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

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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 formation 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

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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 abandonment 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 preoccupation with the scope and scale of Comanche power has hindered analyses 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 founding 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

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Comanche studies of the past decade, an important but at times limiting form of Comanche exceptionalism now permeates many versions of western 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, incentives, 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,

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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 new Spanish technologies, and to live in larger numbers, however, offered them varying, if circumscribed, options. They could move clandestinely into the colony, separate in small parties, and raid outlying pueblos and settlements for horses. They could hunt elk, deer, and buffalo in greater numbers, tanning hides to trade in Pecos, Taos, and the other trade centers of New Mexico. They could also attempt to entice distant neighbors and kinsmen to join them. After the Reconquista, the Ute offered such enticements to Coman- che groups, cementing these relations over time to form the most powerful military and political alliance to date north of New Mexico. Beginning in the early 1700s and lasting nearly four decades, the Comanche-Ute alliance made New Mexico, for the first time, an inseparable part of these communities’ lives. To New Mexico these proud and powerful northerners came, both to trade and to raid, and by midcentury, their combined attacks had displaced New Mexico’s most proximate Indian allies as well as several of its northwestern settlements, including those along the Chama. Adapting to the region’s patterns of violence, the Ute and Comanche mastered many of the unforeseen dynamics unleashed by Spanish colonization, becoming preeminent warriors, equestrians, and statesmen.10 Despite the alliance’s success, the Ute found themselves in a growing quandary. They needed first and foremost the resources of the borderlands to survive, particularly the horses, metals, and wares that had become essential to their economies. They had made, however, both the Comanche and New Mexicans critical to their fortunes, the former as allies and the

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latter as combatant-providers. They needed both. Without the Comanche their access to New Mexico became compromised, but as the Comanche acquired growing horse herds on the southern Plains, the Ute became less central to Comanche fortunes. Indeed, despite their long-standing ties, by midcentury, the Ute increasingly threatened Comanche prospects. Since the Reconquista, the Ute and the Comanche had competed for common resources but had done so as allies who shared spoils, raiding territories, and military information. By the 1750s, the Comanche had become more powerful than the Ute through the development of Plains trade networks around which Comanche economies now revolved. They were no longer a mountain people and no longer depended on their Ute allies. Once facilitated by Ute alliance, the Comanche expanded quickly, bringing themselves into a more bountiful world where multiple imperialists, trading partners, and resources—most notably bison and horse- grazing grasslands—would make these former allies of the Ute something greater indeed. As the political economy of the borderlands increasingly linked peoples across multiple regions, the Ute found themselves suffering from their allies’ transition to the Plains. No longer able to depend fully on the Comanche to help navigate New Mexico’s north, the Ute grew isolated and confronted the region’s pandemic cycles of violence alone. Their dilemma in 1700 had been how to survive in the north without allies. Soon it became how to endure with them.11

The Displacement of Violence and the Origins of the Comanche-Ute Alliance, the 1600s

Spanish conquerors already knew of New Mexico’s northern Indian people prior to their colonization. They were “savage Indians”—indios bárbaros—peoples who refused Spanish missionization and settlement and thus could be conquered in battle and enslaved. Unlike the sedentary and horticultural Pueblo communities, outlying Indians were nomadic peoples “without reason,” similar to those whom the Spanish had encountered during Spain’s conquest of northern Mexico during the sixteenth-century “Chichimeca Wars.” Linguistically and culturally distinct, northern native groups appeared too scattered and unsettled for New Mexican leaders, who generally had little interest in moving off the Rio Grande.12 Following Spanish conquest in 1598–99, different Athapaskan- speaking peoples, initially referred to as “Vaqueros Apaches,” and “Apaches Navajo,” became the first northern groups incorporated into the colony’s political economy. Relative newcomers themselves to the Southwest, the Apache and Navajo had traded with Pueblo communities

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for generations prior to Spanish contact, and after conquest they became drawn into the currents of empire.13 Quickly consolidating control over the region’s immediate hinterlands, the Apache and Navajo better positioned themselves to acquire horses, metals, and the resources with which to trade for them, such as captives and hides. Their raids against the colony, however, often prompted retaliation. In the 1650s, for instance, Navajos west of the Rio Grande attacked Jemez Pueblo, killing nineteen and capturing thirty-five. New Mexican governor Juan de Samaniego y Xaca responded by invading Navajo territories, killing untold numbers while enslaving 211. While many Apache and Navajo bands continued to trade with New Mexi- cans, the increasing raids and reprisals eroded the confidence between the region’s codependent yet antagonistic neighbors. In response to Navajo counterattacks in the early 1660s, for example, Governor Bernardo López de Mendizabal murdered Navajo traders who came to trade at Jemez, enslaving their women and children, and did the same to unsuspecting Apaches at Taos. He also launched campaigns into Apache and Navajo homelands, acquiring hundreds of additional slaves to be sold to the slave and mining centers to the south. By early 1664, Apache and Navajo reprisals had become so fierce that the new governor forbade the entrance of any bárbaros into the pueblos at all, further eroding the prospects for peaceful exchange and enhancing the incentives for raiding.14 The first century of Spanish rule included countless examples of Spanish aggression against and retaliations by Navajo and Apache groups, as lightning-quick raids and internecine warfare plunged the region, as Thomas Hall puts it, into a state of “endemic warfare.”15 By the last decades of the 1600s, as the Pueblo Revolt exiled the Span- ish for over a decade, Navajo, Apache, and more distant Ute bands profited from the Spanish absence, escalating their attacks on the Rio Grande.16 Armed with new weaponry and horses, these raiders also ventured to their north and began incorporating more distant native peoples into the folds of New Mexico’s economy, some as captives, some as traders, and some, like the Comanche, as allies. During the twelve-year Spanish absence, the cir- culation of weapons, horses, and goods accelerated throughout the region, further spreading these technologies and relations of violence onto more distant peoples and territories.17 This displacement of violence reshaped distant Indian communities, forcing many for defensive reasons to con- solidate into larger political units, while pushing others into new political alliances and still others to migrate to more proximate trading and raiding locales. All such realignments characterize the earliest recorded moments of Comanche history and help explain the subsequent rise of both Ute and Comanche militancy. The origins of Comanche hegemony lie, then, not

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with the Comanche alone—far from it—but in their relations with other native peoples, particularly the Ute, and the multipolar world of violence that formed following Spanish colonization.18 The Comanche and the Ute speak related Numic branches of the Uto- Aztecan, or Shoshonean, language family, and Comanche scholars have consistently drawn on Comanche linguistic origins to explain their migration south onto the Plains.19 The earliest “Comanches” lived in small bands throughout the northeastern Great Basin and began migrating onto the Plains in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Dan Flores, “the Comanches’ drive to the south from their original homelands in what is now southwestern Wyoming and northwestern Colorado was part of the original tribal adjustment to the coming of horse technology to the Great Plains. There is reason to believe that the Eastern Shoshones, from whom the Comanches were derived . . . were one of the first intermountain tribes of historic times to push onto the Plains.”20 Combing archaeological and ethnographic records for additional traces of their Shoshonean origins, Comanche scholars all agree that the Comanche were once a Great Basin people whose migration onto the Plains was initiated by the many advan- tages of equestrianism. Such linguistic and ethnographic claims are incontrovertible. Contem- porary Comanche speakers speak a Numic dialect intelligible by Nevadan Shoshones, among others, and Comanche oral histories locate Comanche origins along the eastern slopes of the Rockies.21 Preoccupation with such Great Basin origins, however, obscures as much as it reveals. Discussions of Comanche “prehistory” that situate these groups in fixed and acces- sible categories of analysis cannot withstand scrutiny, since these discussions often assume static notions of political identity and maintain timeless claims about Indian culture. Flores’s claim, for example, that once the Comanche became bison hunters, “appear[ing] to have abandoned all the old Shoshonean mechanisms, such as infanticide and polyandry, that had kept their population in line with available resources,” relies on problematic ethnographic texts that identify essential “Shoshone” and “Coman- che” traits and then project them throughout history.22 With no documented references in sixteenth- or even seventeenth-century Comanche history, scholars often rely on ethnographies to shed light into the earliest moments of Comanche history and unwillingly perpetuate a series of meth- odological and essentialist dilemmas. They take postcontact ethnographic and political designations and apply them to peoples and times removed from the revolutions initiated by European invasion, often minimizing and naturalizing the relations of violence engendered by colonialism.23 Accessing precontact American Indian history remains among the

