Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives

Part One

1600–1880

STEPHANIE COLE

In 1690, an expedition of Spanish soldiers and Franciscan missionaries crossed the Rio Grande for the first time, intent on establishing a settlement. Over the course of the next three centuries in the territory that would eventually become known as Texas, thousands followed them, sometimes on military quests to subdue the territory or plunder its assets but increasingly often to settle. The shifts in governing authority that accompanied these migrations, along with economic development and an unsettled social order, occasionally brought women in Texas a measure of autonomy uncommon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But such opportunities were unevenly distributed and declined over time. Once Anglo-American control supplanted Mexican hegemony and most Indians were pushed out or killed, signs of women’s independence were harder to find, even for those of wealth and privilege. Frontier conditions prompted the exploitation of all women’s labor and especially that of enslaved women. Whereas once women in Texas enjoyed a measure of independence, by the late antebellum period, most lived lives as circumscribed as those of other southern women, and the Civil War and emancipation did little to change that. Some women continued to play important economic roles throughout the nineteenth century, but their influence in the public sphere narrowed.

Women who lived in Texas during the initial years of Spanish colonization enjoyed perhaps higher status than at any later period. Between 1690 and 1780, Spain’s footprint in Texas was light, both because of its own hedged commitment—other parts of the empire commanded more resources than did its northernmost province—and as a consequence of the powerful and persistent resistance of the native inhabitants. As one governor put it in the late 1770s, in an immense desert country, there were only San Antonio, a villa without order, and two presidios, seven missions and an errant population of scarcely 4,000 of both sexes. Indians were far more numerous, including Caddos in the eastern part of the territory, Apaches in the western half, and newly arrived Comanches and Wichitas in the north. Though no native group in Texas offered women a political voice, native military dominance meant that Indian women who did not live in missions had more freedom of movement than did women in Spanish settlements and were recognized for both economic and diplomatic contributions. For women within the confines of San Antonio, however, the Spanish legal code, Las Sieta Partidas, offered significant protection. Unlike their English counterparts, courts in New Spain guarded free women’s property rights and helped enslaved women purchase their freedom.

The multiple shifts in political and military power that marked the region between 1820 and 1865 were seldom good for women regardless of race or status, though a few found maneuvering room in the frequent periods of uncertainty. In the 1820s, having recognized the shortcomings of the mission system for securing control of the region and fearing American encroachment, the Spanish contracted with several empresarios to organize settlers from the United States and Europe. These settlers found themselves with a new government after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, and their numbers grew steadily, reaching 21,000 by 1834. After Texans had their own revolution and created the Republic of Texas in 1836, the number of American residents increased to 30,000 Anglos and 5,000 slaves. Annexation to the United States in 1845 brought a veritable onslaught of settlers, and the white population reached 102,000, with an additional 38,000 slaves by 1847. Not surprisingly, men dominated among those who came by choice, as the appeal of new economic opportunities or of the escape from a bad marriage were often irresistible. The resulting shortage of women offered less advantage than we might assume, however, as women needed men to survive, and abandonment and abuse were a fact of many women’s lives. Still, both the republic and state constitutions retained much of the Spanish civil law that governed property rights. In South Texas, women played an important role in bridging the divide between Mexican and Anglo cultures. As the ranching economy expanded there, so, too, did women’s influence.

For African American women, these shifts in power were less positive. Though southern migrants to Texas had initially promised the Mexican government that they would convert to Catholicism and obey Mexican laws restricting slavery, they repudiated such promises in favor of pursuing cotton profits. As early as 1820, enslaved women—including Tivi, a runaway who believed that crossing the Sabine River into Spanish Texas rendered her free—eventually secured freedom by escaping into Mexico. But the vast majority of enslaved women could not run away and thus found themselves the reproductive building blocks of a cotton empire. For this group, statehood—and its corollary, increased migration—only made matters worse. When Texas seceded in 1861, one-third of Texans were enslaved, half of them women.

The economic expansion financed by enslaved women’s labor benefited women in slaveholding families, though not as much as slaveholding men. Antebellum Texas law mirrored that of other southern states, with only vestiges of Spanish property rights remaining in the protection of wives’ claim to community property. Wealthy white women may have experienced less abandonment and more comfort, but their lives were something of a gilded cage. A strict patriarchal social order dictated marriage, children, and a decorative life that gave witness to elite men’s honor and virility. Extraordinary wealth and a secure social position meant that Sallie McNeill, granddaughter of Levi Jordan, one of the largest slaveholders in the state, could circumvent part but not all of that equation. Still, elite privilege and white supremacy benefited slaveholding women, and thus most women upheld the gender roles that underwrote class and racial hierarchies. Although secession led directly to a long and costly war, they did not repudiate Texas’s decision to leave the Union, perhaps because they acknowledged that the reason given publicly—defense of the institution of slavery—served them as well. In any event, white women in antebellum Texas seldom denied men’s right to make such decisions. Harriet Perry, whose husband joined the Confederate Army in 1862, sought to leave decisions in his hands even as his absence and the necessities of war forced her to expand her sphere of action. She was not alone, as perhaps half of Texas men of military age served in either the Confederate Army or state militia troops, and the war made widows by the thousands.

When the reality of Confederate defeat finally reached Texas in June 1865, enslaved women were freed, but they then confronted a sometimes indifferent, sometimes hostile government in charge of the process of establishing just what that meant. Women were excluded from the turbulent politics of the era, and disorder and lawlessness throughout the state further limited women’s public participation. Until 1875, Comanches controlled the western part of the state. But with the final defeat of Indians, women, especially in more settled parts of the state, once again became important economic actors. As capitalists, producers, and boosters in towns such as Waco, women both black and white sought to restore family fortunes as they worked to expand the local economy. In this capacity, they helped to promote the process of urbanization, which ultimately created yet another new role for women in Texas, one that for the first time brought with it a public voice.

