El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  The settlement scarcely survived, and resentment festered as La Salle was absent for long periods. In March 1687 a group of men with La Salle on another of his journeys mutinied and killed him. Some of the survivors of this expedition returned to France, while the remaining handful of people at the settlement were attacked by the local Karankawa people the following year.50 The Spanish made five attempts to look for La Salle after hearing what the French were doing and in 1689 found the ruins of Fort St. Louis. Upon further exploration, the Spanish found two survivors living among the Native Americas. One survivor and mutineer, Jean l’Archevêque, told the Spanish what had happened and was later imprisoned.51 After his release, however, he turned his loyalty to Spain and worked as a translator and soldier, later appearing in New Mexico.

  The next significant French expedition came under the leadership of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who managed to find the mouth of the Mississippi River and navigate through its maze of channels. He established a settlement in Biloxi Bay in 1699 and, near the coast, a small military outpost, Fort Maurepas, which would serve as the first capital for the Louisiana territory.52 In 1702, they moved northeast to a bluff overlooking the Mobile River and established Fort Louis de la Louisiane, though that lasted only a few years. In 1711, the residents were uprooted once again to start a settlement twenty-five miles south, building another Fort Louis, which would be renamed Fort Condé in 1723.53 The French by this point were under the leadership of Iberville’s brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, the Sieur de Bienville, who governed the Louisiana territory until 1740.

  French objectives in North America were not unlike those of the Spanish and the English: exploration, trade, and profit. However, French interaction with Amerindians was markedly different from that of the Spanish. Rather than using an encomienda-style labor system like the Spanish, or developing plantations along the lines of the English, many of the French started their commercial exploits by trading furs, such as beaver. French traders often resided at close quarters with Native Americans and, over time, they were able to build intimate ties with many chiefdoms, partnering with indigenous women and having children, who were known as métis. Profitable furs were sent to France, and guns and manufactured wares were shipped over to be sold to the Indians.

  That is not to say the French eschewed more spiritual activities. Although the earliest French settlers in Santa Elena were Huguenots, Catholicism remained the dominant faith for the seventeenth-century arrivals, among them a number of Jesuits who began to appear in North America in the early 1600s. These priests left extensive accounts of their time among the people along the modern U.S.-Canadian border, including the Iroquois and Algonquin. Like the traders, the Jesuits often lived within Indian villages, where they continued to attempt to convert these “heathen” people.54 Some Jesuits also participated in exploration missions, such as Jacques Marquette, who was a member of the party that in 1673 discovered a route from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, which La Salle would travel all the way down nine years later.55

  The French activity in the Mississippi valley unsettled Spanish administrators in Florida, so in 1698 they erected a small defensive settlement, Santa María de Galve, near the waters of Pensacola Bay. Around the same time, in northern New Spain, the Spanish continued their attempts to broker alliances with the Native Americans west of the Mississippi River, including the Caddo-speaking Hasinai people, with the aim of buffering any French advances into that territory.

  The Hasinai were part of the larger Caddo confederacy, which spread out in East Texas and western Louisiana. Although there were some twenty-five different chiefdoms, their ways of life had certain shared characteristics. They were mostly agricultural, growing crops like maize and squash, supplemented by the hunting of bison and other animals. They were also sedentary, living in grass homes in villages that also included temple mounds.56 The Spanish began to call this region Tejas, also spelled Texas, after the Hasinai word for “friends” or “allies,” ta-sha.57 Priests tried to put missions among the Hasinai, building San Francisco de los Tejas, just east of today’s Augusta, Texas, in 1690, which was followed by Santísimo Nombre de María, located around twelve miles northeast on the Neches River, in the same year. A smallpox epidemic descended not long afterward, killing about three thousand people. The Hasinai blamed the Spanish for the devastation and drove them out of the territory. San Francisco de los Tejas was abandoned by 1693, and Santísimo Nombre de María was destroyed in an earlier flood in 1692. With little to show for these efforts, in 1694 the viceroy of New Spain, at this point struggling with a number of other concerns, abandoned any further activity in this part of Texas, for the time being.58

  THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY opened with a crisis in Europe. Spain’s Hapsburg king, Carlos II, died in 1700 with no heir. The prospect of the Spanish throne passing to a French Bourbon, Philippe d’Anjou, the grandson of María Theresa—Carlos’s half sister and the first wife of Louis XIV—left the rest of the continent with serious concerns about the balance of power if France and Spain were united. England, Holland, and Austria went to battle against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict that spilled into the colonies and was known in North America as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13).