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most perplexing challenges for Indian historians, and early Comanche and other borderlands Indian histories are particularly difficult.24 No evidence of long-standing political confederacies, pictorial or mnemonic recording systems, or even sustained territorial occupation characterizes numerous Plains and mountain peoples.25 While Navajo and Apache groups had complicated relations with the Spanish throughout the 1600s, the Ute and Comanche did not. Only faint, fragmentary traces into these groups’ earliest documented histories remain. The Spanish, moreover, inconsistently classified these northern peoples, often subsuming them into racist and generic designations, such as “indios bárbaros.” Most important, Spanish influences reconfigured the fabric of Ute and Comanche societies before their appearance in documentary records. Scholars accustomed to stable ethnographic designations or geographically bounded “tribes” or “nations” need only peruse the scattered remnants of these groups’ documentary records to see that the origins of many native histories remain shrouded in mystery. The earliest histories of these northern peoples remain ones in motion, not tied to specific locales, dates, or even identifiable bands. They remain clouded worlds of constant movement and turmoil with the only documentary evidence coming from often confused and uncertain newcomers. These fleeting references, furthermore, are often moments of conflict, accounts of raids, reprisals, enslavements, and military campaigns. Documentary Comanche and Ute history have, then, fragmented and violent origins and cannot be easily interpreted outside of the violent disruptions precipitated by European intrusion. Violence not only characterizes these histories; it also becomes a primary lens for accessing and analyzing them.26 Although sparsely documented, Spanish-Ute relations in the 1600s mirrored those of surrounding groups, particularly in the reoccurring cycles of trade, raiding, and enslavement. As early Spanish expeditions throughout the Southwest encountered various Ute and other Great Basin peoples, these Shoshone-speakers responded in multiple ways to the powerful influences emanating from New Mexico. Seventeenth-century Spanish sources indicate heightened levels of conflict, greater migratory ranges, and increased band consolidation throughout Ute territories in northern New Mexico and Colorado. The first documented Spanish encounter with identifiable Ute peoples, for example, came shortly before 1639, when Gov- ernor Luis de Rosas returned to Santa Fe after raiding northern peoples. Accused of violating loosely regulated protocols against Indian slavery, Rosas reportedly provoked an “unjust war against the ‘Utaca’ nation” that “killed many and brought . . . eighty people in capture.”27 Many of these captives ended up in New Mexico’s forced labor workshops, or obrajes,

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while others were taken further away from their homelands to slave and mining centers to the south.28 Rosas’s slave raid provides an appropriate and inauspicious beginning to Spanish-Ute relations. “Unjustly” enslaved at the hands of superi- orly armed and mobile forces, these unidentified Utes quickly compre- hended the painful new logic of Spanish-Indian relations. The fact that Rosas killed “many” while also enslaving eighty testifies not only to the region’s heightened levels of violence but also to the increasing concen- tration of northern peoples in larger groups capable of absorbing, if not repelling, violent attacks. Like all surrounding peoples, the Ute responded to the displacement of violence with the best deterrent they initially could muster: numerical strength. Anthropologists have long argued that small- scale band organization remained the predominant sociopolitical form for Great Basin groups into the contact period.29 Rosas’s raid and subsequent seventeenth-century Spanish observations shed light on the emergence of larger Ute territorial groups, if not bands. While building upon existing political and cultural institutions, such consolidation suggests the creation, or even ethnogenesis, of larger bands throughout New Mexico’s northern hinterlands.30 Rosas’s raid, furthermore, destroyed an existing Ute encampment, forcing survivors to flee to neighboring communities along this traumatic edge of empire. The fact that Rosas’s and subsequent Spanish raids devastated large, unspecified Ute communities further reveals the difficulties in -identify ing northern peoples. Such bands often consisted of hundreds of tents that, when encamped, the Spanish referred to as rancherías. Within such encampments, distinctions among native groups often remained unclear to Spanish chroniclers. By the mid-1700s, as Ute and Comanche bands shifted allegiances, New Mexicans began using more precise territorial and band designations. Projecting these classifications back onto earlier periods, however, becomes problematic. Bands of undifferentiated “Ute” and later “Comanche” peoples traveled through unmapped lands, lived at times among different native groups, and suffered largely undocumented raids, like that by Rosas, in which the total number of casualties remains unknown. Assigning clear political or even territorial distinctions to these worlds remains, then, not only difficult but also dangerous, potentially categorizing unidentifiable peoples into static topologies. While such ethnographic distinctions remain inherently partial, the Spanish did recognize broad linguistic, political, and territorial differences among their neighbors that provide fragmented, if limited, insight into the transformations occurring in the north. Often using Pueblo informants, New Mexicans differentiated between bands of Navajos and Apaches

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with whom they had sustained trading and diplomatic relations. The Ute, however, initially remained outside of the realms of Spanish knowledge, only rarely in the seventeenth century venturing into New Mexico. In the decades following Rosas’s raids, for example, Utes only appear in missionary descriptions of the colony’s distant north. They lived, as Fray Alonso de Posados, custodian to New Mexico’s missions from 1661 to 1665, noted, in “a land which the Indians of the north call Teguayo,” approximately one hundred leagues to the northwest.31 Although Rosas had attacked and enslaved a large “Utaca” encampment to the north, few Spanish leaders, traders, or missionaries traveled northwest out of the colony during the 1600s.32 By the end of the seventeenth century, then, Shoshone-speaking peoples remained largely outside the spheres of European colonization but increasingly within spheres of European influence. Like Navajo and Apache groups, Ute bands faced the threat of Span- ish enslavement, interwoven with the growing need for Spanish goods. The Ute and other surrounding peoples accordingly formed larger political units not only for defensive, military purposes but also to increase their territorial ranges. New Mexican trade fairs at Taos and Pecos had attracted northern people for centuries, and they expanded during the colonial era.33 Spanish settlers, desperate themselves for economic development in this distant corner of empire, rewarded those Indian groups who most consistently brought in items of value, most notably hides, furs, dried meats, and slaves. New Mexican and Plains Indian trade fairs became hubs in the region’s political economy around which all peoples revolved, native and nonnative alike. For Indian communities, these new trading relations quickly became critical lifelines. Acquiring these trade items, however, required sustained and often violent labor. As the Spanish rewarded those who ferried resources into New Mexico, increased militarization and internecine warfare accompanied Spanish trade goods out of the colony. While Pueblo Indians received certain rights in colonial society, outlying groups had only their own strength and numbers for protection. As Elizabeth John states, “Missionaries vigorously protested the enslavement of Indians and could largely protect their Pueblo charges from that illegal fate, but no power on the northern frontier could prevent the enslavement of ‘wild’ Indians.”34 Indios bárbaros, thus, not only had to defend themselves against Spanish incursions but also against each other, as raids, counterraids, reprisals, and counterreprisals plagued every Indian society in the region, violent cycles of destructive frontier conflicts characterizing northern Indian relations throughout the colonial era. Largely undocumented, the increased violence

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brought heightened pain, terror, and trauma to the everyday lives of native peoples throughout the early West. It was in this world of heightened violence and trade goods that “Yutas” peoples struggled to survive. Native groups had long raided and even enslaved each other prior to Spanish intrusion, but never to such an extent or with such frequency.35 Larger consolidated bands, capable of more rapid and greater territorial movement, and using new forms of weaponry, militarized New Mexico’s expanding hinterlands. New Mexi- cans also encouraged such violence, using Indian allies for military purposes and Indian traders for economic gain. Subject to raids from their native and Spanish neighbors, Ute and other Indian bands redirected violence against each other, but also back against New Mexico, the source of disruption. Following Rosas’s raid, Ute bands suffered from such attacks by Apache, Navajo, and even Pueblo raiders. As the Apache and Navajo in the 1600s incorporated new trade goods and consolidated their own societies for defensive and raiding purposes, their relations with the Ute devolved into violence.36 Pueblo groups similarly used their familiarity with Spanish technologies to raid northern peoples, particularly after the Pueblo Revolt, when the diffusion of Spanish technologies, particularly horses, increased. During the Reconquista, for example, after sack- ing Taos and returning to Santa Fe from the northwest to avoid potential Pueblo counterattacks, Governor Diego de Vargas encountered Ute groups near the Colorado border who mistook his battalion for Pueblo warriors, who had recently “often come to this region . . . disguised as Spaniards, mounted, and with leather jackets [armor], leather hats [helmets], fire- arms, and even a bugle.”37 While sparsely documented, such intertribal attacks, like Rosas’s earlier raid, now shaped Ute communities in critical ways. At greater distance from New Mexico and in conflict with New Mexico’s most proximate Indian powers, the Ute developed strategies of survival that soon made them among the most powerful peoples in the region. Shortly after the Pueblo Revolt, the Ute became middlemen in the expanding horse trade. Although few seventeenth-century sources suggest direct Ute involvement with the horse trade, scholars often date the spread of the horse to the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and locate the Ute at the center of such dispersal.38 Drawing largely from environmental assessments of the region’s grasslands, scholars conclude that Ute, Apache, and later Comanche groups not only incorporated horses into their societies but also increasingly spread them through extensive trade networks. Many seventeenth-century Apache groups, however, maintained semiseden-

