Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540-1859

Traders and Raiders

Traders and Raiders

The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859

Natale A. Zappia

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2014 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Set in Arnhem and Franklin Gothic

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zappia, Natale A.

Traders and raiders : the indigenous world of the Colorado Basin,

1540–1859 / Natale A. Zappia.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-1584-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-1585-1 (ebook)

1. Indians of North America—Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico)—History. 2. Indians of North America—First contact with Europeans—Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico) 3. Indians of North America—Wars—Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico) 4. Indian traders—Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico)—History. 5. Frontier and pioneer life—Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico) 6. Colorado River Valley

(Colo.-Mexico)—History. I. Title.

E78.C62Z37 2014

979.004’97—dc23 2014003459

18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

Part of this book has been reprinted with permission in revised form from Indigenous Borderlands: Livestock and Power in the Native Far West, Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 2 (May 2012): 193–220.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Naming People, Geography, and Time Periods

Introduction

Interlude: The Journey of Pook

ONE Native Histories and the Interior World

TWO Europeans and the Interior World

Interlude: The View from Huwaaly Kwasakyav

THREE Trading and Raiding Networks

FOUR The Expansion of Interregional Raiding

Interlude: Pascual’s Warning

FIVE The End of Native Autonomy

SIX Shifting Strategies within New National Borders

EPILOGUE: The View from the Colorado River, 2013

APPENDIX 1: Tables

APPENDIX 2: List of Missions Relevant to the Interior World

APPENDIX 3: Tribal Names

APPENDIX 4: Population Figures of Selected Native Communities

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURE 1. Journeys of José Serrano and Maria de Los Angeles, 1823–26 4

FIGURE 2. The interior world, ca. 1300–1540 7

FIGURE 3. California tribal lands, twenty-first century 9

FIGURE 4. Arizona tribal lands, twenty-first century 10

FIGURE 5. Major contours of trade and political/cultural influence of Native North America during the early colonial period 12

FIGURE 6. Chumash-manufactured shell beads 22

FIGURE 7. The interior world, ca. eighteenth century 26

FIGURE 8. Population density in the Southwest, 1200–1500 37

FIGURE 9. Zuni pottery 46

FIGURE 10. Yokuts basket 47

FIGURE 11. California petroglyphs, Cahuilla territory, late 1800s 51

FIGURE 12. Eusebio Francisco Kino, A Passage by Land to California 54

FIGURE 13. The interior world, ca. 1829–59 100

FIGURE 14. The interior world, 1859–65 116

FIGURE 15. Olive Oatman with tattoos, ca. 1860 124

Acknowledgments

This work has benefited from the guidance, suggestions, and encouragement of many individuals. My research began as a graduate student at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the guidance of several mentors, including Janet Brodie, Hal Barron, Terry Burke, Judith Habicht-Mauche, Andrés Reséndez (who graciously advised me from afar at UC Davis), and Lisbeth Haas. I am deeply indebted to Lisbeth’s constant encouragement and critical feedback, which shaped my methodological approach. The influence of my undergraduate mentor at Cornell University, Robert Venables, can also be found in the pages of this book. At Whittier College, my colleagues in the History Department, Bob Marks, Laura McEnany, José Orozco, José Ortega, and Elizabeth Sage, fostered a supportive environment as I completed the manuscript.

I am especially appreciative of my colleagues David Igler, Steven Hackel, Juliana Barr, Boyd Cothran, Ben Madley, James Brooks, Steve Fountain, Al Hurtado, Janet Fireman, Paul Conrad, Jeffrey Shepherd, Josh Sides, William (Willy) Bauer, and Brian DeLay for sharing their time and offering extensive feedback. Anonymous readers have made this a much stronger work, and I am very grateful for the fine work of the editors at the University of North Carolina Press, particularly Mark Simpson-Vos, who steadily and patiently guided me through the entire revision process. I also thank the editors and anonymous readers at the Pacific Historic Review for their critique of an earlier article that helped me revise parts of the manuscript.

