The Jar of Severed Hands: Spanish Deportation of Apache Prisoners of War, 1770-1810 (review)

Borderland scholars have long known about the deportation of Apache prisoners of war from northern New Spain to central Mexico and on to Cuba, but we have not known much. What we do know stems mainly from two articles published in the mid-1970s, one by Max Moorhead and another by Christian Archer. After that, as Mark Santiago remarks, deportation had been considered as "discussion points" by other scholars, including this reviewer, but no "detailed description" of the policy and practice of deportation had been undertaken.

Santiago seeks to fill this void, noting that by the late eighteenth century, the Spanish empire evolved a successful strategy in its long war with Apaches. It involved settling accepting Apaches into peace establishments and providing them many of the goods they had previously raided for as rations, and waging unceasing war against those that would not accept. Prisoners taken during these campaigns were deported beyond the northern frontier to other areas from which they were never expected to return. Santiago estimates that at least 2,000 Apaches were deported between 1773 and 1810, roughly the same number as those who settled in peace establishments.

From the late seventeenth century, both Apaches and Spaniards took captives, often adding them to their households as enforced servants. Spanish regulations forbade this practice and ordered all prisoners be sent to Mexico City. So, from 1773 to 1810, colleras (chain gangs) of bound Apache prisoners of war usually mounted on mules or horses were annually sent (twice in 1787, 1788, and 1789) to the south. Santiago focuses on two colleras that initially piqued his interest in the topic via some impressive archival sleuthing amongst receipts and financial accounts. The first collera, in 1791, transported seventy-four Apache prisoners from Chihuahua City to Mexico City, accompanied by three Apaches from peace establishments seeking the return of their kinsmen who had been deported. The second collera followed the same path in 1792 with eighty-two Apaches, but rebellion broke out during the issuing of a meat ration after ten days on the trail, leaving twelve Apache men dead. The soldiers ultimately removed a hand from each one, the "jar of severed hands" in the title, as proof of their deaths.

Santiago continues with descriptions of colleras into the 1790s and early 1800s, including one in 1799 that saw the mass escape of fifty-one Apache women outside of Veracruz. Despite being bound together in pairs, only one woman was recaptured. Santiago concludes with a consideration of deportation as central to Spanish policy. So useful was deportation that the United States resorted to it in 1886, exiling the Chiricahua Apaches away from the Southwest, many of whose ancestors would have been deported in colleras a century before.

Thanks to this groundbreaking work by Santiago, we now have two known unknowns: the fate and experiences of Spanish captives going north and of Apache captives going south. Work by James Brooks and others has revealed something of the life of Hispanic captives amongst the Navajo and Comanche. Tantalizing hints are spread across the documentary record about those Hispanics taken captive by Apaches for some scholar to collect. A recent dissertation by Paul Conrad illuminates the experience of those Apaches exiled across the Caribbean Basin. Even more remains to be known about captives and deportations in the borderlands.