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Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands 1861â"1867
By Andrew E. Masich UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Andrew Masich
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5853-2
CHAPTER 1
Peoples of the Southwest Borderlands
During the 1860s, Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos struggled for power in the area now known as the Southwest Borderlands of the United States. Each group brought to the conflict its own ideas of war. While there were significant differences in the way they sought power through violence, there were also many similarities. All the peoples of the borderlands embraced some form of martial credo. In every group the men spent an inordinate amount of time developing warrior traditions, weapons, strategies, and tactics intended to give them an advantage over rival communities while demonstrating their value to the women and other members of their society. The men's sense of worth was inextricably tied to the way they were viewed by their own group. Social status and the acquisition of mates depended on their ability to dominate or exert power over others inhabiting or passing through the territory they considered their domain.
All the peoples of the Southwest understood the concept of conquest by force of arms, yet the rules of war differed for each group, and the strategies and tactics employed varied. The antagonists all adopted elaborate war rituals, costumes, and weaponry designed to achieve tactical advantage and calculated to awe their enemies. All the groups that vied for power and dominance in the borderlands believed in some form of vengeance warfare and practiced some form of captivity and slavery. The peoples who came into conflict in the borderlands of the 1860s all shared a belief in an afterlife and had religious and spiritual traditions that guided their behavior in the corporeal world.
Though each tribe or band had its distinctive characteristics, the indigenous Indian peoples of the Southwest all felt a deep connection to the land they inhabited. Whether they adopted sedentary, seminomadic, or nomadic-pastoral survival strategies, they differed significantly from their Hispano and Anglo counterparts in their ideas of land ownership. The Indian warriors especially valued independent initiative and action and only followed chiefs or war leaders in whom they had confidence. These positions were not hereditary. When it came to war, leaders changed often, and individual warriors or bands followed their own course. Leaders influenced followers or led by example, rather than demanding compliance based on rank. This leadership model made cooperative strategic operations against enemies difficult to plan and execute. Groups of like-minded men within a band or tribe typically congregated in warrior societies, which became both social and fighting units. Their weapons varied depending on the men's physical abilities, the environment, and the motives for violent conflict.
The pedestrian Yumans of the Colorado River generally preferred close combat with war clubs while the mounted warriors of the southern plains employed lances and other weapons suited for fighting on horseback. The mountain-born Apaches mastered surprise, ambush, and fighting-retreat tactics — rarely attacking head-on in the open — loosing arrows and slung stones with extraordinary skill. All the indigenous peoples quickly adapted to weapons and war materials introduced by Hispano and Anglo newcomers. Most of the Indian peoples of the borderlands recognized sharp distinctions between "raiding" and "warfare." The raid for enemy property was an extension of time-honored hunting and gathering traditions, while war was motivated by revenge for losses or offenses suffered at the hands of enemies. Women and children captives were an essential feature of the raid-war complex. Men took captive women for wives, and families desired male children to replace losses resulting from war and natural attrition. Raiding and warfare were often seasonal activities, closely related to the availability of food and forage.
Hispano warriors exhibited a merging of Indian and European martial traditions. A racially hierarchical and, often, hereditary system of leadership emerged from the Spanish conquest of the Americas. In war, officers exerted control over soldiers — both regulars and militia — and civilian auxiliaries. Leaders generally came from the upper classes, while fighting men came from the lower classes of mestizos and assimilated or subject Indian peoples. Internecine fighting characterized the borderlands of the 1860s, and political and class rivalries often hampered concerted or strategic action against enemies. Hispanos highly valued individual courage and honor, and abhorred the vergüenza, or shame, that attached to cowardly misconduct. Their weapons and tactics reflected the mixture of ethnicities seen in the men themselves. Lances and short swords were often the weapons of choice for mounted warriors, while footmen employed a wide variety of arms depending on terrain and availability. Over time, firearms became increasingly important. Slavery and peonage were deeply rooted in the Hispano tradition, and captive-taking often became the primary motive for raiding and the cause of retaliatory warfare. Women captives were desired as criadas (servants) and boys as herders; these were quickly assimilated into the Hispanos' sedentary agricultural or pastoral settlements. Raids, punitive expeditions, and campaigns related to the growing seasons but were not entirely dependent on them.
Anglos brought a highly militarized society to the borderlands. They were by no means a homogeneous group — Texas rebels, for example, differed culturally and temperamentally from Anglo Unionists, from California and the territories, and from regular army soldiers. Among the Anglos were small numbers of African Americans who, in the late 1860s, fought with regular U.S. Army units and were, from the Indians' point of view, virtually indistinguishable from their white counterparts in terms of tactics and martial culture. The Indian peoples of the southern plains called them "black whitemen" and, by the end of the decade, referred to them as "Buffalo Soldiers." In general, the combative Anglo-Americans exhibited European ideas of strategic warfare and military doctrine, adhering to highly stylized tactics that evolved from the Napoleonic tradition. The soldiers organized themselves around an officer corps composed largely of trained professionals. A rigidly hierarchical system of leadership left little room for independent action in the standing professional army, but during wartime, volunteer troops demonstrated a willingness and capacity for innovation that often surprised the regulars.
