Читать книгу Prairie Imperialists - Katharine Bjork - Страница 12

Chapter 3

The Right Kind of White Men

“It was your handkerchief that saved you,” the leader of the Mexican Rural Guards told him. Second Lieutenant Robert Lee Bullard stood frozen with fear inside the rim of a mountain crater in Sonora as three Rurales kept their rifles trained on him. While the Yaqui Indians attached to the Fourth Cavalry’s expedition south of the border were away from camp searching for signs of Geronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apaches, Lieutenant Bullard had taken the opportunity to go hunting. He was dressed “in Indian style—hatless, coatless, pantless; in shirt, drawers and moccasins only.”¹ Absorbed in the pursuit of a pronghorn antelope among the rocks and crevices of the Sierra Madre mountains, Bullard had been unaware that he was in turn being tracked by the Mexicans, who mistook him for an Apache. When he finally noticed them, Bullard’s first thought was similarly that the crouching figures who had him in their sights were Apaches.

In August of 1886 all the Mexican borderlands were attuned to the movements of the Apache leader and the followers who had joined him in fleeing intolerable conditions at the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, where the army sought to confine the Chiracahaus. In arduous campaigning, sometimes involving up to a quarter of its forces, the army had spent the previous four years in fruitless pursuit of three dozen hostiles, only seventeen of whom were fighting men.² Penetration by American troops into Mexican territory also created tensions between the two countries. The urgency of Geronimo’s capture or death was one of the few things on which Mexicans and Americans agreed.

In words calculated to belittle the American soldier, the leader of the Rural Guard made it clear that Bullard owed his life to his own ineptitude—and to the Mexicans’ superior scouting skills and knowledge of the terrain. “Two hours or more we have followed you and three times have we rested our guns as just now to kill you for an Apache,” he told the chagrined Bullard. “But you were so careless, unsuspecting, so easy to get,” the Mexican concluded scornfully, “that each time luckily we waited to have you better, though each time we could have killed you.”³

In that tense moment in the mountain crater, as “the desert … and the solitude of nature filled the spot,” Bullard wrote later, the rookie army officer had expected death. “My life stopped; I stood nailed to the spot. I did not move or cry or think but waited in dumbness and numbness for the end.”

Aside from the personal drama of his situation, Bullard’s tableau captures the uneasy alliance between U.S. and Mexican forces in Sonora and Chihuahua less than forty years after the United States had forcibly wrested the northern frontier territories from Mexico, thereby acquiring the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, most of Colorado, and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.⁴ The scene also illustrates the prominence of indigenous techniques of warfare, including knowledge of the country, tracking, and ambush. All parties to the Apache conflict relied on such methods, but Mexico was suspicious of the U.S. Army’s employment of Apache and other native scouts in Mexican territory. Dependence on Apache scouts was also a source of deep racial anxieties within the leadership of the U.S. military as it struggled to reconcile axiomatic Anglo-Saxon superiority with the manifest failure of well-equipped white troops to subdue, contain, or even keep up with an opponent described by one contemporary historian as “the most savage and intractable Indians in the country.”⁵

Finally, our attention, like that of the Mexican Rural Guards, is drawn to the incongruity between Bullard’s handkerchief, that vestige of civilized attire, and the rest of his self-described “Indian togs.” As the Yaqui scouts of Troop H ranged over the desert below, matching their skills as trackers against the U.S. Army’s most elusive quarry, the young lieutenant assigned to the expedition as quartermaster and commissary had been caught playing Indian.⁶ Bullard’s inept efforts to embody cultural knowledge by dressing up and chasing antelope after a romantic ideal of Indian hunting had attracted the attention of other actors in the contested landscape of the Sierra Madre. However, as the Mexicans pointed out to him in insulting terms, there was something in Bullard’s obvious inability to embody Indianness convincingly that stayed their hands from killing him, until they could get close enough for the telltale handkerchief to confirm their sense that they had the wrong target.⁷

By his own account, Robert Lee Bullard made a bad Indian. What is more, he was proud of how poorly he played the role. Bullard was not interested in truly transforming himself, either physically or culturally. He was not one to “go native,” to take on the identity, even provisionally, of an Apache or any one of the other so-called primitive peoples he encountered during the successive wars of colonial pacification in which he took part. He was, however, deeply interested in the tactical knowledge he believed could be acquired through inhabiting such roles. In this, his outlook and actions were in keeping with a long line of frontier soldiers.

