CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
NORTHERN MEXICO THROUGH IMPERIAL EYES
U.S. Travel Accounts to Northern Mexico, 1803-1854
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of Master of Arts
in History
By
Shoshanna Lande
May 2013
The thesis of Shoshanna Lande is approved:
__________________________________________
Dr. Patricia Juarez-Dappe
________________
Date
__________________________________________
Dr. Josh Sides
________________
Date
__________________________________________
Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Chair
________________
Date
California State University, Northridge
ii Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank the CSUN History Department. I have
learned so much from every professor with whom I have worked. In addition to the
invaluable training as an historian, I have received encouragement from everyone. To Sue
Mueller and Kelly Winkleblack-Shea: my graduate experience was better because of the
interactions with the two of you. You made navigating grad school easier. I would
especially like to thank Dr. Josh Sides, who was the first person to tell me that I could
excel in a doctoral program. Without that initial conversation, I may never have pursued a
career in academia. Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, my gratitude to you goes beyond
words. I have learned so much from your classes, and even more from the conversations
in your office. Thank you for backing my admission to the program even though I did not
have a background in history. Dr. Patricia Juarez-Dappe has been my professor, my
advisor, and my mentor. I am truly grateful for everything you have done for me. One
day I hope to be as good a professor as you are.
I would like to thank the Los Angeles Lakers for losing in the first round of the
playoffs. If they had played more than four games in the post-season, I may not have
finished my thesis.
To all of my fellow graduate students, thank you. The perspectives you brought to
the classes we took together were some of the most valuable aspects of my education at
CSUN. I wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavors. Special shout out to Isaí
Garcia.
iii Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to thank my friends and family. To my
mom, who is the most awesome person ever: thank you for planting the seeds of curiosity
in me, and thank you for all your support. To my sister, Deb: your friendship keeps me
sane, in an insane kind of way. Thank you for admonishing me when you caught me
slacking. Thanks for helping me slack when I needed it.
This Thesis is dedicated to the memory of the smartest man I have ever known:
my dad. Michael Lewis Lande, on to the next one!
iv Table of Contents
Signature Page
ii
Acknowledgements
iii
Abstract
vi
Chapter 1: Introduction
1
Chapter 2: The Spanish Period
10
Chapter 3: The Early Mexican Period
21
Chapter 4: The 1830s and 1840s
33
Chapter 5: The U.S.-Mexico War and the Early American Period
51
Chapter 6: Conclusion
63
Notes
67
Works Cited
73
v ABSTRACT
NORTHERN MEXICO THROUGH IMPERIAL EYES
U.S. Travel Accounts to Northern Mexico, 1803-1854
By
Shoshanna Lande
Master of Arts in History
This research paper examines the ways that European-Americans depicted
Northern Mexicans in travel accounts between the time of the Louisiana Purchase and the
years just following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Between these years, thousands of
U.S. merchants, soldiers, topographers, trappers, and traders poured into Texas, New
Mexico, California, and other points in Northern Mexico. Many of these Euro-Americans
wrote about their experiences in this foreign land and among these foreign people; their
travel accounts and narratives have become a part of the genre of American travel writing
and reveal much about the interests that the United States held in the region.
Between these years, both Euro-American and Mexican events helped shaped the
discourse that these travel writers helped create. While Mexico was fighting for
independence, the United States was looking for economic and expansion opportunities.
At the same time that Mexico was experimenting with self-government, the United States
was adopting a new foreign policy called the Monroe Doctrine, in which the United
States asserted its hegemony over all of Latin America. While Mexico embraced the
vi liberalization of its economy, Euro-American traders opened channels of exchange into
Northern Mexico, and fur traders from Russia and the United States were competing in
California for control of its resources.
In 1836, when Texas, led largely by Euro-Americans, declared its independence
from Mexico, the United States began to consider the opportunities for expansion into
Northern Mexico. The annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845, the U.S.Mexico War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill
refocused both American and Mexican attention on Northern Mexico. This research
paper will explore the ways that Euro-American travelers described the land and the
people of Northern Mexico, and the ways that these perceptions changed over time with
regard to the larger political projects.
