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3. Catch as Catch Can: The Evolving History of the Contact Period Southwest, 1838–Present
- University of Arizona Press
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For much of its course, study of the Contact Period of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico has been frozen in concepts and paradigms long ago superseded by scholars in other fields. Centuriesold historical frameworks have survived in strictly narrative, triumphalist accounts of “great men” and “great events” that have flashed across the region. For far too long, the sole criterion of worthwhile history of the Southwest has been “the declaration of true things in order set foorth” (Cooper 1578). As far as that goes, that is an admirable, if extremely limited, goal, one that ignores an equally ancient desire for understanding the past and using that understanding to guide the present. As long ago as the seventeenth century, the English biographer of Elizabeth I, William Camden (1630), put it this way: Take away from History Why, How, and To what end, things have been done, and Whether the thing done hath succeeded according to Reason, and all that remains will rather be an idle Sport and Foolery, than a profitable Instruction. The historical study of the sixteenth-century Southwest began as a simple, naïve narrative told from an essentially European perspective, and it has, in large measure, continued in that vein. Broader study and analysis have taken a backseat to drama, adventure, glorification, and entertainment. For the English-speaking United States, what was to become the American Southwest was a dim and largely irrelevant quadrant of the continent until the nineteenth century was well under way. It was the vast, remote, and amorphous north of New Spain and then Mexico, of Catch as Catch Can The Evolving History of the Contact Period Southwest, 1838–Present Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint 48 Historiography interest primarily for its celebrated wealth of silver. Until 1838, it was unlikely that anyone could have been found in the United States who had reliable information about events and people of the preceding three hundred years in northern New Spain. In that year, though, the collector and bibliophile Henri Ternaux-Compans (1838) published the ninth volume in his series Voyages, Relations et Memoires Originaux pour Servir a l’Histoire de la Découverte de l’Amérique. This publication offered French translations of Spanish-language relaciones (firsthand accounts) by Fray Marcos de Niza and Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera of the Vázquez de Coronado expedition from Mexico City to present-day Kansas and back between 1538 and 1542. The expedition resulted in the first contact between Europeans and Native Americans of the Southwest and extreme northwest Mexico. French being the international language of the day, TernauxCompans ’s volumes were soon read by educated Americans. As in all of his volumes, Ternaux-Compans simply presented firsthand narrative accounts of European “adventurers,” as he called them, in their wondrous activities among the peoples and places of a “new world.” His emphasis on documents that told of glamorous and stirring actions by intrepid European men in a wealthy land dovetailed easily with the belief of many Americans of the day that their “manifest destiny” was to spread across the continent and exploit its resources. That westward expansion had already been under way for years by 1838, with decades of aggressive filibustering by American frontiersmen , the paper annexation of Louisiana by the United States in 1803, and the American-ex-patriot-led Texas rebellion of 1836. American imaginations lusted wildly after the remainder of the Mexican north and were hungry for news of its mineral wealth. Although many Americans generally had cultivated a dislike of Spaniards and Mexicans for decades, tales of the “heroic deeds” of the first conquerors, Spaniards or not, were hot sellers in the United States and served as promise of the North American future. Consequently, Ternaux-Compans’s translations soon inspired books and pamphlets in English. After peace was negotiated following invasion of New Mexico and California by United States armies in 1846 and 1847, military surveyors of the Corps of Topographical Engineers were anxious to locate, among other things, the places and peoples that [34.207.178.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:43 GMT) Catch as Catch Can 49 figured in the published accounts of the Vázquez de Coronado expedition . Some carried copies of Ternaux-Compans’s translations to guide their search. One of those surveyors was Lieutenant (years later, Brigadier General ) James H. Simpson. As a young man he performed a geographical reconnaissance of the Navajo and Zuni country in 1848. More than...