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tary, horticultural villages north of Santa Fe. They were primarily village farmers, not nomadic horse traders.39 The Ute by contrast were not horti- culturalists but seasonal hunters who traveled to trade, hunt, recreate, and worship. Such migratory economies in the late 1600s intersected with the spread of equestrianism, as the Ute adapted horse trading to their seasonal patterns. Intimately familiar with the diverse ecologies of the Rocky Moun- tain–Plains borderlands, the Ute became among the West’s first equestrian societies, camping, hunting, and trading along the eastern steppes of the Rockies. Horses, like Spanish metals, accelerated the displacement of violence. As horses facilitated their movement, Indian groups traveled, migrated, and hunted across greater distances. They also increasingly fought, killed, and enslaved each other. Horses and the violent political economy that they extended shattered and recalibrated native worlds throughout New Mexico’s expanding hinterlands. Spanish leaders were aware of the growing magnitude of horse trading and constantly attempted to stem the spread of horses out of the province. They had little idea, however, of the range of the horse’s influence and even less of its violent effects on Indian peoples. While colonial officials bemoaned equestrian raids on New Mexico, such attacks paled in comparison to the intertribal warfare that native peoples endured. Spanish colonialism and its attendant technologies of violence sparked infernos of conflict that raged throughout western North America, as the horse became a critical element in the region’s violent remaking. Surprisingly, few have drawn larger conclusions about the primacy of the Ute in the spread of the horse.40 Throughout the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Ute had horses. They knew how to acquire, keep, and maintain them. They knew firsthand of their military and economic import, and they used this knowledge not only to fend off hostile Indian attacks but also to create stronger relations with new partners and allies. Having suffered through decades of raids, the Ute needed allies, and they began identifying potential neighbors for such purposes. Concomitantly, other Shoshonean-speaking migrants had entered onto the Plains, drawn in part by the abundance of game, bison, and now horses. These Coman- che newcomers also needed horses, allies, and trading partners, as well as access to New Mexico. The Ute could supply these needs. For, despite their initial hostilities in the 1630s, by the time of the Reconquista, Ute leaders had established incipient trading relations with New Mexicans and had secured partial favors from colonial officials. Before the Pueblo Revolt, for example, Governor Antonio de Otermin noted that New Mexico had “finally found itself . . . on the eve of having more [peace] than ever, with the hopes of the reduction to our holy faith of the innumerable and warlike

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nation of the Yutas . . . [whom] we have been treating.”41 Similarly, in the aftermath of the Reconquista, de Vargas invited the Ute groups whom he encountered to Santa Fe, “as had been their custom prior to 1680.”42 By 1700, then, the Ute not only had horses, they also had learned to court favors from the Spanish. Exactly when the Ute and Comanche initiated sustained diplomatic relations is unknown. No records identify when Ute traders came into Comanche camps, traded horses and other goods, and laid the foundation for future relations. Ties between the Ute and the Comanche likely solidi- fied during the Spanish absence in the 1680s as horses, goods, and traders filtered into the north. The Spanish absence, moreover, reshaped Ute diplomacy. For while the Spanish had welcomed Ute traders before 1680, their prolonged absence created new exigencies for Ute leaders. For over twelve years, the Ute wondered when and, more important, whether the Spanish would return, and with each passing year, they increased their raids against Pueblo communities. As de Vargas noted, against “the Tewa, Tano, Taos, Picuris, Jemez, and Keres,” the Ute “have continued the war . . . with great vigor.” During the Spanish absence, then, northern raiders gained not only greater knowledge of the region but also increased confidence in their capacities to attack the Rio Grande.43 When the Spanish did return, they noted the increased power of Ute bands throughout the north. They also noted the presence of the Ute’s newest ally, the Comanche. In the earliest Spanish references to Coman- ches, New Mexicans not only refer to Utes but also to the growing violence in the region. First documented in 1706, when military reports identified them on New Mexico’s eastern Plains, the Comanche and their Ute allies preoccupied New Mexicans attempting to facilitate the return of Pueblos taking refuge at the Apache town of El Cuartelejo. Sergeant Major Juan de Ulibarri reported that Utes and Comanches were besieging Apachería. En route to the Apache village, Ulibarri learned of an impending Ute and Comanche attack. Along the Arkansas River in Colorado, his party met Apache warriors moving to fight the Ute and Comanche, and on their return to Santa Fe, the Spaniards camped among Jicarilla Apaches who were recovering from recent Ute and Comanche raids. Undocumented before the Pueblo Revolt, the Comanche now fought alongside their Ute allies for control of the north.44 Bolstered by these early raids, the Ute and Comanche in the first two decades of the 1700s increased their territorial range at the expense of surrounding Indian peoples, particularly the Apache and Navajo. As Ulibarri reported, Apache communities at La Jicarilla, El Cuartelejo, and other sites northeast of Santa Fe faced repeated Ute and Comanche attacks. To

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the northwest, Navajo raids against New Mexico similarly dropped off as the Ute and Comanche occupied the prime trading and raiding territories on the western banks of the Rio Grande. Coupled with Captain Roque de Madrid’s punitive campaigns against the Navajo in 1705 and 1709, the Ute-Comanche presence decisively curbed Navajo movements into the province, leading one Navajo historian to conclude that “an unprecedented period of peace, lasting more than fifty years, followed the campaigns of 1709. During this time, known Spanish documents record not a single Navajo raid upon Spanish settlement. . . . The Navajo clearly and earnestly wished no war with the Spaniards. Indeed, their desire for peace went deeper: they wanted Spanish protection against a deadly alliance.”45 The scourge of seventeenth-century New Mexico, the Navajo and Apache no longer dominated New Mexico’s northern borderlands and now frequently turned to the Spanish as well as to each other for protection against this new and “deadly alliance.”

The Height of the Comanche-Ute Alliance, 1706–1740s

In the 1600s, Apaches, Navajos, Pueblos, and Spaniards had displaced new relations of violence to the north, engulfing Shoshone-speakers in the region’s violent political economy. Now, in the first decades of the 1700s, allied Ute and Comanche bands redirected such violence back against New Mexico and its Indian allies. The Ute and Comanche raided not just for resources, however, but also for strategic ends. Raiding New Mexican settlements seasonally, the Ute and Comanche often simultaneously fought to dislodge Apache and Navajo settlements that provided buffers against their raids into the province. Apache communities northeast of Santa Fe consequently grew more reliant on Spanish protection, as wave after wave of alliance attacks crashed against their villages in the early 1700s. New Mexicans also now joined Apache warriors in campaigns against the alliance, solidifying the social and political ties between their village worlds. Many Spanish leaders, particularly Franciscan missionaries, even encouraged colonial officials in Mexico City to incorporate besieged Apaches into the kingdom of Cross and Crown, hopeful that the beleaguered and increasingly faithful Apache would soon become the first Spanish converts on the Plains. Plans for missionization were, however, quickly dashed, as New Mexicans in the 1720s became unwittingly drawn into a devastating encounter with advancing French forces, whose increased presence on the Plains combined with Ute-Comanche attacks to derail Spanish expansion in the region altogether. Ute-Comanche raids, in fact, became so severe that

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the centuries-old Apache trading centers along the Arkansas and Canadian rivers remained more than simply unincorporated into the Spanish empire. They became completely displaced. Never again would native groups live in horticultural villages along these watersheds, as the descendants of these communities became among the first diasporic peoples in the Southwest. Also displacing multiple New Mexican settlements, alliance control by midcentury appeared unparalleled. Throughout the first decades of the 1700s, alliance raiders struck the colony and its Apache allies with furious regularity. In 1716, while Gov- ernor Félix Martínez was visiting western Pueblos, Ute and Comanche raiders attacked Taos. In 1718 Jicarilla Apaches arrived at Taos pleading for Spanish protection, and a year later Utes raided Taos and Cochiti pueblos, stealing children and horses and prompting Governor Antonio Valverde Cosio to call together the province’s leading citizens to decide how best to deal with these northern raiders. “The Ute nation and Comanche nations, who always united, have been committing robberies,” Valverde reported. “It appears to all, that since their own lands are more than two hundred leagues away from this kingdom . . . they are coming to attack us on sight.” Mounting a massive force in the summer of 1719 of “some six hundred with as many horses,” this force of presidio soldiers, settlers, Pueblo auxiliaries, and Apache warriors, failed to engage the alliance. Smoldering fires, recently abandoned possessions, and fresh tracks enticed but ultimately frustrated the phalanx in its month-long campaign. While failing to punish the alliance, Valverde succeeded in cementing relations with northern Apaches, of whom the alliance had “killed many . . . and carried off their women and children.”46 Beleaguered by alliance raids, Apache villages throughout the 1720s eagerly welcomed New Mexicans and even agreed to accept Spanish colonization. They heeded governors’ calls for their baptism, erected crosses over their homes, and pledged their loyalty to Cross and Crown. Hear- ing of their fidelity, Viceroy Marques de Valero ordered Valverde to missionize these Plains people, partly in order to curb alliance attacks while also stemming French advances to the east. News of Ute and Comanche power now combined with larger geopolitical concerns to attract the attention of New Spain’s leading imperial officials. Valero, Valverde, and their Apache allies’ dreams of becoming an extension of the empire, however, were soon dashed by the defeat of Pedro de Villasur, Valverde’s lieuten- ant general. Ordered in 1720 to travel north to monitor French inroads among northern peoples, Villasur and his Pueblo auxiliaries were routed by a Pawnee-French ambush near the confluence of the Platte and Loup rivers in Nebraska. The loss cost New Mexico over thirty presidio soldiers,