Like other military men and civilian elites of his generation who found virtue in “the strenuous life” and saw in it an industrializing nation’s salvation from effete overcivilization, Bullard advocated activities that brought white men into contact with the elemental forces of nature. The relationship between civilization and primitiveness, for Bullard, like others of his generation who grappled with the question, was complex and contradictory. Wildness promised renewal and empowerment for the civilized man who embraced it; it also threatened to corrupt him.⁸

Bullard’s explanation of the behavior that led to the standoff in the Sierra Madre is telling: “I was new,” he wrote of the incident, “and in those days these Indian togs caught all new men’s fancy. On the least lead the most civilized of us quickly reverts to the primitive.” Bullard’s account speaks to his embrace of different mores and the general freedom for new men such as himself to shed some of the constraints of civilized comportment in the frontier posts to which they were assigned. It also underscores Bullard’s belief in the tenuousness of the white man’s claim to be civilized and the inevitable tendency to “revert to the primitive.” For Bullard, the tension between the civilized and the primitive was one he felt he had contended with all his life. For him, the distinction was racial.

Born in 1861 on a cotton plantation in eastern Alabama, Bullard was socialized early into the power and immutability of racial hierarchy. He remained acutely aware of racial difference throughout his life. His diaries and autobiographical writings constitute a ledger in which he weighed the costs and advantages of his association with those he regarded as his racial inferiors. His writings also include frequent observations and hypotheses about the relationship between race and the capacity to attain civilization among the peoples he encountered and read about during a military career that encompassed the Indian Wars in the Southwest, spy missions in Cuba and Mexico, and a stint as military governor in the Philippines.

Bullard’s childhood was shaped by intimate but racially circumscribed relations with his family’s former slaves and other freedmen and women on and around the family’s farm in Lee County, Alabama. Bullard blamed his early childhood “association with Negroes big and little” for having “marked” him in negative and enduring ways. “I grew up with them, both short on morals, purpose, manners and education. It told on me. Skipping the morals, I was fifteen before I felt the moving of any ambition; twenty before I began to correct my plantation manners to which reversions are still not uncommon; thirty before my African methods of speech began to yield to grammar; forty before ‘aint’ gave way to ‘is not’ and ‘are not’, and to this day ‘r’s’ and ‘ings’ are a difficulty.”⁹ Bullard feared that racial inferiority was inscribed in his speech as well as in his character. Its effects were expressed through his behavior; it was part of his very way of being. His embodiment of such defects was something he struggled against for much of his life, always fearing a “reversion” to “plantation manners.” Bullard’s association of inferiority with ways of speaking also reflects his awareness of the stigma attached to southern culture—white as well as black—in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat, which was construed by the victorious North as proof of the inherent backwardness and decadence of southern society. As the first cadet to “carry the name of Robert E. Lee back to West Point,” Bullard was sensitive to the claim of the regnant Yankee culture to define the norms of civilized behavior to the detriment of an Alabama-bred boy like him, whose childhood heroes had been two sisters’ husbands who served on the staffs of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.¹⁰ At the same time, Bullard believed that the humiliation his family had felt after the war provided him with insights into the psychology of resistance to the American occupation of the Philippines and Cuba.

Later in life, when he had achieved success in his army career, and the bitter memories he associated with growing up under Reconstruction had faded, Bullard was able to reflect with amusement on the ironies of his elevation through the ranks of the “Grand Army of the Republic,” or GAR, as the Union army became known. Bullard’s humor on the subject, like the reabsorption of the white southerners into the federal army and the attenuation of Reconstruction, was accomplished at the expense of African Americans.

