The Far-West has a history that movies have not told and that was starred by Spain. Long before other Europeans, Spaniards faced Apaches, Comanches and many more Indian tribes. They also created a defensive network based on a line of forts (the presidios) and a unique cavalry (the cuera dragoons) that supported the colonization and articulated the defence of the northern border of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
A strategic objective justified to defend this border so stubbornly: to protect the silver mines of New Spain, the most valuable resource of the Spanish empire in America, from incursions of natives and other European powers.
Many cities in the southwestern United States had their origins in Spanish presidios and retain their Hispanic names. This is the case of San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Tucson, Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio or Laredo. But to vindicate our history, we must first know it…
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| Cuera dragoons patrol (18th century) |
- An extended version of this article, entitled Presidios y dragones de cuera, was published on May, 2020, in Revista Ejército (Army Magazine), nº949. The full issue can be downloaded through this link
- Other related posts in this blog: The Ballad of Anza, Bernardo de Gálvez. Pensacola 1781, The Spanish Far-West, The Hispanic Roots of the United States (for readers with little time) and Index of posts about History
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| The Alamo was first a mission and then a Spanish barracks, before reaching fame for the battle that took place there in 1836. |
In 1521, Hernán Cortés conquered Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, but not all of today's Mexico. The occupation and colonization of the rest of the country, and the other territories that constituted the viceroyalty of New Spain, was a process that developed very unequally according to the areas. In the north it lasted the three centuries of the Spanish presence in that part of the world.
One of the pillars of the Hispanic advancement was the presidio. According to the RAE (Spanish Royal Academy) dictionary, the word presidio comes from the Latin praesidium which meant 'military garrison', 'protection', 'help'. Of the various presidio meanings, the one it applied in America was not that of 'prison establishment' but that of 'city or fortress that could be garrisoned with soldiers'.
The first presidios, whose garrisons were called presidial troops, were built in New Spain during the so-called Chichimeca War. This long and cruel guerrilla war originated after discovering silver mines in the Zacatecas area, north of Mexico City, and lasted for much of the second half of the 16th century. In it, the Spaniards faced several tribes they called barbarians for lacking cities and complex social and political structures, being nomads or semi-nomads, practicing looting and rejecting any attempt at civilization.
These presidios were built as tiny castles. They had very small garrisons, of just half a dozen cavalry soldiers who lived there with their families. There also used to be some Indians who worked as auxiliaries. The most characteristic element of the presidial soldiers was always the cuera, a long vest made with several layers of tanned leather that protected them from the arrows and white weapons. The cueras were an evolution of the conquerors’ armors, poorly adapted to the semi-desert north of Mexico.
The presidial forces provided escort to caravans, mule trains and travelers. They could persecute and fight small parties of hostile Indians but lacked the necessary military capacity to win the war.
When the Chichimeca conflict finally ended - more as a result of purchase of wills and missionary effort than by a military victory - the Spanish colonization continued advancing north. In 1598, an expedition led by Juan de Oñate, called 'the last conqueror', reached the current New Mexico where the city of Santa Fe was founded a few years later. With this expedition, horses, mostrencas cows (ancestors of the long horn), sheep, pigs, agriculture, irrigation systems, religion and Spanish culture entered the southwest of what are now the States United.
During the seventeenth century, insurrections of different native groups were frequent in New Spain. The most serious uprising was that of the Pueblo Indians in 1680, known as the Great Northern Revolt. It was a crisis without precedent for the Spanish presence in the north of the viceroyalty. It caused the expulsion from New Mexico of Spaniards and allied Indians and spread the revolt to other areas, although with much less catastrophic results.
By 1693 the lost territory had already been recovered. The Spaniards reduced the pressure on the Pueblo Indians, the coexistence improved, and they faced together a common enemy that frequently harassed them, a series of indigenous groups known as the Apaches.
However, the presidio system suffered from multiple administrative and military problems, largely derived from the sale of public office that had occurred by the end of the 17th century. Some provincial governors bought the position to use it for their own benefit. This affected the presidios since the captains served the interests of the governor or their own, rather than ensuring the security of the border. The system should be improved.
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| Cuera dragoon (by courtesy of Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau) |
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Equipment of a cuera dragoon. The most characteristic element was the cuera, a long vest made withseveral layers of leather that protected from arrows and white weapons. In addition, according to the regulations of 1772, each dragoon should have six horses, a foal and a mule. |
In the north of the viceroyalty, new presidios were built, but now with the target of protecting nearby missions, towns, farms and mines. It went from the linear strategy of communication routes protection, applied during the Chichimeca war, to a strategy of action in areas of influence. They also increased size and garrison of dragoons (soldiers equipped to do the service alternately on horseback or on foot) to be able to carry out their task in very large, sparsely populated and almost always unsafe areas, mainly due to raids by different barbarian tribes.
