Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

600 Apaches attacked Spanish soldiers near Pecos in 1773
December 20, 2006

Have you heard of Hugo O’Conor? Do you know about the battle that he and his troops had with 600 Apaches in the vicinity of Pecos, Texas? A brief mention of him in Maria Wade’s “The Native Americans of the Edwards Plateau” ignited my curiosity. She wrote that in late November and early December he led an entrada to “chastise” the Apaches of West Texas. (In this essay, “entrada” means military expedition, with the extra agenda of exploration and mapping.) Over the next few days I spent five hours doing Internet research and several more hours investigating the Sibley Nature Center’s library section, “Hispanic Borderlands history and culture, as well as investigating the Midland County Public Library.

I found no other mention of the specific entrada noted by Ms. Wade. O’Conor left Ireland in the 1750s to serve in the Spanish Army. Politically, he was an Irish Jacobite, a member of a movement with the core issue of restoring a Catholic Monarch to England. A century and a half before James I (of the Stuart family based dynasty) had promoted religious tolerance that benefited Catholics in Scotland, Ireland, and England. Many Irishmen, collectively known as “the wild geese of Ireland,” including many of the second and third sons of the landed gentry, served throughout Europe in the armies of Catholic monarchs after refusing to serve as soldiers for the English empire.

O’Conor duties in the Spanish Army took him to “Northern New Spain” where he commanded one of the presidios along its northern border. He served with such distinction that he became the military governor of Texas from 1768 to 1771. In 1771 he became the inspector of all the presidios from Texas to Sonora and given the rank of lieutenant colonel. The Spanish settlers of Texas and the “mission Indians” that accompanied them had a long relationship with Lipan Apaches who sought protection from the Comanches invading from the north. Despite numerous attempts to develop trade alliances with the more western Apaches, these “Natages” (as they are called in Spanish documents) preferred to trade with the Spanish settlers of Northern New Mexico and raid the Spanish presidios of Texas and Northern Mexico.

In 1773 O’Conor successfully fought the Mescalero Apache around the Bolson de Mapimi and its surrounding mountain ranges in northern Mexico. Emboldened by his success he led his troops north, crossing the Rio Grande at La Junta de los Rios (modern Ojinaga), passed through the Davis Mountains to the Pecos River. Somewhere north of modern Pecos 600 Apaches attacked his command. Ms. Wade indicated that the battle ended in the Spaniards’ favor. I could find no more information to indicate his return to the presidios. Did he go east, across the Llano Estacado, to San Antonio, or west to the presidio near present day El Paso, or back south?

O’Conor returned to the region in 1776 to again attack the Apaches of the region. One of the Apache leaders was a Spaniard who had escaped from prison in the Mexican state of Durango, some 400 miles to the south. Despite this tidbit of information, I could find no further record of that entrada. Frustrated by the lack of accessible materials, I turned to other writings.

I first turned to the writings of Daniel Weber, who currently directs the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU. In May 2003, he was named to the membership in the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica by the King of Spain and was knighted in a special ceremony. In February 2005, Weber was named to membership in the Orden Mexicana del Aguila Azteca (the Order of the Aztec Eagle), the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals.

In Weber’s article “The Spanish Borderlands of North America, a Histiography,” he states, “Until recently American history gave short shrift to Spain’s borderlands.” He quotes historian Light Cummins, “the Spanish borderlands has an orphan history because there is no geopolitical entity that views the entire history of the region as its special story.” Weber also quotes historian Helena Wall, “the shifting demographics of the region demand that we rethink our common past.”

Although historian Herbert Bolton had argued that point for decades, beginning in 1921, neither he or his 104 Phd and 323 Masters students that he trained influenced how history has been taught, either in the region or nationally. Even to this day, students are taught that the Pilgrims and the Jamestown settlers were the first “American colonists,” despite Spain’s involvement in the “American Southwest” that predated the Pilgrims by 80 years.

O’Conor’s entradas into West Texas are part of our regional history, just as are the stories of deVaca, Coronado, de Sosa, Ugalde, Ugarte, the blue nun, ciboleros and comancheros. When I learned of O’Conor’s expeditions, my imagination began to try to visualize what O’Conor might have seen and felt. Dry recitations of history (as this essay has been) are largely ineffective at inspiring others to learn more about our region’s historical events. A modern American can easily visualize the history that begins with the Pilgrims because the intelligentsia of the East Coast has dictated that American history beginning with the Pilgrims is more important than our or any other regional history.

As we move into the new socioeconomic paradigm created by NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the ensuing mercantile distribution network of La Entrada al Pacifica, it behooves our society to become familiar with our regional history before Anglo settlement. Those that understand our regional history will be ready to profit in the 21st century as our local economy becomes shaped by worldwide trade that enters the United States along La Entrada al Pacifica.

To learn more about the research and the issues debated by modern borderland historians I plan to read New Views in Borderlands History, edited by Robert H. Jackson and The idea of the Spanish Borderlands, edited by Weber, as soon as the Sibley Nature Center acquires them. We are able to order these books because of a grant (specifically for books on Hispanic History in the Southwest) given to us by Charles “Dick” Harris, a retired MISD teacher and a member of Sibley.