Three decades after he became the first southerner with the name Robert Lee to matriculate at West Point since the Civil War, Bullard paid a visit to Lee County (which, like Bullard, had changed its name following the war). There, a chance encounter with one of his father’s former slaves provided the material for a story that served as a commentary on the ironies of history and on the complexities of Bullard’s loyalties as both soldier and southerner.

As Bullard later recounted the tale, he was visiting his family in Opelika when he met a former slave of his family named Frank Bullard. The two Bullards—one white and one black—encountered one another “within two miles of where both he and I were born.” When Robert Bullard told Frank who he was, the older man looked puzzled, as “he evidently struggled with old memory to locate himself and me together,” Bullard remembered. At a GAR meeting years later, Bullard slipped into dialect to tell the rest of the joke:

Then, after a moment or two, [Frank] said, “Oh, yes, yes, I remember. You’s ‘Babe’. Dey tol’ me you went away long time ago into the yankee army what come down thr’ough heah when freedom come fer de niggers. Are you with de yankee Army now?” I told him I was and that they treated me very well. I could see that Frank, still kinky but white-haired, old and worn, was still struggling with his memory about the time ‘the yankee army came down thr’ough heah’ and the how of my being with that army. “Well, ‘Babe’,” he said, “when dey come down thru’ heah, dey met me on de ‘big road’ drivin yo’ Pa’s fo’-mule team an’ they onhitched my lead mule that I had trained to lead the team on a ‘jerk line’, the best lead mule I ever see’d. Dey told dey was goin’ to bring him back. They didn’t; they never did bring back that mule. I wish you would ‘quire ‘round ‘mong them yankee soldiers fo’ dat mule.”¹¹

For Bullard—and for the white audiences he regaled with this story in later years—the humor lay in the portrait of the former slave seemingly locked in an antebellum past—the loyal retainer indignant over the confiscation of his master’s mule. “For Frank,” Bullard told appreciative northern audiences, “the passage of time did not count in his memory.” The punch line of Bullard’s joke was that “Frank’s heart and mind were set on getting that mule back.”

Bullard told this story to a national meeting of the GAR, where he claimed it was received with “much laughter among the old fellows.” When Bullard joked that he was doing what Frank had asked, inquiring after the mule, “some two dozen hands went up in acknowledgement that they had carried off Frank’s mule.” This was followed, Bullard wrote, “with a sort of honorary membership for me (and almost for Frank) and my decoration with the badge of the GAR.” Bullard described himself as “rebel born and rebel bred.” Yet he eventually found success—and even acclaim—as an officer in the “Yankee Army.” In the younger man’s telling, Frank Bullard, the devoted black retainer, was depicted as stuck in the past, unable to fathom or adapt to the changes wrought by the Civil War.

As he began his army service in the Southwest, Bullard fit his perceptions of Indians into familiar and axiomatic ideas about race and the hierarchies of civilization. His fears about the danger of “reverting to the primitive” in Indian Country had their roots in the stigma of racial taint he felt from his upbringing in Alabama. For Bullard, only two things offset the disadvantages he felt he had suffered as a result of his childhood association with blacks on and around his family’s plantation. The first was the understanding he felt he had gained of racial difference itself, to which he credited his first significant career advance, which came as the commander of a black volunteer regiment in the Spanish American War. He expressed this belief in his autobiography: “My compensation for these, their stamp and marks upon me, has been an appreciation of the difference between negros and white men, just, I believe; for, guided by it, I was at thirty-seven to make my first military reputation commanding negroes.”¹²

Besides the specific expertise that Bullard claimed in “commanding negroes,” he also claimed analogous knowledge and insight into the character of Filipinos, Cubans, and later Mexicans, again all based on an analysis of the ways they supposedly differed from Anglo-Saxons. As his career took him from the border region of the United States and Mexico to the southern Philippines and then to Cuba and finally sent him on a spy mission into Mexico following the outbreak of the revolution in 1910, Bullard continued to work out his theorems on the relationship between race and the capacity for self-government. Successive colonial postings led him to claim increasing authority on how to pacify and govern the empire’s lesser races. His observations on recalcitrant Moros and deceitful and ungrateful Cubans under U.S. occupation frequently led him to comparisons with the South of his boyhood.¹³

