Spanish Borderlands refer to the Spanish colonial frontier in what later became the United States. By the late eighteenth century, Spanish claims extended west along the southern rim of North America from Florida to California, and north along the coast to Alaska. The Spanish borderlands vanished as a regional entity in 1821, when Mexico became independent, but its cultural and material legacies endure almost two hundred years later in the borderlands between Mexico and the United States.
Spanish Exploration and Settlement
In the sixteenth century, this vast region was home to a variety of native peoples, ranging from mobile bands in Texas, California, and Arizona to larger farming towns in New Mexico and even larger confederacies east of the Mississippi. This mosaic of local worlds was in constant motion. Ecological, religious, and political forces brought groups together, but also placed them in conflict. Trade connected the humid east, high plains, and arid west. Large-scale migrations—such as that which Apache and Navajo forebears made to the Southwest shortly before the Spanish conquest—were not unheard of.
The Spanish expanded into North America from beachheads in the Caribbean and Mexico. In 1528, after a hurricane landed him on the Texas coast, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca wandered west into the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts. When he finally met Spaniards near the Gulf of California in 1536, he passed along rumors of wealthy cities to the north. This inspired new journeys in the 1540s. Hernando de Soto, formerly with Francisco Pizarro in Peru, searched for another Inca empire between Florida and Texas. The provincial governor Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led a similar expedition into New Mexico and the western plains. Both returned empty-handed, leaving behind a legacy of arrogance, violence, and disease.
Explorations were followed by more sustained settlements. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded San Augustine, Florida, in 1565 to displace a colony of French Huguenots and protect Spanish silver fleets sailing through the Bahama Channel. Sir Francis Drake razed the colony in 1586, but it rebounded to become a center for secular and missionary expansion. The 1546 discovery of silver in Zacatecas, Mexico, followed by other mining rushes to the north, opened a new corridor of migration along the Sierra Madres. Juan de Oñate, son of a wealthy Zacatecas family, gained royal permission to settle New Mexico in 1598. New Mexico lacked mines, but offered a harvest of souls for Franciscans. Like Florida, the New Mexico colony was also maintained as a defensive buffer, to protect the mining towns to the south from European rivals to the east. Settlers also migrated along the western Sierra Madres into Sonora, and by the 1680s, Jesuits were setting up missions among the Pima communities of southern Arizona.
The borderlands became contested terrain in the late seventeenth century. In 1680 the Pueblo Indians revolted, driving colonists from New Mexico. When Diego de Vargas retook the province in 1694, he had to acknowledge the limits of colonial power and ease native exploitation. Farther east in 1682, René Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, sailed down the Mississippi, claiming Louisiana for the French. The Spanish sent colonists into Texas to counter the French, and by 1716 established a permanent frontier outpost at Los Adaes, on the Louisiana border. Meanwhile, in 1670, the British founded Charleston as a mainland resource base for Barbados, and within decades British settlers in the Carolinas posed a threat to Spanish Florida. The eighteenth century would be marked by a series of wars between the French, British, Spanish, and their Indian allies to control what would later become the southeastern United States.
These rivalries took a new turn in 1763, when France yielded its North American possessions following the Seven Years' War. Toward the end of the war, France ceded western Louisiana to Spain—perhaps to compensate Spain for its help in the war. In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, England confirmed Spain's title to western Louisiana in return for Florida. Until 1800, when Spain ceded Louisiana back to France, the Mississippi became the new border between English and Spanish North America. When the thirteen colonies revolted in 1776, the Spanish provided financial and military assistance, driving the British from the Mississippi and gulf region. As a reward, the United States returned Florida to Spain in the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Meanwhile, Carlos III (1759–1788) worked to build Spain's control over western North America. For over a century, Spain had been on the decline as a world power, and its mercantilist policies—which limited the supply and raised the cost of imported goods in New Spain—were hard on frontier outposts. Frontier defense was badly financed and administered. Well-mounted and well-armed Comanches and Apaches took advantage of raiding and trading networks between imperial frontiers to gain an edge over the Spanish. Carlos III therefore set out to reorganize frontier defenses. His administrators attempted to establish a rational line of presidios with mounted patrols, made alliances with Indians to fight other Indians, and set up "peace establishments" to placate former enemies with federally subsidized food, tobacco, and alcohol. As defenses improved, so did economic conditions. From the official perspective, conditions in the Spanish borderlands began to improve by the late 1780s.