I could not have completed this work without the generosity of several institutions, fellowships, and grants, including the Huntington Library, Bancroft Library, Braun Library, William Clark Memorial Library, UC Mexus, Mabelle McLeod Fellowship, UC Santa Cruz, National Endowment for the Humanities, Historical Society of Southern California, Charles Redd Center for Western Research, American Historical Association, and Whittier College. I would also like to thank the superb staff at all of the archives I visited: the Huntington Library, Bancroft Library, Braun Library, Clark Memorial Library, Arizona State Museum, California State Archives, California State Library National Archives (Laguna), New Mexico State Records Center, Seaver Center for Western History, University of Arizona, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Riverside, University of California at Santa Cruz, and Museum of Man (San Diego). Special thanks also go to the staff who offered their time and assistance at the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum (Agua Caliente Cahuilla Reservation), Barona Cultural Center and Museum (Barona Reservation), Cabazon Cultural Museum (Cabazon Band of Mission Indians), and Colorado River Indian Tribes Library. This book is dedicated to the work of these and other institutions located within Indian country that continue to share Indigenous-centered histories.

My family has supported me throughout this long journey. Two children, Olivia and Aidan, arrived along the way and have provided much-needed grounding in the smaller day-to-day journeys. My wife, Jenn, has carried me along all the bumpy roads. She also created most of the maps for this book. She continues to inspire my curiosity and creativity. I thank her for everything.

Note on Naming People, Geography, and Time Periods

This study crosses over several uncertain geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Place names among diverse peoples change over time and cultures. I have utilized Native markers interchangeably throughout the text while also employing post-Columbian designators such as the names of states, rivers, mountains, and national boundaries that the reader will be most familiar with. Geographic designations such as California, Far West, and Southwest did not exist during the pre-Columbian period, but they are used here for orientation. Following the conventions of Native and non-Native scholars, I interchangeably use the terms Indigenous, Native, and Indian (while also opting to capitalize all of these terms for consistency alongside other scholars). All of these indicators are problematic and inevitably fail to capture the complexities of individuals and communities with identities constantly in flux across an Indian/European/Euro-American continent. Along the Lower Colorado River alone, just a few of the cultures included Mojaves, Quechans, Chemehuevis, Cocopahs, and Halyikwamais. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, these cultures further identified themselves in a number of ways that varied from group to group and even within individual communities.

During the early modern period before hardened national borders emerged, Europeans and Euro-Americans also identified themselves in myriad ways. The cultures explored in this study included Europeans (i.e., first-generation Spanish conquistadors, Jesuit/Franciscan/Dominican missionaries from across Europe, Russian/British/French fur traders), Euro-Americans (i.e., Mexicans—Sonorans, Californios, Sinoloans, Nueva Vizcayans, and Nuevo Mexicanos; Anglos—Virginians, Tennesseans, New Yorkers, New Englanders, Utahans), and Christians (i.e., Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons) within all of these groups. Thus, over a vast territory and time period, local identities loomed large and constantly shifted. However, for the sake of consistency, I interchange Spaniard with European (before Mexican Independence in 1821) and Mexican or Anglo-American with Euro-American (after 1821) to differentiate the larger periodization and major non-Native groups who entered the interior world. Similarly, I interchange Spanish and English versions of place names depending on the period of settlement. New Mexico, for example, appears as Nuevo Mexico before American colonization in 1848. I have also opted to use the phrase pre-Columbian instead of pre-contact. Over the past two decades, scholars have generally favored the latter phrase in order to equalize the imbalanced teleology that Columbian brought to early American narratives involving Indigenous actors. In this study, however, new forms of contact occurred among multiple Indigenous groups before and after the arrival of Europeans. Thus, pre-Columbian better situates us within the dynamic early encounters between Native and European worlds without privileging European directionality.¹

Similarly, Natives identified the same landscapes and objects differently, and where appropriate I use Indigenous terms to indicate particular items or other markers. As much as possible, I have used cultural identifiers officially recognized by tribes today. Within Indian country, many tribal members also identify themselves in a number of ways. Appendix 3 lists all of the names associated with each culture as a point of reference for the reader. Finally, I have included a map at the beginning of most chapters. While centering on the Colorado River and its surrounding locales, this study covers several centuries that experienced multiple migrations, sweeping demographic shifts, and ecological changes that constantly reconfigured the complex cultural geography of the region. Each map contains overlapping Indian and Euro-American spaces in order to help better visualize these interactions unfolding between 1540 and 1859.

Traders and Raiders

Introduction

In 1821, millions of subjects became citizens across a vast territory freed from the Spanish empire. In an instant, New Spain transformed into the state of Mexico. Across the country, political leaders from the continent’s largest cities and smallest pueblos grappled with their new national identity. As these citizens began the long and sometimes-bloody struggle to fully realize their independence, Indigenous captors and captives engaged in their own battle over autonomy in a seemingly remote corner of northwest Mexico. Two years after Mexico gained independence, a kidnapped eight-year-old boy from a Quechan village on the Lower Colorado River unwillingly became part of this struggle.

