Spanish period of Arizona

In the late 1700s, colonists began steadily entering the region of northern New Spain that is the modern-day U.S. state of Arizona. They were attracted by reports of the discovery of deposits of silver around the Arizonac mining camp. Most of the colonists left after Juan Bautista de Anza announced it had merely been buried treasure, however several stayed and became substinence farmers. During the mid-eighteenth century, the pioneers of Arizona tried to expand their territory northward. Their settlements included missions and presideos in the traditional lands of the Tohono O'odham and Apache Indians.

In 1765, the Bourbon Reforms began, and Charles III of Spain did a major rearranging of the presidios on the northern frontier. The Jesuits were expelled from the area and the Franciscans took their place at their missions. For the most part, Spanish Arizona had a subsistence economy with occasional small gold and silver mining operations. Relations with the native americans went through cycles of mutual peaceful trading to raiding each other. The Spanish period ended with the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba at the conclusion of the War of Independence in 1821.

The First Settlements

Spaniards established towns for themselves in southern Arizona in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the late 1600s, however, a few settlers were grazing their livestock on the lush grasslands drained by the headwaters of Santa Cruz. Ten years before Kino and Manje explored the Pimería Alta, José Romo de Vivar was running cattle at the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains. A prominent Spanish rancher and miner, he may have been Arizona's first Hispanic pioneer.

More colonists trickled into the region after the Jesuits reestablished the missions of Bac and Guevavi in 1732, but the most important impetus to Spanish settlement was the discovery of large chunks and slabs of silver lying on the ground near a ranch called "Arizona", which was located in Sonora a few miles southwest of modern Nogales. The name Arizona has been proposed to come from two O'odham words, "unicode|alĭ" and "unicode|ṣonak", meaning "small spring." [cite web |url=http://www.shgresources.com/az/symbols/names/ |title=Arizona Symbols, State Names |accessdate=2006-11-30] [Saxton, D., Saxton, L., & Enos, S. (1983). "Dictionary: Tohono O'odham/Pima to English, English to Tohono O'odham/Pima". Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.] A more probable source for the name is the Basque phrase "aritz ona", meaning "good oak"; [cite web |url=http://www.azcentral.com/news/columns/articles/0225clay0225.html |title=A sorry state of affairs when views change |publisher=Arizona Republic |accessdate=2007-03-03 |author=Thompson, Clay |date=2007-02-25] [cite web |url=http://test.ahs.state.az.us/story/mar/az_name.htm |title=How Arizona did NOT Get its Name |publisher=Arizona Historical Society |accessdate=2007-03-03 |author=Jim Turner] since the ranch was the property of Bernardo de Urrea, one of the several Basque residents of Sonora. The treasure of Arizona, was a popular story, and eventually became the name of the territory.

The discovery of the silver itself was made by a Yaqui Indian in 1736. Prospectors streamed into the region, creating Arizona's first mining boom, but a legal dispute ensued to determine if the silver was a buried treasure or a natural deposit. If the former case was true, the king was entitled to the whole treasure, but only one fifth in the case of a natural deposit. Juan Bautista de Anza senior, father of the famous explorer and soldier, was the commander of the Fronteras presidio and the chief justice of Sonora, and was ordered to seize the silver until the issue was resolved. After investigation, the silver was declared a natural deposit, and the miners were allowed to keep their share of their discoveries. The owner of a huge 2500-pound chunk of pure silver, Lorenzo Velasco, became Sonora's largest rancher.Like Espejo's ore, the treasure of Arizona added to the mining myths that would attract prospectors in later years, and cause railroad speculators to pressure U.S. President James Buchanan to buy southern Arizona from Mexico in the early 1850s.

Most of the pioneers who remained in Arizona made their living as subsistence farmers, not miners. These were families that cleared the fields, built up the herds, and constructed homes for themselves along the Santa Cruz and its tributaries. The mission registers of Guevavi recorded their names, Ortega, Bohórquez, Gallego, and Covarrubias. They also chronicled ceremonies that marked the end of one generation and the beginning of another.

The generations faced extinction on several occasions. The first was in 1751, when O'odham led by Luis Oacpicagigua rebelled against the harsh discipline of several Jesuit missionaries. Luis and his followers killed two priests and more than two hundred Spanish settlers before the revolt dissipated and Luis surrendered to the Spaniards at the Pima community of Tubac along the Santa Cruz River. The rebels received pardon, but Luis would die in prison a few years later for preparing another rebellion. To prevent further uprisings among the O'odham, the Spanish Crown established a new garrison of professional soldiers at Tubac in 1752. It was the first permanent Spanish settlement in Arizona and the northernmost military outpost of Spanish Sonora.