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a third of the trained Spanish garrison, and halted all efforts to colonize Apachería.47 News of the Villasur debacle quickly spread throughout New Spain, prompting Valero to order an immediate inquiry into the causes of the defeat. After leaving office, Valverde attempted to exonerate himself by offering pictorial representations of Villasur’s defeat, likely drawn by surviving Indian auxiliaries or at least based on their testimony. Known as the Segesser Hide Paintings, these two surviving documents offer incom- parable insight into the nature of eighteenth-century Plains Indian warfare and into the violent processes of social change remaking New Mexico’s northern borderlands.48 While Segesser II, the well-known portrait of Villasur’s defeat, depicts the campaign’s demise, Segesser I details an attack by unspecified Indian raiders on an overmatched Indian ranchería. Unsure of the location, combatants, or the reasons behind the making of Segesser I, borderlands historians have often overlooked or offered conflicting assessments of this critical document, in which the identities of both sides remain unrecover- able.49 Since the attacking warriors are equipped with Spanish weaponry, mounts, and both equestrian and personal armor, several have suggested that these are genizaro or Pueblo auxiliary forces aligned with Valverde.50 None of the defending combatants is mounted or has armor. All of the attackers employ metal weapons such as swords, axes, and metal-tipped lances, indicated on the original by distinct indigo coloring, while only one of the defenders possesses such weaponry. One defender also has a single metal strip attached to his shield. While scholars debate the possible identities and artists of Segesser I, more focused attention to its actual coloring is warranted. For, like the thousands of northern Indians who came into New Mexico to trade, the unknown artist(s) of Segesser I instinctively recognized the distinctions between Spanish-introduced weaponry and those previously used by native groups. They purposely differentiated between such metals when com- posing the parchment and understood that such distinctions were neces- sary. As everyone in the region understood, possession of horses, metals, and armor decided the outcome of many conflicts, and despite the cherub- like portraits of women and children, the defending ranchería stands little chance against the intruders. The underequipped were undoubtedly over- run and their women and children, at best, captured. While the identities of these combatants remain unknown, their clash illustrates central themes in borderlands history: native peoples equipped with superior technologies of violence incorporated distant and underequipped societies into the disruptive folds of empire, capturing or enslaving their women and chil-

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dren whenever possible. As Comanche and Ute raids from this period suggest, Indian raiders attacked moreover for specific economic, military, and political purposes in response to generations of colonial violence. Possession of technologies of violence alone did not offer immunity from attack. On the contrary, Indian raiders often targeted those with the most sustained trading relations with New Mexico, and throughout the 1720s the Ute and Comanche made life dire for New Mexico’s Apache and Navajo allies, whose communities not only stood in the way of alliance raiders, but had also received years of supplies from the Spanish. In the early 1720s, Apache delegations annually came into Santa Fe and recounted sorrowful tales of alliance attacks. Governors, such as Carlos de Bustamante, also visited Apache villages, witnessed the extent of their suffering, and urged the viceroy to establish the proposed and needed missions. After a visit to La Jicarilla, for example, Bustamante reported, “The nations Ute and Comanche had attacked them a second time and abducted . . . their women and children.” As Spanish officials in Mexico painstakingly debated whether to colonize Apachería, the Apache began fleeing their homelands. In May 1724, an Apache delegation reported to Bustamante that “since their persons are not being protected . . . they have decided . . . to go to the province of the Navajos,” who shared griev- ances against the alliance.51 For the next three years, the Apache awaited a final decision, and in 1727 unfortunate news arrived. After the northern inspections of Pedro de Rivera, New Spain’s visitador, colonial authorities finally decided against Apache colonization and urged the Apache to relocate to New Mexico: they could either leave their homelands for a mission settlement near Taos or endure continued alliance onslaughts alone.52 Having served as loyal scouts, regular traders, and repeated hosts, Apache leaders felt betrayed. In the violent world of the northern borderlands, however, sedentary Indian settlements outside the protection of Spanish forces were largely untenable, and these Plains villagers had little hope of remaining in their homelands. The cost of equipping distant missions, combined with the continuing onslaughts from the Ute-Comanche alliance, doomed Apache chances for missionization. In 1733, after years of further attacks, the Jicarillas abandoned their villages and came, according to Alfred Barnaby Thomas, “to live near Pecos . . . where a mission was briefly established among them. . . . Soon after, however, the greater part fled . . . though the remnants joined the Taos against the Comanches.”53 The abandonment of La Jicarilla and shortly thereafter of El Cuarte- lejo signaled the end of sedentary Apache communities north of New Mexico. While some Apaches resettled among the Navajo and Pueblo, most fled south, where they developed raiding economies that paradoxi-

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cally came to plague Spanish and later Mexican societies. De Rivera’s recommendations against colonizing Apachería eventually came to haunt New Mexican, Tejano, and northern Mexican provinces, as Apache refu- gees, driven south by the Ute–Comanche alliance, became among the most accomplished raiders in western history.54 While Ute and Comanche raids in and around New Mexico are partially visible in Spanish sources, the same is not true of Spanish and native reprisals. While some governors, such as Valverde, kept detailed accounts of their expeditions, most did not, or their accounts have not survived. Bustamante, for example, in May 1724 referred only in passing to a campaign he led against the alliance in an effort to liberate Jicarilla captives. Recounting the campaign’s success, Bustamante wrote, “I had the fortune to restore sixty-four persons” from their alliance captors.55 Making no mention of Ute or Comanche casualties, Bustamente, like earlier governors, led large campaigns to punish alliance raiders. Only documentary traces, however, remain of such encounters, underscoring the need for partial interpretations of these northern histories. Occasionally, Spanish authorities did record moments from the indigenous wars swirling throughout the north. Like New Mexicans, besieged Apache communities retaliated against the alliance, pursuing raiders and even launching retaliatory campaigns of their own. In 1726 Apache raiders returned to New Mexico with “prisoners who were Comanches.”56 Ute and Comanche captives also begin appearing in marriage and legal records from this time. In 1725 an unidentified Ute was married at El Paso, while in 1733 another Ute captive appeared in a court case along with other genizaros who unsuccessfully petitioned the governor for a land grant at Belén, a settlement south of Albuquerque.57 Genizaros, as Ramón Gutiér- rez and James Brooks detail, were exiled Indians, ransomed captives, prisoners of war, and their children who by the mid-eighteenth century came to constitute a caste of detribalized Indians in colonial society. As the Ute and the Comanche warred with New Mexicans they increasingly became captured, eventually becoming members of these subordinate groups. The offspring of colonialism, such captives underscore the intertwined violent and hybrid effects of colonial encounters in the Spanish borderlands.58 The Ute and the Comanche also increased their own captive-raiding throughout the first half of the 1700s. Whether to replace lost members, to trade to others, or to ransom them back to New Mexico, Ute and Coman- che bands, like all surrounding Indian groups, enslaved women and children. With so few sustained accounts, the Southwestern Indian slave trade has often confounded borderlands historians. Many, for example, recoil at Spanish reports of Indian slavery, choosing either to ignore the causes of

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such brutality or simply to attribute them to presumed innate native tra- ditions and personalities. A few scholars have recently attempted to move beyond such views and have focused instead on the myriad ways captives both bounded and negotiated different cultural groups.59 Neither of these approaches fully suffices. The Indian slave trade remained prima facie a product of colonialism, and all Spanish accounts, whether from sympathetic friars or condemning magistrates, came from participants implicated in the process of colonization.60 Spanish accounts of Indian slavery must, accordingly, be viewed through an optic of violence that recognizes both the disruptive effects of Spanish intrusion into native worlds and colonial attempts to justify such intrusion. When documenting incidents of Indian “savagery,” Spanish recorders, in a sense, bore wit- ness to the violent effects of their own presence while trying to rational- ize them. As “indios bárbaros,” Utes and Comanches, by definition, per- formed irrational acts of violence. They acted violently due to nature, not in response to economic or political forces, and Spanish accounts often fol- low such prescriptions. In the first ethnographic description of the Coman- che, for example, Pedro de Rivera in 1727 recounted: Each year at a certain time, there comes to this province a nation of Indians very barbarous, and warlike. Their name is Comanche. They never number less than 1,500. Their origin is unknown, because they are always wandering in battle formation, for they make war on all the Nations. They halt at whichever stopping place and set up their campaign tents, which are of buffalo hides. . . . And after they finish the commerce . . . which consists of tanned skins, buffalo hides, and those young Indians they capture (because they kill the older ones), they retire, continuing their wandering until another time.61 “Always wandering in battle formation,” the Comanche, like their Ute allies, traveled in militarized bands, constantly prepared for defense as well as to enslave weaker neighbors. For Rivera, their “barbarous and warlike” nature explained their enslavement of captives, not their “certain,” annual “commerce” with New Mexico. By the time of the Comanche’s earliest sustained appearance in Span- ish sources, then, colonial violence had become woven into the fabric of their society. Rivera’s claim that Comanche slavers simply killed older captives rather than risk their enslavement was influenced by his racial and cultural prejudices. Yet chauvinism alone cannot explain the slaves of the Comanche. Did the Comanche and other native groups kill older and male captives? If so, why? Like their many neighbors, the Ute and the Comanche adapted to

