Juliana Barr is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.

Peace Came in the Form of a Woman

Indians and Spaniards in the Texas BorderlandsBy JULIANA BARR

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5790-8

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................ixIntroduction.........................................................................................1PART I Turn-of-the-Century Beginnings, 1680s-1720s..................................................171. Diplomatic Ritual in the "Land of the Tejas"......................................................272. Political Kinship through Settlement and Marriage.................................................69PART II From Contact to Conversion: Bridging Religion and Politics, 1720s-1760s.....................1093. Civil Alliance and "Civility" in Mission-Presidio Complexes.......................................1194. Negotiating Fear with Violence: Apaches and Spaniards at Midcentury...............................159PART III New Codes of War and Peace, 1760s-1780s....................................................1975. Contests and Alliances of Norteo Manhood: The Road to Truce and Treaty...........................2076. Womanly "Captivation": Political Economies of Hostage Taking and Hospitality......................247Conclusion...........................................................................................287Notes................................................................................................293Bibliography.........................................................................................347Index................................................................................................389

Chapter One

Diplomatic Ritual in the "Land of the Tejas"

In the 1680s and the 1690s, multiple Caddo groups within the Natchitoches, Kadohadacho, and most notably the Hasinai confederacies began to give hearings to the various European aspirants who came to their lands, seeing in them the possibility of meeting ever-increasing political and economic needs for horses, guns, and military allies. Over time, Hasinai goals and Spanish and French ability and willingness to meet those goals determined the shape and form of eighteenth-century socioeconomic relations. Yet, in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, these Europeans and Indians struggled simply to establish contact with one another. The earliest meetings between Caddos and their French and Spanish visitors delineated what might be imagined as the outer rings of cross-cultural interaction. Their encounters skimmed the surface of Caddo and European societies by calling into action only the most public manifestations of male and female honor required by formal diplomatic ceremony.

Caddo, rather than European, custom dictated the ceremonies followed in the first meetings of these peoples, making clear the Caddos' power over their European visitors. Unable to communicate well with each other through speech, Europeans and Caddos searched for other means to convey and interpret meaning-making object, appearance, expression, and action critical. They brought together their respective traditions of ceremony and protocol in efforts to establish diplomatic exchange. The Caddos' advantages of home ground, superior numbers, and force offset any presumed military superiority afforded by European technology and arms. Frenchmen and Spaniards arrived in such small numbers relative to their Caddo hosts that aggression on their part would have been foolhardy and self-destructive. The European newcomers thus followed the Caddos' lead in protocol.

Caddo hospitality rituals conveyed and armed honor both domestically and diplomatically. Ceremonies of early contact included all members of Hasinai communities and reflected the civil and political dimensions of Hasinai identity, position, rank, and prestige. Welcoming rituals allotted to all persons a role commensurate with their position and contribution to the society and presented to observers the social value of each. Status position accorded by social order and hierarchies of age, lineage, and gender thereby determined individual and community roles in Caddo ritual performances. Caddo men and women of both elite and nonelite status had their parts to play. Europeans thus enjoyed a composite view of Caddo societies in their own villages, temples, and ceremonial centers-how adequately or poorly they interpreted what they saw was another matter entirely.

In contrast, Caddos gained only a faint glimpse into Spanish or French cultures, their view being limited to the few men who wandered into and out of their lands in the 1680s and 1690s. They saw nothing of the Europeans' own communities and socioeconomic systems, and among the groups with whom they did interact, Caddos could make judgments only of the divisions and ranks structuring relations among Spanish and French men because the parties were all-male. The Frenchmen and Spaniards that Caddos met also presented quite contrasting pictures to them. In 1689, for example, Alonso de Len's expedition included a military leader, about ten officers, eighty-five soldiers, two missionaries, one guide, one interpreter, and twenty-five muleteers, craftsmen, and laborers in charge of supplies, food stores, and manual chores. Those stores included seven hundred horses, two hundred head of cattle, and pack mules carrying eighty loads of flour, five hundred pounds of chocolate, and three loads of tobacco. In contrast, the French survivors and deserters from La Salle's Fort Saint Louis came on foot, carrying their supplies and what goods they hoped to trade on their backs, and they arrived in much smaller numbers; twenty-four men made up La Salle's first party and seventeen the second. At the beginning, then, cross-cultural understanding, if even possible, was inevitably uneven.

In the early stages of contact, when both the Europeans' and the Caddos' goals remained simply ascertaining a starting point for friendly relations, the key exchanges were those between elite men, mostly because of Caddo custom. Rituals reflected the sociopolitical categories of Caddo society, in which patrilineal descent of political and religious leadership existed within a larger matrilineal kinship system. Caddos lived in dispersed settlements, each of which consisted of multiple family farmsteads of generally equivalent status. These local communities allied together to form larger confederacies. Cadds, men of civil and religious authority, headed each village and were advised by councils of elders called canahas, while a xines functioned as a head priest at the level of the confederacy. These positions were all hereditary offices, almost all male (Spanish and French records indicate two historical moments in which extraordinary circumstances put women into positions as cadds), and passed by descent through a male line but within the matrilineal kinship system-for example, from a man to his sister's son.

Meanwhile, households under the authority of the matrilineal clan functioned as the basic social and economic unit of production. Women, as heads of clans, held primary authority in Caddo cultivation, organized divisions of farming labor, and controlled the agricultural produce. Caddo cosmology established the interdependence of patrilineal leaders and matrilineal clans in the origin story of Ayo-Cadd-Aymay, the Supreme Being, which fray Isidro de Espinosa recorded in the 1720s. In the...