The hardness of his mission made it necessary for each dragon to have several horses and a mule. This compelled the presidios to maintain a large herd that usually had to graze outside the presidio grounds, requiring a good number of men for the surveillance. Even so, they were frequently stolen by Indian marauders.
Many of the presidial soldiers were not peninsular or Creole. They were often born on the border itself and belonged to the various castes in which the society of the time structured. The presidios used to be multiracial enclaves in which, among the soldiers and their families, there were whites, mestizos,coyotes (son of Indian and mestizo, that is 75% of Indian blood), Indians, mulattos, blacks….
The occupation of South Texas took place in the second decade of the 18th century to counteract the arrival of the French, who were expanding from Canada to the south following the course of the Mississippi River. In 1720, a small expedition commanded by Pedro de Villasur was sent from Santa Fe to the northeast to investigate and assess the French presence. They reached Nebraska, in the geographic centre of the United States, where they were massacred by the Pawnee Indians, equipped with firearms supplied by Gallic merchants. The necessary occupation of Texas extended the territories under nominal Spanish sovereignty and also the size of an already huge and diffuse border.
One of the works carried out in order to improve the presidial system was the long inspection trip of Brigadier Pedro de Rivera through the presidios of northern New Spain. It resulted in the promulgation by the viceroy Marquis of Casa Fuerte of the presidial regulation of 1729.
The regulation, written in a time of relative peace, tried to put order in many aspects of the operation of the presidios, but the reduction of costs of the presidial system prevailed. The total strength of only 1006 men distributed in 23 posts was reduced to 734 men and 19 posts.
At the beginning of the 18th century, a new tribe, the Comanches, had appeared on the great plains. They were warriors, hunters and nomadic shepherds and soon became the dominant group in those regions thanks to their rapid and effective adoption of the horse. In the open field they were militarily superior to their competitors in the hunt for the cybolo (buffalo), the Apaches, to which they pushed south and southwest.
Not many years after the publication of the presidio regulation, by the middle of the 18th century, Apaches, and Comanches also, intensified their frequent and often massive raiding incursions into Spanish territories. Large areas of northern New Spain suffered a permanent state of guerrilla warfare that would ravage those territories for many years.
Apaches, like the Chichimecas once, lacked the concept of a nation,their trade and agriculture were very limited, they didn't raise horses, but they learned to use and steal them very soon. They were warriors and hunters and needed raiding to survive. Raids in revenge for the losses suffered were also part of their customs. They were hated by the Indian tribes with whom they had contact, and resisted to the sedentarization process, that Spaniards promoted to try to end that way of life. In addition, they usually respected only for a short time, the fragile peace agreements that the leaders of each band signed occasionally and individually with the Spanish authorities.
An attempt by Apaches to approach to the Spaniards, motivated only by their need for help against their Comanche enemies, took place in Texas. The mission of San Sabá was founded, specifically for the Apaches. Despite the protection it should receive from a presidio located a few kilometres away, a large party of Comanches, Taowayas and other tribes razed the mission in 1758, a few months after its foundation, ending with the project.
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| Some Spanish presidios in the south of the present-day United States and northern Mexico |
The fate of that remote border was linked to what was happening in other parts of the world. In 1763, the peace of Paris was signed that put an end to the Seven Years' War, a kind of first world war in which almost all European countries took part and fought in many sites of the planet. The borders of the Viceroyalty of New Spain changed. They lost East and West Florida, which remained in the hands of the United Kingdom and, by way of compensation, France ceded Louisiana.
Due to the bad result of the war, the Spanish monarch Carlos III decided that it was time to put order in his armies and in the empire, beginning a period of great Bourbon reforms. In 1765, he sent to New Spain as visitador (visitor), a kind of plenipotentiary inspector, to the jurist and enlightened politician José de Gálvez, who will remain in the viceroyalty until 1772.
Gálvez promoted numerous actions and reforms, which would continue after being appointed in 1776 Secretary of State of the Universal Office of the Indies (Minister of the Indies).
One of these actions was the occupation of Alta California, initiated in 1769 and motivated by the need to anticipate the threat that English and Russian began to pose. This could endanger the important commercial line of the Manila Galleon, which came every year from the Philippines and sailed along those coasts to Acapulco.
Another outstanding action was a new inspection trip to the presidios of the north of the viceroyalty. It was carried out by the Marquis de Rubí between 1766 and 1768 and resulted in a new regulation of presidios, put into effect by Viceroy Bucareli in 1772. Many organizational and operational problems were addressed, some of which the regulation of 1729 had already tried to solve with little success. The most important point was to define a line of 15 presidios, separated each other about 160 km and located more or less on the current border between the United States and Mexico. Outside of that line were the presidios of Santa Fe (New Mexico) and San Antonio (Texas). Others, such as Los Adaes (Texas), were removed and some detachments were also established to serve as liaisons with the farthest presidios.
