Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier

Chapter Seven. The Ranching Industry in Colonial Natchitoches

146 chapter seven The Ranching Industry in Colonial Natchitoches Whereas the earliest French colonists of Natchitoches brought few, if any, animals with them as they made their way up the Red River in the early eighteenth century, the settlers quickly obtained livestock through the Indians and Spaniards who lived along the LouisianaTexas frontier. Well-supplied with manufactured items, Natchitoches eagerly exchanged these items for cattle and horses with the Indians and Spaniards Texas, even though the Spanish Crown prohibited trade between its own subjects and other Europeans. Initially, however, very few Natchitoches colonists established ranches, for most farming families from France and Canada had little experience with large-scale livestock raising. Gallic settlers tended to keep a few domesticated animals , but failed to have a clear concept of ranching; in fact, the French language lacks the word ranch, inducing Louisiana colonists to coin the term vacherie.1 The commercial livestock industry of Natchitoches only fully developedafterSpainassumedfullcontrolofLouisianain1769 .Full-fledged ranching endeavors began at the same time that cash-crop agriculture began to flourish in the district. Although French creole planters in the bottomlands downstream from town also maintained horses and cattle, the establishment of tobacco plantations, coupled with the population decline of the nearby Indian tribes, encouraged Natchitoches stockmen to establish their vacheries in the forested hills and unproductive floodplains away from the fertile soil along the Red River and its tributaries. Whereas the population of the tobacco producing region consisted almost exclusively of free people of French descent and their African slaves, the ranching areas were made up of a mixed workforce of enslaved and free workers of various backgrounds. While most of the men who owned ranches on the outskirts were French creoles with ties to the town’s wealthy families, most vachères (cowboys) were poor men. Many were slaves of African descent, while others were free laborers such as acculturated Native Americans, many of whom were negotiating massive social disruptions and divisions caused by diseases. These indigenous survivors and slaves joined another group 147 the ranching industry in natchitoches of free hirelings who also were displaced by economic change; these people included dispossessed creoles excluded from tobacco production as well as immigrants such as Anglophones and Hispanics who equally were unable to enter plantation society for economic, cultural, or religious reasons. A social fluidity existed at the vacheries that encouraged individuals who originated from different cultural traditions to collaborate, resulting in a syncretic ranching style influenced by Carolina southern littoral, West African, and Mexican coastal traditions . More importantly, however, the vacherie came to offer a more egalitarian alternative to plantations in Natchitoches and Louisiana, where class and race were ever more increasingly becoming rigid categories and polarizing forces. In the absence of livestock raising, many people who became ranchers and vachères would otherwise have found themselves eking out a meager living on the margins of the plantation economy in Spanish Louisiana or in the United States. Thus, participation in ranching came to represent an important alternative—both socially and culturally—to the exclusively French creole hierarchical plantation society of Natchitoches. A decade before St. Denis founded Natchitoches in 1714, the French Canadian had already set in motion a trade in horses with the mountrich Hasinai Indians of East Texas. By 1722, Natchitoches residents had acquired 42 horses, all but one of which were owned by St. Denis and Derbanne (Table 7.1). Over the course of the next four years, the town’s two leading citizens increased their herd to 66 horses, while three other settlers owned 6 mounts. Through continued trade with the Indians and natural reproduction, Natchitoches residents increased the number of horses and mules threefold to 225 by 1737.2 Spaniards had brought cattle to East Texas from ranches in Coahuila and Nuevo León as early as 1690. Although the Franciscans abandoned their first missionary effort among the Hasinais in 1693, St. Denis reported in 1715 that “the cattle left behind by the Spaniards had Table 7.1. Number of Livestock at Natchitoches, 1722–1787 Year Horses and Mules Cattle Pigs Sheep and Goats 1722 42 12 — — 1726 72 38 — — 1737 225 460 250 — 1765 581 914 597 157 1770 849 1,752 1,268 200 1776 1,258 1,842 782 300 1787 1,018 2,777 — — 148 chapter seven increased until they count now by the thousands . . . and the land is overrun with them.” In the second...