Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late Colonial Brazil

The major gold and diamond strikes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries produced an unprecedented economic expansion, a complex urban society, and a rich Baroque culture in the inland region of southeastern Brazil that came to be called Minas Gerais. The mining windfall transformed Portuguese America and the transatlantic commerce that linked it to Europe and Africa. By the time the Portuguese crown fully acknowledged these changes and transferred the colonial capital from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, however, the inevitable depletion of the mineral washings was well underway. The accompanying economic havoc, first felt on a large scale around the middle of the eighteenth century and intensifying as the decades passed, resulted in severe social dislocation and political discontent. ¹ Long after the search for gold purportedly ended and the concerns of colonists turned elsewhere, the inhabitants of the captaincy of Minas Gerais continued to scour outlying lands for new mineral deposits and, when these failed to materialize, for pastoral, agricultural, and commercial alternatives.

Between the 1760s and 1820s, local elites, slaves, impoverished settlers, and seminomadic indigenous peoples engaged in a violent contest for land and resources, radiating outward from the mining district's major towns. Throughout the vast hinterlands of Minas Gerais, this conflict sometimes smoldered, sometimes flared, accompanying the primary instance of frontier migration during Brazil's transition from colony to nation; yet, both this conflict and the migration itself have gone virtually unstudied, subject to the long-standing scholarly tendency to emphasize Brazil's coastal populations and export matrices. A slow-moving, often inconspicuous dispersion to the west, to the south, and, especially for the purposes of the present article, to the east, this internal colonization depended on the actions of both the powerful and the poor, the white and the nonwhite, the free and the enslaved, each with their own reasons for journeying to the frontier, each with their own claims on unsettled land, each seen as invaders by the indigenous groups who occupied this domain.

Although present in virtually every zone in which settlement occurred, indigenous resistance would peak in the rugged, mountainous zone, then still blanketed by the great Atlantic forest, wedged between the inland mining district and the Atlantic coast (see figure 1). Forging a local policy of frontier incorporation, captaincy officials, despite a profound ambivalence concerning their own actions, challenged a crown policy that designated this area, along with other frontier zones, as "forbidden lands"—territory placed off-limits to settlers in an attempt to block the flow of contraband to coastal dwellers and seafarers. In the process, events on this remote colonial frontier impinged on metropolitan authority, eroded established territorial boundaries, undermined crown indigenous policy, and recast regional identity.

Penetration of the region and aggression against its native occupants took what appeared to be a dramatic turn in 1808. Following the arrival in Rio de Janeiro of the Portuguese royal court, in flight from Napoleon's armies, Prince Regent João declared open war on the Botocudo Indians, officially sanctioning their slaughter and enslavement, a policy that remained in place until 1831. Archival evidence reveals, however, that the militarization of this conflict began a full half-century earlier. Despite royal prohibitions, virtually every governor of Minas Gerais, from the 1760s on, pursued a policy of violent Indian conquest at one time or another, although none commanded the military resources and few possessed the unabashed anti-Indian candor of the prince. That the conflict commenced long before the crown declared war demands a rethinking of the basis of this official action. Far from a sudden reversal marking the ultimate deterioration of relations between the state and the remnant of the once numerous Indians of non-Amazonian Brazil, the crown's action in fact capped a long history of conflict caused by settler and state...