Euro-Americans relied on anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic rhetoric to describe
Northern Mexicans during this time period. In their travel accounts, they argued that
Spanish and Mexican rule was corrupt, oppressive, and ineffectual. They described the
people as indolent, uneducated, and naïve. They remarked that the Catholic Church was
avaricious and insincere. They depicted a landscape that was undeveloped. In all, EuroAmerican travelers created a discourse about Northern Mexico and its population that
delegitimized the latter’s claims to the land. Politicians and expansionists in the 1840s
used the discourse created on the pages of these travel accounts to justify American
expansion into Northern Mexico.
vii CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
In many respects, Cubans are like children.
Orville Platt, 1901
In 1901, Orville Platt introduced an amendment in the United States Senate that
restricted Cuban economic autonomy and subordinated the island nation to the United
States. The Senate justified the adoption of the so-called Platt Amendment because, it
argued, Cubans were unable to adequately govern themselves. Platt put it most bluntly
when he wrote: “In many respects, Cubans are like children.”1 This rhetoric regarding
Latin Americans was not new in 1901. In fact, at the earliest point of contact between
European-Americans and Latin Americans, the former found ways of describing the latter
that delegitimized Latin American claims to the land. The Spanish borderlands (later
known as the Northern Mexican frontier, now known as the American Southwest) were
often the spaces where these early points of contact occurred. Beginning in the early
nineteenth century, European-Americans began to create a discourse of Latin American
dependency in Northern Mexico to justify U.S. expansion and imperialism into the
region.
In 1803, the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory from France.
Suddenly, the young country shared a long and unmapped border with Spanish Mexico, a
land that had largely been unvisited by Euro-Americans. Jefferson, an early proponent of
westward expansion, promptly commissioned explorers and topographers to map out the
new country and discover the nature of its resources. At the same time, Spain was losing
its power in the Americas. Because of a continued war with Britain from 1796 to 1808,
which impaired Spain’s abilities to carry out its transatlantic trade, other European
1 powers supplied Spanish-American ports with manufactured goods. As James Lockhart
and Stuart B. Schwartz have argued: “in a very real sense Spanish America had already
acquired commercial independence from Spain in advance of any moves toward political
separation.”2
The move for political independence began in earnest following the political
turmoil in Spain caused by the Napoleonic Wars. In 1808, Napoleon defeated Spain and
forced Ferdinand VII to abdicate the Spanish throne in favor of Napoleon’s brother,
Joseph. Spanish resistance to French control took the form of a five-person regency
(cortes), based in Cádiz. Spanish-Americans, both peninsulares (those born in Spain) and
criollos (those born in New Spain of pure Spanish decent), strongly believed in the
legitimacy of the king; however, they did not recognize the legitimacy of the cortes.
Mexican criollos decided that the power vacuum in Spain was the perfect opportunity to
challenge peninsulares in Mexico City for social and political control in New Spain.
Traditionally, peninsulares received the favored ecclesiastical, governmental, and
military positions. In defiance of this tradition, a criollo priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo,
began the struggle for independence as a movement of Americans versus Europeans.
While Hidalgo’s movement and that of his successor, Father José María Morelos,
failed to recruit many criollos, they did spur the excitement of a large following of castas
and natives. By the mid 1810s, “small bands of patriot guerrillas had been fighting for
years in several regions of Mexico,… causing heavy military expenses, living off the land
like bandits, and gradually gnawing away at the fabric of colonial rule.”3 Sustained
guerrilla warfare, political chaos in Spain, and economic independence spelled the
writing on the wall for Spain’s control of its American colonies. In Mexico, the death
2 knell came when army commander Agustín de Iturbide switched sides and began fighting
for independence, instead of against the guerrilla forces. Iturbide proclaimed Mexico’s
independence in the capital city on September 27, 1821. Iturbide had himself crowned
emperor of the newly independent Mexico, though his reign lasted less than a year,
because “years of patriot struggle had generated political convictions and animosities not
easily soothed by a make-believe monarch.”4 In 1823, the United States of Mexico was
formed and a republican constitution was adopted the following year.