A second redeeming feature of his childhood association with blacks, which Bullard recognized, was the influence of Peter Christian, a freedman whom the young Bullard admired for his woodcraft and storytelling. Years later, Bullard recalled the impact Pete had had on him in a speech in which he reflected on the early influences on his life, particularly those that had inclined him toward a military career. “You know a small boy usually wants at various times in his life to be all sorts of things. I remember a fine young negro man, Pete Christian, that had married my nurse Sally. Pete could make more kinds of traps and snares to catch birds and rabbits and squirrels and he knew how to place them with skill and he knew all the trees of the forest and he knew before they were ever written at least half of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus’ stories and had told them to me,” Bullard said. “There was a period in my life when I thought I would like very much to be a fine negro man like Pete.”¹⁴ Bullard’s youthful identification with Pete Christian is clear. So, too, is the way the older man became associated in Bullard’s memory with two significant enthusiasms of his life: scouting and storytelling. These central themes appear again in Bullard’s unpublished autobiography, in which he wrote at length of his admiration for Pete and of his appreciation for the things he had learned from the former slave. Again, Bullard stressed the tutelage Pete offered him in woodcraft, which Bullard would later extol as one of the foundations of scouting. He also valued the appreciation Pete awoke in him for the Uncle Remus stories:

Strong, kind, good humored, a boy in way but a man in fact, he was a fellow indeed for boys. He knew and could do so many things! From watching him I learned to be something of a cobbler, carpenter and basket-maker; from being with him, the names and habits of birds and animals; the names and something of trees; something of woodcraft, trapping, fishing and what-not; and from listening to him, an appreciation of those sweetest and most delightful of all stories, the “Uncle Remus” child’s stories of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer B’ar and the others that Joel Chandler Harris has later lovingly put among the classics. For all of these, their pleasures and their helps, I owe something to Pete Christian, Negro.¹⁵

Even obscured by the lyricism of nostalgia and boyish admiration, Bullard’s attempts to recall and explain the nature of the relationship between Pete and the white boys of his family opens a window on race relations in the era of Reconstruction. By what it omits as well as by what Bullard attempts to explain, his depiction of postemancipation social relations inadvertently reveals enduring patterns of race and power. By way of explaining Pete’s special role in the family, Bullard writes, “Pete was never really a slave. He had grown up in the house and almost as a member of the family of his master.”¹⁶ The probable explanation for Pete’s presence in the house of his master and the ambiguity about his former slave status is that Pete was the son of a white man. Bullard never mentions Pete’s parents, nor calls him “mulatto,” as biographer Allan Millett does.¹⁷ However, he notes that Pete was distinguished by “a freedom and non-servility of manner found among no negroes about him.” To explain why a grown man would keep the company of white boys such as Bullard and his brother, he continues, “Cut off by racial and social conditions from association with white men and desiring often other company than that of negroes, he turned to the white boys of our family, my brothers and me.” Then, as if to forestall any further reflection on the matter, he concludes, “Custom allowed it.”¹⁸

In later life, Bullard expressed revulsion toward interracial sexual relations, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he left out the detail of Pete’s paternity, while suggesting it by the inclusion of other details, such as his allusion to Pete’s “freedom and non-servility of manner” and his curious status as “almost … a member of the family of his master.”¹⁹ Bullard’s assumption that “the company of white boys” would appeal to Pete more than the society of adults of his own community is consistent with an unquestioning sense of white superiority and a disdain for African Americans to which Bullard subscribed until the end of his life.²⁰

Appreciative though it is in tone, his description of Pete deploys a dominant stereotype that cast blacks (as well as Indians and other colonial peoples) as childlike, not fully adult in capacity or behavior. In a seemingly benign—even admiring—way, he depicts Pete as a “boy in way but a man in fact.” Here, Bullard unselfconsciously articulated one of the emasculating and dehumanizing tenets of white racist ideology. Reinforced by violence and lack of opportunity, such constructions stripped men such as Pete of their manhood and adult social stature and instead attempted to consign them to a lifelong status of “boy.”