  Some of the opening shots of this conflict were fired at the recently finished San Marcos fort in St. Augustine, as the English, aided by Indian allies and led by the South Carolina governor James Moore, attacked the Spanish in 1702. They had worked their way down from South Carolina, destroying a Spanish fort on Amelia Island and fortifications near the St. Johns River. By the time the English arrived in St. Augustine, the townspeople had taken refuge inside the fort, waiting out a siege that lasted around seven weeks. The fort’s coquina walls held out until a fleet from Havana arrived in late December and chased away the English, but not before they had set fire to the town.

  The French had limited resources to contribute to the conflict; in 1708 French Louisiana consisted of fewer than three hundred settlers, including 122 soldiers.59 However, a plan was organized to make use of the sea power of French privateers, and in 1706 a joint force of the Spanish in Florida and French corsairs attacked Charles Town, though the city remained in English hands.60 The war ended in 1714, with Philippe, now Felipe V, on the Spanish throne after renouncing his French claims. The British—as they had become when the Acts of Union created Great Britain by uniting England and Scotland in 1707—emerged victorious from the negotiations of the Treaty of Utrecht. They were ceded much of France’s territory in Canada, including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Hudson Bay. In addition, within Europe, Spain was forced to turn over Gibraltar and the island of Minorca to Britain. Also as significant, the British won the lucrative asiento, a contract that granted its traders an exclusive right to supply African slaves to Spanish America.

  North American colonists had to contend with changing power balances on two fronts: the rivalries and wars of Europe and those in the Native American world. The disease, enslavement, and migration that forced Native Americans into new lands or confederations in the late 1600s meant that by the early 1700s there were a number of recent alliances and animosities among Indian groups. Among the most powerful groups to emerge in this period were the Creeks, also known as Muskogee. The Upper Creeks, as the Europeans called them, lived along the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers that feed into the Alabama River—near modern east Alabama and west Georgia. The Lower Creeks, as they were known, were situated along the Apalachicola River in Florida, and as far north as the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers.61 There was a constant jostle for influence, trade, and alliances among the Upper and Lower Creeks with the British and Spanish. It was a situation that each side could exploit. For instance, the Creeks helped the British fight the Spanish—for example, during a devastating attack on the mission Santa Fé de Toloca among the Apalachee in 1702—but the Spanish at various points played to the Creeks’ anxieties by telling them they might be enslaved by the British.62 Relationships could be
fragile and subject to quick changes.

  The Creeks also participated in slave raids for the British, who had started giving them goods—including arms and alcohol—on credit, allowing them to run up large debts. Because the Spanish missions in Florida had been abandoned by the early 1700s, few Indians were left to enslave. They had to turn to deerskin to pay the British and became indebted to the tune of about one hundred thousand skins by 1711, something that would require years of labor to produce. The Creek people were angry about their treatment—not only what they considered trickery in allowing the debts to accumulate, but also the British habit of punishing indebted Indian men with humiliating public floggings.63

  The Creeks were not the only people with grievances, and in April 1715 some Yamasee people executed a few English traders, triggering a conflict known as the Yamasee War (1715–17). A number of Native American nations, including the Upper Creeks and the Chickasaw, joined the Yamasee in attacking English settlements, and even some runaway black slaves joined the effort.64 After months of fighting, the British faced defeat, until they managed to enlist the help of the Cherokee people, who drove the Yamasee out of the Carolina territory and into Spanish Florida.65