Indian Women Who Carry Gallantry Still Further Than the Men

A Barometer of Power in Eighteenth-Century Texas

JULIANA BARR

In the August heat of 1749, a solemn procession of visiting dignitaries entered the town of San Antonio de Béxar. For the Spaniards waiting to greet them, few visitors could come close to capturing the power and fear associated with this group. The dignitaries came as representatives of multiple Lipan Apache nations, long a source of Spanish intimidation and dread in response to the raids they had launched against the small villa (town). They had harassed the province with injuries, ravages, incursions, and attacks, bemoaned one Spaniard, so that no one dared to leave his house without evident danger of losing his life. Indeed, the Apaches had signaled their approach with agreed-upon smoke signals, ostensibly so that the presidial (military) and state officers awaiting them could arrange the proper rituals with which to receive them. More likely, the signals gave fair warning of their coming to assuage Spanish misgivings and assure a peaceful reception. For Clemencia, an Apache woman held captive within the walls of Mission San Antonio de Valero, the columns of smoke must have elicited both hope and apprehension. Her fate hinged on the outcome of the meetings. The Apache delegation might agree to treaty negotiations, bringing peace to their two peoples for the first time, and through their efforts she might regain her freedom and return to her family. Hearts beat equally fast in the chests of the arriving Apaches. They did not come simply for diplomacy but also to retrieve wives, sisters, sons, and daughters who, like Clemencia, had been captured by Spanish soldiers. San Antonio did not represent simply the base of their former enemies; it was the prison of lost loved ones.¹

APACHE WOMAN AND CHILD ON MULEBACK IN CENTRAL TEXAS

Painting by Friedrich Richard Petri, ca. 1850.

Petri (Friedrich Richard) Collection, di_04091.

Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American

History, University of Texas at Austin.

One might imagine that this diplomatic entourage was made up entirely of men—who else would Apaches send into the enemy camp to hammer out a military truce? However, such an assumption would be wrong. Indeed, neither Apaches nor Spaniards would have reached this moment if not for the labors and the suffering of Apache women. Over the preceding three decades, streams of Apache women, primarily those captured by Spanish forces, had beaten paths between the Spanish town and Apache villages as emissaries of peace. The stream was made up of either captive women sent home by Spanish officials with diplomatic overtures or free women chosen by Apache leaders to carry similar messages to their Spanish foes. That it had taken thirty years to reach this moment spoke volumes about the enmity between the two peoples. That women stood at the fore of such negotiations tells much about both customary Native diplomacy in the region and the state of relations with Spaniards. Apache men alone could not approach this town—hostile intent would be assumed, and Spaniards would take them to be a war party.

Over the five days that followed the Apache dignitaries’ arrival, Spanish and Apache women and men came together for meetings, ceremonies, and ultimately celebration. The men—warriors, soldiers, missionaries, citizens, chiefs, and officials—ratified the treaty in the town plaza by ritually burying past weapons of war. Spanish women provided a feast of beef, corn, squashes, and fruit, and Apache women, many newly freed from captivity, joined their families (and those of the Spaniards) in the entertainments that followed. More important, Apache women emerged as the centerpiece of Apache and Spanish pledges of alliance. Spaniards initially freed only the most recently captured female prisoners; others had been sold away to distant towns, and months would pass before Spanish officials’ orders could bring about their return, if it could be achieved at all. Meanwhile, Apache leaders brokered marriages for some of the former and current captives, some of whom were the leaders’ daughters and sisters, seeking spouses for them from among San Antonio residents. With these ties, peace would be assured, for these maidens represented the Apaches’ commitment to a long-lasting peace. The Apache men sought the unions as a means of creating kinship ties and a measure of identity and security for the Apache women still in Spanish settlements.²

These gestures represented an unusual amelioration of Apache-Spanish captive diplomacy, since many of the young women chosen for these political unions had for years been held hostage in the San Antonio missions. In that time, they had been baptized and so by Spanish custom could not be returned to live in what the Spaniards would view as apostasy, given their assumption that Indian converts who lived outside a Christian community would renounce the faith. Combined with the Spaniards’ refusal or inability to return captives who had been enslaved, deported, or sold long distances away, the Apache men’s efforts likely reflected their worry that the women might never be freed to return to them; thus, their futures had to be secured by other means. Mission records confirm twenty-three baptisms and at least ten marriages of Apache women to Indian residents at Mission San Antonio de Valero (now known as the Alamo) between 1749 and 1753. Adding even greater import to the marriages, one of the girls was the niece of Apache chief Boca Comida.³

On the other side of the equation, Indian officials and families in the missions invested the unions with great political significance. Thus, Clemencia (her baptismal name) married Roque de los Santos, a Xarame Indian who served as governor of Mission Valero for nine years, and another woman, Barbara, married the grandson of Xarame Miguel de Aldana and his Payaya wife, Marzela, one of the first families of San Antonio de Valero whose members had long held governing positions as fiscals (officials in charge of maintaining mission lands). Yet another woman, Angela, married Melchor Medina, the son of a Valero alcalde (magistrate). Rosa María became the wife of Joseph Miguel Puente, the founder of the leading Papanac family at the mission. Years later, the children of such unions, including María de la Candelaria, María Dolores Cuevas, Feliciana de Villegas, María de los Dolores, and María de Silva, continued their mothers’ legacy by integrating Apaches into Valero’s leading Indian families through marriage. During this period, Franciscan missionary Mariano de los Dolores y Viana reported that he baptized and married several Apache women to Native men of the Valero pueblo, while other mission residents had traveled to the Apache encampments outside of town and returned happy with the results of their visits and perhaps the courtships they had pursued while there. He concluded that Apache headmen demonstrated their stability and firmness, significant of the union they desire in having agreed that some Indian women marry those of Mission San Antonio [de Valero]. The marriages of Apache women thereby solidified Spanish and Apache male leaders’ political investments in the alliance.⁴

The emancipation of Apache women captives or their marriages to San Antonio residents signaled the beginning of Apache-Spanish ties in and around San Antonio de Béxar. With the permission of Apache leaders, Spaniards also later built small settlements, the San Sabá and El Cañón mission-presidio complexes, in the heart of Apachería (the Apache nation and its lands) to broaden and strengthen these bonds. Yet these treaty efforts did not pave the way for peace in the region. Watching from a distance, Comanches, Wichitas, and their allies (known collectively to the Spaniards as Norteños [Nations of the North]) saw the pact as a potential threat to their own expanding power in the borderlands. Their escalating raids against Spaniards and Apaches plunged both into a new era of unbridled fear and hostility. Spanish and Apache efforts to contain Norteño wrath kept women at the forefront of the military struggles. Indeed, the contrasting statuses and experiences of Spanish, Apache, Comanche, and Wichita women tell us a good deal about power relations in the eighteenth-century borderlands. Just as Apache women such as Clemencia had borne many of the burdens of the 1749 Apache-Spanish treaty agreement, the costs of the failure of that peace and the ensuing two decades of warfare fell disproportionately on the backs of the women involved.⁵

