A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795–1799 by Mark Santiago (review)

The borderlands history of the Spanish empire in the present-day southwestern United States has been the focus of significant scholarly works over the past several decades. Mark Santiago’s book, A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795–1799, marks another significant contribution to that historiography. The specific focus of this work is the so-called Apache Uprising, a conflict between Mescalero Apache warriors and Spanish forces in the “Interior Provinces,” a swath of Spanish settlements that dotted the Rio Grande Valley from the Gulf Coast into present-day New Mexico. Santiago’s work engages with the complex nature of Spanish-Apache relations and frames it within a broader context of Spain’s efforts to maintain its North American empire amidst conflicts with France, Great Britain, and the emerging United States.

A Bad Peace and a Good War challenges previous historians who contend that the Spanish settlements on the frontier experienced a time of relative peace from the 1790s through the early 1800s. To the contrary, Santiago describes the complex balance of war and peace that defined Spanish-Indian relations after the American Revolution. Believing that a “bad peace was better than a good war,” Spain worked to cultivate trade relationships and foster Indian dependency on Spanish goods and accepted low levels of Indian raids against Spanish settlements as preferable to a full-blown Indian war (p. 65). At the same time, however, Spain sought to reassert its control over the Interior Provinces and use them as buffer to protect New Spain from potential invasions by Great Britain and the United States. Frontier violence rose steadily as drought and disease contributed to an increase of violence between the Apache and neighboring Comanches. Throughout the mid-to-late 1780s, Spain’s bifurcated strategy to re-institute peace—forcing Natives to settle on pseudo-reservations or face violent and unrelenting warfare—was unsuccessful.

When that violence drove desperate Apache warriors to launch a serious of destructive attacks on Spanish settlements in the 1790s, “Spain unleashed all the power and subtleties available to a modern nation-state against a tribal society,” resulting in a coordinated, violent, and ultimately successful campaign to pacify the Mescalero (p. 188). Santiago notes that the commanding general of the Interior Provinces, Pedro de Nava, implemented a strategy of total war that achieved peace after four years of protracted campaigns against the Mescalero holdouts. Nava launched coordinated attacks deep into Mescalero territory during the late fall and early winter to disrupt their yearly buffalo hunts. He manipulated complex internal political structures and historical rivalries by fostering dissension among the Mescalero, dividing the Mescalero from other Apache bands, and exploited the Comanches’ long-time enmity against the Apache by forming a strategic alliance with them. Above all, Nava refused to exchange prisoners captured during the conflict. To devastate Apache morale and weaken their ability to resist, Spain designated Apache men, women, and children who were taken during the conflict as prisoners of war and deported them to Cuba. Over the course of the conflict, Nava’s use of maximum pressure left the Mescalero no choice but to accept Spanish terms and restore peace to the Interior Provinces.

The trite maxim that “all history is local” notwithstanding, the broader historical context of this work reveals that suppressing the Mescalero Uprising was an integral part of Spain’s efforts to maintain its standing among other European colonial powers, specifically France and Great Britain. While Santiago correctly sees the United States as the primary threat to New Spain after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, more time could be spent investigating the fraught nature of U.S.–Spanish relations from the 1780s through the 1790s beyond Spain’s paranoia about an American invasion of New Orleans. After the Revolutionary War ended, Spain cultivated a secret agent among the...