Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10–41. For an instructive comparative overview focusing on Central Asia, Siberia, and Africa, see Anatoly M.
Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1983; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), esp. 222–27.
6. Here I draw less on Immanuel Wallerstein’s classic model of the modern capitalist world economy than on his followers and critics who argue that nonstate precapitalist societies—agrarian empires, confederations, and chiefdoms—can unify large regions and create hierarchical inter-
Notes to Pages 6–7
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ethnic power structures. World-systems are not necessarily global. Instead, “world” means an integrated, organic, and hierarchical interaction network that has definite boundaries and an internal logic of its own that drives it. For modified world-system models, see Christopher Dunn-Chase and Thomas D. Hall, Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems (Boulder: Westview, 1997); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gillis, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1994); and Peter N. Peregrine and Gary M. Feinman, eds., Pre-Columbian World-Systems (Madison, Wis.: Prehistory, 1996).
7. This shift in paradigm can be traced through the following works, which, while focusing on different places, periods, and themes, demonstrate that early American history can be understood only in concert with American Indian history: Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, 1975); Neil Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact to the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); White, Middle Ground; Daniel H.
Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998); Daniel K.
Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2003); David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2006); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); and DuVal, Native Ground. Two compelling, continent-wide syntheses show just how profoundly the incorporation of Native Americans into our stories has changed the master narrative of North America: Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001); and Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
8. Quote is from Vine Deloria, Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 39. See, too, Frederick Hoxie, “The Problem of Indian History,” Social Science Journal 25
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Notes to Pages 8–10
(1988): 389–99; Daniel Richter, “Whose Indian History?” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (Apr.
1993): 381–82; James A. Hijiya, “Why the West Is Lost,” William and Mary Quarterly 51 (Apr.
1994): 285–87; and Neil Salisbury, “The Indians’ New World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (July 1996): 435–37. Traditionally, the most common formulation of the extent of Native agency in the making of colonial North America has been that Indians often controlled the balance of power among European imperial powers—a notion that may hold true for the continent’s eastern half during the times of war (especially the Seven Years’ War) but does not necessarily capture the magnitude of indigenous agency in other places and periods.
9. For critiques and reconstructions of the frontier concept, see, e.g., Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in The Frontier in History: North America and South America Compared, ed. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 3–13; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, “Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 3–27; Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814–41; and J. Parker Bradley and Lars Rodseth, eds., Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005). For the impact of borderlands history on frontier studies, see, e.g., the various essays in Cayton and Teute, eds., Contact Points. In contrast, Weber’s Spanish Frontier employs a modified frontier construct to retell the history of the original borderlands, Spain’s North American empire: he frames Spain’s North American colonies not as a fixed spatial entity but as one side of a shifting, multisided frontier.
10. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves; White, Middle Ground; and Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders.”
11. For a parallel dynamic on the mid-eighteenth-century Cherokee-British borderlands, see Gregory Evans Dowd, “‘Insidious Friends’: Gift Giving and the Cherokee-British Alliance in the Seven Years’ War,” in Contact Points, 114–50.
12. Similar views of the Southwest can also be traced in scholarly studies. See, e.g., Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 364–66, 370–71, 490; D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 193–202; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Americas: The History of the Hemisphere (London: Phoenix, 2004), 84, 105–6; James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41–43, 420–22; and Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2004), 35–39. The notion that the American Southwest stood low in Spain’s imperial priorities also informs J. H. Elliott’s masterful Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For a profoundly important study that modifies the world-system theory by emphasizing local initiatives but also promulgates the view of Euro-Amer
ican colonial weakness in the Southwest, see Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1350–1880
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(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). For a sweeping assessment of the historiography of the Southwest in general and Texas in particular, see Gerald E. Poyo and Gilberto M. Hinojosa,
“Spanish Texas and Borderlands Historiography in Transition: Implications for United States History,” JAH 75 (Sep. 1988): 393–402.
13. Weber, Spanish Frontier; David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Weber, Bárbaros; Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Blackhawk, Violence; Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991); Thomas W.
Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998): 485–513.
14. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); and James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002).
15. Brooks, Captives and Cousins, esp. 30–35. Also see James F. Brooks, “‘This Evil Extends . . . Especially to the Feminine Sex’: Negotiating Captivity on the New Mexico Borderlands,” Feminist Studies 22 (Summer 1996): 280. Brooks’s work focuses on New Mexico borderlands. As for Texas, Juliana Barr has concluded that although “Native modes of social control, broadly defined and distinctive within each group, prevailed” in Texas, “no one group controlled the entire region. . . . All groups, be they Spaniard or Indian, stood on relatively equal footing in their continued struggles to hold territory and to survive.” See Barr, “Beyond Their Control,” 152–53, 169.
16. See, e.g., Nancy P. Hickerson, “Ethnogenesis in the South Plains: Jumano to Kiowa?” in History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 70–89; Patricia C. Albers, “Symbiosis, Merger, and War: Contrasting Forms of Intertribal Relationship among Historical Plains Indians,” in Political Economy of North American Indians, ed. John H. Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 93–132; Anderson, Indian Southwest; and Brooks, Captives and Cousins.
17. Like James Merrell’s interpretation of the colonial Northeast, this study argues that the recent historiographical focus on cross-cultural crossings and collaborations threatens to obscure a fundamental fact about the history of colonial America—that it is in its essentials a story of conflict, hatred, violence, and virtually insurmountable racial, ethnic, and cultural barriers. See James Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1999); and James Merrell, “Shamokin, ‘the very seat of the Prince of Darkness’: Unsettling the Early American Frontier,” in Contact Points, esp. 21.