The concepts of "total war" and "war of extermination" introduced by the Anglos escalated the violence in the borderlands to new levels of lethality. Combined with industrial mass production of sophisticated firearms and logistical technologies, the Anglos sustained campaigns and operations on tactical and strategic levels during all seasons of the year and in all conditions. In the borderlands of the 1860s, their practice of capturing "prisoners of war" was a kind of captive-taking generally seen as a temporary war measure, never the raison d'être for fighting. At the same time, their evolving attitudes toward slavery and race became the root cause of cultural difference and internecine conflict. Loyalties, North or South, were generally determined by state of origin, though individual conscience and circumstance often influenced decisions related to which army a man would join. The Anglos, led by professional military men, sought to subdue other peoples by armed force and then regulate all aspects of civil life.
Indigenous Peoples and the Spanish
Hundreds of years prior to the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, people descended from ice age migrants, who had come to North America twenty thousand years earlier, settled along the tributaries of the Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers of the arid Southwest. The Indian peoples and cultures that evolved in the Americas were by no means a monolithic group, but, rather, diverse tribes and bands with distinct languages, survival strategies, traditions, and customs. By the time Europeans arrived in the Americas, Yuman- and Uto-Aztecan–speaking peoples lived in permanent villages along rivers or fortified stone and adobe structures atop high mesas and subsisted by means of intensive agriculture supplemented by hunting and foraging. Pressured by Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne peoples of the central and southern plains, Athabaskan-speaking Navajos and Apaches migrated into the region from the north and east as the Spanish entrada developed from the south.
By the early eighteenth century, the Navajo clans sheltered in the deep canyons of the upper Colorado River, growing crops and hunting, while diverse Apache bands subsisted primarily by foraging, hunting, and seasonally cultivating crops along the mountain rivers and high desert streams to the south. These people became adept at supplementing their supplies by raiding the more sedentary agrarian tribes in search of food, captives, and other useful or fungible commodities. Over the next hundred years, this tradition of raiding increasingly targeted the Spanish arrivals who lived in small, isolated villages and possessed herds of domesticated animals — cattle, sheep, goats, and horses.
The horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish radically changed the survival strategies and lifestyles of the first peoples to inhabit the Southwest. The availability of the easily domesticated quadrupeds revolutionized transportation and band mobility on the southern plains, where true horse cultures evolved within only a few generations of the animal's introduction. The peoples of the plains began to follow the great buffalo herds as they migrated across the vast grasslands. Prior to the adoption of the horse, hunters on foot found it difficult to kill the powerful American bison and, when successful, to transport the hundreds of pounds of perishable meat. Horses enabled the hunters to ride alongside a running buffalo and slay it with a lance or arrows, then pack meat, hide, and other useful parts of the animal back to a village. In time, the Comanches and other Plains Indians learned to move their villages with the wide-ranging herds, carrying buffalo hide tipis, camp equipment, and children on pole-drag travois pulled by ponies bred for their stamina.
The mobility of the villages greatly expanded the reach of the horse peoples and increasingly brought them into conflict with others. Employing many of the same skills used in buffalo hunting, the Comanches and Kiowas became expert mounted fighters. Wars of conquest and retaliation escalated as did raiding for captives and profit. The Plains warriors drove most of the neighboring Apache bands from the open grasslands of the Staked Plains (Llano Estacado) to the mountains and deserts to the south and west. More than thirty related and cooperating Comanche and Kiowa bands kept the Arapahos and Cheyennes well to the north toward the Arkansas River and away from the southern herds. The people inhabiting the northernmost Mexican outposts and Pueblo Indian villages feared and paid tribute to the warriors of the plains and did not stray far from the protection of settlements on the Rio Grande.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the influence of the ever-expanding Comanche empire rippled westward toward the Rio Grande. By trade and raid the river and mountain peoples of the Southwest also adopted horses, but the effect of these animals on their tribes was not as profound as it was on the nomadic Plains tribes. The sedentary peoples remained in their villages close to dependable crops, foraging ranges, and hunting grounds. The seminomadic Athabaskan Navajos and Apaches, however, lived in seasonal rancherías and increasingly relied on horses for hunting and for raiding neighboring tribes, sometimes even venturing onto the plains and ranging deep into Mexico. Their horse herds remained relatively small when compared to the Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes, and the animals sometimes served as a supplementary food source, an unthinkable dietary taboo for the horse people of the plains. Still, even in the Southwest Borderlands, horses began to take hold as the principal medium of wealth and economic exchange.