The Uncle Remus tales, which delighted the youthful Bullard and inspired his later attempts at writing about the folkways of colonial peoples, appealed to whites because they reflected a view of black culture that was childish and un-threatening—less developed than the supposedly more evolved Anglo-Saxon culture—and because they denied manhood to African American men, infantilizing them. According to David Murray, “a great part of the appeal and power of Harris’s writings lay in the indefinite suspension of any recognition of power relations or historical change.” Instead, Murray suggests that “keeping the focus on the close relation between the boy and Remus made it possible to provide a sentimental image of rapport as well as to deny the African American any mature manhood.”²¹ This was not new. An earlier book, Edward E. Pollard’s Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South, quotes an approving review from the New Orleans Delta claiming that the author knows the Negro nature “not by intellection merely, but also by heart; knows it, not through the cold light of ethnological science only, but most of all through the warm, enkindling recollections of boyhood and youth. The negro, who in his true nature is always a boy, let him be ever so old, is better understood by a boy than a whole academy of philosophers.”²² For white men, childhood was an individual developmental stage through which they progressed. Primitive people, on the other hand, were perpetually childlike. The developmental childhood of entire races of people made them apt playmates and also, oddly, the sources of folk wisdom and elemental skills derived from being close to nature, which might be adapted and fashioned to suit the purposes of more “grown-up” civilizations.

Robert Lee Bullard’s ideas about race were typical of his time and upbringing. What is interesting is the connections he made between common racist tropes of black backwardness and childishness and his celebration of the “pleasures and helps” of scouting, which he associated with African American folk knowledge and later with Indian fighting techniques.

Bullard thought that white civilization was antithetical to the values of scouting, which he extolled in many of his writings. He remained equally insistent on the redemptive power of such a connection with the primitive precisely for “super-civilized” (presumptively Anglo-Saxon) men. One example of the relationship he saw between the two is apparent in a short story he wrote about the Philippines which was never published. “No amount of learning or philosophy or civilization ever quite takes a man beyond a secret willingness, even longing to be trapper, ranger, hunter, woodcraftsman or fighter of savages or outlaws, all in one word, scout,” he wrote. Scouting, for Bullard, was transformative, not because it allowed white men to become Indians, but because it put them in touch with an essential part of their own nature, from which civilization had alienated them. “In this the high and the low, civilized and savage, the general and the private soldier, differ not,” he wrote. “Emperors and kings, princes, leaders, teachers, the greatest that the world has held, have aspired to the qualities, the name and reputation of scout. Is it, as some supercivilized these days would have us believe, the call-back of the wild, the echo of savagery? Ah, no, but something better than they with all their reason can offer us—touch with nature.”²³According to this view, reason contrasted with nature; savage people were closer to nature, but the supercivilized were even more in need of the benefits of scouting precisely because they had lost touch with it.

During the four years Bullard spent at forts in the Southwest, he made his first observations and wrote his first notes on a project that lasted throughout his military career and into retirement. Bullard was obsessed with articulating a hierarchical schema of civilizations and races. Unlike Hugh Lenox Scott, who took an ethnographic approach to the living cultures of the native peoples who so fascinated him, Bullard’s intellectual project was characterized by a historical abstraction of civilizations past and present. The project was teleological of course. Anglo-Saxon civilization, epitomized by its political and industrial achievements, represented the pinnacle of human development. The question was how long it would take other races to attain the same level of advancement. Bullard’s study was an ideological project with immediate and real applications. Part of the colonial authority he increasingly assumed, as his career led to positions of command over men of races he viewed as inferior to his own, derived precisely from the claim he made to possess privileged knowledge about the character of primitive people. Like other army officers whose careers encompassed the trajectory of American expansion, his early impressions of Indian Country inculcated categories of perception and behavior, and especially ways of relating to subject peoples that informed his approaches to the colonial situations he later encountered in the Philippines and Cuba. For these men, the core of their later relationships to projections of Indian Country abroad was based on their formative experience of Indian Country on the plains and in the desert Southwest. For Bullard, dressing in “Indian togs” and going hunting was a way of assimilating the meaning of Indian Country. So was reading the landscape and romanticizing its past.