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colonial violence in kind, redirecting it against New Mexico while also displacing it onto more distant native groups. Also like their neighbors, they were influenced by powerful Spanish enticements to trade; Rivera’s descriptions after all recount moments of economic exchange. The “certain commerce” that northern peoples brought to New Mexico consisted of northern resources: furs, hides, eventually horses, and also slaves, who throughout the colonial era provided the colony with a growing pool of laborers. New Mexicans “ransomed” Indian captives from surrounding Indian groups, initially “adopting” captives into New Mexican families while eventually in the mid-1700s granting genizaro requests for land.62 Captives were overwhelmingly young women and children whose sexual and reproductive labor became increasingly essential to the colony. Due to constant Indian raids, New Mexico’s borders remained unstable, and colonial officials encouraged settlement to buffer against Indian attacks. As equestrian raids destabilized the colony, however, New Mexican leaders in the 1740s increasingly granted genizaro requests for land at towns like Abiquiu along the Chama and further south at Belén, allowing the children of captives, and even former captives themselves, a modicum of rights in colonial society. New Mexican patriarchs, as Ramón Gutiérrez elabo- rates, employed Indian slaves not only for needed household and agricul- tural labor but also for psychological and sexual “comforts,” as the presence of genizaros and their “illegitimate” children over time underpinned New Mexican hierarchies of honor, patriarchy, and race.63 New Mexico’s Indian trade fairs thus became epicenters of the region’s evolving slave networks, and violence became increasingly gendered as raiders competed for captives in an effort, partially, to populate the colony’s unstable borders. The relations of violence engendered by Spanish intrusion extended far beyond military affairs and shaped the most intimate forms of everyday life within and outside of colonial society. New Mexican as well as Indian captors generally found adult male captives too difficult to enslave, transport, and adopt into New- Mexi can society; as Rivera implied, they often killed them in battle. Although some male captives were sent south in the 1600s to the mining centers of northern Mexico, throughout the 1700s settlement, defense, and economic development dominated New Mexico’s colonial affairs, and the vast majority of captives thus were women and children.64 Moreover, whereas in the 1600s Spanish slavers, like Governor Rosas, directly procured slaves from surrounding nonequestrian Indians in military campaigns, in the 1700s outlying native groups became the primary slave traffickers. While some scholars suggest that patterns of servitude originated in precontact Native America, the violent transformations engendered by colo-

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nial technologies, economies, and warfare—combined with New Mexi- cans’ growing proclivity for female and young captives—suggest that the increasingly gendered nature of the Indian slave trade stemmed from colonial disruptions, not from precontact Indian “culture.”65 Eighteenth- century Indian groups, themselves recalibrated by powerful and violent changes, thus adopted and extended the patterns of enslavement flowing from Spanish colonization. Although few sources directly reveal the Ute- Comanche alliance’s involvement in the Southwestern Indian slave trade, by midcentury colonial settlements increasingly facilitated the traffic of young women and children into New Mexico from Indian traders. After Abiquiu’s founding in 1754 and for over a century along the Chama, for example, more than 150 “Utes” were baptized, the vast majority of them women and children.66 By 1740, the Ute had incorporated the most powerful of northern peoples into an alliance that dominated the most proximate trading and raiding locations on the colony’s perimeter. In the northeast, northern Apachería was no more, and Ute-Comanche raiders continued to drive these former Spanish allies further south. On the western side of the Rio Grande, many attributed the sustained Spanish-Navajo peace directly to Ute-Comanche depredations. In 1745, for example, traders among the Navajo noted that Ute and Comanche attacks had forced Navajo families to “live on the tops of the mesas in little houses of stone. And that the reason for their living in those mountains is because the Yutas and Coman- ches make war upon them.”67 The alliance now seemed at the zenith of its power, with few groups, other than mobilized Spanish military campaigns, capable of pursuing alliance raiders. Often moving with impunity along the colony’s periphery, the Ute and the Comanche frequently attacked and fled before retaliatory forces were mobilized. Ute and Comanche control in the north was not absolute, however. Spanish campaigns that did engage the alliance inflicted heavy tolls. In 1747, for example, Governor Codallos y Rabal ambushed a Ute ranchería, killing 107 while capturing 206 slaves and nearly 1,000 horses.68 As with most Spanish engagements, little is known of the exact location, date, and participants, except that in this case, Antonio Santiestevan, a soldier standing guard over the captives, fell asleep and was subsequently tried in Santa Fe after a captive escaped.69 Only because of a guard’s negligence does this massacre and enslavement become visible. The following spring, the Ute responded with attacks that forced the abandonment of numerous Chama Valley settlements, as Juan Beitta noted in his March letter to Governor Codallos y Rabal. As with their dispersal of the Apache, the Ute’s ability to displace

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colonial settlements underscores their power in northern New Mexico. Alliance raids remapped the colony’s boundaries and reconfigured its bal- ance of power. The Ute had, however, sustained serious losses to Codallos y Rabal and continued to endure cycles of intertribal conflicts. They had also recently begun losing influence with their Comanche allies. Consum- mate diplomats and raiders, the Ute still found themselves in a situation of precarious security, particularly because their homelands north of New Mexico remained relatively isolated from the dynamic Plains. While eastern Ute bands raided seasonally onto the Plains with their Comanche allies, they returned to their mountain valleys, leaving the Arkansas, Canadian, and other watersheds behind until the next season. After the Apache dispersal, however, the Plains northeast of Santa Fe became home to vibrant trade centers that linked Indian, New Mexican, and French traders from the east. During the 1730s and 1740s, the Comanche began dominating these lands, occupying former Apache territories while consolidating their control over the rich grazing grasslands of the Southern Plains. While the Ute to the west migrated from mountain parks to Plains river valleys, by 1730, if not sooner, the Comanche had become, as Rivera noted, entirely a Plains people. The Ute dominated northwestern New Mexico, but Coman- che control over the colony’s northeastern Plains soon proved far more advantageous. The Comanche no longer needed their Ute allies. Indeed, despite the two peoples’ long-standing cultural and diplomatic ties, the Ute threatened Comanche diplomacy and, most important, Comanche trade.70 The first hint of Ute-Comanche tensions occurred in 1735. For the first time, Spanish authorities described the Ute as “enemies” of the Comanche after Comanches had come that year to trade buffalo hides for Spanish knives and expressed animosity toward unspecified Utes.71 No other direct accounts of Ute-Comanche hostilities remain until the 1750s, but evidence of Comanche disengagement with the alliance reoccurred throughout the 1740s. In the summer of 1748, for example, just months after Bietta’s urgent report from the Chama, six hundred Comanches entered Taos and assured their hosts of their lack of involvement in any of the year’s previous raids.72 Comanche sights, as Pekka Hämäläinen argues, now centered on their Plains trading centers and on monopolizing trade between New Mexico and French Louisiana. The Comanche were quickly becoming imperialists of their own, and over the next generation their power grew over a constel- lation of subject peoples, including New Mexicans.73 The Ute-Comanche alliance had developed, expanded, and was now dissolving in a multipolar world. For the Ute, the changing imperial economies of the Southern Plains,

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Comanche fortunes, and a new reformist governor in Santa Fe ushered in dramatic realignments in the northwest, realignments that would eventually link New Mexico and Ute communities for the next half century. After taking office in 1749, Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupin began a series of initiatives to incorporate Indian neighbors into a more stable regional economy. Committing to punish northern raiders as well as Spanish settlers who abandoned their villages, he made force and discipline cornerstones in his policies of détente with northern peoples. Comanche and Ute raids continued during his first years and were often met with brutal counterattacks. Unlike many of his predecessors, however, Vélez Cachupin followed such clashes with overtures of peace and captive exchange. While Comanche fortunes flourished on the Plains, Ute stability remained less secure. Gen- erations of raiding, subjugation to Spanish campaigns, and Indian reprisals had exacted heavy tolls on Ute bands, and in the early 1750s, Ute leaders came to New Mexico to sue for peace, inaugurating a dramatically new era in New Mexican–Ute relations.74 By the end of his short but revolutionary tenure, terms of endearment would flow from the governor’s lips about these once “savage” peoples. In his report to his successor, Velez Cachupin implored him to “show [the Ute] the greatest kindness. . . . Protect them in their commerce and do them justice . . . to their captain, named Thomas, show all courteousness, great friendship, and love.”75 Flowery terms of affection characterized much of the next generation of Spanish-Ute relations, while in application, the emerging Spanish-Ute détente heralded dramatic changes for the lands and peoples throughout New Mexico’s growing hinterlands.