His captors, most likely Akimel O’odhams from the Gila River, which flowed west into the larger Colorado, abducted him and possibly several other children during a raid.¹ From their farms of cotton, corn, and wheat along the Gila River Valley, these Akimel O’odhams struck out at their Colorado River neighbors during the eighteenth century as the reach of New Spain receded. In the early nineteenth century they also targeted Apachería communities to the east, who themselves raided livestock and people from weakened Spanish settlements during this period. This particular attack on the Quechans may have been reciprocal—a response by the Akimel O’odhams to an earlier raid on one of their own villages. These violent, routine kidnappings enacted a long-standing strategy utilizing interregional captivity networks. Simultaneously, they created territorial buffer zones while also integrating Native communities into yet larger Indigenous continental trading orbits. During this period of Mexican independence, though, these unnamed Akimel O’odhams had also incorporated Indigenous captives into more restrictive, violent, and (for the captors) lucrative slave markets that connected Indian and Spanish/Mexican landscapes. What once served primarily military objectives for Indigenous captive raiders became by Mexican independence a political-economic means to obtain livestock (usually horses), seeds, and manufactured goods. Through this rapidly expanding and violent market, new and dizzyingly complex alliances emerged and dissolved within local Indian communities and between larger Indigenous (i.e., Ute, Navajo, and Comanche) polities and Euro-American (i.e., Spanish, French, British, and American) colonies.²

The Quechan boy accompanied his kidnappers on a 100-mile journey east to the northern Sonoran mission La Purísima Concepción de Caborca, where he received the christened name José Serrano. Despite the recent political changes occurring farther south in Mexico City, Caborca survived as a missionary outpost that held onto the old ways of Spanish colonialism in the most northern reaches of Mexico. José Serrano received his baptismal rites from Father Faustino Gonzalez. Like the mostly Akimel O’odham congregation he ostensibly served, Gonzalez was also a survivor, escaping the fate of fellow Sonoran Jesuits forced to leave New Spain in 1767. He remained at Caborca until 1839, and for over thirty years presided over baptisms, weddings, and funerals that stitched together this tiny community isolated from the corridors of power in Mexico City. The majority of his congregation had been captives sold by Maricopa and Akimel/Tohono O’odham traders who surrounded the small chain of Mexican settlements. Kidnapped victims came from all over the region, and included Apaches, Quechans, Southern Paiutes, and Yavapais. Even fellow O’odhams and Maricopas were sold. Gonzalez took part in the trade, purchasing captives with mules and other livestock.

José Serrano likely became a criado, or household servant. Criado derives from the verb creer—to raise.³ Spaniards employed this gentler euphemism to justify coercive forms of bondage in towns and missions across New Spain, but Indigenous captors also engaged in similar practices through the language of adoption, kin, and ritual.⁴ Thus for Quechan children like Serrano, the pain and trauma suffered within a spectrum of bondage could look strikingly similar within Native and Spanish worlds. Such practices had existed before and after Europeans arrived and were central to political-economic exchange within Native North America and between Indigenous and European communities. In 1823, the young boy Serrano became yet another unwilling participant in this long-standing network.⁵

Serrano’s real name is lost, but Gonzalez stated that he belonged to gentile parents of the Yuma nation who lived on the Colorado River.⁶ In the baptismal record, Gonzalez listed Serrano as a nijora, a designation he shared with hundreds of other children sold or kidnapped into bondage across the colonial Southwest during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The precise origin of nijora is unknown, but it derived from an Indigenous lexicon and indicated a captive status.⁷ José Serrano’s adopted father, the Pima Indian War Captain Antonio Serrano, most likely purchased him from Akimel O’odham captors somewhere to the north along the Gila River. Like many other rescatîn—or redeemers—throughout Sonora and Nuevo Mexico during this time, Antonio purchased Indian captives (almost always children) from Native raiders. Every mission or town employed a rescatîn like Antonio to negotiate child captives into guardianship, a term that most likely designated life as a criado serving missionaries or other households in Sonora.⁸

