Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast

12. Contest and Violence on the Northern Borderlands Frontier: Patterns of Native–European Conflict in the Sixteenth-Century Southwest

From the early decades of the sixteenth century, the shifting northern frontier of New Spain became a theater for both exploration and con- flict, as Spanish-led expeditions advanced tentatively into new, unknown territories (Altman 2010; Chipman 1967; Gerhard 1982). Small parties of Europeans, Native Mexicans, and Africans who had entered the Tierra Nueva of the American Southwest in the 1520s and 1530s met with extreme hardships (Adorno and Pautz 1999:212–231), lethal violence (Damp 2005:13–14,101–104), or the threat of it at the hands of Native communities (Rodack 1997:102–104). From the killing of Esteban the Moor and others at Zuni in 1539 to the large-scale violent confrontations between Pueblo groups and the expeditions of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540–1542 and Oñate y Salazar in 1599, sixteenth-century Native–European contacts in the American Southwest were punctuated by major and minor episodes of armed conflict. These military encounters and campaigns of Native resistance occurred well before the betterknown Pueblo Revolts of 1680 (Hackett and Shelby 1942; Liebmann 2010a, 2010b; Preucel 2002; Wilcox 2009) and 1696 (Espinosa 1988). Throughout much of the Southwest, therefore, it appears that armed conflict had an important and continuous role in shaping, and reshaping , the relationships between Old World and New World communities from their outset. Our understanding of these initial interactions in the Southwest has, and continues to be, informed largely by historical documents rather than physical remains. Furthermore, our evaluations of these largely literary sources have been profoundly affected by the relative abundance of recent research and new data (i.e., modern translations and additional documents) for the earlier part of the sixteenth century (e.g., Flint and Flint 2005). Far less historical and archaeological research in Contest and Violence on the Northern Borderlands Frontier Patterns of Native–European Conflict in the Sixteenth-Century Southwest Clay Mathers  206 Conflict the Southwest, however, has been focused on the period from ca. a.d. 1550 to 1600.1 As a result, the volume of modern translations, documents, and material evidence for the later sixteenth century is correspondingly smaller. Nevertheless, archaeological investigations at newly discovered sites in New Mexico suggest evidence of sixteenth-century military confrontations—both relating to the large Vázquez de Coronado entrada (Damp 2005; Mathers et al. 2007, 2008). Our discussion below attempts to bring together different sources of data bearing on these initial encounters and to place the early history of Native–European conflict in the American Southwest into a wider geographical, political, and historical context. Throughout the sixteenth century, threats of violence and coercive force, as well as large-scale military conflict, were not unique in either the Old or New Worlds. In the eastern hemisphere, many European powers had sustained periods of warfare lasting decades or longer, as did the Aztec and Inca empires in the west. As medieval Iberia emerged from the Reconquista and began developing its empire, long traditions of social, political, and economic policy began to be transformed and reconfigured continuously as the frontier ceased to be peninsular and rapidly became global. These changes were accelerated considerably as the kingdoms of Castilla and Aragón extended their power westward to the Americas. Established patterns of social and military conduct underwent regular readjustment to cope with a new, unfamiliar landscape of risks and opportunities. On the cutting edge of empire, early Spanish-led entradas borrowed from traditions of conflict and warfare extending over eight hundred years—from the Islamic invasion of 711 to the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (O’Callaghan 2003; Tallet 1992). Faced with a variegated hemisphere of unfamiliar and often uncooperative Native communities, early Spanish-led expeditions found many medieval military precedents unhelpful and the need for rapid adaptation imperative. Although their initial military contact with Europeans often found Native communities unprepared and disadvantaged with respect to tactics and weapons, many quickly adjusted to the presence of European powers and the external threat to their communities. Building on traditions with their own significant historical roots, Native groups throughout the Americas began evolving a new and imaginative set of Contest and Violence on the Frontier 207 responses ranging from creative compliance, negotiation, and passive resistance to open conflict, guerilla warfare, and large-scale, sustained campaigns of armed confrontation (Anderson and Dibble 1978; Chamberlain 1953; Dye 2002; L...