Like most frontier communities, Tubac was an ethnic melting pot, its population composed of Spaniards, Spanish-Indian offspring, mulattos, Spanish-mulatto offspring, and Indians from various tribal groups. The captains of the presidios may have been peninsular Spaniards or "criollos" (Spaniards born in the New World). Most non-Indians had a mixture of European, Indian, and African backgrounds. For the next century, these Hispanic pioneers would fight a battle for survival along the Santa Cruz River.

In 1775, Juan Bautita de Anza led a group of Spanish colonists from Tubac to San Francisco Bay, dreaming of northward expansion. The Spaniards tried to secure that route five years later by settling along the lower Colorado, but the Yuman-speaking Quechan Indians soon grew tired of Spanish livestock trampling their fields and Franciscan missionaries attempting to alter their lifestyle. The Quechans bided their time until the morning of July 17, 1781. They surprised the Spaniards during mass and slaughtered them, including the Franciscan missionary Francisco Garcés. According to historian David Weber, the Yuma revolt turned California into an "island" and Arizona into a "cul de sac," severing Arizona-California connections before they could be firmly established. José de Züñiga, captain of the Tucson presidio, blazed a trail between Tucson and the Zuni pueblos in 1795, but Apache hostilities prevented that route from becoming well-traveled. In the Southwest, Hispanic pioneers moved north-south, not east-west, sealing the isolation of the northwestern provinces.

The Apachería

The failure to open these routes left Arizona exposed and surrounded on the edge of a twisted upthrust of mountain ranges and river gorges known as the Apachería. The region was both a homeland and refuge for the Apaches, to whom livestock raiding became as important as gathering agave or harvesting corn. The Apaches even referred to the people of northern Mexico as their "shepherds." Because of their bloodthirsty reputation, however, the Apaches had been largely misrepresented. Raiding "to search out enemy property" in the language of the Western Apaches was an economic activity usually carried out by five to fifteen men. Raids were designed to run off livestock and not to harm the stock raisers themselves. Apaches waged war in order to seek revenge for the death of a kinsman, and blood vengeance was a common theme in Native American cultures across North America.

Apache autonomy ultimately proved to be a fatal weakness. Clan affliction only partially counterbalanced intense loyalty to the local group. The various Apache bands never forged a common identity strong enough to drive the Spaniards, Mexicans, or Anglo-Americans out of the Southwest. The Spaniards, and later the Anglo-Americans, defeated the Apaches by exploiting divisions among the Indians themselves. The strategy did not evolve until late in the colonial period. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the Spaniards had to overcome other threats to their northwestern frontier: the Yaqui revolt of 1740, the Pima rebellion of 1751, and the guerrilla warfare of the Seris and Lower Pimas during the 1750s and 1760s. Not until the Seris were worn down by the military campaign in Sonoran colonial history were the Spaniards able to turn their full attention to the Apaches. Even then, it took more than twenty years of intense military pressure before the Spaniards and the Apaches achieved peace.

The Bourbon Reforms

The first thing the Spaniards did during the Bourbon Reforms was to realign their presidios. In 1765, Charles III of Spain commissioned the marqués de Rubí to make a sweeping inspection of the northern presidios. Rubí's recommendations resulted in the Reglamento of 1772, a major reorganization of the presidial system carried out by Hugo O'Conor, one of the "Wild Geese" who fled Protestant-controlled Ireland to fight for the Catholic kings of Spain. O'Conor transferred the presidio of Terrenate north to the west bank of the San Pedro in 1776. It survived for less than five years before the garrison limped back to Sonora, decimated by the Apache attacks. O'Conor was more successful in 1775 when he relocated the presidio of Tubac forty miles to the north. There, at the new site of San Agustín de Tucson, the soldiers were closer to the Western Apaches, enabling them to mount offensive campaigns into Apache territory more easily. They also had wood, water, and the comforting presence of several nearby O'odham communities. Hispanic residents of Tucson and Pimas fought Apaches together for the next hundred years.

The presidial reforms were part of broader shifts in Spanish policy that were known as the Bourbon Reforms, which took place under the Bourbon kings of Spain. In 1776, Carlos III placed the "Provincias Internas", or the northern "Interior Provinces", including Sonora, under the direct jurisdiction of the Spanish Crown rather than the viceroy in Mexico City. The king streamlined the administration the Provincias Internas by creating one official, the "comandante general", who had broad civil and military power and direct access to the crown. The "commandante general" was supposed to take decisive action against both Indian and European antagonists, including the Russians on the Pacific coast and the British in the Mississippi Valley. Spanish officials were worried that the expansion of the Russians and the British might not only threaten the northern provinces, but also the rich silver-mining areas of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí. Militarization replaced missionization as the dominant policy of conquest along the frontier.

The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1765 foreshadowed that change. Missionaries from the Society of Jesus first entered northwestern New Spain in the 1590s. Believing that most soldiers were bad influences on Native Americans, they tried to establish autonomous mission communities where they could isolate and protect their Indian converts. In areas where they were successful, such as the valley of Río Yaqui and the Pimería Alta, they also dominated Indian land and labor. As Spanish ranchers and miners settled along the mission frontier, competition for Indian resources broke out between the missionaries and the colonists. The Jesuits won many of the skirmishes with colonial officials, but in 1767 they lost the war.

