Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast ed. by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey M. Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker (review)

This work comprises fifteen chapters by twenty-six authors—an introduction; a chapter on “Native Perspectives”; paired chapters on “Historiography,” “Climatic Influences and Impacts,” and “Disease”; and three chapters on “Political Organization” (two of them treating the Southeast), “Conflict,” and “Discussion.” Entrada is a new buzzword in borderland studies, used to connote the numerous and sometimes substantial raids launched by the Spaniards into the present U.S. Southwest and Southeast during the sixteenth century, almost always assisted by Native Americans, who outnumbered them.

The principal characteristic of these entradas was their failure to achieve territorial domination or settlement, serving instead as reconnaissance missions and softening-up exercises. Altogether, the Spaniards completed ten expeditions to the Southwest and nearly as many to the Southeast. The simultaneous forays of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (Southwest) and Hernán de Soto (Southeast) are by far the best chronicled. They are similar in character, scope, and purpose to the ghazawāt and razzias practiced by Islamic expansionist states (as well as the attacks by the Mongols) during the late Middle Ages, or those by the Turkic peoples north of China proper. All of the contributors argue that these expeditions (de Soto’s excepted) comprised not professional mini-armies but multicultural and multi-ethnic crowds that spent more time assimilating and sharing than fighting. When they did fight, the Spaniards were often defeated or rebuffed.

The chapters on climate are the most enlightening and innovative (81–120). Advances in dendrochronology and historical weather patterns allow the authors to apply more granulation to the historical record than previously possible. This fruitful collaboration confirms and explains much of the written and archaeological record, permitting more thoroughgoing hypotheses about pre-contact conditions. As Dennis B. Blanton insightfully points out, “None of the newcomers had sufficient firsthand knowledge to know which of the [climatic] conditions were anomalous; consequently, they had a weak basis for making comparative judgments” (108). This observation would have been true about other aspects of these newly found lands—a point easily clouded by hindsight.

A prominent theme throughout these chapters is that, rather than top-down hierarchies, the Spaniards and Indians tended to co-exist on the ground, the former becoming entrants into existing sociopolitical arrangements. For instance, David Hurst Thomas describes St. Augustine, the only permanent Spanish settlement in the sixteenth century, as having been “transformed into another powerful Mississippian chiefdom, both competing and allied with neighborhood Native American groups” (261).

In an intriguing volte face, the contributors all seem to have silently jettisoned the disease model of protohistorical American Indian demographic change, which dominated discussion from the 1970s until recently. This notion ascribed implausibly high and implausibly rapid hemispheric death tolls due almost entirely to numerous “virgin soil” epidemics. The orthodoxy now seems to be that disease became a primary cause of depopulation only toward the end of the sixteenth century. Regrettably, the reasons for this turnabout are not explicitly given.

The studies in this book are both true to the evidence and successful in emphasizing both the banality and the tragedy of this particular New World encounter. For the Spaniards, the entradas often became the stuff of epic; for the Indians, they marked the prelude to privation, subjugation, and disease. In the interim, however, they occasioned a high degree of interaction and even assimilation. Nonetheless, the process was neither inexorable nor uniform.

Inevitably, perhaps, the book evinces considerable redundancy; readers will find themselves tracing the steps of de Soto’s and Coronado’s expeditions more than once, if from different perspectives. Withal, it is good to have the latest developments in borderland scholarship (plus a sixty-page bibliography) conveniently collected in one place.