Spanish, who overtook the Aztec empire in 1521, initially found little to hold their interest in the mountainous desert regions beyond Mexico’s central plateau. While Spain putatively claimed territory reaching far into the North American plains and contested the rival claims of Britain and Russia in the Pacific Northwest, in fact, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, as Spain’s richest and most populous colony was called, remained anchored in the central and southern parts of Mesoamerica, where the new rulers were able to command the labor and tribute of people who were conditioned to the demands of empire and had fewer viable means of long-term resistance.33
Discovery of silver deposits in 1548 in areas of what is today Zacatecas provided the initial impetus for Spaniards to explore and settle the frontier. They founded cities near the mining centers and developed haciendas to produce food for the mines and associated settlements. The Spanish also enslaved native people to provide labor in the mines and other Spanish enterprises. These initiatives were met with strong resistance from the region’s original inhabitants, who attacked their mule trains and raided the isolated outposts of the Spanish empire.34
Paralleling the mining frontier that developed northward from Zacatecas and Durango to Chihuahua and Sonora, the Spanish established a system of missions and presidios. Franciscans began their missionary work near the mines of Parral in the 1560s and by the early seventeenth century had established several missions. Over the next two centuries, they founded many more missions throughout New Spain and as far distant as Taos, New Mexico. After 1769 they were charged with missionizing Alta California, where they established a line of missions from San Diego to San Francisco. The Jesuits, meanwhile, administered missions in northwestern New Spain and Baja California from 1591 until the expulsion of the order from the viceroyalty in 1767. In addition to the goals of religious and cultural indoctrination, the missions sought to consolidate disparate indigenous communities through the process of reducción, or concentrating Indians into settlements under the jurisdiction of the mission. These reducciones also served as sites for the recruitment and organization of Indian labor. To protect the missions the Spanish maintained presidios, or fortified outposts, garrisoned by the military. The Spanish also sent colonists among the people of the north. By the end of the sixteenth century, some four hundred families from Tlaxcala had been recruited to resettle in several colonies around Saltillo, Coahuila. In return for privileges not usually accorded the Crown’s Indian subjects, the Christianized Tlaxcalans were meant to demonstrate to other indigenous peoples the advantages of accepting Hispanic ways.35 Over time, the colonization efforts took on an increasingly defensive and explicitly military function.36
None of the Spanish colonial institutions—the presidio, mission, forced reducciones of Indians, or military colonies—had the desired effect of pacifying Mexican Indian Country. Instead, by the end of the eighteenth century, autonomous Indian tribes, the indios bárbaros, who had not been incorporated into patterns of Hispanic life, dominated the north. In 1768 a Spanish official who had spent two years traveling 7,600 miles throughout Spain’s frontier territories reported to the king that much of present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were in reality nothing more than “imaginary dominions,” under the control of hostile Indians. Apaches, reported the Marques de Rubí, controlled the lands from southwestern Texas to California. Comanches, Kiowas, Wichitas, and Pawnees harassed Spanish settlements and missions in Texas and New Mexico, stealing horses and cattle and killing other Indians who had joined the missions. Even tribes like the Utes, who sought to remain at peace with the Europeans, behaved as though settlers’ animals “were there for the taking,” complained the marquis.37
Recent scholarship has sought to look beyond the often alarmist rhetoric of frontier residents and officials to examine cross-cultural interaction and accommodation between Mexicans and the indigenous people of the north, and the state-level diplomatic initiatives they undertook to minimize and contain conflict. However, peace was elusive and racial enmity, once ignited, produced a conflagration that engulfed the north. As Brian DeLay has written, “once Mexicans and the ‘cruel and indomitable Apaches’ started killing, enslaving, and stealing from each other, hatreds, reprisals, and calls for revenge acquired a fierce and ultimately irresistible momentum.”38
Faced with increased Apache raids and large-scale depopulation of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Spaniards decided to try something new. In 1776, the same year that the Franciscan mission was established in San Francisco, New Spain created a new military organization for the frontier provinces called the Commandancy General of the Interior Provinces. The commander general was charged with waging a war of extermination against the Apaches all along the frontier. To support this mission they also created the compañía volante or flying company, essentially a highly mobile cavalry unit. It was the forerunner of the efforts mounted by the U.S. Army a century later. This period also saw the regularization of the use of Apache auxiliaries recruited from one band to join with the Spanish effort against another.39 This was another technique the United States would later adopt.
Though the primary policy was one of extermination, Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez also offered Apaches the opportunity to settle near the presidios in camps called establicimientos de paz where they would be provisioned with food, aguardiente, and even firearms, as a way of securing their dependence on the colonial government. Significantly, the Chiricahua and other bands accepted these terms and settled provisionally near the Sonora and Chihuahau presidios.
Independence from Spain in 1821 brought with it a host of challenges for the new nation, constrained by fiscal woes and a weak and unstable central government that was unable to devote the military or administrative resources necessary to preserve a fragile peace that had allowed areas of endemic conflict such as Chihuahua and New Mexico to experience an encouraging period of tranquility and blossoming prosperity during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. After 1830, an escalation in raiding, attacks on Mexican ranches and settlements, murder, kidnapping, and theft of animals and property turned the northern third of Mexico “into a vast theater of hatred, terror, and staggering loss for independent Indians and Mexicans alike.”40
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