A Fateful Day in 1698: The Remarkable Sobaipuri-O’odham Victory over the Apaches and Their Allies by Deni J. Seymour (review)

In this carefully researched study, archaeologist Deni J. Seymour provides the most definitive account yet written of an important and well-documented southwestern battle between the Spanish-allied Sobaipuri-O’odham (Pima) and their Jocome-led indigenous enemies on Easter in 1698. Led by the Jocome leader El Capotcari, more than 400 Jocomes, Janos, Sumas, Mansos, and Apaches attacked the Sobaipuri-O’odham village of Santa Cruz de Gaybaniptea along the San Pedro River in today’s southern Arizona. After sacking and burning the settlement and killing five Sobaipuri residents, the attackers were unexpectedly met by a force of more than five hundred O’odham and were defeated in an ancient form of battle known as the contest of champions, which pitted the ten best fighters on each side against one another. As the remaining enemy combatants retreated to the safety of their camps in the surrounding mountains, they suffered hundreds of losses from Sobaipuri archers’ poisoned arrows.

A Fateful Day in 1698 is one of a growing number of interdisciplinary books treating single battles in the Southwest and linking them to the participants’ modern descendants, including Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn (Penguin, 2008) and James F. Brooks’s forthcoming Mesa of Sorrows (W. W. Norton, 2015). The most unique feature of Seymour’s work, however, is her decision to privilege translations of Spanish documents and historical archaeology over narrative history to identify the proper location of the battle site, which archaeologist Charles Di Peso misidentified in the early 1950s, and thus to provide “a new methodological standard for locating and evaluating historically referenced places” (9).

Combining documentary, archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence, Seymour’s fourteen-chapter interdisciplinary study can be divided into three sections. The first, comprising the first five chapters, examines the history of the battle, and the second, which extends through chapter 12, serves as an archaeological report on the battle site, from the adobe-walled structure built for Father Kino to the weaponry of the participants. The last section assesses the importance of the battle from multiple perspectives, most notably that of the Sobaipuri-O’odham descendants from the Wa:k community (San Xavier del Bac) on the Santa Cruz River. One of the most significant conclusions Seymour draws, based on documentary and archaeological evidence, is that the material cultures of Jocomes, Janos, Mansos, and Sumas were initially distinct from “ancestral Athapaskan-speaking Apaches” (65). Although most current scholars would concur with this interpretation, many Apache descendants of this battle, whose voices are virtually absent from this study, would strongly disagree. Rather than celebrate “The Remarkable Sobaipuri-O’odham Victory,” they would emphasize their displacement of the Sobaipuri from the San Pedro River valley by 1762.

Although Seymour has likely sacrificed a wider readership by not adopting a more engaging chronological historical approach, specialists will appreciate her thoroughness. She includes transcriptions of the original Spanish documents in the appendix so that her English translations can be easily verified, and the conclusions she draws from the material record, which she acknowledges is less extensive than the documentary one, still enrich our understanding of the peoples fighting this battle.