The task of managing the relocation of the presidios and implementing the regulation was entrusted to Hugo O'Conor, a Spanish naturalized Irish military, former governor of the province of Texas, who was appointed General Inspector of Presidios of the Internal Provinces of Northern New Spain. He did an arduous job, improved coordination between presidios and achieved some successes against the Apaches, but the violence continued.
In 1777, being already Minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez promoted the creation of the General Command of the Internal Provinces. The northern provinces began to have a differentiated status from the rest of the viceroyalty, so that a General Commander could quickly decide and coordinate all military actions for defending these punished provinces.
The tasks entrusted to all these units were many: to patrol the adjacent land until linking with the patrols of the next presidios of the line, to carry out escorts, to pursue marauders, to participate in campaigns with other units, to take care of the horses herd, to protect the own presidio, to visit the peaceful Indians located in the vicinity... In order to carry them out effectively, it was necessary to increase quite a lot the number of troops specified by the regulations.
De Croix managed to put into service a force of about 900 garrison men, 900 in continuous patrol and 900 in campaign. In 1778 he created the so-called light troop, which replaced a part of the cuera soldiers of each presidio. The light troop did not carry cuera, shield, or spear and was supposed to be more suitable for combat on foot and in mountain areas. The state of war in the Internal Provinces continued, but the new organization would soon begin to bear fruit. For the services rendered, when Croix ceased in 1783 in his position as General Commander, he was appointed viceroy of Peru.
In the meanwhile, Spain helped American revolutionaries effectively, by contributing significantly to the final British defeat in 1783 and recovering the Floridas. The main protagonist of this economic and military support was the governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, nephew of the Minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez.
Bernardo de Gálvez had fought against the Apaches in Sonora when he had the rank of captain. Between 1770 and 1771 he had leadered four campaigns and was injured during an attack by these Indians in the city of Chihuahua, saving his life thanks to the use of the cuera. In 1785 he was appointed viceroy of New Spain and, although he died after only one and a half years in office, he had time to write a document known as Instruction of 1786. In it, making use of his extensive personal experience in Sonora and Louisiana, he established the strategy to follow in the Internal Provinces, especially against the Apaches, considered the most dangerous and irreducible enemies.
The main points of the extensive and widely accepted instruction of 1786 were summed up in the phrase of Gálvez himself "better a bad peace than a good war" and were concretized in:
- To maintain military pressure on the Indians, to the extent of exterminating Apaches if necessary.
- Sustained confidence in building alliances (the defeat of the gentiles consists in persuading them to destroy between themselves).
- Indians who wanted peace should become dependent on the Spaniards through gifts and commerce (gifts were cheaper than war and more effective than useless troop increases).
The implementation of the 1772 regulation of presidios by Hugo O'Conor, the defensive network set up by Teodoro de Croix, the application of Bernardo de Gálvez's Instruction of 1786, the peace treaties with Comanches achieved by Anza and Cabello, and successive designations of competent General Commanders, gave a gradual turnaround to the situation of the Internal Provinces.
By the mid-1790s, and despite some uprising like that of Mescalero Apaches in 1795, many Apache bands had been pacified and were installed in the vicinity of presidios, where they received rations and protection from the Spaniards (a precursor to the Indian reserves implanted in the 19th century by the United States). Peace was relative but infractions, both of Indians and Spaniards, were considered individual actions, which did not justify resuming war.
The troops of the presidial companies, plus those of the flying companies and those of three companies of Indian friends (two of opatas and one of pimas), stabilized around 3000 men. To this figure we must add the militias, smaller in number and of a very variable military value according to the units. Therefore, it can be said that 3000 soldiers defended 3000 km of border.
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| The line of presidios according to the regulations of 1772 (Map: M. Alonso Baquer. Illustration: Juan de Aragón) |
At the beginning of the 19th century, this border changed again, first when Spain gave Louisiana back to France and then when Napoleon sold it to the United States. This gave rise to new border problems, now between Spain and the young and expansionist United States.
Peace with Indians was kept in most of the Internal Provinces until the independence of Mexico, in 1821. In Texas, it was only until 1810, when Mexican revolutionary movements and American interference ravaged the province, leaving free way for Apaches and Comanches to resume their raids.
Original Spanish text: F. Moreno del Collado ©
Reviewed by: A. Vílchez, J. Serrano, M. Arranz, M. Rispa
Translated on February 25th, 2020
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