puelches, Pehuenches, Pampas, and some Patagonians—held the fourth position. Unlike the “savages” in the first four stages, who “had not progressed to the point of declaring in public their recognition of Divine Providence,” the remaining Indians were ranked according to the degree to which they had absorbed Christianity and other Spanish ways, beginning with Indians who had accepted baptism but fled the missions and thus became “wild Christians.”⁵⁷ While Spanish scholars created taxonomies and examined shades of meaning, in popular parlance Spaniards of the late eighteenth century used bárbaros, salvajes, bravos, and gentiles interchangeably to describe Amerindians who lived beyond the pale of Christendom. To convey in English what the Spaniards actually meant, I often use the English word savage in this book. Bárbaro, or “barbarian,” translates poorly into English, where it suggests Goths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals. Gentil, or “heathen,” refers only to the Indians’ religious state in relation to Christianity. Savage, more than any other word in English, corresponds to the time and place this book examines—as does its Spanish cognate, salvaje. As one Spanish savant noted in the 1790s, the word salvajes, “taken from the French, les sauvages, seems the most suitable for characterizing all tribes not subject to the [Spanish] monarchy.”⁵⁸ Spaniards, of course, knew these unsubjugated peoples by the names of specific bands, tribes, or chiefdoms,⁵⁹ but outsiders had usually bestowed those names and thus ascribed identities rather than describing them. Picunches in Chile, meaning “people of the north,” was clearly coined by Indian peoples who lived to the south of them. Labels indicating a group’s geographical location, such as Serranos in Argentina, the mountain people, or the Gileños, “people who live along the Gila River” in Arizona, originated with Spaniards who did not live in those places. Still other ascribed identities referred to the degree to which outsiders perceived a group as hostile or friendly, as with the Aucas (in southern South America) or Comanches (in southwestern North America), whose names meant “enemy” in Quechua and Ute, respectively. Or a name might refer to the

16

INTRODUCTION

appearance of Indians, as in the case of various peoples to the south of Lake Maracaibo in today’s Venezuela, whom Spaniards called Motilones (from the Spanish verb motilar, “to cut the hair”) because, in contrast to their neighbors, they wore their hair cropped short.⁶⁰ Applied to peoples whose own name for themselves was usually “the people,” these ethnic labels were often capricious and imprecise as well as counterfeit. Outsiders might give the same people a multiplicity of names or apply the same name to several groups, depending on their physical location or relationship at a given time. Who the “people of the north” were depended on how far south the observers were. The groups themselves, whatever name they went by, generally represented mixtures of people who did not see themselves as the single people that outsiders imagined them to be. As is usually the case, ethnic labels suggest a false sense of ethnic purity or ethnic continuity. People met and mingled, became bilingual or multilingual, and moved in and out of ethnic groups. Athapascan speakers of the eighteenth century, for example, did not all derive from Athapascan stock. Navajos, Athapascans of Apache origin, seem to have absorbed some Pueblos and Paiutes who became Navajos, and the number of Pueblos living among Navajos was so great that one scholar has suggested that Navajos “may have been Puebloans for part of their history.”⁶¹ By the eighteenth century, many communities of independent Indians had also incorporated individual Africans and Europeans, along with aspects of their cultures and their genes—racially, but not ethnically, many Indians were, like Spaniards, mixed bloods, or mestizos. Just as they conceal racial and ethnic mixtures, ethnic labels obscure local politics and local identities. By the 1700s, for example, a clear division existed between supposed ethnically pure Miskitos and Zambo-Miskitos who had absorbed black African slaves. Nonetheless, in juxtaposing Indians against Spaniards, I often refer to Miskitos as if they were a single society. Today many Indian peoples prefer to identify themselves in their own languages, but I have chosen to retain the historical names by which Spaniards knew them and with which modern readers are more likely to be familiar. For example, I use Tarahumaras instead of Rarámuris, Seris instead of Comcáac, Pápagos instead of Tohono O’odhom, Cunas instead of Tules, Guajiros instead of Wayús, Matacos instead of Weenhayek, Guahibos instead of Wayapopihíwis, Chiriguanos instead of Avas, Payaguás instead of Evuevís, and Patagonians rather than Tehuelches. If the words for Indians and their tribal names require explanation, so does the word Spaniard, a label that was also originally applied to them by outsiders and whose meaning, like that of all ethnic markers, depends on context.⁶² In the narrowest sense of the word, a Spaniard, or español, in eighteenth-century Spanish-American society was a peninsular, that is, a person born in Spain of Spanish-born parents, or a criollo, a person born in America to Spanish parents. Other words, like mestizo, lobo, and coyote, applied to Americanborn mixed bloods. Yet all Hispanicized peoples, whatever their place of birth or racial composition, became “Spaniards” when they sought to distinguish themselves from indios domésticos or indios salvajes. As one missionary wrote in 1788 from the Indian country of Texas, “When I say Spaniard I mean a non-Indian; this is the usage here.”⁶³

INTRODUCTION

17

In writing about Spaniards and their savages, I do not mean to imply that these were mutually exclusive groups. Just as the category of Spaniards included acculturated persons of Indian and African ancestry, so, too, did the category of savages include Hispanics and Africans and their descendants who lived among Natives. Moreover, the interests and circumstances of peoples within the categorie