On the surface, it might seem that by the 1780s the signification of peace in the form of a woman had come a long way from the power invoked by the Virgin Mary’s image on Spanish banners in the 1690s. Yet, in many ways, individual native systems of conveying peace through the presence of women, brokering alliance through networks of real and fictive kinship, and maintaining political and economic ties through joint family settlement varied little in their core functions over the century. Of course, the distinct cultural and political economies of Caddos, Cantonas, Payayas, Apaches, Wichitas, and Comanches had determined the spectrum of practices and beliefs governing those diplomatic systems. In their turn, Spaniards had read, understood, and responded to those controls in different ways, at different times, with different peoples—with resultant relations often riding upon their successes and failures in understanding the world of native politics to which they were beholden for peace.
If we scan across the North American continent in the eighteenth century, cross-cultural relations in Texas appear far different from those in other regions. To the west, Pueblos had allowed Spaniards to return to New Mexico following the short-lived success of their 1680 Revolt, and chastened missionaries and settlers tempered the religious and labor demands made on their Pueblo neighbors. Yet, Spanish enslavement and Indian captivity together created a vast network of human exchange that would disrupt innumerable families and bands while incorporating untold numbers into the servile underclass of Spanish society. In the western region of the Great Lakes, called the pays d’en haut by the French, Frenchmen had learned the rhythms of calumet ceremonies and the rhetoric of trade jargons in order to foster a mutually lucrative fur trade network with numerous Indian nations. With French settlement focused far to the east in the St. Lawrence valley, it would be primarily unlicensed traders known as coureurs de bois and a handful of Jesuits who infiltrated these regions to the west. Establishing claim to Louisiana, French traders and agents extended their networks to the south among the Choctaws, Caddos, Wichitas, and others.
Through commercial exchange, mutual accommodation and mutual dependence went hand in hand for Indian and French peoples. Meanwhile, along the Atlantic, the English had made little if any effort to learn native languages, ascertain native interests, or recognize native rights to the land. With steady immigration consisting increasingly of families, the English population grew rapidly, together with its demand for land and the force to take it. Having destroyed the littoral nations through a combination of deadly disease, fiery warfare, and ravaging slave raids, the English in the eighteenth century were turning their energies toward the more powerful interior nations of Iroquois, Shawnees, Creeks, and Cherokees. Such efforts eventually encouraged the establishment of an independent United States and the beginning of new policies to dispossess eastern-dwelling Indian peoples of their homes and lands by force and coercion. The often Anglo-centered narrative of conquest, colonization, and expansion in early America thus differs markedly from Spanish circumstances in Texas, where survival was contingent upon accommodating Indian nations with power greater than their own.1
The stories of Indian-Spanish relations across Texas and over the duration of the eighteenth century add up to quite a distinctive sum within the worlds of early North American historiography. Elsewhere, scholars have already found European discourses of discovery, exploration, conquest, and settlement to be gendered and sexualized with the projection into the “New World” of “Old World” notions of masculinity and femininity.2 European structures of colonial authority in other regions of the Americas asserted dominion through cultural prescriptions and interventions into institutional and domestic life with different consequences for indigenous men and women. In seeking to understand these consequences of colonial expansion, scholars have studied changes in gendered valuation of labor, control of resources, political participation, and domains of status and authority.3 All of these areas witnessed to some degree the power of Christian and commercial European influences to transform and sometimes derail native gender systems. Some of the most prolific scholarly debates have focused on the ways in which colonizers viewed and judged indigenous and enslaved peoples in gender-specific ways, in the process constructing categories of “white,” “black,” “Indian,” “savage,” and “race” through gender and sex differences.4 Concepts such as hybridity and the categorization of unions between European men and Indian women as métissage and mestizaje and of their offspring as métis and mestizo further cast colonial relations as sexual exchange and mediation. These concepts, in turn, complicate distinctions of culture and race.5
Race would become as important in Texas as it already had become in Virginia, New Mexico, and Louisiana, but that would not happen until the nineteenth century. In eighteenth-century Texas, native concepts of gender cut across what in other areas of early America were European perceptions of racial difference because native institutions of kin-based social and political order predominated. The appearance of gendered standards and practices in political economies of gift giving and hospitality, alliances instituted in joint family settlements, honors and dishonors inherent in violence and war, exchanges of women through intermarriage, captivity and hostage taking, and political relationships conceived through fictive and real kinship marked the power of diverse Indian peoples and nations, each in their own way, to frame diplomatic negotiations by their own rules. It is not that race was not there—of course it was; it had become a central component of Spanish worldviews well before the eighteenth century—but gender prevailed over it, because native controls prevailed over those of Spaniards. The Spanish documentary record makes this clear: they did not get to call their own tune even in their own record books.