18. For an illuminating discussion on the development, methodology, and limitations of ethnohistory, see James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–12. The term side-streaming comes from Richter, Ordeal, 5.
19. Frederick E. Hoxie, “Ethnohistory for a Tribal World,” Ethnohistory 44 (Fall 1997): 603–12. See, too, Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (Jan. 2006): 13–14.
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Notes to Pages 15–22
20. Bruce Trigger, “Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations,” JAH 77 (Mar. 1991): 1195–1215. The shift from local, tradition-bound behavioral models toward practices that were based on more “universal” economic laws is also at heart of Richard White’s masterful chapter on the fur trade in Middle Ground (pp. 94–
141). For White, however, the real story is not so much the change itself but the lasting, only partially resolved contention between the two models of thought and behavior. The literature on subtantivist-formalist (or relativist-rationalist or idealist-materialist) debates is far too extensive to be discussed here at any length. Besides the above-cited works by Trigger and White, the most relevant discussions in the context of Native North America include Arthur J. Ray and Donald Freeman, Give Us Good Measure: An Economic Analysis of Relations between the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay Company before 1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); George R. Hamell, “Strawberries, Floating Islands, and Rabbit Captains: Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (Winter 1987): 72–94; and Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
21. It should be emphasized that such cultural categories and meanings were not static. Although difficult to verify from the thin and fragmented historical record, it is important to keep in mind the possibility that even the most deep-seated practices and conventions—such as the gift giving—
acquired new meanings as Comanches expanded their sphere of influence, came in contact with other peoples, and were exposed to different ways of thinking. Accordingly, I have, whenever possible, tried to adhere to Marshal Sahlins’s maxim of the dialectical relation between history and structure and show how “in action meanings are always at risk.” See Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), ix.
C H A P T E R 1 . C O N Q U E S T
1. This Spanish-Franco rivalry in North America’s southern fringes had, of course, a broader geopolitical dimension: French Louisiana was established to challenge Spain’s claim to exclusive control of the North American Gulf Coast and break its monopoly over the strategic sea-lines of the Gulf of Mexico.
2. “Diary of Juan de Ulibarrí to El Cuartelejo, 1706,” and Pedro de Rivera to Juan de Acuña, marqués de Casa Fuerte, Sep. 26, 1727, AC, 61, 211. Quotes are from Pedro de Rivera, Diario y derrotero de lo caminado, visto y observado en la visita que hizo a los presidios de la Nueva España Septentrional el Brigadier Pedro de Rivera, ed. Vito Alessio Robles (Mexico City: Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, 1946), 78.
3. David Rhode and David B. Madsen, “Where Are We?” in Across the West: Human Population Movement and the Expansion of the Numa, ed. David B. Madsen and David Rhode (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 213–19; and Alice Beck Kehoe, America before European Invasions (London: Longman, 2002), 125–27, 131.
4. Shoshonean-related archaeological material east of the Rocky Mountains becomes increasingly prevalent in the sixteenth century, which points to at least more frequent seasonal migrations and perhaps permanent relocation across the Rockies. See Demitri B. Shimkin, “Shoshone-Comanche Origins and Migrations,” in Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific Science Congress of the
Notes to Pages 22–24
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Pacific Science Association, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940), 4:20–21; and Sally T. Greiser, “Late Prehistoric Cultures on the Montana Plains,” in Plains Indians, A.D. 150–
1550: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups, ed. Karl H. Schlesier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 49–52. For the mountains-plains ecotone and its historical importance, see Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kans
as Press, 1998), 22–24. For the drought and its effects, see David A. Baerreis and Reid A. Bryson, “Historical Climatology of the Southern Plains: A Preliminary Survey,”
Oklahoma Anthropological Bulletin 13 (Mar. 1963): 70–75; and Waldo R. Wedel, Central Plains Prehistory: Holocene Environments and Culture Change in the Republican River Basin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 42–48.
5. For migrations, see Charles A. Reher, “Adaptive Process on the Shortgrass Plains,” in For Theory Building in Archaeology, ed. Lewis R. Binford (New York: Academic, 1977), 13–40; and Karl H.
Schlesier, “Commentary: A History of Ethnic Groups in the Great Plains, A.D. 150–1550,” in Plains Indians, ed. Schlesier, 308–81.
6. For Shoshone migration, see Colin G. Calloway, “Snake Frontiers: The Eastern Shoshones in the Eighteenth Century,” Annals of Wyoming 63 (Summer 1991): 84–85; and Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” JAH 78 (Sep. 1991): 468. For pedestrian plains hunters, see Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 37–54; and Charles A. Reher and George C. Frison, “The Vore Site, 48CK302, A Stratified Buffalo Jump in the Wyoming Black Hills,” Plains Anthropologist 25, Memoir 16 (1980): 136–43.
7. For Shoshone expansion into the northern plains, see Binnema, Common and Contested Ground, 88–94.
8. For the Apaches on the central plains, see Wedel, Central Plains Prehistory, 135–51. For Comanche and Shoshone traditions, see Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 9–10. Quote is from W. P.
Clark, The Indian Sign Language (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersley, 1885), 120. At least some late nineteenth-century Comanches maintained that it was the Shoshones who were an offshoot of their nation rather than the other way around. See Clark, Indian Sign Language, 120.
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