Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500–1821 by F. Todd Smith (review)

Anyone who has ever wondered how Texas is embedded within the southern United States needs to read this book. Expanding geographically upon his many previous works on Native American history, F. Todd Smith reminds us that the ties that bind Texas to the South run much deeper than the U.S. Civil War. The entire Gulf South area, stretching from East Texas to Florida and from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Arkansas River, is a “distinctive historical region” (1) deserving treatment as a whole not simply as an extension of the cultures on the East Coast, but from multiple perspectives focusing on the environment, trade, slavery, warfare, and immigration.

Smith breathes new life into an otherwise familiar tale of the Black Legend and the spread of epidemic diseases among powerful indigenous chiefdoms throughout the colonial era. Rather than presenting new evidence, Smith’s straightforward narrative offers a fresh analytic approach in the recent trend of new frontier history. Long before the Spaniards arrived, climate change and drought dramatically halted mound-building traditions among Mississippian cultures, including the Caddos in East Texas. Most readers are more familiar, however, with Hernando De Soto’s infamous search for gold that featured slave raids and brutality throughout the Southeast. His lesser-known field marshal, Luis de Moscoso y Alvarado, picked up De Soto’s sword following his death and reached the Trinity River by October 1542, taking more captives from whom he learned about the western limits of settled, agriculturally oriented towns in Texas before returning to the Mississippi on empty stomachs. Smith also details the Barroto-Romero sea expedition launched in 1686 from Havana to Veracruz. This group inspected the entire Gulf coastline, including the “first detailed explorations of Galveston Bay and Sabine Pass,” two important geostrategic points of conflict and entry in Texas.

Meanwhile, another movement that eventually affected Texas began from the British colony of Carolina and captured Indians in the interior Gulf South for sale as slaves on English plantations near Charleston and the West Indies. Smith clearly links French settlement of the Lower Mississippi Valley to this British threat and, in turn, Spanish settlement of Texas and West Florida in reaction to the French threat. New Orleans after its founding in 1718 became the epicenter of this clash of empires in the Gulf South region. There the inhabitants engaged in the dynamics of strategic intermarriage and smuggling both sides of the Mississippi for the sake of survival. Smith never loses sight of Native American resistance and adaptation to increasingly rapid changes in the Gulf South region, including the migration of Wichita groups from eastern Oklahoma into north central Texas and the arrival of Cherokee, Choctaw, Alabama, and Coushatta groups in East Texas.

Smith’s concluding chapter and epilogue details the changes that came with the American conquest of the Gulf South and Texas. His discussion of warfare, Indian removal, and African slavery between 1821 and 1845 provides an understanding of the imposition of a “strict biracial system” (257) with which we are familiar.