  Conflict also spread around the Gulf of Mexico. In 1718, Governor Bienville claimed for France a small crescent of land near where the Mississippi River fans out into the Gulf, calling it La Nouvelle-Orléans, after the Duke of Orléans.66 Although its climate was brutal—hot and sticky in the summer and prone to flooding and hurricanes—it was well positioned for trade, and a handful of settlers arrived. The French had also continued exploring north along the Mississippi River, building a small outpost in 1716 near the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi that meanders from Louisiana through northeast Texas. This was close to the Natchitoches chiefdom, a group that was also part of the larger Caddo confederacy, with whom the French were eager to trade. The Natchitoches also distrusted the Spanish, in part because of their failed attempt at planting missions among the Hasinai in the 1690s.67 This territory had not come under any European dominance, but as the French leaned west, the Spanish were drawn back to Texas. They were spurred into action after French traders arrived at the outpost of San Juan Bautista, near the Río Grande (by today’s Guerrero, in the Mexican state of Coahuila), in July 1714.68 They responded with a flurry of building in East Texas, constructing a small fort in 1716 along with four wooden churches.69 Two Franciscan missions were also built just to the west of Natchitoches—Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de los Ais and San Miguel de Linares de los Adaes, near San Augustine, Texas, and Robeline, Louisiana, respectively—in an attempt to establish a boundary between Spanish and French spheres of influence among Native Americans. In 1718, farther south, a presidio was placed near the headwaters of the San Antonio River, with the name San Antonio de Béxar. A mission—San Antonio de Valero—was built there in the same year and it would later be known as the Alamo.70 Four more missions were later added, strung southward along the San Antonio River.

  In the same year, hostilities in Europe resumed, this time in the War of the Quadruple Alliance, which pitted Spain against France, England, Holland, and Austria. The French in Natchitoches used the opportunity to attack and capture San Miguel de Linares de los Adaes, as well as ambush the Spanish fort in Pensacola in May 1719.71

  While plans were being made for a Spanish attack on Louisiana, the larger conflict ended, in 1720. Spanish officials in Texas took the opportunity to reinforce the frontier, with the most significant addition being a presidio near the Los Adaes site in 1721; it garrisoned around a hundred men and would become the capital of Spanish Texas from 1729 to 1773.72 Farther away from Louisiana, also in 1721, the presidio of Nuestra Señora de la Bahía de Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was built on the Gulf, on the site of the earlier failed La Salle expedition.

  Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío had launched an attack in 1719 against the Ute and Comanche when he heard that the French were nearby and living among the Pawnee and Jumanos.73 In June 1720, Valverde y Cosío’s lieutenant, Pedro de Villasur, was dispatched with around one hundred men, among them the Frenchman Jean l’Archevêque, who had earlier survived at the Matagorda Bay colony and pledged his allegiance to Spain.74 They set off to the northeast from Santa Fe, reaching the Río de Jesús María (today’s Platte River, in Nebraska), which they followed to the Rio San Lorenzo (today’s Loup River). They found the Pawnee people, but their attempts to communicate with them foundered. Villasur and his men set up camp nearby and the following morning were woken by a volley of gunshots—no doubt from French weapons—as the Pawnee ambushed them. Villasur and l’Archevêque were among those killed, with only a few Spaniards escaping.75