This essay explains the significance of women in these intercultural power relations by retelling the dramatic events that quickly unfolded as a result of the Spanish-Apache alliance, most prominently the 1758 Norteño annihilation of the San Sabá Mission. That story, however, must be told from three different perspectives—those of the Spaniards, the Apaches, and the Norteños—to see fully how the Spanish mission-presidio complex in Apachería became not only a lightning rod for Norteño fury but also a divining rod for the shifting fates of Indian women for the remainder of the century. Political and military sovereignty in eighteenth-century Texas determined who lived in fear and who did not. Thus, when Comanche, Wichita, Spanish, and Apache men expressed fears for their women in the midst of these imperial struggles, those expressions served as a medium of communication, an inspiration for alliance, a call to arms, and a gauge of power (or powerlessness). Apache, Wichita, and Comanche women often acted as the go-betweens and diplomatic agents as those struggles were negotiated. Put simply, women marked the lines of dominion among Spanish and Indian nations in Texas.

Understanding the San Sabá episode is not possible, however, without a basic understanding of the position of Texas Spaniards in the borderlands at midcentury. The Spaniards’ standing in the region was a far cry from what they hoped it to be: that of representatives of the wealthiest and most expansive European empire in the Americas. That expansion had stopped cold in this region of North America where Native peoples could be neither conquered nor subordinated. In fact, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the Spaniards’ presence was so insubstantial that they had gone largely unnoticed by Comanches, Wichitas, and many other Indian nations. That changed when the Spaniards united with the Lipan Apaches.

The only part of the region in which Spaniards could legitimately claim to exercise control (though their territorial ambitions certainly looked beyond these boundaries) consisted of the south-central areas of San Antonio de Béxar and La Bahía. There, Coahuilteco- and Karankawa-speakers had allowed Spaniards to establish small fortified settlements focused on mission-presidio complexes where both Spanish and Indian families united in defense against raids executed first by Apaches and later by Comanches and Wichitas. To the east, where Los Adaes had been established, the Spanish government maintained a presidio and missions at the sufferance of Caddos, whose lands surrounded the tiny pocket occupied by Spaniards. Beyond these three towns and their immediate environs, the region’s Indian populace had no reason to identify the remainder (and majority) of present-day Texas as anything but Apachería, Comanchería, Wichita, and Caddo territory. In turn, as long as the dominant Caddo, Wichita, and Comanche nations could rely on French markets in Louisiana to supply guns, ammunition, and material goods in exchange for horses and hides, they had little need to pay attention to Spaniards—except, that is, for targeting the horse herds that aided hunting, defense, and market exchanges with Frenchmen. The power of these Indian nations ensured that Spaniards never broadened their reach beyond South Texas. The one time they attempted it, their efforts resulted in the 1758 debacle at San Sabá. The denouement made clear that Indians were not living in a Spanish borderland; rather, Spaniards were living along Indian borders that could be trespassed only at great peril.

Fear had defined the Spanish experience in Texas from the first attempts at settlement. Spaniards unknowingly established the missions and villa of San Antonio de Béxar on the border of the great nation of Apaches, who had extended their domain more than eight hundred miles from New Mexico to the land of the Tejas (Caddo Indians) and north to the southern Plains. In 1721, Apache warriors immediately issued a warning against the Spanish encroachment by planting arrow shafts with red cloths flying from their tops in a line along the presidio (fort) walls. For the next thirty years, Spaniards knew Lipan Apaches only as enemies who used Spanish settlements and ranches in south-central Texas as supply depots for horses. Throughout the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s, as Apaches mounted raids on San Antonio, fear and frustration escalated among Spanish settlers, soldiers, and officials. The inability of presidial forces to stop the warriors’ attacks transformed horse raids into what many Spaniards believed to be signs of a supposed war of extermination against them. Thus, the Apache strategists who took hundreds of horses became, in Spanish telling, enemies of humanity, terrorizing civilian populations of women and children. Through such constructions, Spaniards transformed their soldiers and officers into chivalrous defenders of civilization while reducing Apache warriors to barbarous savages preying on the most defenseless of innocents. Their rhetoric thereby used women to define both extremes of male honor.⁶

It was no coincidence that the Indian bands that posed the greatest threat to the authority Spaniards wished to extend to the region figured prominently in images of Indian warriors as savages so cruel they killed regardless of sex and age. The real danger of attack, however, remained distant from the arenas and activities of women and children. Apaches targeted horses, not women, and their raids focused on the herds on nearby ranches outside civilian settlements. Fray Benito Fernández de Santa Ana carefully noted that though enemy Apaches can travel through the land as they please, only the shepherd Indians in charge of the herds were endangered by the raids. In instances when Spanish officials had deaths to back up their rhetoric about the murder of women by hostile Apaches, those women were mission Indians rather than Spaniards. It seems likely that the location of the women’s labor—in agricultural fields outside of mission and villa walls—put them in the path of raiders and thus in the line of fire. Yet even these deaths remained few and far between. The burial records of Mission Valero, for example, indicate that out of 1,088 deaths recorded between 1718 and 1782, only 15 were at the hands of hostile Apache, Comanche, and Coco raiders—and Apaches clearly did not bear sole responsibility for such deaths.⁷

Nevertheless, from the Spanish perspective in the 1730s and 1740s, Apache depredations had to be stopped, and the Spaniards sought to do so by launching multiple campaigns against Apache rancherías (villages), taking numerous women and children captive. Fray Benito Fernández argued that the raids accomplished nothing except increasing Apache hatred and that it was ridiculous that soldiers and citizens who pledged their service to the king sought only their own gain through the capture of horses, hides, and Indian men and women to serve them. Such vile intentions would result in an equally vile outcome, he concluded. Fray Juan Domingo Arricivita agreed, arguing that the campaigns supposedly intended to bring a cessation of strife had instead enlivened the war, because in proportion as the Apache suffered harm, so did their hatred and the revenge they took increase. Even presidial commander Toribio de Urrutia admitted his trepidation, reporting to the viceroy that by 1740, no one traveled along the roads out of fear of Apaches; in addition to the sentinels stationed along the routes, he and his forces maintained constant vigilance at all hours of the night because no moon passes without [Apache] tracks being found near the presidio. If things continued in this way, he worried, all respect for the presidios and settlements would be lost.⁸

