The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New Mexico’S Eighteenth-Century Northern Borderlands

The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New Mexico’s Eighteenth-Century Northern Borderlands Ned Blackhawk, University of Wisconsin–Madison Abstract. Examining shifting diplomatic and military initiatives undertaken by bands of Ute Indians in New Mexico, this article locates forms of colonial violence at the center of the early American West. Through their adaptations to the arrival of new colonial technologies, economies, and motivations, the Ute and other Indian peoples throughout northern New Mexico responded to the arrival of Spanish colonialism in creative and often violent ways. While forms of band consolidation, equestrian adoption, and increased warfare have characterized many studies of the indigenous West, less attention has been paid to the diplomatic strategies initiated by equestrian leaders in their new worlds. Increased diplomacy and alliance for- mation characterize the earliest recorded Comanche and Ute histories and offer windows into how Europeans influenced indigenous geographies as well as how various Shoshonean speakers responded to such transformations. In March 1748, Juan Beitta, the alcalde mayor overseeing the recently settled Chama River communities northwest of Santa Fe, sent an urgent letter to the governor pleading his settlers’ concerns. “The inhabitants . have come before me,” he reported, “stating that . they find themselves in imminent danger of losing their lives” due to “invasions” from “the pagan Indian enemies, Yutas, Aguaguanos, Comanches . who appear in said places, daily. There is no other remedy, except for the petitioners to move . until the said enemies become pacified.” Governor Joaquín Codallos y Rabal concurred and wrote back permitting the settlers to abandon their houses, lands, crops, and livestock, “which for the time being they [can] leave.” These defensive “buffer” villages on the colony’s northwestern perimeter had been settled largely to keep Indian raiders out Ethnohistory 54:4 (Fall 2007) doi 10.1215/00141801-2007-028 Copyright 2007 by American Society for Ethnohistory Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/54/4/723/410279/EH054-04-08BlackhawkFpp.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 724 Ned Blackhawk of the heart of the province; now, due to Ute and Comanche raids, they stood empty with fallow, untended fields.1 Bands of Ute Indians in New Mexico and Colorado became in the first half of the 1700s powerful actors in New Mexico’s northern borderlands, striking terror into the hearts of Spanish and native communities throughout the northern Rio Grande. By midcentury, New Mexican officials had identified three Ute bands—“Yutas,” “Aguaguanos,” and “Moaches”— with whom they interacted not as a singular political entity but as con- federated bands.2 A half century earlier, in 1706, the Spanish had first identified another Shoshonean-speaking people, the Comanche, north of the colony.3 New Mexicans over the next two generations, however, had trouble differentiating between these linguistically related neighbors who, as Beitta suggested, seemed to travel, live, and raid together. Only in the 1740s and 1750s did colonial officials begin consistently distinguishing between Ute and Comanche groups; within a generation of the 1748 aban- donment of the Chama settlements, the Comanche besieged the colony, raiding settlements, stealing livestock, horses, and captives, and returning to their strongholds in Comanchería. The Ute, by contrast, began in the 1760s to accept New Mexican trading, exploration, and even missionary campaigns in their homelands. They soon also became trusted and regular guests at the governor’s palace in Santa Fe.4 The divergent paths followed by the Ute and Comanche after 1750 have obscured the ties that bound them beforehand. The commonalities between these northern peoples were once not only linguistic but also political and diplomatic. While Comanche historians have recently reposi- tioned these historical actors in narratives of the early West, their preoccu- pation with the scope and scale of Comanche power has hindered ana- lyses of the origins of Comanche hegemony. The multiplicity of peoples, motives, and factors that contributed to the rise of the “lords of the south Plains” remains underexcavated.5 For not only are the Comanche absent from Spanish sources until 1706, they are also not identified on New Mexican maps until 1758, over a century and half after the colony’s found- ing and three generations following the Reconquista, when Spain, after a decade’s absence following the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, again regained control over the northern Rio Grande.6 How, then, did Comanche newcomers so quickly come to dominate colonial New Mexico’s northern borderlands? How did they do so, moreover, when the closest Indian powers to New Mexico—the Navajo and Apache, as well as the Ute—had already forged generations of economic, military, and political relations with the Spanish? Was Comanche dominion preordained? Did it stem from particular traits of Comanche culture or social organization? Judging from the extent of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/54/4/723/410279/EH054-04-08BlackhawkFpp.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Ute Diplomacy 725 Comanche studies of the past decade, an important but at times limiting form of Comanche exceptionalism now permeates many versions of west- ern history. By resituating the origins of Comanche hegemony, this article proposes alternative and less teleological paradigms for conceptualizing Indian histories along New Spain’s northern edge of empire. Far from being inherently predisposed to militancy, the Comanche adapted to violent social relations already long established throughout the colonial Southwest. More- over, they did so in close conjunction with their Ute neighbors, with whom they shared more than simply language. In an enduring, albeit sporadically documented alliance, the Comanche emerged onto New Mexico’s plains not alone but in confederation with the Ute, who had endured waves of colonial disruptions dating back nearly a century. Such waves had flowed north from New Mexico since its earliest days and reconfigured Ute and other northern Indian peoples in dramatic ways. Most notably, Spanish- introduced diseases, technologies, and economies engulfed the Ute in cycles of disruptive and violent change. Spanish metals did more than simply replace native weaponry; horses did more than augment native mobility; and the motivation to trade, raid, and enslave became more than additional variables in the calculus of native economics. Such technologies, incen- tives, and goods altered the fabric of everyday life in increasingly violent ways. With each passing year, Spanish technologies, particularly metals, spread to more distant native peoples and transformed their manufactur- ing, trading, and military capacities. Horses similarly revolutionized native economies and increased territorial conflicts and resource competition.7 Significantly, Spanish leaders also encouraged and rewarded those groups who most consistently ferried resources into the colony. Coming into the province to trade their captives, skins, hides, and horses, the Ute and other northern peoples received essential trade goods, better equipping them to return to their homelands to acquire more resources for future exchange. Obtaining such items to trade, however, required tremendous and often violent labor, as intertribal conflicts over captives, hunting grounds, and resources escalated throughout the colonial era. As in other zones of encounter and along other slaving frontiers, colonialism violently reconfigured indigenous societies before their lands became the actual sites of colonization. The new economies, relations, and technologies of violence and the complicated multilateral world they engendered provide essential context for understanding the emergence of New Mexico’s northern Indian powers.8 As such waves reverberated north from Santa Fe, they crashed against native societies, who tried as best they could to absorb the shock. Slave raids, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/54/4/723/410279/EH054-04-08BlackhawkFpp.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 726 Ned Blackhawk diseases, and the introduction of Spanish technologies initially brought little else than trauma.9 Among the Ute, nonequestrian bands throughout the 1600s lost family members to better-armed Spanish and Indian slavers. Utes also perished due to diseases, and when new technologies did arrive, they usually were in the hands of their enemies, who themselves were responding to the region’s increased patterns of warfare. The Ute adapted to these disruptions by attempting to gain access to and acquire these new technologies. They also started living in more concentrated numbers. Even- tually they got horses. Throughout the 1600s, the Ute endured colonial violence and began to adopt new technologies, reorganizing their societies and redirecting violence against their European and native enemies. By the early 1700s, they deployed violence for both economic and strategic ends, positioning themselves in a growing cast of Indian powers in competition for the region’s many resources. The colonial violence that had arrived in their communities in the early 1600s became, a century later, redirected onto other native groups and also back against New Mexico. When enduring the displacement of violence, the Ute had limited choices. Their decisions to trade and travel south, to adopt

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