If Indian dominance was especially clear in Texas, it was likely not unique. Indian peoples throughout the Americas continued to exert power over their would-be European conquerors into the nineteenth century. The view from Texas should push us to interrogate the assumptions we bring to the reading and writing of European-Indian relations and the history of early America, which despite our best efforts are often still freighted with unspoken or unconscious presumptions of European technological superiority, Indian “primitivism,” Indian resistance, and implicit, corresponding European dominance. To paraphrase David Weber, what many North Americans remember about Indian-Spanish relations begins and ends with the conquistadors—despite the fact that in the 1790s, independent Indians still controlled over half of Spanish America. Perhaps that might not seem unexpected, given that the Spanish government lost control of its finances, its vast bureaucracy, and its own subjects. Yet, we err similarly with the history of European-Indian relations across the continent. The story of early North America too often reduces to a preordained chronicle of the pre–United States. We are, after all, storytellers, and stories demand a narrative arc; surely the narrative of early America ends with the creation of the United States. In a form of “upstreaming,” that framework inevitably misshapes and misdirects our reading of documents, events, and peoples in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries. By the 1790s, much more than half of North America was in native hands. How can we possibly understand that world on its own terms—terms far removed from the assumptions that tell us that defeat was inevitable for Native Americans, whether by disease or war, and that the only sensible narrative arc is one of declension, albeit with notable interludes of noble last stands?6
In December of 1819, Juan Antonio Padilla painted a clear picture of the state of Spanish-Indian relations in Texas as Spanish rule drew to a close in Mexico. After an assessment of the position of each Indian nation in Texas, he concluded that the province of Texas remained “all under the domination of the barbarian.” “Barbarians,” or indios bárbaros, still meant independent Indians with commercial and military might. Moreover, “domination” did not necessarily mean war or hostility in clear-cut terms. From San Antonio southward, small Spanish settlements dotted the landscape like isolated islands in a vast sea over which Indians reigned, making them easy targets for raids. The peace treaties in Texas had the effect of encouraging mounted Apache and Comanche raiders to take aim at Coahuila and Nuevo León rather than at their Texas allies. Native powers thus still failed to see Spaniards as one united nation.7
Over the first two decades of the nineteenth century, reverberations of Mexico’s War for Independence soon engulfed the province of Texas, leading to round after round of civil disturbances among royalists, rebels, and Anglo-American interlopers from the neighboring United States. When Spanish trade obligations fell apart because of disruptions in production and supply lines caused by the war, native groups often divided along family band lines, so that some remained friendly to Spanish interests while others returned to taking by force what they could no longer receive through peace policies. Those who stood by their Spanish allies and the Spanish Crown offered military aid against Anglo-American invaders and Mexican insurgents alike. In 1806, thirty-three Comanche chiefs and two hundred warriors pledged their assistance to Governor Antonio Cordero when Anglo-American soldiers stood poised on the Texas-Louisiana border ready to assert with force that U.S. boundary claims extended to the Rio Grande. Ties between Governor Cordero and Comanche chief Sargento grew so close that Sargento adopted Cordero’s name to signal brotherhood. In 1810, Cordero lent official sanction and prestige to forty Comanche warriors under capitán grande Sargento’s leadership by commissioning the men with Spanish military uniforms. Meanwhile, local Spaniards in the Nacogdoches area found sanctuary among Caddo neighbors and allies when insurrections turned against them. Once the war ended with Mexican independence in 1821, however, no matter which side they had favored, Caddo, Lipan, and Comanche leaders traveled at the invitation of Agustín de Iturbide to the Mexican capital in Monterrey to renew peace relations between their nations and the newly independent Mexico. Their dominion continued long after as well. Historian Andrés Reséndez points out that among the competing nations in nineteenth-century Texas, Comanchería defended its territorial boundaries better than did Mexico and maintained its sovereignty longer than did the Texas Republic.8
It was not until well into the nineteenth century that Anglo-Americans built up sufficient numbers and force to establish dominion and, in turn, to categorize all native peoples as a single, subordinate group to be either removed or exterminated—and even then they would do so primarily by the power of germs, not steel. As Anglo-Americans slowly expanded their grasp in the region, so too did they bring a new racial element to the foreground of the region’s cross-cultural struggles, giving primacy to concepts and expressions of Anglo, Indian, and Hispanic “races.” Almost another entire century would elapse, though, before Anglo-American dominance was firmly entrenched and native controls declined in Texas. As that process unfolded over the nineteenth century, idioms of cross-cultural relations changed so that gender continued to serve an important role, but simply as it structured notions of racial identity and hierarchy. Only then did gender assume the function most commonly associated with it in the colonial context—that of marking difference, of distinguishing the defiled from the sacred, and the barbarous from the civilized. Only then did gender supply a foundation for invidious hierarchies of difference and discourses of race. If that process was at no time simple, quick, or manifest, then surely it was not destiny.