Having cast Apache men as beyond redemption, Spanish officials also removed Apache women from a category of womanhood meriting chivalric consideration as noncombatants. Spanish military policies—such as daybreak attacks on Apache family villages—regularly involved the indiscriminate killing of women, children, and the elderly. Thus, one finds opinions like that of military officer José Castillo y Terán, who believed that Apache women’s lives should not be spared because only by shedding their blood by means of firearms—pardoning only the children or those who voluntarily surrender—will [Apache] pride be punished. Apache warfare and raiding did not customarily involve women, but Spanish juntas de guerras (councils of war) argued that combat decisions had to take Apache women into consideration because even if perhaps they do not wage war in the same manner as the men, they do help with it. Spanish leaders contended that Apache women represented an equivalent to reserve corps. Even if women were present at battles only to hold horses while men fought or to swell Apache numbers and an appearance of force, Spaniards cast their duties in the same category as those of Apache warriors, thereby desexing them. Such constructions resulted in the belief that if Indian women were not women by Spanish standards, then perhaps their deaths at Spanish hands did not violate Spanish codes of male honor. If women’s lives were sometimes spared, it reflected the fact that their capture and enslavement could be used for political or economic profit.⁹

One can imagine the inversion of gendered standards of honor—an inversion bred of fear—that drove Spanish officials to manipulate captive Apache women in efforts to coerce the peace eked out in 1749. But how could the Spaniards persuade the powerful Apaches to maintain the peace? After the agreements forged at San Antonio de Béxar, missionaries next proposed to offer the Lipans missions to cement the alliance; religious conversion seemed a sure way to pacify the Apaches. And it soon looked like the Franciscans might realize that goal, as Apache families began to express interest in a mission in the 1750s, asking only that it be a mission-presidio complex and that it be built in their lands northwest of San Antonio. Many Spaniards doubted the Apaches’ commitment to Christianity, but the gamble seemed worthwhile. Spanish officials vested multiple hopes in this new establishment: that it might be the first in a series of mission-presidio complexes to neutralize Apaches across the northern provinces, that it might expand Spanish territorial boundaries, that it might open the way for discovery of mineral wealth believed to be in those northern regions, and that it might become a jumping-off point for an overland trade and communication route to Santa Fe, New Mexico.¹⁰

Eight years after the peace accord, then, Spaniards traveled into Apacheria for the first time in peace. They built the Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba, northwest of San Antonio in present-day Menard County, and planned two more missions along the San Saba River within Apache territorial borders. The Spaniards also built a presidio, San Luis de las Amarillas, with room enough for three to four hundred soldiers and their families. At the Franciscans’ request, the presidio was constructed across the river and three miles away from the mission so that soldiers could not harass Indian women. At the same time, the soldiers needed to be nearby, as the religious fathers believed that an authority of arms would be essential to maintaining warriors’ respect.¹¹

Spanish plans recognized women as just as essential as men to the success of this institution of alliance. Balancing the hope of military intimidation was the clear desire to attract Apache families to the missions. Full conversion would not succeed without them, and equally important, Franciscans believed that the presence of women and children guaranteed the Apache men’s peaceful intent. Thus, while one storeroom at the mission held saddles, horse bits, and horse blankets (the usual gifts for men), supply lists of blouses, skirts, earrings, necklaces, rings, and flannels made clear the Spanish desire to attract women into permanent residence. Spanish officials even set aside funds to have clothes made for the women by tradesmen in San Antonio. With care, Spanish officials sought to recognize hierarchies among Apache men and women, specifying certain blouses and skirts for head women, certain coats and trousers for chiefs, and rings for princes. Perhaps as a mutual gesture of trust (or bravado), Spanish forces brought their own families, filling the presidio with 237 women and children. The soldiers stationed as guards at the mission also brought their wives, as did three Tlaxcalteco Indians sent to help guide conversion efforts: Apache and Spanish families would live together within the mission walls.¹²

Despite the best-laid Spanish plans, no Apaches were to be seen as the complex went up during the spring of 1757. Fray Benito Varela was sent by superiors in search of the wayward Apaches, but he had no success in drawing them to the mission. By the summer and fall of that year, church and state officials increasingly lamented that the Apaches were proving themselves fickle and faithless. At no time did the Apaches take up residence, but family bands occasionally dropped by the mission during bison hunts. Because missionaries gave them food and horses as inducements to stay, the mission quickly came to function as a supply depot for the Apaches. What was not immediately apparent to the Spaniards was that the Apache parties were also heading north to engage in sorties against Comanches and Wichitas.¹³

Spanish officers and missionaries repeatedly chose to disregard hints of brewing trouble. Several small groups of Lipan warriors passed through in the fall of 1757, stopping only overnight at the mission before hurrying to the south. Over the winter, the Spaniards at San Sabá began to hear rumors that Norteños were massing to destroy the Apaches, but since no Apaches could be found at the mission-presidio complex, the Spaniards turned a deaf ear to suggestions that the complex might be a target. The growing number of Norteños in the region soon became undeniable, and at midnight on February 25, 1758, warriors later identified as Comanches and Wichitas stampeded the presidio horse herd and drove off sixty animals. Though commanding officers sent fourteen soldiers in pursuit, twelve days of tracking the raiding party brought no recovery of the animals or punishment for the raiders. Several days later, another squad sent to escort a supply train as it approached the complex came under attack by twenty-six warriors.¹⁴

