Frederick Jackson Who? The Spanish American Frontier in the Late Eighteenth Century

David J. Weber. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xvii + 440 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

David J. Weber, pre-eminent historian of the Spanish Borderlands, has focused his remarkable energy and prodigious erudition to produce nothing less than a massive survey of the Spanish frontier in North and South America under Bourbon rule from roughly 1750 to 1800. His previous "big book" The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) considered only one hemisphere. In Bárbaros, Weber tackles both hemispheres and revisits the earlier piece with new observations and arguments so that this work can be read alone although the reader interested in this volume will benefit from studying the earlier one. If The Spanish Frontier in North America established Weber's status ahead of his predecessors in Borderlands history, Herbert Eugene Bolton and John Francis Bannon, then Bárbaros distinguishes him as "the" scholar of the American frontier in its broadest sense, moving far beyond the more regional concerns of earlier writers who concentrated only on the United States.¹

While fully cognizant of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis," Turner is not cited here.² Weber notes that the Bourbon Reforms extended "to the very edges of Spain's colonies, affecting Indians who lived beyond Spanish political control. In the late eighteenth century, the borderlands of the Spanish Empire acquired heightened strategic importance as they gained the attention of Spain's European rivals or, in the case of North America after 1783, the young United States. Bourbon officials hoped to consolidate political control over some of those strategic frontiers, secure them from Indian raiders and foreign interlopers, and make them more productive" (p. 5). Weber's conceptual ideas are partly from the work of Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron who write, "By frontier we understand a meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined," and they designate "borderlands for the contested boundaries between colonial domains." They continue, "[E]qually important to the history of borderlands and frontiers were the ways in which Indians exploited these differences and compelled these shifts, partly to resist submission but mainly to negotiate intercultural relations on terms more to their liking. In this fashion, borderlands and frontiers together provide us with the vocabulary to describe the variegated nature of European imperialism and of indigenous reactions to colonial encroachment."³ Weber adds his concept of "strategic frontier" for space contested by colonial powers" and provides a thoroughly fresh and invigorating look at the past (p. 280n22).

Weber begins by setting the vastness of the Bourbon Spanish American stage from Tierra del Fuego to contemporary Mexico where independent Indians still maintained their existence more than two and a half centuries following their alleged "Conquest." In the vast expanses north of Mexico claimed by Spain but now part of the United States, "Comanches alone dominated most of the southern plains, a region of some 240,000 square miles, larger than all of Central America" (p. 12). Independent Indians numbered 2.7 million whereas independent Indians residing along the western border of the U.S. in 1790 counted fewer than sixteen thousand fighting men. Bourbons pursued diverse and frequently contradictory policies toward independent Indians, and Indians pursued their own interests according to their abilities. Some independent Indians succumbed to a few soldiers and missionaries justifying a Spanish policy of peaceful subjugation. "Some [independent Indians] had sufficient power to force Spaniards to abandon all efforts to conquer them. Some independent Natives, particularly those with access to guns and ammunition from Spain's rivals, could make Spaniards pay tribute to them and to recognize their autonomy—that is, to invert the relationship that Europeans imagined as proper and normal" (p. 9). Thus Indians significantly shaped Spanish policies depending upon their power...