Conclusion: Beyond American Indian “Infanticide”— Rethinking Western Indian Responses to Colonial Expansion

While historians have often failed to recognize the centrality of native peoples, such as the Ute, in the making of settler societies, many have recently examined forms of native adaptation to colonial expansion. Indian historians have increasingly analyzed native peoples’ creative responses to colonial rule, highlighting the ability of native groups to carve out shared spaces within colonial regimes. Following Richard White’s reinterpreta- tion of French-Indian relations in the Great Lakes, colonial historians have attempted to find “middle grounds” where native groups and Europeans encountered each other and together made colonial history.76 Such increased attention to native-European relations has restored Indian peoples to their rightful place at the center of the colonial experience. Indians not only reacted to colonialism but also acted to reshape

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and mitigate its most horrific forms. This realignment of early American history has, however, often focused excessively on the ties between Indians and Europeans, celebrating Indian agency within the traumatic colonial world. As the history of northern New Mexico suggests, Indian adaptation and survival carried high and often deadly costs for native peoples removed from colonial societies. The ability of the Ute and the Comanche to endure and even prosper amid the region’s cycles of violence included countless moments of suffering, enslavement, and warfare not only against colonial settlements but also against less powerful Indian societies that lacked commensurate technologies of violence. Some, like New Mexico’s Jicarilla Apache allies, failed to adopt requisite forms of military equestrianism, while others were driven into less productive lands. As the Ute and New Mexicans built common institutions and forms of alliance in the second half of the 1700s, the forms of violence intrinsic to the region’s political economy did not end. They became further displaced onto more distant and, to the Spanish, unknown peoples, groups largely without horses, metal weaponry, and, most important, the means to acquire them. Nonequestrian Great Basin Indians, now known as the Southern Paiutes and Western Shoshones, first became incorporated into the violent world of European colonialism by Ute raiders, many of whom by 1800 lived in migratory slaving societies.77 The origins of such violence are found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the economies of violence engendered by Spanish intrusion. By foregrounding shifting patterns and relations of violence, scholars seeking to gauge these colonial histories can further assess indigenous responses to European expansion. Along New Mexico’s shifting colonial boundaries, nonequestrian Indians confronted the crisis of European colonization by using the precious few resources acquired through trade, warfare, and plunder to better prepare themselves for their next colonial encounter, be it with imperial or indigenous actors. Some, like unspecified “Ute” and “Comanche” bands, endured the waves of violence that crashed on them before their sustained appearance in colonial archives. Others did not and remain lost to historical inquiry. Locating violence, in time and space, at the center of these worlds necessitates analyses of the forms of warfare, conflict, and resolution initiated by Indian actors in response to colonial expansion. Historicizing these diplomatic, military, and economic relations also brings previously marginalized subjects, like Ute diplomacy, to the centers of historical inquiry, revealing the critical role of native peoples in the making of the early West. Such attention also steps outside of fixed and often problematic assessments of Indian cultural responses to colonial expansion and disputes recent claims about the

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endurance and import of precontact Indian cultural norms. Assessing how Indians responded to the revolutionary influences of Europeans will always remain central to American history. Our capacity to see into these distant lands, however, remains clouded, as the disruptions that took hold shook many foundations to their core.

Notes

1 “Inhabitants of Abiquiu and Ojo Caliente,” Spanish Archives of New Mexico, State of New Mexico Records Center and Archive, microfilm set 1, reel 1, frame 263. See also Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Spanish Archives of New Mexico, 2 vols. (Cedar Rapids, IA, 1914), 1:25. For the settlement of the Chama River in the 1740s, see Francis Leon Swadesh, Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier (South Bend, IN, 1974), 33–37. 2 For first “Moaches” Ute band identification, see “Instructions of Don Thomas Velez Cachupin, 1754,” in The Plains Indians and New Mexico, 1751–1778: A Collection of Documents Illustrative of the History of the Eastern Frontier of New Mexico, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Albuquerque, NM, 1940), 130. 3 “The Diary of Juan de Ulibarri to El Cuartelejo, 1706,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman, OK, 1935), 59–77. 4 For overviews of eighteenth-century Spanish-Ute relations, see Marvin K. Opler, “The Southern Ute of Colorado,” in Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes, ed. Ralph Linton (New York, 1940), 122–28, 156–79; S. Lyman Tyler, “Before Escalante: An Early History of the Yuta Indians and the Area North of New Mexico,” PhD diss., University of Utah, 1951; Tyler, “The Spaniard and the Ute,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (1954): 343–61; Albert H. Schroeder, “A Brief History of the Southern Ute,” Southwestern Lore 30 (March 1965): 53–78; Robert W. Delaney, The Ute Mountain Utes (Albuquerque, NM, 1989), 7–19; Virginia McConnell Simmons, The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (Boulder, CO, 2000), 29–46; and James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), 148–59. For Ute band classifications, see Opler, “Southern Ute,” 126–27; Delaney, Ute Mountain Utes, 6–7; Simmons, Ute Indians, 17–24; and Donald Callaway et al., “Ute,” in Great Basin, ed. Warren L. D’Azevedo, vol. 11 of Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, DC, 1986), 336– 40. As Opler, Delany, and Callaway have argued, using precise ethnographic and band designations in eighteenth-century Ute history is complicated by the transformations initiated by European contact. 5 For overviews of Comanche–New Mexican relations, see Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman, OK, 1951); Charles L. Kenner, A History of New Mexican–Plains Indian Relations (Norman, OK, 1968); Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1350– 1880 (Lawrence, KS, 1989); Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson, AZ, 1991); Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spaniards,

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and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795, 2nd ed. (Norman, OK, 1996); and Thomas Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706–1875 (Lincoln, NB, 1996). 6 Cartographically, the Comanche first appear on a parchment of New Mexico prepared for Governor Francisco Antonio Marin del Valle in 1758, whereas multiple Ute references appear in the maps of Francisco Alvarez y Barreiro from 1727; Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West, 6 vols. (San Francisco, 1957–63), 1:80–86. 7 Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Jour- nal of American History 90 (2003): 833–62. 8 Scholars have increasingly identified the disruptive influences engendered by Spanish colonialism in the Southwest, moving beyond the celebratory “Bol- tonian” paradigm for assessing the effects of Spanish intrusion into the South- west. See Hall, Social Change; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT, 1991); Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Power, Sexuality, and Marriage in New Mexico, 1500– 1846 (Stanford, CA, 1991); and Brooks, Captives and Cousins. For changing historiographical emphases, see also Albert L. Hurtado, “Herbert E. Bolton, Racism, and American History,” Pacific Historical Review 64 (1993): 127–42. The study of violence and its impact on Indian societies remains less developed, particularly in assessing the effects of Spanish intrusion on native communities removed from the colony. As R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead argue, whereas “the role of violent conflict may be readily seen, it is more difficult to know what that recognition implies: at the very least, it involves the need to revitalize our ideas about the ethnographic universe, going beyond the rejection of untenable notions of self-contained, stable local societies, and instead devel- oping a conceptual framework for understanding conflict and change as part of the historical process underlying observed ethnographic patterns”; Fergu- son and Whitehead, “The Violent Edge of Empire,” in War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. Ferguson and Whitehead (Santa Fe, NM, 1992), 3. 9 Demographic assessments of Ute population decline due to Spanish diseases are limited to general observations for the colonial period. Several scholars have suggested that a series of “routes of contagion” existed between central Mexico, northern Mexico, and New Mexico, and epidemics were reported in Santa Fe in 1623, 1636, 1641, and 1660. See Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, NM, 1987); Daniel T. Reff,Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City, UT, 1991); and Robert H. Jackson, Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687–1840 (Albu- querque, NM, 1994). For related assessments, see Peter N. Jones, “Old World Infectious Diseases in the Plateau Area of North America during the Protohis- toric: Rethinking Our Understanding of ‘Contact’ in the Plateau,” Journal of Northwest Anthropology 37 (2003): 1–26; and Richard W. Stoffle et al., “Direct European Immigrant Transmissions of Old World Pathogens to Numic Indi- ans during the Nineteenth Century,” American Indian Quarterly 19 (1995): 181–203. 10 For varying assessments of the contradictory and paradoxical nature of New Mexican–Indian relations, in which peaceful trading and violent raiding often