Nevertheless, Spaniards could not anticipate the scale of force that was approaching. On March 16, a united band of two thousand Comanches, Wichitas, Caddos, Bidais, Tonkawas, Yojuanes, and others (twelve different Indian nations in all) surrounded the mission at dawn. As soldiers reported, the echoes of shouts, the nearby firing of guns, the puffs of powder smoke, and the pounding of horse hooves made clear the vast number of approaching Indians, until the country was covered with them as far as the eye could reach. During the attack, they pillaged mission stores and herds, burned mission buildings to the ground, and killed eight Spanish men, including two missionaries who would go down in record books as having been martyred in the cause of saving Apache souls. During the attack, Spaniards took pointed note of the fact that the attacking Indians rode Spanish horses and carried European arms and ammunition, which they could only assume represented the profits of raids on Spanish settlements in New Mexico and trade in the French markets of Louisiana.¹⁵

The appearance of this virtual army of Indians—unprecedented in both numbers and diversity—sent shock waves all the way down to Mexico City. It was one thing for leather-armored soldiers to fight Indians armed with bows and arrows; it was quite another to face a force armed with guns as good if not better than those of Spanish soldiers. Never before had one of the mission guards seen so many barbarians together, armed with guns and handling them so skillfully. Colonel Parrilla, the commander of Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas, summed up the military reaction: Spaniards in Texas were facing a fearful new Native challenge. The heathen of the north are innumerable and rich, he argued; "they enjoy the protection and commerce of the French; they dress well, breed horses, handle firearms with the greatest skill, and obtain ample supplies of meat from the animals they call cíbolos [bison]. From their intercourse with the French and with some of our people they have picked up a great deal of knowledge and understanding, and in these respects they are far superior to the Indians of other parts of these Kingdoms."¹⁶

The responses of intimidated soldiers and officers fixed on the fate of Spanish women, with cries that the Norteños intended to catch the Presidio off guard, capture it, and murder us all, including our wives and children. After the San Sabá attack, one soldier declared falsely, Our forces had endured much suffering and many deaths at the hands of the savage barbarians, who did not spare the lives of the religious, or those of the women and children. If wild hordes who were armed with European weapons and who wanted to kill all the Spaniards stood poised to descend and savagely slaughter women and children, the rumors were all the more ominous. The Norteños’ overwhelming victory at San Sabá, Parrilla warned the viceroy, will encourage the barbarians to still greater boldness and audacity, for they will consider themselves capable of scattering our settlements and blocking our troops from advancing. Such a force might well be capable of a hitherto unthinkable feat: the invasion and conquest of Spanish lands and the confounding of Spanish imperial power. It is also quite probable, Parrilla concluded miserably, that the Natives might undertake the occupation of more territory, thus doing great harm to our settlements. Alarm rapidly spread from San Sabá to San Antonio and from there to Coahuila, Nuevo León, and ultimately Mexico City. Spanish women and children everywhere were imperiled.¹⁷

At the San Sabá presidio, now on the front lines of the Spanish defense, soldiers demanded that the fort be moved southward, to safer (Spanish) territory, casting their fears in terms of concern for their wives and children. Deposition after deposition stressed that the soldiers were merely responding to the continual outcries of women and children and that the helpless condition of the women drove their pleas. The soldiers rationalized their unprecedented insubordination in demanding a retreat despite orders to hold their position at the presidio as praiseworthy service, not cowardice, because they merely sought to protect women and children who should not be reduced to bait for the cruel and bloodthirsty heathen. Their desperation became so great that Colonel Parrilla faced imminent mutiny and desertion, and he feared that men would run off while tending the horse herds outside presidial walls, leaving their women and families behind in their terror. Provincial and viceregal authorities stood firm, however, asserting that Spanish honor forbade the abandonment of San Sabá as ignominious and shameful. If Norteño insolence went unanswered, it would be natural that the offending Indians would assume that the fear among the Spaniards of another attack was what had occasioned the change and this very notion might encourage them to start it. Moreover, the Apaches could not be given the impression of Spanish fear or the inability of Spanish arms to protect their families lest the alliance fail. In the end, Spaniards commemorated the series of catastrophes in their records and history as the massacre at San Sabá. More important for the immediate future, they put rhetorical spin to very real fears of powerlessness and transformed the endangerment of Spanish women into a call to arms for Spanish men.¹⁸

It is difficult to know exactly how Lipan Apaches would have told the story of San Sabá, since they left no accounts. Hypotheses must be based on their actions, and Apache actions made clear that they, too, came to San Sabá out of fear for their families, children, and elderly.

Beginning in the 1720s, Apaches in Texas had begun to experience new pressures from expansive Comanche and Wichita bands that were moving steadily south into lands long held by the Apaches. The Apaches’ need for horses increased with these growing challenges to their territorial claims. As their safety and defensive capabilities became more and more tied to the ability to move quickly, a regular supply of horses became critical to their survival. In answer to this need, raids on the mission and presidial herds of Spanish settlements had offered a regular supply of horses for the thirty years prior to the 1749 Spanish truce. What Spaniards often viewed as wars of extermination in actuality represented the strategic decision by warriors to make San Antonio and Bahía gathering sites from which to acquire horses needed for hunting to feed women and children and for riding to battle to defend communities. Economic and geopolitical considerations, not bloodthirst, explained Apache men’s raiding.

At the same time, Apache women faced increasing dangers. As raiding and hunting parties became larger, women and children traveled with warriors, assisting men in maintaining camps, processing hides, and even making arrows. In turn, the presence of women in these parties put them in the line of fire when hostilities arose. In addition to a growing number of epidemics that swept through Lipan settlements, the capture of women and children by enemy Indian and Spanish groups, who preferred to sell them as slaves rather than return them to their families via negotiations, meant devastating demographic loss. Apache codes defined warfare as a male profession and the battlefield as a site of male activity—there was no place for women as victors or victims. Women might accompany raiding parties to supervise the removal of horses back to villages, for example, but they remained far from the sites of battle. Indeed, men put much thought and care into removing noncombatants to places of safety when they anticipated war, so much so that Spaniards learned to interpret the placement of women, children, and elderly in areas that lent themselves to safety and defense as a preparatory sign of hostility by Apache men. Governor Domingo Cabello wrote with assurance that the evidence that Lipan Apaches were planning the most terrible revenge for a Spanish attack that had killed men and women lay in the fact that they are thus moving all their women and children to the canyon of San Sabá preparatory to falling upon the aforementioned places.¹⁹