  Despite a number of losses and setbacks in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the Spanish managed to build up their presence in Texas to around 250 soldiers and ten missions, though they amounted to little more than specks on a landscape still dominated by Native Americans. While the French had been warded off, the lack of settlers in Texas was a growing concern because it hampered Spain’s ability to maintain control of its frontier.76 One Franciscan friar wrote to the king in 1716 asking for “Galicians and [Canary] Islanders” to come to Texas to take advantage of a fertile paradise with a climate ‘similar to that of Castile.’”77 Attacks by local Native Americans—who were proving resistant to conversion—were a constant threat. Although official land grants were made, it was difficult to farm in many of the areas and there were few indications of any new mines. To many in New Spain, going to the frontier was dangerous, and it did not seem that the risks were worthwhile. Still concerned about poor settlement, the crown agreed in 1723 to permit and pay the passage for two hundred isleños from the Canaries to immigrate to Tejas, though in the end the scheme was hampered by an eight-year bureaucratic delay, after which only fifty-six people, in fifteen families, came over. Although the isleños were, in theory, welcome additions, in practice they found it difficult to carve out a place for themselves between the missions and the military garrisons. The friars ensured that the settlers could not hire Indian labor, because it provided the missions with crop surpluses. The Canary Islanders found it hard to compete, opting instead to try to raise cattle or work as merchants.78 Yet, at the same time, the isleños had created their own town, San Fernando, with its own civilian government, laying claim to valuable lands earlier irrigated by soldiers—again causing friction, this time with the military. This led to frustrated attempts to secure permission from the viceroy to hire Indians—a move foiled by the friars—while the military governors prohibited soldiers from buying from local isleño merchants.79 In 1745 the viceroy of New Spain described the isleños as people who “maintain themselves quite comfortably by trading,” though many might have begged to differ.80 The three-way feud continued for years, while other settlers stayed away, leaving Texas as a Spanish outpost.

  IN 1725, THE governor of Florida, Antonio de Benavides, wrote a letter to one of his superiors seeking clarification about a group of runaway slaves that had been on his mind, noting that over the “eight months more or less we find ourselves in this Presidio seven blacks, that on two separate occasions have fled the City of Carolina.”81 The arrival of runaways was a familiar issue for Benavides, as it had been for governors before him.

  The first reported instance of slaves fleeing from the plantations of South Carolina was in 1687. The Spanish baptized them as Catholics and gave them sanctuary. Word of this spread, causing many more slaves to make their way to Florida. Officials in St. Augustine were forced to ask the crown for guidance, and by 1693 a royal decree granted these refugees their freedom through conversion to Catholicism and a pledge to the crown. This helped Spain in two ways, by depriving the English of their labor force and by populating the frontier with people loyal to Spain.82

  At issue for Benavides, more than two decades later, was that the most recent group of runaways had arrived during a pause in the ongoing animus between Spain an
d Britain.83 He was willing to pay 200 pesos for each runaway, but the planters rejected this offer and threatened to come to Florida and take their slaves back. Forced to make a decision before receiving official instructions, he sold a total of ten runaways at a public auction in St. Augustine and paid off the disgruntled Carolina planters with the proceeds.84

  The hiatus with the British was brief. Even before Benavides’s slave dilemma, the British had built Fort King George in 1721, near where the Altamaha River runs into the Atlantic Ocean, by today’s Darien, Georgia. The fort sat along a crucial route for defense and trade, near the site of the abandoned Santo Domingo de Talaje mission. The Spanish were by now accustomed to living with the ongoing British threat, and in 1728 Benavides had requested more men.85 Into this already volatile mix entered another English colony, though it would not follow the same path as Virginia or South Carolina. Instead, Georgia was to be a place for the “worthy poor” of Britain, according to the English social reformer James Edward Oglethorpe, who founded the colony, named for George II, with the intention of giving debtors in prison a new life.

  Oglethorpe had served in the military and as a member of Parliament, where the squalor of British jails was brought to his attention. His goal was to establish a colony in North America in which to place those whose crime was often that of simple poverty, and by 1730 he had chosen a site by the Savannah River, with South Carolina to the north and Spanish Florida to the south. Oglethorpe presented the colony as a possible buffer zone between the two rivals—the people sent there could protect as well as work the land—and gambled on this being the key to winning government support. The royal charter he was granted in 1732 permitted him to establish the colony on land between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers, and he joined the first ship to Georgia in October of that year, arriving in early 1733. Later that year, as part of his campaign, he wrote a pamphlet, A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia, laying out his case. In it, he argued that the poor and prison-bound could “relieve themselves and strengthen Georgia, by resorting thither, and Great Britain by their Departure.” In addition, the colony would not permit the labor of enslaved Africans, at least not at first.86