Renewed Spanish energy was also reflected by expansion into California and the Pacific Northwest. By the 1760s, Russian fur hunters, with the help of Aleut labor, had made significant inroads into Alaskan sea otter populations. Concerned that the Russian empire would move into California, Carlos III encouraged its settlement in the late 1760s and early 1770s. By 1781, a string of missions, presidios, and towns lined the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. Isolated from the rest of Mexico by strong ocean currents and formidable deserts, California's ties to colonial markets were weak. Yet Franciscans, in particular, struck it rich. Not only was California rich with potential converts, but here colonists did not have to vie with other empires for native bodies, souls, and trade. In 1790, the Spanish expanded as far north as Vancouver, which they jointly occupied with the United States and England until 1819. But they lacked the resources to settle this far northern frontier. Practically speaking, San Francisco marked the upper limit of Spanish control along the Pacific.
American Expansion
By century's end, then, Spain controlled the southern rim of North America from Florida to California. But newcomers were starting to edge their way west. For instance, the U.S. population of Kentucky rose from 12,000 in 1781 to 221,000 in 1800. Kentucky pioneers began to float flour and bacon down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Spanish markets in Louisiana and Florida. Because this trade was technically illegal, goods often entered the borderlands along well-worn smuggling routes. Worried about their rapidly growing neighbor, and hard-pressed to populate its frontiers from within, Spanish leaders came up with a radical plan to encourage American immigration to Spanish Louisiana. If Americans could not be stopped, why not assimilate them to provide a buffer to westward expansion? In the early American Republic, many frontiersmen were indifferent—and at times even disloyal—to the United States. By 1792, some 45,000 had accepted the new offer by migrating west and taking an oath of allegiance to Spain.
One can only guess how this risky plan might have ended, because in 1800, Spain returned Louisiana to France, and three years later, France sold the province to the United States. Spain and the United States disagreed on the extent of the purchase; the Spanish insisted, for instance, that the vast Missouri River system fell outside Louisiana. In 1804, when Lewis and Clark traveled up the Missouri, Spanish officials tried, unsuccessfully, to intercept them. The U.S. explorer Zebulon Pike was arrested in Colorado in 1806, when his effort to map the southern edge of Louisiana landed him in Spanish territory. Suspecting that he had come to spy, Spanish officials stripped him of his journal and maps and sent him home. In an 1810 account, Pike described New Mexico and Texas as places hungry for manufactures but held back by mercantilist Spain. The lesson was obvious: northern New Spain would be a rich market for U.S. goods, were the rules to change.
And barely a decade later, they would. In 1810, Mexicans initiated a movement for independence, which finally bore fruit in 1821. Two years earlier, in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded Florida to the United States and agreed to a formal boundary with Louisiana. The wars of independence in Mexico had a drastic economic impact. As military subsidies dried up, Indians returned to raiding, making life even more desperate for Spanish-speaking residents. On the other hand, Mexico opened the frontier to trade in 1821. As northern provinces cautiously embraced U.S. capital, goods, and immigrants, new linkages and tensions emerged, eventually leading to the U.S.-Mexican War and the annexation of Texas, New Mexico, and California. After three centuries of Spanish rule, this contested region lay at the brink of a new borderlands era.
Bibliography
Cutter, Donald, and Iris Engstrand. Quest For Empire: Spanish Settlement in the Southwest. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1996.
John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Jones, Oakah L., Jr. Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Spicer, Edward H. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533– 1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962.
Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.
