Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 by Natale Zappia (review)

In Traders and Raiders, Natale Zappia examines the broad political, cultural, and economic changes that shaped indigenous societies in modern Arizona, California, northern Sonora, and southern Nevada prior to widespread American settlement in the mid-nineteenth century. Zappia reimagines the Southwest borderland as an “interior world” controlled by indigenous communities, rather than a colonial periphery solely defined by European agency (5). His book is an ambitious project that analyzes over three centuries of historical change and over two dozen indigenous groups using evidence from the colonial archive, oral traditions, and archaeological remains.

This book contributes to a growing body of scholarship in early American and Native American history that reimagines North America as an indigenous space. In his introduction, Zappia asks, “How does our story change when the powerful ecological, political-economic shock-waves of the Atlantic World become absorbed into the densely packed web of alliances, trading networks, commodities, and busy waterways of an unbroken, population chain of Indian states, polities, and even empires?” (5). Zappia argues that our understanding of the Southwest shifts when we view the Colorado River as the “geographical, historical, and cultural anchor” of the region and Spanish intrusions as “tiny dots in an expansive network of Indian trails, trading centers, and territories” (6). Zappia situates his book within a historiography of North American borderlands that include scholars such as Juliana Barr, Kathleen DuVal, and Pekka Hamalainen, among others. The book also intervenes in the historiography on the Southwest borderland and California. Zappia lends new insight by imagining the “interior” as an indigenous space in its own right and not as a frontier of the Spanish Empire. His analysis of colonial California does not exclusively focus on mission sites established along the coast but rather the political and economic relationships between coastal Natives and communities living in the interior.

Chapter 1 illustrates that, prior to European colonization, the “interior world” was a dynamic space characterized by migrations, technological innovation, economic connectedness, and warfare. Zappia traces how the trade of pook, beads crafted from shells gathered along the California coast, bound together an indigenous group ranging from the Pacific Coast to the Colorado River. Chapter 2 investigates how Spanish colonialism changed indigenous economies as it uprooted indigenous peoples from their homelands, generated conflict between communities, and established the demand for captive labor. Missions offered potential economic security but were often raided for captives by equestrian groups who would sell the captives on the growing market for slaves. Uprisings at missions occurred frequently in the interior, culminating with the 1781 Quechan expulsion of the Spanish on the Colorado River.

In chapters 3 and 4 Zappia analyzes the transformations to indigenous economies during the late Spanish and early Mexican period, when few colonial expeditions invaded the Colorado River Basin. The Spanish Empire created a duel market for labor and livestock for their mines and missions in Sonora. Indigenous communities mobilized extensive social networks in order to defend claims to land along the Colorado River from raiders. Mission sites in California became peripheral to the continental interior as mobile raiders from the Colorado River targeted them for captives and livestock. Native captives were becoming an “exploitable commodity” on a wider scale as slaves were sold to Mexican ranchos in California and elsewhere. Chapter 4 shows that Natives found uses for the Old Spanish Trail as it inadvertently facilitated indigenous captive and cattle-raiding networks that connected California with New Mexico.

Chapters 5 and 6 describe how indigenous raiding economies waned across the continental interior in the 1850s as the American settler state emerged as the hegemonic power. Native autonomy suffered as white settlers and miners established new territorial regimes that confined indigenous peoples to reservations. Warfare between indigenous groups and the United States concluded in the 1850s, when the United States established Fort Mohave on the Colorado River in 1859. Older raiding economies declined in this period as indigenous groups were...