persons, they integrated themselves into colonial society, adopting Spanish surnames and learning the Spanish language. At least a few Tejano rancheros, however, did acquire slaves in New Orleans, exchanging cattle for bond‐people or acquiring them through barter with the French living in neighboring Louisiana communities. In the latter years of the century, some farmers living around Nacogdoches held slaves. Although Spain did not follow a pattern of exporting Africans to New Spain’s Far North, the Crown did extend its official policy on slavery to Texas. This prohibited Africans from congregating, lest they plan insurrection, and from possessing firearms. Given the dire need for free laborers to perform so many menial tasks on the frontier, however, doubt exists that colonials stringently enforced such slave codes. More plausibly, Africans worked alongside other day laborers in an integrated workforce.
Tejanas
Women’s place in Spanish Texas probably resembled that of other women in similar colonial societies. Living far from the interior, Tejanas escaped some of the sexual limitations more strictly outlined in New Spain proper. The rigors of frontier life tended to soften gender discrimination, as they did that of race, and women engaged in such duties as fighting Indians, helping with ranch and farm chores (including herding), and conducting mercantile activity. Still, women’s chief role was that of providing the best possible domestic setting in an isolated place. The drudgery of dragging in water and wood, preparing food, making, repairing, and washing clothes, cultivating local plants, making household necessities such as soap, and passing on to the children the morals and values of Spanish‐Mexican culture all crammed their way into a woman’s busy life.
Although frontier life may have had certain democratizing tendencies, it posed severe problems for women. Isolation limited social mobility–improvement for women could occur only through fortuitous changes, such as marriage to a rising businessman or rancher. The region offered little opportunity for women to establish their own vocations, though some women practiced midwifery as a profession. Indeed, most of the responsibility for taking care of the ill (such as treating snakebites, setting bones, or tending to rheumatism) fell on the shoulders of women. It was women who primarily practiced curanderismo (folk healing). In addition, on the frontier, women were often treated as objects. Fathers might arrange marriages for their young daughters, unscrupulous military officers sexually exploited their subordinates’ wives, and shameless husbands abused their spouses with impunity.
The law denied colonial women certain rights. Women could not vote or hold elective office. Moreover, a man could legally prevent his wife from leaving him. On the other hand, Tejanas could use the judicial system and be parties to suits under Spanish law, either as plaintiffs or defendants. Tejanas could prepare wills for themselves; this right gave them the freedom to override patriarchal restraints on gender. Women, therefore, left material possessions to family and friends, such as clothes, personal articles, or household goods, although in the case of women who had amassed meaningful assets or had become widowed, beneficiaries could inherit savings, home, or ranch property. In short, women in Spanish Texas enjoyed more legal rights than did their contemporary counterparts in French or British North American colonies.
The historical record shows that women played constructive roles in colonial society. Doña María Hinojosa de Ballí, sometimes hailed as Texas’s first cattle queen, enlarged the South Texas ranch she received upon her husband’s death; the estate eventually covered much of the lower Rio Grande Valley as well as Padre Island. Other women similarly experienced success as ranch managers, among them Ana María del Carmen Calvillo, a single woman from San Antonio who during this era (and continuing until the 1850s) also made a going concern of inherited ranchland. Doña María achieved success despite a series of setbacks in life: a failed marriage, the death of her children, and the untimely murder of her father.
Indian Accommodation and Resistance
No one knows exactly how many Native Americans lived in Texas during the colonial era, for government officials found it difficult to ascertain a correct count of unsettled tribes. One census in the late 1770s placed the number of Indians (excluding those in the missions) in excess of 7000, whereas modern researchers offer a higher figure, perhaps 20,000 for the late eighteenth century. Figure 2.4 shows the distribution of Indian tribes in colonial Texas.
The Indians who came from the hunter‐gatherer bands inhabiting the areas east and south of San Antonio to the Gulf Coast displayed the most interest in the teachings of the missionaries. In many cases, however, reasons other than a true desire for conversion to Catholicism explain their cooperation. For the Coahuiltecans, a move to the mission conformed to their traditional transitory lifestyle and they relied on the institutions for protection from neighboring tormentors. For other Indian bands, missions acted as temporary shelters for families during times of stress; the transients would leave once conditions for them improved. For those afflicted with disease or starvation, the mission centers simply offered an alternative to death. Whatever the reason for their arrival at the missions, their stays there afforded Indian families an opportunity to develop kinship connections or alliances with other groups. Furthermore, once under the tutelage of the friars, the neophytes learned numerous usable skills; prospective converts learned to farm, herd stock, manufacture cotton and woolen products, and make useful items such as bricks, soap, adobe, and footwear. Those in San Antonio helped erect the town’s complex of missions by digging irrigation ditches, building beamed bridges and other structures, planting vegetables and cotton, and pasturing horses, sheep, goats, and pigs that the friars then sold locally at modest profits. By the end of the eighteenth century, Indian converts had accepted aspects of Catholicism into their lifestyle, as well as new attitudes toward work and certain other tenets of European civilization. Some in Béxar had even intermarried or become Hispanicized to the point that they became part of the local labor force. Tribes such as the Coahuiltecans, on the other hand, ceased to exist as a distinct people during the eighteenth century due to displacement by Spaniards, the unceasing hostilities of warlike tribes, and the scourge of Old World plagues.
Figure 2.4 Indian tribes of Colonial Texas.
But most other Texas tribes had no desire to submit themselves to the disciplined life that was the mission routine. This fierce independence was displayed by the Karankawas of the Gulf Coast, whom the curates had once seen as likely recruits for conversion. Certainly, the Karankawas visited the missions, not so much because they wished to convert, but because in the course of the tribespeople’s regular migratory cycles they came to see the missions as sources of subsistence. The members of other tribes also failed to assimilate to mission life, and they, too, remained faithful to their traditional way of life by maintaining economic independence. The Jumanos, for all their clamoring for Christian teaching, sought to use the Spaniards as temporary guards who might protect them as they conducted trade with the Caddos of East Texas. The Caddos also resisted missionary overtures, due to their ability to provide for themselves, both as skilled farmers and traders, the commerce that they had developed with the neighboring French in Louisiana proving favorable.
Ultimately, Native American peoples in Texas suffered irreversibly from such factors as frontier warfare with Europeans, intertribal power struggles, waves of epidemic diseases introduced by the Europeans, population losses, and climatic changes over which they had no control. For instance, the shortage of people to work garden plots, form effective hunting parties, and prepare products for home use and the trade circuit led to disaster for many tribes. Then, early in the eighteenth century, came another hardship to the plains people of Texas, one that posed dire consequences. Whereas buffalo had once roamed in great numbers throughout many parts of Texas, drought that plagued the plains during the