Bullard was less steeped than Scott in the poetry of Indian Country, less inclined to embrace “the land of romance, adventure, and mystery” that Scott anticipated as he rode the Great Northern Railroad to the end of the line in Bismarck in 1876.²⁴ Whereas Scott depended on Francis Parkman to orient him to the landscape and people of the North, the book that Bullard had chosen to bring with him when he reported for duty to Fort Union was Don Quixote. Their choice of books says a great deal about the inclinations and temperament of each of these West Point graduates as they embarked on their frontier army careers. Each had his own dreams and romantic notions. Significantly, though, Scott, like Parkman, focused his imagination on the land before him and on relations among the peoples vying for control over it. He was especially fascinated by all the ways Indians had adapted themselves to survive on the northern plains. His descriptions of native peoples extol their oneness with the natural landscape. On the southern border, with only Miguel de Cervantes as guide, Bullard encountered a landscape that seemed to him alienating and uncivilized. “Mighty nature ruled here,” he wrote. “For the hand of man had barely touched her face.”²⁵ Where Scott registered the sublime, Bullard read into the landscape grandeur, but also menace. He found the Sierra Madre wild and dark. He wrote that “the mountains were sometimes frightful in their grandeur, their black repulsiveness and loneliness.”²⁶ Bullard’s descriptions of human settlement in the region emphasize its timelessness and remoteness from the world of movement and consequence, the modern world, the world of men who mattered.

Bullard showed none of the interest in contemporary Indian cultures that so absorbed Scott. His imagination was instead captured by “the occupation of the region in ages gone by a civilized people.”²⁷ Bullard’s racially determined ideas about the advancement of civilizations throughout history allowed him to admire the pottery and earthen mounds of vanished civilizations while disparaging the culture and character of the contemporary inhabitants of the region.

Considering how much Bullard later referred to his experience of commanding Indians, it is striking how little attention he paid to the real Indians he encountered in the borderlands, either inhabitants, auxiliaries, or adversaries. Although they later formed a significant point of reference both for his reflections on military pacification and the development of his schema of civilization and barbarity, at the time Bullard seems to have written and reflected little on the Indian scouts, even those attached to his unit. Since he assumed that the contemporary Indians descended from the earlier civilizations whose achievements he found praiseworthy, Bullard viewed the contemporary Indians of the Southwest as the degenerate “half-civilized” descendants of the civilizations that had created the earth mounds and pottery that spoke to him of higher achievements in the past.

Aside from his imaginative affinity for the exploits of empire, Bullard also pinned his career hopes on mastering the languages of empire, even defunct empire; and, like his study of men and civilizations, Bullard’s choice of language was expedient, too. Aided by his copy of Don Quixote and a Spanish dictionary, Bullard began a study of Spanish which he kept up as long as American imperial engagement with areas of the old Spanish empire made it seem worthwhile. He continued this study throughout his time in the Southwest and during training in Alabama in anticipation of going to Cuba in 1898. The beginning of Bullard’s study of the Spanish empire and Hispanic civilization in the Americas and the Philippines also dates from his time on the border. In the margin of the diary in which he noted his interest in the “curiosities of Old New Mexico, the Pueblo Indians, their history and traditions,” Bullard mused that, as he was being introduced to one chapter of the history of the expansion of the Spanish empire, he was at the same time contemplating going on to Manila “to renew the impressions on the other side of the world of the Spaniard and his ways—Santa Fe on the great Plains of the west, America, and Manila, over the great seas in the far, far East.”²⁸