Six years later in 1829 and more than 500 miles away at the San Diego mission in Alta California, another child from the Colorado River, Maria de Los Angeles, similarly received her baptismal rites from Father Vicente Pasqual Oliva. Oliva served as part of the Franciscan and Dominican wave of missionaries charged with converting los indios or gente sin razón (people without reason) of Alta and Baja California. Led by the audacious Junípero Serra, the Franciscans established a chain of twenty-one missions along the coast, initiating a series of biological, cultural, and economic revolutions across Native California.⁹ Like the older missions in Caborca, the San Diego mission also stood on the isolated edge of a weak Mexican state that (like its Spanish predecessor) failed to protect its priests and citizens (both Native and Euro-American) from Indian uprisings and raids.¹⁰

Stationed at San Diego since 1820, Oliva presided over an increasingly precarious political landscape. In 1826, Alta California governor José María de Echaeandía freed all Natives at San Diego from missionary rule and offered them Mexican citizenship, dramatically undermining the ecumenical and economic power of the Franciscans. Oliva struggled to retain his spiritual authority at San Diego, but an emerging Californio class had sown the seeds for Native secularization.¹¹ Nonetheless, while Franciscans and Californios clashed over the labor and land of Native Californians, citizenship eluded Maria, who moved west on a heavily trafficked trading route shared by Quechans and Kumeyaays that cut through the harsh Colorado Desert and was known by Spaniards as the Yuma route.

Although no definitive evidence exists, Maria’s captors were most likely Maricopas, who frequently clashed with their Quechan enemies along the Colorado River. By Mexican independence, Maricopas drew considerable political-economic power from their relationship with Spanish and Mexican diplomats desperate to connect Sonora and Las Californias. These captors simultaneously trafficked letters between missions, goods between Indian villages, and victims like Maria.¹² Father Oliva listed five-year-old Maria as Yuma del Rio Colorado and sanctioned the Californiana Maria Francisca Estudillo to act as her godmother, or padrina.¹³ After her baptism, Maria most likely became a criado of the prominent Estudillo family who settled in Santa Barbara by 1840.¹⁴

FIGURE 1. Journeys of José Serrano and Maria de Los Angeles, 1823–26.

From the perspective of the Spanish/Mexican South, all of these individuals—criados and nijoras; padres and padrinos; neophytos and gente sin razón; rescatîn and Indian captors—fulfilled the designs of a northward moving Euro-American empire. Franciscan priests saved neophyto souls but also served the interests of Alta California. O’odhams, Maricopas, and rescatîn provided criados for labor in Sonora. And nijoras like José Serrano and Maria de Los Angeles experienced the most nefarious results of colonialism at missions, presidios, pueblos, and ranchos across la frontera. Here they converted to Christianity, produced and ate new types of food, spoke new languages, wore new clothes, adopted radically different customs, and suffered through the deadly effects of ecological imperialism.¹⁵ Uprooted from their common origins on the Colorado River, Maria and José thus became colonial subjects in the Far North.

Looking at the history of this vast region that separated them from the vantage point of European and Euro-American settlements also confirms the power foreign invaders wielded in reshaping Native landscapes with disease, wheat, horses, cattle, missions, mines, and pueblos. Whether Californio, Sonoran, or Nuevo Mexicano, Spanish and Mexican settlers in one way or another benefited from captive Indians. Natives crucially served as the lynchpin to the success of these new regimes, and thousands of forced laborers maintained colonial economies across the greater Far West well after independence.¹⁶ Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spanish and Mexican settlements crept up Alta/Baja California and the Gila River. Missions of the Californias reshaped the coastal economy while further east other priests attempted to tame the harsh climate of Sonora and Sinaloa.¹⁷ During this time, Spaniards and Mexicans attempted to link both ends of the region through a chain of settlements, thus fulfilling the dreams of the earliest conquistadors such as Francisco Coronado and Cabeza de Vaca, who searched for riches and (for de Vaca, at least) spiritual salvation in the deserts and mesas of the interior during the sixteenth century. From this vantage point, then, Native O’odham/Maricopa captors, more powerful Indian raiders from Apachería and Ute territories, and the most vulnerable victims like Maria de Los Angeles and José Serrano all became subsumed within the larger, violent colonial orbits of New Spain, Mexico, and, ultimately, the American Far West.¹⁸

What happens, though, when these historical orbits are reversed—an Indigenous core to a European/Euro-American periphery? What if the pervasive tentacles of a coastally connected Spanish/Mexican North or American Far West are replaced instead with the expansive reach of continentally linked Numic, Yuman, and Athabascan geographies (including Apachería, Comanchería, Dinetah [Navajo], and Ute territory)? Or zooming out even farther across an Indigenous continent, how does our story change when the powerful ecological, cultural, and political-economic shockwaves of the Atlantic world become absorbed into the densely packed web of alliances, trading networks, commodities, and busy waterways of an unbroken, populous chain of Indian states, polities, and even empires connecting Iroquoia and Cherokee lands to Anishinaabewaki and Osage country to Comanchería and Apachería to Yokuch territory and Illahee?¹⁹

What happens if we can understand the lives of José Serrano and Maria de Los Angeles from within an Indigenous interior world?