By the 1750s, Apache leaders decided to seek European arms, military aid, and safety for their women and children by a new means, leading to the official peace with Spaniards. The treaty not only ended hostilities but also, in the eyes of the Apaches, created a military alliance. With treaty in hand, the next step was to make the Spaniards act on the alliance. To that end, the Lipans requested a mission-presidio complex for their people, seeking to mollify Spanish demands for conversion and to gain the service of presidial soldiers whom the Apaches knew would be assigned to protect the mission. More difficult was the task of persuading Spaniards to build the complex in Apache territory, as their defensive needs required, but several years of lobbying in San Antonio by Apache men and women finally led to the erection of the San Sabá complex in the lands of the Apaches. Apache chiefs welcomed the news from Fray Mariano de los Dolores that the Spanish government had committed to provide them with a presidio with one hundred men, who would defend them against all their enemies. Spaniards chose to concentrate on the mission element of the complex, believing the presidio to represent merely enforcement of the pacification and conversion process. Apaches focused on the military aspect of the complex, viewing the presidio as a practical means of obtaining allies with guns against their Comanche and Wichita rivals.²⁰

By the time the complex had been completed in 1757, however, the Apaches had begun to doubt the structure’s promises of protection. An encounter not even registered by the Spaniards was a key element to Apache decision making. An Apache woman attempted to explain the situation to Fray Benito Varela when he came looking for the missing Apache flock. She told him that she had just escaped capture by a raiding party of Caddos and four apostate warriors from the San Antonio missions. She was a member of the family band of Apache chief Casa Blanca’s brother, and while they were camped on the Colorado River, the raiders had killed him, his wife, and their two children before taking two women and two children captive. She had later escaped, bringing with her one of the little girls, who had been wounded by a bullet.²¹

The woman refused to accompany Fray Varela to San Sabá, but other relatives traveled there in May 1757 to warn of the region’s growing perils. The family bands set up encampments near the mission, and in negotiations that followed, Apache leaders tried to explain why their visit would be only temporary. Two chiefs, Chico and Casa Blanca, alternately pledged their continued friendship and hedged on the arrival date of all their peoples. They struggled to settle on an explanation that would satisfy and avoid alienating the Spanish missionaries and officers. Casa Blanca expressed his rejection of settlement at the complex outright, angered by the recent death of his brother and the capture of his female relatives. He explained that with only seven hundred warriors to defend the two thousand women, children, and elderly under his protection, the one hundred soldiers at the San Sabá presidio were insufficient to dissuade him from moving his people south to mountains his enemies could not penetrate. Despite Spanish gifts of tobacco and three head of cattle to soothe his wrath and comfort his grief, the chief brusquely concluded that neither he nor his people would settle in a mission because that was not their choice. More important, the lives and liberty of all his followers came first. In addition, his people needed to leave immediately if his men were to join other Apaches in a war against the Norteños. Vengeance and the recovery of lost family members demanded this action.²²

Chief Chico tried to be more conciliatory, explaining his inability to settle at the mission as a consequence of his responsibilities to family and to his people—his inability to deny his people what they asked of him on account of the love he felt for them. Chico explained that more time was needed for their bison hunts and that during those hunts, families had to be kept together for fear of Norteño attack. If Spanish soldiers would join the Apache groups in a campaign against these enemies, he implied, their congregation at the mission would take place all the sooner.²³

Further ill fortune—the deaths of Chico’s brother and sister, who fell gravely ill while at San Sabá—cemented the Apaches’ departure. Apache custom regarding the proper rituals of mourning required that family members and their community immediately leave the area of death. Spanish missionaries noted that the deaths stunned the mind and spirit of Chief Chico, though he did not share his grief with them. In speaking to Fray Jiménez, Chico said simply that obligations of honor demanded that he aid the other Apache leaders, who had asked him with tears in their eyes not to abandon them at a time when they had decided on a campaign against the Comanches.²⁴

By the winter of 1757, the Apaches’ outlook had grown even more grim as they had come to realize that the mission-presidio complex might prove a trap in which their women and children would be sitting ducks for their enemies. Tracks all over the region indicated that the Norteños were massing. Apache leaders tried to make clear to the inattentive Spaniards the danger of remaining in the area. To bring that point home, Apache men cast their fears in terms of the safety of their women and children. But the missionaries and officers realized the Apaches’ dilemma only in hindsight. Years after the San Sabá attack, in a Franciscan history of the region, Fray Juan Domingo Arricivita wrote that because Chief Casa Blanca had only seven hundred warriors to protect over two thousand, including women, children, and old men, and two thousand seven hundred head of stock, if he waited for his enemies [at San Sabá], who were more numerous and had the advantage of firearms, the slaughter this would inflict would be frightful and would exterminate them completely.²⁵

In March 1758, Apache men passed through the region and again tried to warn the Spaniards of approaching danger, but they failed to comprehend the seriousness of these fears. In frustration, Apache warriors moved south to safer ground, far from their Spanish allies. Therefore, when the attack came, Apache warriors had sequestered their families, ensuring that no women and children fell victim to the Norteño raiders. Yet two Apache men who had remained behind aided the escape of a Spanish woman and children from the mission. Providing support and comfort, they helped the wife of one of the mission guards, Corporal Ascensio Cadena, and two soldiers’ sons travel more than 130 miles on foot along hidden pathways to San Antonio, carrying the children on their backs the entire way.²⁶

From the Apache vantage point, the events at San Sabá suggested that the Spaniards were ineffective allies. They neither provided the military aid the Apaches needed to defend their families nor held the Apaches in sufficient esteem to listen to them as equals or consider Apache women’s safety on par with that of Spanish women. Yet new rounds of commitment encouraged a continued alliance. The renewed agreement to joint settlement at a mission complex had a propitious beginning as a result of concerted Spanish efforts to rescue the daughter of a principal chief who had been captured and sold off to Nuevo León. Again, the security of women inspired Apache loyalty to their allies. Between 1758 and 1767, Spaniards fortified the presidio at San Sabá, transforming it from a wooden to stone fort, and built two new missions for Apache settlement, San Lorenzo de la Santa Cruz and Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria del Cañón, along the Nueces River at a site long proven to provide shelter for Apaches. From this new base farther south in Apache lands, tribal leaders felt confident leaving their women and children within the mission walls for safekeeping while raiding northern foes and hunting bison—accompanied by Spanish soldiers—on lands they still sought to defend against Comanche and Wichita incursions.²⁷