Bullard reported to Fort Union in the fall of 1885. His first assignment was to guard a border supply base for pack trains that carried supplies for the use of scouts in the Sierra Madre. The following July, Bullard became quartermaster and commissary for a mule train as it moved supplies a hundred miles south across the border into the Mexican state of Sonora. He recorded some of his first impressions in a diary he kept on the journey: “We passed through beautiful park-like mountain villages; dry parched lowlands, brown, crumbling adobe Mexican villages with their great old Catholic churches far, far out of the great busy and inhabited world; through old towns and fields whose people had long long ago been killed or driven off by the fierce apaches. It was most interesting, new and strange to me.”²⁹

The arid mountainous country through which Bullard’s company drove its mules had a long history as Indian Country, a place where successive colonial governments had been unable to exert effective control over native peoples. It was also the context in which Bullard had his first opportunity to observe the role of the Apache scouts who were attached to the army. He was not impressed: “From time to time detachments of troops came into our camp in passing or to obtain supplies and I gradually learned how troops worked in Indian warfare. We used Indian scouts after the hostiles but from what I saw of them I concluded that the scouts were almost as hostile and uncertain as the hostiles themselves. I saw a whole company of them get drunk and almost break away to go on the war path right under the eye of their commanders and at the muzzles of the rifles of our two companies of U.S. troops. That was a great object lesson in control and discipline or rather in the lack of these.”³⁰

Bullard was contemptuous of contemporary Indians. The cursory observations he later committed to his diary rehearse common prejudices of the time; he found the Apaches lazy, prone to drunkenness, deceitful, brutal. In short, he constructed racial difference between Indians and whites along the lines of familiar stereotypes widely available in popular culture. At the same time, he had a wistful reverence for what he regarded as the more accomplished civilizations of the remote past. Ever susceptible to a romantic reading of the landscape, Bullard imagined the crater in which he encountered the Mexican Rurales as a remnant of one of the ancient volcanoes that had “vomited their fires upon these lands before Aztec, Toltec or white men ever came.”³¹ This was pure fancy on Bullard’s part; neither the Aztecs nor any of the other settled agriculturalists who had made the valley of Mexico the center of expansive civilization for a millennium before the coming of the Europeans, had exercised any influence over the north. The land did not favor the intensive cultivation which nourished the concentration of population in the valley of Mexico. More importantly, the inhabitants of the region were not amenable to conquest and subjugation to an empire based on tribute and trade. The Mexica people, known to history as the Aztecs, regarded the seminomadic tribes of the north as barbarians. Their collective name for them was chichimecas, the sons of dogs.³²

The Spanish, who overtook the Aztec empire in 1521, initially found little to hold their interest in the mountainous desert regions beyond Mexico’s central plateau. While Spain putatively claimed territory reaching far into the North American plains and contested the rival claims of Britain and Russia in the Pacific Northwest, in fact, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, as Spain’s richest and most populous colony was called, remained anchored in the central and southern parts of Mesoamerica, where the new rulers were able to command the labor and tribute of people who were conditioned to the demands of empire and had fewer viable means of long-term resistance.³³

Discovery of silver deposits in 1548 in areas of what is today Zacatecas provided the initial impetus for Spaniards to explore and settle the frontier. They founded cities near the mining centers and developed haciendas to produce food for the mines and associated settlements. The Spanish also enslaved native people to provide labor in the mines and other Spanish enterprises. These initiatives were met with strong resistance from the region’s original inhabitants, who attacked their mule trains and raided the isolated outposts of the Spanish empire.³⁴