Victims of the colonial experience, baptized in missions hundreds of miles apart, these children also shared a common origin on the Colorado River. Before their kidnappings, both had once eaten corn, beans, squash, and melons planted along the Lower Colorado. Wrapped in cotton blankets made by Akimel O’odhams to the east, they played with intricate shell beads manufactured on the Channel Islands by the Chumash to the west. They may have shared kin or clans that observed some of the powerful images of centuries-old (and more recent) rock art that dotted the Mojave Desert. They listened to the same oral histories told along the Colorado River. And with their unfortunate capture during raids, they fell victim to Indigenous interethnic rivalries shaping the region since the fifteenth century, long before any conquistador there benefited from Indian captives.

Maria and José can tell us an altogether different story diverging from the colonial narrative, one where la frontera looks vastly different. From this angle, the chain of settlements appears more like tiny dots in an expansive network of Indian trails, trading centers, and territories. Indigenous trade, military alliances, and horticultural practices controlled many of the political-economic and spatial dimensions of the region that would become the U.S.-Mexico border well into the later decades of the nineteenth century. These communities wielded two powerful tools defining the political economy of this vast territory: trading and raiding, linking them with an Indian continent.

Exploring the economic and cultural dimensions of Native trading and raiding reveals how a remarkably diverse group of Indian communities including the Mojaves, Quechans, Cahuillas, Yokuts, Kumeyaays, Maricopas, Akimel O’odhams, Utes, Cocopahs, Yavapais, Southern Paiutes, and many others forged an Indigenous interior world that linked present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Baja California. At its farthest reaches, the interior world stretched west to east along the San Bernardino Mountains and Gila River Valley and north to south across the Great Basin and the Colorado Delta. The interior world was a region loosely shaped by geographic borders (mountains, rivers, and deserts), economies (tools, commodities, captives, livestock), food systems and ecologies (plant/animal resources, water sources, grazing/farming land), and transportation (Indian highways, trading middlemen). This study explores all of these themes but also argues that the interior world was largely defined by the paradoxical relationship between politicaleconomic autonomy (from Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans) and captivity (by Indian communities).²⁰

Indian trading and raiding shaped all of these dimensions as the interior world expanded and contracted over four centuries. The Colorado River stood at the center of this vast region, acting as the geographical, historical, and cultural anchor. Although its surroundings seem barren and isolated, it acted as a focal point for economic activities for hundreds of miles.²¹ It is along the river where this study begins in 1540, when the Spanish conquistador Hernando Alarcón provided the first European snapshot of the interior world’s interdependency, and concludes in 1859 when Anglo-Americans decisively shattered this autonomy after the Mojave War.

FIGURE 2.The interior world, ca. 1300–1540. From Don Laylander, The Regional Consequences of Lake Cahuilla, San Diego State University Occasional Archaeological Papers 1 (2006).

By the time Alarcón arrived in the sixteenth century, the Colorado River had attracted interregional traders for over a century, bringing manufactured products including cotton textiles, baskets, dried deer, fish, elk, and rabbits (as well as furs), acorns, seeds, pottery, yucca, pine nuts, mescal, obsidian, mesquite beans, gourd rattles, turquoise, and even an incipient form of currency (made from shell beads). Commodities and ideas moved along the river and through roads connecting towns sometimes as far as a thousand miles apart.²² The Mojaves along the Colorado River, for example, regularly traded at Chumash villages on the Pacific Coast, Yokuts in the San Joaquin Valley, Southern Paiutes in the Great Basin, Zunis on the Colorado Plateau, and Quechans further south on the floodplains of the Colorado River. Indian highways allowed a Mojave trader to make the 400-mile round-trip between the coast and his village in less than four days. At the terminal points, village-based artisans (in Zuni, Hopi, and Chumash communities) produced goods to meet demand. All of these actors indirectly worked together to create a market that bore similarities with early modern trading networks in other parts of the Americas and the Atlantic world. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Native commodities and roads enticed Europeans and Euro-Americans and embedded them within Indian-defined networks.