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yielded similar economic and social opportunities, see Hall, Social Change; and Brooks, Captives and Cousins. For Hall, economic and military affairs primarily influenced Indian motivations, while for Brooks, social stratifications in New Mexican and surrounding Indian communities flowed from the constant cycles of raiding and trade, engendering cultural and kinship networks in and between the Southwest’s multiple cohabitants. 11 This assessment of Comanche economics is based on Pekka Hämäläinen’s analysis of Western Comanche trade centers. See Hämäläinen, “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (1998): 485–513. 12 For parallels between Spanish-Indian conflicts in New Mexico and northern Mexico along the “Chichimeca Frontier,” see Hall, Social Change, 63–109. 13 For overviews of seventeenth-century New Mexican relations with Apache and Navajo groups, see Hall, Social Change; John, Storms Brewed; and Jack D. Forbes, Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard (Norman, OK, 1960). 14 John, Storms Brewed, 88–90. 15 Hall, Social Change, 75–109. 16 For references to Pueblo-Ute hostilities after the Pueblo Revolt, see Tyler, “Before Escalante,” 121–22; Schroeder, “Brief History,” 57; and Simmons, Ute Indians, 30. 17 The Pueblo Revolt is best understood, according to John L. Kessell, as a three- phased Spanish-Pueblo war lasting sixteen years. Its influences reverberated throughout the Southwest as surrounding Indian groups escalated their raids on the province during the Spanish absence, many suffering reprisals after Spanish reconquest. See Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman, OK, 2002), 119–24, 148–57, 201; and Rick Hendricks and John P. Wilson, eds., The Nava- jos in 1705: Roque Madrid’s Campaign Journal (Albuquerque, NM, 1996) for detailed accounts of one such campaign. Much of pre-1680 New Mexican history remains clouded due to the destruction of Spanish archives during the initial phases of the revolt. 18 Patricia C. Albers argues that “distinct but overlapping regional social for- mations where geographically contiguous ethnic groups accommodated themselves” to changing social relations encapsulates the dynamics of Plains Indian history; Albers, “Symbiosis, Merger, and War: Contrasting Forms of Inter- tribal Relationship among Historical Plains Indians,” in The Political Economy of North American Indians, ed. John H. Moore (Norman, OK, 1993), 97. 19 David Leedom Shaul, “Linguistic Adaptation and the Great Basin,” American Antiquity 51 (1986): 415–16; Marvin K. Opler, “The Origins of Comanche and Ute,” American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 155–58; Dimitri Boris Shimkin, Wind River Shoshone Ethnogeography (Berkeley, CA, 1947). Comanche scholars have, according to James Goss, mistakenly traced the origins of Comanche to the Ute word Kumantsi, which “was not a generic term for enemy—it was a term for their ‘other’ relatives”; Goss, “The Yamparika—Shoshones, Comanches, or Utes—or Does it Matter?” in Julian Steward and the Great Basin: The Making of an Anthropologist, ed. Richard O. Clemmer et al. (Salt Lake City, UT, 1999), 80. 20 Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 468.

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21 Foster, Being Comanche, 32–34. Beverly Stone (Western Shoshone) interviews by Ned Blackhawk, Hawthorne, Nevada, February 1999–June 2001, notes and video recordings in author’s possession. Stone, a fluent Shoshone speaker from Austin, NV, lived near Comanche speakers in Oklahoma in the 1980s and noted similarity between these Numic dialects. 22 Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 471; my emphasis. For the hazards of using twentieth- century ethnographies to assess Great Basin Indian history, see Steven J. Crum, “Julian Steward’s Vision of the Great Basin: A Critique and Response” (117– 27); Elmer R. Rusco, “Julian Steward, the Western Shoshone, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs: A Failure to Communicate” (85–116); and Ned Blackhawk, “Julian Steward and the Politics of Representation” (203–18), in Julian Steward and the Great Basin: The Making of an Anthropologist, ed. Richard O. Clemmer et al. (Salt Lake City, UT, 1999). 23 For a study that particularly eschews ethnographic “upstreaming” in favor of more relational social analyses, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indi- ans, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). 24 Flores, Brooks, and Gutiérrez reconstruct precontact Indian cultural practices and institutions to assess Indian responses to colonial expansion. For critiques of Gutiérrez’s claims about precontact Pueblo Indian religion and culture, see “Commentary,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 (1993): 141– 77. For Brooks’s claims about precontact Indian “infanticide” as motivating factors in the origins of Southwestern Indian slavery, see n. 35 below. 25 Ethnohistorians have developed revealing portraits of the elasticity and endurance of contact-era native cultural and political institutions, particularly among indigenous societies that maintained documentary practices and archives. In North America, Iroquois wampum usage best illustrates such insights, while in Mesoamerica Nahua- and Mixtec-language documents have remade colonial Mexican historiography. See, for example, Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colo- nization (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992); Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY, 1993); James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cul- tural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA, 1992); and Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Nudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA, 2001). 26 While restoring agency to the Comanche past, Comanche scholars often minimize the violence inherent to western history. Flores’s famous claim, for example, that for the Comanche “the Southern Plains must have seemed an earthly paradise” diminishes the potential centrality of violence to the region’s history; Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 469. 27 France V. Scholes, “Church and State in Colonial New Mexico, 1610–1650,” New Mexico Historical Review 11 (Oct. 1936): 327, 300–301. 28 As Kessell suggests, “Rosas simply went too far” in his quest for wealth: “In his bustling, dark, and dirty textile workshops at Santa Fe, unfree Apaches toiled alongside purported orphans and levies of Pueblo Indian laborers”; Kessell, Spain in the Southwest, 107. For suggestive links between the mining centers of seventeenth-century Mexico and New Mexico, see P. J. Bakewell, Silver Min-

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ing and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (New York, 1971). As Bakewell argues, early colonial settlers in Zacatecas routinely “undertook sor- ties (entradas) deep into Indian territory merely to provoke resistance, so that they could legally seize slaves in ‘just war’” (32). Such practices, he suggests, not only shaped the composition of Mexico’s frontier society, but were also extended north by colonizers such as Juan de Oñate, whose father had colo- nized Zacatecas (38–39). 29 Julian H. Steward maintains that the horse “completely revamped” Ute politics, culture, and economics, while Omer C. Stewart argues for the existence of preequestrian Ute bands. See Steward, “Native Cultures of the Intermontane (Great Basin) Area,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 100 (Washington, DC, 1940): 445; and Stewart, Culture Element Distributions, vol. 18, Ute–South- ern Paiute (Berkeley, CA, 1942): 235–36. According to Marvin Opler, “One would expect these broad lands of mountains and plains to be the original home of a large and powerful tribe. Yet nothing is further from the truth. The Ute were never strong in numbers”; Opler, “Southern Ute,” 122–25. Elizabeth John heavily borrows from Opler’s assessments and summarizes the revolution brought to Ute band organization: “Once the Utes had horses . . . the scale of Ute life had exploded: their subsistence, warfare, and social organization. But everything hinged upon plenty of horses”; John, Storms Brewed, 119. See also Callaway et al., “Ute.” 30 Gary Anderson argues that the process of “ethnogenesis” characterizes South- western Indian history. See Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1530–1830 (Nor- man, OK, 1999). For additional studies of such processes, see Jonathan D. Hill, ed., History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992 (Iowa City, 1996). 31 Quoted in S. Lyman Tyler, “The Yuta Indians before 1680,” Western Humanities Review 5 (Spring 1951): 161. See also Tyler, “Before Escalante”; and Joseph P. Sanchez, Explorers, Traders, and Slavers: Forging the Old Spanish Trail, 1678– 1850 (Salt Lake City, UT, 1997). 32 For detailed assessments of New Mexican exploration, trading, and missionization northwest of New Mexico, see Sanchez, Explorers, Traders, and Slavers. 33 For sustained analysis of a Pueblo trade center, see John L. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840 (Washington, DC, 1979), esp. 357–411. 34 John, Storms Brewed, 70–71. 35 James Brooks argues that pre-Columbian patterns of indigenous servitude pervaded Southwestern and Plains Indian societies and that these institutions “meshed” with similar forms of gendered, honor-laden captivity instituted by Spanish colonization. He bases such claims for the existence of precontact slavery, however, on troubling ethnographic and documentary accounts, even suggesting that Texas Indians slaughtered their female children due to the threat of posed by neighboring slavers. See Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 3–40, esp. 26–31; and Ned Blackhawk “Review: Captives and Cousins,” Ameri- can Indian Culture and Research Journal 28 (2004): 85–90. Whether or not pre-Columbian Native North Americans captured or enslaved each other is not disputed. Archaeologists have long demonstrated the patterns of warfare intrinsic to sedentary pre-Columbian Southwestern history. See, e.g., Glen E. Rice and Steven A. LeBlanc, eds., Deadly Landscapes: Case Studies in Prehis-

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toric Southwestern Warfare (Salt Lake City, UT, 2001); and LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest (Salt Lake City, UT, 1999). But projecting ethnographic classifications into the precontact world and then basing subsequent explanations for indigenous responses to colonization on them not only perpetuates essentialist and homogeneous visions of Indian history and culture; it also diminishes the traumatic revolutions initiated by European invasion, revolutions that clearly unmade as much as they remade indigenous worlds. Horses, metals (and later guns), and the political economy in which these new technologies revolved accelerated the frequency of captive-taking, commodifying Indian women and children in new and violent ways. See Juliana Barr, “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands,” Journal of American History 92 (2005): 19–46. 36 During the Spanish absence, Apaches “brought many Ute captives, women and children, to sell” to Pueblos; John Kessell et al., eds., Blood on the Boulders: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1694–1697, 2 vols. (Albu- querque, NM, 1998), 2:1003. Navajo raiders in 1694 similarly were reported with Ute captives. See Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 108. 37 J. Manuel Espinosa, “Governor Vargas in Colorado,” New Mexico Histori- cal Review 11 (1936): 179–87. See also Kessell et al., Blood on the Boulders, 1:306–9. 38 Demitri B. Shimkin, “The Introduction of the Horse,” in Great Basin, ed. War- ren L. D’Azevedo, vol. 13 of Handbook of the North American Indians (Washing- ton, DC, 1986), 517–24. See also Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln, NB, 2003), 267–93; and Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Envi- ronmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman, OK, 2001), 87–91. 39 Hämäläinen, “Rise and Fall,” 836–37. 40 Notwithstanding the recent assessments of Hämäläinen, Calloway, Brooks, and Binnema, scholars have not fully demonstrated the effect of equestrianism away from the Plains in the interior and the intermountain West. 41 Charles Wilson Hackett, ed., Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermin’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680–1682, trans. Charmion Clair Shelby (Albuquerque, NM, 1942), 206. 42 Espinosa, “Governor Vargas,” 179–87. See also Kessell et al., Blood on the Boul- ders, 1:306–9, 362–64, for indications of peaceful Spanish-Ute relations prior to 1680. 43 Kessell et al., Blood on the Boulders, 1:307. 44 “The Diary of Juan de Ulibarri to El Cuartelejo, 1706,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman, OK, 1935), 59–77. See also Kessell, Spain in the Southwest, 201–3. 45 Frank McNitt, Navajo Wars: Military Campaigns, Slave Raids, and Reprisals (Albuquerque, NM, 1972), 23. 46 “Council of War, Santa Fe, August 19, 1719,” and “Diary of the Campaign of Governor Antonio de Valverde against the Ute and Comanche Indians, 1719,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman, OK, 1935), 104, 112–13. For additional accounts from the 1710s of the effects of Ute-Comanche raids and of Spanish campaigns against the alliance, see “Cruz to Valero [Taos, 1719],” in