Paralleling the mining frontier that developed northward from Zacatecas and Durango to Chihuahua and Sonora, the Spanish established a system of missions and presidios. Franciscans began their missionary work near the mines of Parral in the 1560s and by the early seventeenth century had established several missions. Over the next two centuries, they founded many more missions throughout New Spain and as far distant as Taos, New Mexico. After 1769 they were charged with missionizing Alta California, where they established a line of missions from San Diego to San Francisco. The Jesuits, meanwhile, administered missions in northwestern New Spain and Baja California from 1591 until the expulsion of the order from the viceroyalty in 1767. In addition to the goals of religious and cultural indoctrination, the missions sought to consolidate disparate indigenous communities through the process of reducción, or concentrating Indians into settlements under the jurisdiction of the mission. These reducciones also served as sites for the recruitment and organization of Indian labor. To protect the missions the Spanish maintained presidios, or fortified outposts, garrisoned by the military. The Spanish also sent colonists among the people of the north. By the end of the sixteenth century, some four hundred families from Tlaxcala had been recruited to resettle in several colonies around Saltillo, Coahuila. In return for privileges not usually accorded the Crown’s Indian subjects, the Christianized Tlaxcalans were meant to demonstrate to other indigenous peoples the advantages of accepting Hispanic ways.³⁵ Over time, the colonization efforts took on an increasingly defensive and explicitly military function.³⁶

None of the Spanish colonial institutions—the presidio, mission, forced reducciones of Indians, or military colonies—had the desired effect of pacifying Mexican Indian Country. Instead, by the end of the eighteenth century, autonomous Indian tribes, the indios bárbaros, who had not been incorporated into patterns of Hispanic life, dominated the north. In 1768 a Spanish official who had spent two years traveling 7,600 miles throughout Spain’s frontier territories reported to the king that much of present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were in reality nothing more than “imaginary dominions,” under the control of hostile Indians. Apaches, reported the Marques de Rubí, controlled the lands from southwestern Texas to California. Comanches, Kiowas, Wichitas, and Pawnees harassed Spanish settlements and missions in Texas and New Mexico, stealing horses and cattle and killing other Indians who had joined the missions. Even tribes like the Utes, who sought to remain at peace with the Europeans, behaved as though settlers’ animals “were there for the taking,” complained the marquis.³⁷

Recent scholarship has sought to look beyond the often alarmist rhetoric of frontier residents and officials to examine cross-cultural interaction and accommodation between Mexicans and the indigenous people of the north, and the state-level diplomatic initiatives they undertook to minimize and contain conflict. However, peace was elusive and racial enmity, once ignited, produced a conflagration that engulfed the north. As Brian DeLay has written, “once Mexicans and the ‘cruel and indomitable Apaches’ started killing, enslaving, and stealing from each other, hatreds, reprisals, and calls for revenge acquired a fierce and ultimately irresistible momentum.”³⁸

Faced with increased Apache raids and large-scale depopulation of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Spaniards decided to try something new. In 1776, the same year that the Franciscan mission was established in San Francisco, New Spain created a new military organization for the frontier provinces called the Commandancy General of the Interior Provinces. The commander general was charged with waging a war of extermination against the Apaches all along the frontier. To support this mission they also created the compañía volante or flying company, essentially a highly mobile cavalry unit. It was the forerunner of the efforts mounted by the U.S. Army a century later. This period also saw the regularization of the use of Apache auxiliaries recruited from one band to join with the Spanish effort against another.³⁹ This was another technique the United States would later adopt.

Though the primary policy was one of extermination, Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez also offered Apaches the opportunity to settle near the presidios in camps called establicimientos de paz where they would be provisioned with food, aguardiente, and even firearms, as a way of securing their dependence on the colonial government. Significantly, the Chiricahua and other bands accepted these terms and settled provisionally near the Sonora and Chihuahau presidios.

Independence from Spain in 1821 brought with it a host of challenges for the new nation, constrained by fiscal woes and a weak and unstable central government that was unable to devote the military or administrative resources necessary to preserve a fragile peace that had allowed areas of endemic conflict such as Chihuahua and New Mexico to experience an encouraging period of tranquility and blossoming prosperity during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. After 1830, an escalation in raiding, attacks on Mexican ranches and settlements, murder, kidnapping, and theft of animals and property turned the northern third of Mexico “into a vast theater of hatred, terror, and staggering loss for independent Indians and Mexicans alike.”⁴⁰