In more violent ways, raiding linked the interior world with other Indigenous and Spanish borderlands of the Far West. Native communities kidnapped enemies (almost always women and children) across the Americas before Spanish contact, but within a century of Coronado’s entrada into the Southwest, kidnappers more frequently became slave traders. Raiding also dramatically expanded as horses, sheep, and cattle arrived in great numbers for exchange. Raiding quickly strengthened the power of Indian societies such as the Comanches and Apaches, forming territories that Spaniards labeled Apachería and Comanchería, or what Gary Anderson has called the Indian Southwest.²³ Further west within the interior world, livestock radically changed the nature of economic exchange. Soon after the arrival of horses, Yokuts and Mojaves began to adopt raiding, ultimately counteracting coastal missionary expansion. At the same time, raiding from Apachería, Diné, and Ute borderlands crept into the eastern edge of the interior world, linking an even larger interregional economy as New Mexican and Sonoran demand for captive labor increased. Despite the introduction of these foreign influences, though, the interior world disrupted the designs of Euro-Americans hoping to colonize the strategically important rivers and roads controlled by Natives. Even in the 1850s, as the encroaching world market squeezed interregional raiding, many parts of the interior world remained free of permanent Euro-American settlement.

Ultimately, though, the interior world became hemmed in and cut apart by American forts, wagon roads, and railroads.²⁴ Once Native trading and raiding dramatically declined after the Civil War, Indian nations struggled to hold onto small bits of territory. While greatly affected by diseases such as measles and smallpox, interior Natives survived in their relative isolation from American and Mexican settlements and maintained a degree of independence. Indians along the Colorado and Gila Rivers continued to farm and provide assistance to steamboat traders. Desert communities continued to gather and hunt in the mountains east of the California coast. Intermittent Native trade of locally produced goods continued despite the overwhelming dominance of the larger Anglo-American market. Knowledge of trails and training of Native runners persevered. Natives no longer controlled strategic crossroads and waterways, but remnants of the interior world nonetheless remained in the shadow of a rapidly developing Mexican-U.S. border. As a result, intact patches of Indian country remain today among the same rivers, mountains, deserts, and highways that existed centuries ago.²⁵

FIGURE 3. California tribal lands, twenty-first century. From EPA, http://www.epa.gov/region9/air/maps/index.html.

FIGURE 4. Arizona tribal lands, twenty-first century. From EPA, http://www.epa.gov/region9/air/maps/index.html.

INTERSECTING NUMEROUS HISTORIOGRAPHIES, disciplines, and regions, this study adds to a flourishing scholarship examining the significance of continental Indigenous history in shaping the politics, economies, and ecologies of the Americas and the Atlantic world.²⁶ In recent years, many works have ably explored these vast overlapping borders, arguing that understanding Indian geography is crucial to mapping early America.²⁷ From east to west, historians have begun drawing more accurate maps of an Indian continent, detailing how Natives put their own mark upon the contours of the global fur trade, slave networks, and imperial rivalries.

Eastern confederacies such as Haudenosaunees, Cherokees, and Westos, for example, shaped and defined new economies together with Europeans in early America.²⁸ These Indigenous powers competed and cooperated with other powerful societies within the Great Lakes and Mississippi region, including the Illinois, Ottawas, and Anishinaabe, whose long invisi[ble] influence, Michael Witgen argues, demands that we rethink the meaning of the New World.²⁹ Indeed, recent works exploring the role of frontier cities such as St. Louis, Michilimackinac, and Kaskaskia have embedded European and Euro-American expansion within webs of intermarriage, kin, and Native mosaics.³⁰ The fur trade further linked the rivers and lakes controlled by the Anishinaabeg with the Native Ground of the Osage and the open southern plains of the Comanches, where Pekka Hämäläinen, Brian DeLay, James Brooks, and Juliana Barr all argue that raiding served as a tool wielded by Native communities to infiltrate Spanish-Mexican borderlands.³¹ As DeLay has written, Indian raids mattered.³² This manifested itself most strikingly through the Comanche empire that expanded between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and shaped the outcome of the Mexican-American War.³³

Continuing further toward the Southwest borderlands, James Brooks and Ned Blackhawk have shed light on the regimes of violence that evolved within the regions controlled by Utes, Navajos, and Apaches. Brooks and Blackhawk locate historical actors among the victims of raiding, revealing how captives sometimes influenced the nature of political-economic exchange within Indian communities