Norteño violence and European disease soon spelled the end, however. The Norteños’ refocused ire resulted in a steady barrage of attacks in the 1760s. Heightened tensions led one chief, El Lumen, to fall into nightmares while away on a hunt in 1763, dreaming that Spanish forces had taken advantage of the men’s absence to kidnap Apache women and children and sell them into slavery. The members of the hunting party hastily returned to move their families to a safer location, far from Norteño rivals and Spanish allies alike. In 1764, the Apache women and children among the remaining population suffered a devastating smallpox epidemic that hit while their husbands and fathers were away. Dwindling hope of safety from the ravages of disease and warfare inspired the mystical apparitions of a spirit who took male and female form, preaching to men and women, respectively, to both resist Franciscan baptism and reject Spanish alliance. The denouement came in November 1766. At the orders of the desperate officer in charge, Lieutenant Váldez, Apache women dressed in soldiers’ overcoats and hats and took up arms to stand guard along the mission walls, in clear contradiction to the Apaches’ gendered rules of war. From the Natives’ perspective, if Spanish men were unable to mount adequate defenses, Apache men could not rely on them as fellow protectors of Apache women and children. Within a month, all Lipans who had sought shelter at the missions had fled.²⁸

So what did the conflicts focused on San Sabá look like from the other side of the battle lines? Documentary records explain even less about the Comanche and allied Norteño perspectives than about those of the Apaches. Perhaps most critical for their viewpoints, Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo women remained far from these scenes of violence, safely ensconced deep within their own sovereign borders. And their borders, unlike those of Apaches and Spaniards, remained inviolate. But for Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo men, political economies related to defending or expanding the resources required by their family bands still determined their actions. The bounty of raids against Apaches—Spanish horses and Apache women captives—as well as expanded hunting territories carved out of Apachería had helped all three nations to underwrite lucrative trade alliances with the French in Louisiana. Comanches and Wichitas had not previously given Spaniards in Texas much attention, but by midcentury, hostilities with the Lipans eventually attracted their gaze. In the 1740s, the Comanches’ pursuit of Apache raiders led them to the San Antonio area and alerted them to the association between the Lipans and the Spaniards. In the 1750s, the San Sabá mission-presidio complex confirmed the possibility of an economic, military, and civil alliance. To Norteño eyes, the presidio conveyed a Spanish commitment to protect the Apaches, while the mission represented material succor and bounty, with its herds of domesticated animals, its agricultural fields, and a regular supply of goods. The large number of Spanish women and children at the presidio signaled the coming together of Apache and Spanish families in a long-term plan of joint settlement in the heart of Apachería.

The complex was not merely a supply depot for Apache settlers but also a base for Apache raiders, which added to Norteño suspicions of Spanish collusion in attacks on Comanche and Wichita rancherías (settlements). Thus, the same presidio-mission complex that Spaniards and Apaches hoped would spell safety and peace looked like an indication of escalating enmity to the Norteño allies who watched its construction from a distance. By Native rules of alliance and enmity, Spanish alliance with the Lipans put Norteño blood on Spanish hands, and Texas Spaniards became targets for the animosity previously directed only at Apaches. The 1758 destruction of San Sabá mission was the concerted Norteño response.²⁹

So how does one analyze the Norteño attack at San Sabá? The most important thing about the attack is that despite their clear numerical advantage, the Norteño allies never sought to engage the presidial forces in battle. The reputed two thousand warriors never approached the presidio, though it was located only three miles from the mission. As a result, despite Spanish rhetoric that the attackers sought to kill women and children, all 237 of those women and children remained unharmed within the presidio walls. During the three days it took to plunder and destroy the mission, Norteño warriors kept watch on the presidio, because several Indians were seen in the tree tops and on hillsides: they clearly wanted their presence known, let[ting] themselves be seen. Such watch would have alerted the Norteños to the fact that forty-one of the one hundred soldiers assigned to the presidio were absent and that the women and children there were consequently vulnerable. The women did not attract the attention of the raiders, however. Indeed, the warriors not only chose not to attack but allowed presidial forces to bring their herds into the presidio stockade, to send a squad of fourteen soldiers and three Indians to reconnoiter the state of affairs at the mission, and then, after reporting back to Colonel Parrilla, to continue along the road toward San Antonio to meet a supply train. In fact, the Norteños allowed the supply train to enter the presidio walls. Tellingly as well, twenty-six escapees from the mission—seven soldiers, one missionary, two soldiers’ wives, eight soldiers’ sons, three mission Indians, an Indian interpreter and his wife, an unnamed youth, and two Apache men—safely traversed the ground between mission and presidio under the watchful gaze of Norteño lookouts and gained the sanctuary of the presidio unchallenged. For three days, the Norteños kept the presidio waiting for an attack that never came.³⁰

Meanwhile, at the mission, Norteños persuaded the naive missionaries to allow them entry. Once inside, the evidence of their eyes and the Franciscans’ statements told the Norteño warriors that Apaches were not present. (The few still there were hidden.) Yet they saw plenty to enrage them. The mission, with its buildings, cattle, provisions, and nearby protective presidio, offered proof positive of the Spanish alliance with the Apaches. Adding insult to injury, the fathers sought to mollify the visitors with gifts, which surely told the warriors the source of the goods that provisioned Apache raiding parties against Comanche and Wichita villages. Norteño warriors promptly set about destroying all objects and structures signaling Spanish-Apache alliance. Strikingly, though, they took very little for themselves, leaving the smoldering remains to be found by Spaniards, including bales of tobacco, boxes of chocolate, barrels of flour, and boxes of soap, broken apart and burning.³¹

Only eight people died during the three days of ransacking and demolition that followed. In all that time, the Norteños made no effort to locate, much less kill, the Spaniards and Apaches who had hidden in one of the buildings (and who later escaped under the watchful eyes of the Norteño lookouts). That building was not even set afire. Moreover, all eight killed were men. Half of the dead, including one of the missionaries, Fray Alonso Giraldo de Terreros, fell in an initial volley that cleared the mission grounds and allowed the attackers access to mission stores and supplies. One woman, the wife of mission servant Juan Antonio Gutiérrez, fell prey to one attacker’s attention: he robbed her of her clothes (which perhaps reflected a desire for plunder as much as humiliation) but did not injure her bodily. The raiders saw no value in harming or capturing Gutiérrez’s wife or any of the other women present.³²