Spain's northern frontier in New Mexico lay far from the seat of government in Mexico City. The 1,600-mile-journey on the Camino Real, either on foot or by oxdrawn carreta, from the capital to Santa Fe and the províncias internas (interior provinces), might take two to three months, if all went well. The far-flung presidios and settlements suffered attacks by Indian raiders as well as internal strife in the form of uprisings by conquered indios bárbaros (barbarous Indians) and occasionally even the captive indios mansos (tame Indians). The bloody Pueblo Revolt of 1680 left hundreds of Spanish settlers dead and thousands captured or displaced. The Spanish regained their northernmost settlements after nearly two decades of reconquista (reconquest) and many concessions to the Pueblo peoples, including guarantees of more tolerance for traditional ways and local autonomy. In 1751, nearly fifteen thousand Pimas attempted to throw off the Spanish yoke in a loosely coordinated uprising that left hundreds dead in Sonora. New Spain's viceroy, Carlos Francisco de Croix, marqués de Croix, eventually forgave the Pimas and expelled the Jesuit missionaries in 1767 for abusing their native charges. But the seed of rebellion had taken root, and in 1781 the Quechan uprising at Yuma Crossing destroyed the Spanish garrison and missions on the lower Colorado, effectively closing the royal road connecting Mexico City to California and ending Spanish influence in that portion of Pimería Alta (upper Pima territory).
When the Mexican War of Independence from Spain erupted in 1810 with the rallying cry of Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla at Dolores, near Guanajuato in central Mexico, many Hispanos in the already militarized northern settlements embraced the call to arms and the promise of a new and more responsive regime. Pueblo peoples, Comanches, Apaches, and Navajos (whom the Spanish called Apaches del Navahu) had to choose sides as well, and the civil war in New Spain resulted in fighting that saw loyalties tested and changed.
By 1821, more than a decade of fighting had depleted the Spanish treasury and made monarch Ferdinand VII vulnerable to a European coup. The conservative Mexican criollos (Mexico-born Spaniards), led by Augustín Iturbide, united with Hidalgo's radical mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian blood) forces, who had borne the brunt of the fierce guerrilla war waged against the Spanish. If successful, the rebellion would guarantee independence from Spain; equal rights for criollos and peninsulares (Spanish-born) alike; recognition of the Roman Catholic Church, with all its privileges, as the official religion; and the establishment of a new monarchy headed by a suitable European royal. This Plan de Iguala became the centerpiece of the Treaty of Córdoba, which brought the war to a close in August 1821 and led eventually to Iturbide's installation as emperor of Mexico.
United States of Mexico
Conditions did not improve, however, for the Mexicans of the northern frontier. In 1824, the people of Mexico dissolved Iturbide's empire and adopted a new constitution, which defined the nation as a federal republic with nineteen states and five territories. The United States of Mexico (Estados Unidos de Mexico) abolished slavery, recognized Roman Catholicism as the state religion, and elected its first president. The northern territories of Alta California and Nuevo Mexico and the newly created state of Texas (Coahuila y Tejas) with its capital in Saltillo, hundreds of miles from the former Texas capital (San Antonio de Bexar), constituted the borderlands with the United States. Mexico's bankrupt and distracted central government and war-weary military focused little attention on the distant outposts in Sonora, Chihuahua, California, New Mexico, and Texas. In need of a buffer against raiding Comanches and Apaches, the Mexican government invited enterprising Americans to occupy the Indian frontier. It seemed a logical solution to the unstable borderlands situation. The settlers were encouraged to create their own citizen milicias (militias) for protection against the tribes considered hostile. Soon the people of the sparsely populated frontier, with its liberalized immigration policies and independent armed forces, began to think and fend for themselves.
Mexican officials saw to it that the newly arrived Anglos took oaths of allegiance to the republic and the Catholic Church, and for a time it seemed as though the borderlands buffer strategy was working. But both Anglos and Hispanos in the north resented taxation without the benefits of military protection and full political participation. By 1830, American settlers outnumbered the Hispano residents in Texas. To address this ethnic imbalance, Mexico's president, Anastásio Bustamante, prohibited further immigration from the United States into the borderlands, though American citizens were allowed to settle in other parts of Mexico. Furthermore, the Mexican government rescinded the property tax law, intended to exempt immigrants from paying taxes for 10 years, and increased tariffs on goods shipped from the United States. Bustamante also ordered all Texas settlers to comply with the federal prohibition against slavery or face military intervention. The Americans from Tennessee, Kentucky, and other Southern states found ways to circumvent or simply ignore the new laws.
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Excerpted from Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands 1861â"1867 by Andrew E. Masich. Copyright © 2017 Andrew Masich. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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