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ibid., 137–38; Twitchell, Spanish Archives, 1:400, 2:279; and “Archive 1347,” Spanish Archives of New Mexico, microfilm set 1, reel 4. See also John,Storms Brewed, 241–42; and Oakah L. Jones, Pueblo Warriors and Spanish Conquest (Norman, OK, 1966), 87. 47 For attempts to missionize Apachería, see “Plans for the Occupation of El Cuartelejo, 1719–1727,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman, OK, 1935), 137–219. Villasur’s campaign is also analyzed in Gottfried Hotz, Indian Skin Paintings from the American Southwest: Two Representations of Border Con- flicts between Mexico and the Missouri in the Early Eighteenth Century, trans. Johannes Malthaner, rev. ed. (Santa Fe, NM, 1991). 48 Named after the Swiss family in whose Lucerne villa they surfaced after 1945, the Segesser Hide Paintings were sent to Switzerland in the 1700s by Philipp von Segesser von Brunegg, a Jesuit missionary in Sonora. See Hotz, Indian Skin Paintings, 3–12. 49 Because it predates the rise of Comanche hegemony, many Comanche historians have not used Segesser I to inform their analyses of Plains Indian warfare. Notwithstanding his extensive use of Spanish sources, Kavanagh, for example, does not use either skin painting; nor does Elliot West, though both narrate Villasur’s demise. See Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 65; and West, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS, 1998), 45. Others mistakenly assume that Spanish artists painted them. See, e.g., William R. Swagerty, “History of the United States Plains until 1850,” Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 13, Plains, ed. Raymond DeMaille (Washington, DC, 2001), 265. Hotz convincingly argues that native artists made each painting, though his claims about the specific native identities in Segesser I are less persuasive. See Hotz, Indian Skin Paintings, 22–52. 50 For competing views on the participants in Segesser I, see Kessell, Spain in the Southwest, 202; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 132–33; and Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 201. 51 “Bustamante to Casa Fuerte, Santa Fe, May 30, 1724,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman, OK, 1935), 208. 52 For an overview of de Rivera’s northern inspections, see Kessell, Spain in the Southwest, 211–21. 53 Alfred Barnaby Thomas, ed. and trans., introduction to After Coronado: Span- ish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727 (Norman, OK, 1935), 46. 54 Elizabeth John details the Apache diaspora into Texas: “Utes and Comanches had killed so many of their men and captured so many of their women and children that all bands were gravely weakened”; John, Storms Brewed, 245, 250–77. 55 “Bustamante to Casa Fuerte,” 208. 56 Ibid. 57 Adolf F. Bandelier, “Contribution to the History of the Southwestern Por- tions of the United States,” Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, American Series, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1890): 5:185–86; Malcolm Ebright, “Advocates for the Oppressed: Indians, Genizaros, and Their Spanish Advo- cates in New Mexico, 1700–1786,” New Mexico Historical Review 71 (1996): 315.

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58 For overviews of genizaro settlements, legal classifications, and ethnic relations, see Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 121–48; Ebright, “Advocates”; Russell M. Magnaghi, “The Gernizaro Experience in Spanish New Mexico,” in Spain and the Plains: Myths, Realities, and Spanish Experience and Settlement on the Great Plains, ed. Ralph H. Vigil (Boulder, CO, 1994), 114–30; Swadesh, Primeros Pobladores; and Fray Angelico Chavez, “Genizaros,” Handbook of the North American Indian, vol. 9, Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz, 198–200. Early genizaro efforts to secure land in the 1730s failed, but in the 1740s settlements at Abiquiu and Belén succeeded, partly due to the border pressures of Ute-Comanche raids. Such growing autonomy reveals evolving genizaro social status. Before 1740 genizaros lacked sufficient political authority to obtain land, though they did receive legal counsel in 1733. Whether they constituted clearly identifiable social or military groups in 1720, at the time of Villasur’s demise and the making of the Segesser paintings, is undeterminable. 59 Stanley Noyes suggests that the treatment of captives varied based on the “personal character” of Comanche captors; Noyes, Los Comanches: The Horse People, 1751–1845 (Albuquerque, NM, 1993), 69–73. James Brooks argues that captivity bound captives and captors together in webs of social relations, pro- ducing “unexpected, often fortuitous results because the women and children who crossed cultures proved remarkably adept at making something of their unfortunate circumstances”; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 30; my emphasis. See also Curtis Marez, “Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexi- cans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicano/a Popular Performance,” American Quarterly 53 (2001): 267–307; and Brooks, “‘This Evil Extends Especially . . . to the Feminine Sex’: Negotiating Captivity in the New Mexico Borderlands,” Feminist Studies 22 (1996): 279–309. 60 From varying disciplinary perspectives, José Rabasa and Ana María Alonso examine the myriad ways that violence between Indian and settler populations shaped the cultural composition of Mexican “frontier” societies. See Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth- Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham, NC, 2000); and Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson, AZ, 1995). 61 As quoted in Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 66–67. 62 For the evolution of Spanish godparent adoption, or compadrazgo, in New Mexico, see Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 124–25, 230, 236–37, 346–47; and Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 150–56. 63 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 153. 64 For New Mexico’s eighteenth-century economic development, see Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, CA, 2000). 65 As Colin Calloway suggests, “Native peoples had raided each other for captives long before Europeans arrived, but as Indians began to participate in the Spanish slave trade, the taking and exchange of captives expanded in scope and assumed new meaning”; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 205. 66 For the presence of “Ute” captives in Abiquiu’s baptismal records, see Thomas D. Martinez, “Abiquiu Baptisms, 1754–1866: Baptism Database of Archives Held by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the State Archive of New

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Mexico,” on file at New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe. For the problems inherent in identifying “Ute” and Paiute captives in New Mexico, see David M. Brugge, Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico, 1694–1875, 2nd ed. (Tsaile, AZ, 1985). 67 W. W. Hill, “Some Navaho Culture Changes during Two Centuries (with a Translation of the Early Eighteenth Century Rabal Manuscript),” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 100 (Washington, DC, 1940), 406. 68 “Año de 1747,” microfilm set 2, reel 8, frames 769–72, Spanish Archives of New Mexico. See also Twitchell, Spanish Archives, 2:219; and Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1888 (San Francisco, 1889), 249–50n48. 69 “Año de 1747,” Spanish Archives of New Mexico; Twitchell, Spanish Archives, 2:219. Twitchell’s spelling and names are inconsistent with the original. A forty-year-old “Yuta” captive woman was sold in November 1747 and subsequently became the subject of a property dispute in 1748. See “Una obligación de Pablo Salazar sobre una india gentil de nación yuta,” Spanish Archives of New Mexico, microfilm set 2, reel 8, frames 875–77. 70 For changing Comanche economies, see Hämäläinen, “Western Comanche Trade Center.” 71 Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 68. See also Twitchell, Spanish Archives, 2:205; Tyler, “Yuta Indians,” 171–73; and Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 120. 72 Twitchell, Spanish Archives, 2:227. See also Bancroft, History of Arizona, 249; and Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 151. 73 Hämäläinen, “Western Comanche Trade Center.” 74 In 1752, leaders of three Ute bands came into San Juan Pueblo north of Santa Fe to sue for peace. See “Revilla Geigedo to the Marques de Ensenada,” in The Plains Indians and New Mexico, 1751–1778: A Collection of Documents Illustra- tive of the History of the Eastern Frontier of New Mexico, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Albuquerque, NM, 1940), 117. 75 “Instructions of Don Thomas Velez Cachupin, 1754,” in Thomas, Plains Indi- ans, 131. 76 White’s paradigm of “the middle ground . . . the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages” has offered scholars an escape from the binaries that have dominated so many portraits of Indians; White, Middle Ground, x. 77 For overviews of the Ute’s traffic in Paiute captives, see Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995 (Lincoln, NE, 2001), esp. 30–47; Stephen P. Van Hoak, “And Who Shall Have the Children? The Indian Slave Trade in the Southern Great Basin, 1800–1865,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 41 (1998): 3–25.

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