Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

West Texas has a fascinating history while it was part of Northern New Spain
January 10, 2007

Northern New Spain centered at missions and presidios established to civilize and control Indians. The European clergy used persuasion, free food, and protection from enemy Indian tribes to induce Indians to become citizens of the new order. The soldiers and the servants of the officers and priests married Indian women. Mestizos (people of Spanish, Indian, and black heritage in varying amounts) outnumbered the European “rulers” and developed their own towns.

The “rebellious” (or free) Indian population became slaves in mines and on plantations when defeated in battle. Some of the mestizo population became intermediaries with Indian tribes resisting acculturation. Recently I wrote of Hugo O’Conor meeting Apaches in battle near Pecos in 1773, and then returning to the region in 1776 to again “take the war to the Apaches.”

Frustrated by the lack of available resources, the staff of the Sibley Nature Center ordered “New Views of Borderlands History,” edited by Robert H. Jackson. In that text, Peter Stern, in “Marginals and Acculturation in Frontier Society,” briefly discusses a group of mestizos and Indians led by Antonio de la Campa. One Spanish report indicates that his force numbered seventeen hundred men (and most had wives and children.) De la Campa send out raiding parties of around twenty men to steal livestock. They traded with the “rebellious” Indians and served as “spies” for the Indians, trading information for horses, and European goods for deer hides and meat, basketry and other Indian goods.

The governmental politicians, mission priests, and presidio officers constantly feared that the “marginals” and Indians would not only continue to threaten the peace and stability of Mexico, but that open and organized rebellion would eventually occur. Such rebellions had occurred in the early beginnings of Spanish control of Mexico, and localized disturbances ignited by concerns of the Indian citizens of Mexico have continued to flare up to the present day as indicated by the trouble in Chiapas in the 1990s.

The ruling elite described the Indians and their mestizo allies as “vicious men of bad habits, thieves, gambleers, dissolute and lost men…who spoil and pervert the salvation, growth and peace of the Indians.” Many land and water disputes arose with between the government and the towns of mestizos. “They form their own pueblos with such little cost,” a priest wrote in 1772, “that they have the sole aim of using for themselves the first mines they find, and will abandon them when a better discovery is made.” Mexico’s history was not entirely shaped by Spanish ideals, but also by the people themselves within a “counter-culture.”

This additional perspective puts O’Conor’s entradas (military expeditions) in another context. Northern New Spain, ( the modern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Sonora, and Coahuila which also included Texas, New Mexico and Arizona), had isolated presidios and missions scattered through a huge region dominated by Indians and their allies, unlike the United States with a “frontier,” a line between settlements and Indian country. Few settlers in the United States became allied with Indians after the four “colonial wars” in the Northeastern North America between British and French interests that culminated in the French and Indian war of 1754-1763. O’Conor was part of an “army of occupation” fighting insurgents “living without God, law, and the king” that disappeared into the hinterlands and among the local population.

In 1771-1776 these insurgents stole over 66,000 head of livestock, captured 154 people, and killed 1,674 people in the northeastern Mexican territory of Nueva Vizcaya (modern day Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Coahuila.) Similar losses occurred in Chihuahua, and the insurgents sometimes sought refuge in what is now Trans-Pecos Texas. During the 1771 entrada, O’Conor was concerned with such a refuge in what is now known as the Delaware Mountains (just south of the modern Guadalupe Mountains National Park.) This population of insurgents developed an economy based on hunting buffalo to the east of the Pecos River. Spanish reports from the 1780s document Apache/mestizo groups hunting buffalo “east of the sanddune region east of the Pecos River,” i.e. the Llano Estacado.

Almost every small town in west Texas and eastern New Mexico has a small museum with Spanish artifacts and long-time residents who tell legends of buried treasure from the days of Spanish and Mexican rule. Maximilian’s treasure in Castle Gap near Crane and McCamey is the most famous of these legends, along with Ben Sublette’s gold from the Guadalupe Mountains. Signal Peak in Howard County reputedly had Spanish artifacts in a cave near its summit. The provenance of many of these artifacts is just as likely to be linked to the insurgents than to the earlier conquistadors or the later Cibolero/Comanchero involvement.

The Sibley Nature Center’s focus of all things west Texans is giving rise to a growing appeal to schools throughout the region. As this essay was being written, school representatives from Pecos visited and the administrator of a private school in Hobbs telephoned to discuss visits to the Sibley Nature Center. Although the science of ecology and related disciplines was the beginning point for the Center’s activities, the addition of historical education with an emphasis on the Indian and Spanish period has helped us reach a broader audience.

With our recent success in fundraising, the Sibley Nature Center is seeking to become “more user-friendly.” We would like our readers to suggest services they would like to see the Center provide. Among the ideas that the staff has generated are; adult and children’s classes from specific subjects such as birdwatching, drought-adapted horticulture, to art and photography classes, to outdoor skills such as rapelling and canoeing, and to lead fee-based tours to sites of special interest in West Texas. Please call Richard Galle at 684-6827 or email him with your ideas.