The only individuals violently attacked after the first shooting were men who foolishly interrupted the raiders in their ransacking. More interesting still, despite the arsenal of French guns that so exercised Spanish imaginations, Norteño warriors primarily chose beating as their means of attack. Why? According to Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo protocols of warfare, opponents had to be equally matched for a contest to be meaningful. Victories were measured not by the number of dead but rather by grades of martial deeds demonstrative of a warrior’s valor and prowess. In a warrior’s manner of attack might be read his estimation of the enemy he struck down, and the judgment of Spanish manhood seems clear. In sum, the Norteños never sought a fight with presidial soldiers; when forced to fight, they chose fisticuffs over armed combat and rejected possible battle trophies, and upon leaving the area, they taunted the soldiers at the presidio who never came out to fight. Combined with the number of people allowed to escape, the treatment meted out indicates that the raiders did not view the Spaniards as worthy of combat, much less honorable warrior deaths. Except for nine soldiers sent over by the presidio, the presidial forces mounted no defense of the complex or the women and children within it. If the Spanish soldiers could not fulfill the part of warrior, they would not be treated as such.³³

Norteño fearlessness in the face of their new Spanish foes became even clearer when Spanish forces sought to redeem their honor through a direct assault on a Wichita village five months after the San Sabá debacle. Their mission of vengeance collapsed at the hands of Comanche and Wichita men—and, even worse, Wichita women. In August 1758, a punitive expedition of 600 men—380 presidial soldiers and militiamen from Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Saltillo (with only 30 from Texas itself), 120 mission Indians called up as auxiliaries, and 134 Apache warriors—set out for the Red River, where the Norteño foes were massed. Along the way, the Spanish forces attacked a Yojuane village; killed 55 people, including women and children; and took captive 149 other women and children, who were then sold into slavery. They surely hoped to subject the Comanches and Wichitas to the same fate.³⁴

In settlements along the Red River, Norteño forces awaited the Spanish expedition at a fortified Wichita village while allies continued to pour in without ceasing. They did not simply outnumber the Spanish forces arrayed against them—they outnumbered the entire Spanish population in Texas. At the end of a road skillfully cleared by hand for great smoothness, the Norteños greeted the foreign intruders from within a village surrounded by a stockade and moat as well as extensive agricultural fields of corn, beans, pumpkins, and watermelons, all in bloom and enclosed by a palisade. Warriors armed with French muskets lined the walls. All in all, it was a far more imposing fortification than any offered by Spaniards in defense of their families. Wichita women evidently felt safe within those walls. In clear sight of Spanish soldiers, many Indian women and children entertain[ed] themselves, it seems, by watching the action. As Wichita and Comanche men fought dexterously outside, the women inside cheered them on, secure in their fortress, adding their voices to those of their husbands, fathers, and sons and mock[ing] the accuracy of Spanish swivel guns. With great bearing, boldness, and well-ordered valor, the Norteños drove the intruders away from the village. In the end, fifty-two soldiers died, militiamen quickly began to desert, and the Norteños captured two cannons. Finally, after the expedition deemed retreat the only option, the unrelenting Norteño warriors pursued Spanish forces all the way back to San Sabá. While the Wichitas and Comanches exerted great effort in their defense and protection of their territory (and their women), Spanish officials lamented the humiliating rout as the very disgraceful campaign that brought such shame to the nation and disgrace to our arms.³⁵

In the months and years that followed their victory at San Sabá, the dominant position of Norteños (and especially Comanches) in the Texas borderlands became clearer still. They never again allowed the Spaniards to advance northward, and by 1771, viceregal authorities ordered that the San Sabá presidio be abandoned and that diplomacy with the feared Comanches and Wichitas be pursued with great vigor. As new contacts and ultimately peace agreements unfolded, Comanche and Wichita women assumed unprecedented roles in Spanish diplomacy. Thus, the routes blazed by Apache women back and forth to San Antonio in the 1730s and 1740s continued to be traversed by Comanche and Wichita women, who went to the Spanish villa to command the respect and obligation of their Spanish neighbors. Yet unlike Apaches, these women rarely traveled as captives. Their diplomatic service reflected the dominant position from which their nations negotiated with Spaniards.³⁶

Proof of the women’s authority became even more apparent when Spaniards next visited the principal Wichita village on the Red River in 1778. Wichita leaders called on their women and children to greet the visitors, who arrived in hopes of solidifying peace agreements. All day long, women from all the houses assumed their customary roles at the center of Wichita hospitality rituals, coming forward to offer feasts for the dignitaries. In return, Spaniards honored the women with diplomatic ritual and presents. Only after entering the Wichita palisades did the Spaniards understand the economic power that gained Wichita women such status—they tan, sew, and paint the skins, fence in the fields, care for the cornfields, harvest the crops, cut and fetch the firewood, prepare the food, build the houses, and rear the children, their constant care stopping at nothing that contributed to the comfort and pleasure of their husbands. So prominent were women’s labors that one of the Spanish officials could only conclude in a report to his superiors that the Wichita government is democratic, not even excluding the women, in consideration of what they contribute to the welfare of the republic. In this land, women carry gallantry still further than the men. No wonder Wichita men evidenced such determination to protect them from any threat from outside those walls; no wonder Wichita women displayed so little fear from within them.³⁷

Comanche women operated from an even greater base of power and traveled the roads of Texas without worry or trepidation. In the wake of the first Spanish-Comanche treaty in 1785, Spaniards in San Antonio de Béxar gawked at the seeming boldness of the Comanche women, who arrived with little guard and few defensive pretensions. Governor Cabello tried to warn them about such strange behavior, little conceiving the power of the Comanche nation that made possible the security and impunity of its women as they moved between their rancherías and his town. Roads on which no Spanish woman dared to venture, even with a well-armed expedition, held little danger for their Comanche counterparts. The Comanche women went to San Antonio as