Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (review)

2??8Book Reviews447 Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. ByJuliana Barr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 410. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN g78-o-8o78-3o82-6. $59-95. cloth; ISBN 978-0-8078-5790-8. $19^5, paper.) Thirty years ago, litde was known about Native Americans in colonial Texas. In die past three decades, however, scholars have produced studies diatshed much light on die region's Indian tribes—Caddos, Wichitas, Comanches, Apaches, Karankawas , and Coahuiltecans, among odiers—that detail the diplomatic, economic, and military histories of these groups. In diis well-written and meticulously researched work, Juliana Barr, a graduate of die esteemed women's history program at the University of Wisconsin, has examined the indigenous tribes of Spanish Texas through the prism ofgender, providing as deep an understanding of Indian-EuroAmerican relations in Texas as scholarship has produced in other, better studied regions of North America. Barr's work is based on die correct beliefthat—unlike in other parts ofLatin America—die various Indian tribes, not the Spaniards, dominated colonial Texas. Therefore, they dictated the terms of engagement widi Euro-Americans through "the networks of kinship diat provided the infrastructure for native political and economic systems and codified both domestic and foreign relations" (p. g). Because die Indians of Texas used gender as the organizing principle of their kin-based social, economic, and political domains, it also functioned as a communication tool for the often nonverbal nature of cross-cultural interaction between the tribes and the intruding Euro-Americans. Employing these ideas in a highly original manner to interpret the situation along die Louisiana-Texas frontier, in part one of her study, Barr convincingly demonstrates that the Caddos in the region came to prefer the French over the Spaniards not just because the former provided diem with a military and trading alliance, as past scholarship has shown. By bringing women with them and settling as families in the post at Natchitoches, as well as by establishing unions with native women, die French were able to incorporate themselves into the kinship system that structured the dominant Caddo society. On the other hand, the Spaniards—mainly priests and soldiers—alienated their hosts by bringing few females to the missions and presidios of East Texas, and by demonstrating litde interest in marrying Caddo women. Intriguingly, however, die author shows how, over the course ofdie early eighteenth century, die isolated Spaniards became absorbed in the Caddo-French trading networks by developing small-scale ranches dispersed among the Indians and by intermarrying widi die French "brothers" of die Caddos. Part two investigates die Coahuiltecans and die Lipan Apaches who dealt widi the Spaniards who settled in San Antonio. Barr demonstrates how the ravaged Coahuiltecans incorporated the missions into their migratory subsistence patterns and as a means offormalizing an alliance with the Spaniards, not ofdeclaring subordination to Spanish rule. Concerning the Apaches, the audior focuses on die role ofwomen in die initial warfare and subsequent alliance diat developed between the Indians and the Spaniards in the first half of the eighteendi century. Part three deals with die Spanish effort to establish peace widi the Norteños through male-dominated 448Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril negotiations on batdefields and in council houses, and how women then played an important role in transforming the transient truces into a permanent end to the hostilities. Although the author, particularly in the book's final two sections—heavily influenced by the work of Robert A. Ricklis and James F. Brooks—occasionally has to force the prism of gender onto subjects that are not necessarily applicable , ultimately Barr's study succeeds brilliantly in its effort to provide a more complete understanding of Indian-Euro-American relations in Texas during the eighteenth century. One only hopes that she plans to use her considerable abilities and interpretive skills to examine the situation between Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in the complex world ofTexas during the first half of the nineteenth century. University ofNorth TexasF. Todd Smith Looting Spiro Mounds: An American King Tut's Tomb. By David La Vere. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 266. Illustrations, maps, notes...