The Spanish Crown allowed gray-robed Franciscans to replace the Jesuits, but the friars never had a chance to exercise the power that their black-robed predecessors had. Immediately after the expulsion of the Jesuits, Spanish officials toyed with the idea of abolishing missions once and for all. They abandoned the idea when they realized that the missions were the cheapest and most effective way to control the Christianized Indians. As the world economy grew more capitalistic, resources such as land and labor became more commonplace in the marketplace rather than rights and duties locked in a feudal order. Jesuit dreams of independent missions contradicted the entrepreneurial dream of abundant land and a mobile labor force. With the Jesuits gone and the Franciscans weakened, it became much easier for Spanish settlers to exploit that land and labor for private gain.

Territorial Expansion

Beginning in the 1770s, soldiers from presidios scoured the Apachería. At Tucson, Captain Pedro Allande y Saabedra mounted nearly a dozen major forays against the Apaches between 1783 and 1785 alone. Allande was a nobleman who had fought the Portuguese and the Seri Indians during his career, capping it in Tucson by impaling the heads of his Apache enemies on the palisades of the presidio walls. As governor of New Mexico during the 1780s, Juan Bautista de Anza severed an alliance between the Navajos and the Western Apaches. He then employed Navajos as auxiliaries in his campaigns against Apache groups living among the headwaters of the Gila River. Other Spanish commanders formally incorporated Native Americans into the military as well, with Opatas manning the flying company at Bavispe and Pimas serving as the reinstated garrison of Tubac. The use of one Indian group to fight another was a very old strategy in northern New Spain, one that dated from the Chichimec wars of the 1500s. In addition to the Navajos, Anza persuaded the Utes and the Comanches to stop fighting the Spaniards and carry the battle to their Apache foes.

In 1786, Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez instituted a policy to establish 'Apache peace camps' ("campos de paz apaches") where Spanish military commanders offered "defective firearms, strong liquor, and other such commodities as would render them militarily and economically dependent on the Spaniards" to Apaches who agreed to stop fighting; a form of pacification or appeasement. This approach led to a full-fledged rationing system in 1792, when a native of the Canary Islands named Pedro de Nava became Commandant General of the Provincias Internas. Apaches were already living in the 'peace camps' near the garrisons of Janos, Fronteras, Bacoachi, Santa Cruz, and Tucson, but Nava made the 'peace camps' a prime component of Spanish Apache policy. At the camps the Indians received cattle, flour, brown sugar, and tobacco from the Spanish, who hoped that the rations would take the place of raids.

Many Apaches never accepted the Spanish program, but a number of 'peace camps' were remarkably successful. In 1793, for example, more than a hundred Western Apaches from the Aravaipa band left their territory in the Galiuro Mountains and sued for peace at Tucson presidio. José Ignacio Morago, the officer in command, gave chief Nautil Nilché a suit of clothes in honor of the occasion. The Apache leader reciprocated by handing Morago six pairs of enemy Apache ears. Common currency on the frontier, the trophies symbolized Nautil Nilché's new loyalties. He and his kinsmen and kinswomen settled north of the presidio along the floodplain of the Santa Cruz River, where they formed the nucleus of an Apache Manso (Tame Apache) community that remained a part of Tucson's frontier population for the next half century.

During the last few years of Spanish rule, the total non-Indian population of Arizona hovered around 1,000, with 300 to 500 people at Tucson, 300 to 400 at Tubac, and less than 100 at Tumacacori. The rest of Arizona remained Native American. A few pioneers grew crops, raised livestock, or operated small gold and silver mines in outlying areas such as Arivaca and the San Pedro Valley, but most Spaniards continued to live along the Santa Cruz.

Although the soldiers in Arizona belonged to almost every racial category, most presidial officers were full-blooded Spaniards or their descendants. As anthropologist James Officer notes, the Elías González, Urrea, Comadurán, Zúñiga, and Pesqueira families belonged to an elite that linked Hispanic Arizona with Arispe, Altar, Alamos, and other important Sonoran centers of power. Members of this aristocracy intermarried, formed business partnerships, and helped one another fight for control over Sonora's military and economic affairs. One native Tucsonese, José de Urrea, nearly became president of Mexico itself during the civil wars following independence from Spain.

The lives of most Hispanic residents of Arizona, on the other hand, were constricted by river, desert, and the Apaches. They had a largely subsistence economy and their most important crop was wheat, followed by corn, beans, and squash. The most important animals were cattle and horses, although a herd of 5,000 sheep at Tubac produced enough wool for 600 blankets in 1804. During times of relative peace, farming and ranching expanded along the Santa Cruz and other watersheds.

References