By the time Mexico adopted the Constitution of 1824, foreign powers,
specifically Britain and the United States, had “developed a vested interest in trade with
Latin America and would no longer permit Spain to intervene in the Western
Hemisphere.”5 To protect their interests in the Americas, Great Britain and the United
States quickly recognized the independence of former Spanish colonies. In 1823,
President James Monroe issued a declaration to forestall further European intervention in
the Americas. The so-called Monroe Doctrine declared that enlightened and democratic
ideals prevailed throughout the Americas, and that “any attempt on [Europe’s] part to
extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere [will be considered] as dangerous to
our peace and safety.”6 At the same time, the opening up of Spanish America to the rest
of Europe and the United States piqued the interest of traders, adventurers, scientists, and
missionaries, among others. In November 1821, William Becknell became the first EuroAmerican trader to arrive in Santa Fé via an overland route from the United States.
Becknell pioneered the Santa Fé Trail, which connected Independence, Missouri to the
New Mexican capital, but he was by no means the only Euro-American interested in
gaining a foothold in the Northern Mexican market.
3 Mexican independence and the new thoroughfare allowed more Euro-Americans
to travel overland to Northern Mexico. In tandem with those events, the incipient
Mexican government continued a policy established during the final years of Spanish rule
that encouraged foreigners to settle in their northern frontier, while the United States
openly advocated the policies of westward migration and free trade. Both policies
brought European-American travelers to Texas and New Mexico and spurred writers and
journalists to set their gaze on the Pacific Coast. Over the next decade, the frequency of
interactions between Euro-Americans and Northern Mexicans intensified. By 1835, there
were 20,000 Euro-Americans living in Texas and thousands more trekking to California
and New Mexico each year. The successful revolt by foreigners and tejanos in Texas in
1836 encouraged some in California to attempt to duplicate the process, and some in
Texas to expand their rebellion to New Mexico. This also augmented the amount and
kinds of interactions between European-American travelers and Northern Mexicans.7 For
example, many European-Americans aided in the revolt of 1836 in California, which was
carried out under the leadership of the Californio, Juan Bautista Alvarado. During the
first couple of decades after Mexican independence, Northern Mexico had undergone
certain significant changes, mainly with respect to its social order. Nonetheless,
California and New Mexico remained on the periphery of Mexico, largely isolated and
underdeveloped. That is not to say, however, that these territories and their Mexican
populations were isolated from the changing world.
By the outbreak of war between Mexico and the United States in 1846, California
and New Mexico had seen a throng of European-American explorers, trappers, traders,
and diplomats traverse its social and political boundaries. Many of these European-
4 Americans wrote about their experiences in a foreign land, among an unfamiliar people.
Travel accounts became popular literature in the early 1800s.
The travel accounts and
narratives about Northern Mexico during the first half of the nineteenth century have
become part of the genre of American travel writing. June Hahner reminds us:
the cultural, class, and racial boundaries separating foreign travelers from their
subjects could not be easily breached. The Latin Americans whom foreigners
tended most to meet and write about were members of the upper classes. The
visitors’ interactions with the poor were largely limited to street sellers, servants,
or slaves.8
Therefore, while these travel narratives reflect some of the events and attitudes in
Northern Mexico, they largely reveal much about the interests that the United States held
in the region.
The earliest travel writers helped create stereotypes about Northern Mexico and
its inhabitants. The discourse Euro-Americans created about Latin Americans in Northern
Mexico illustrates the anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic attitude of these early travelers.
Republican ideologies informed the ways they wrote about the Spanish monarchy, largely
reducing it to a tyrannical and oppressive form of government. They described the
climate as enervating and characterized the population as correspondingly shiftless. Later
travelers reinforced these stereotypes, though some descriptions evolved. For example,
the treatment of the Catholic Church changed in reaction to the secularization of the
missions beginning in 1833. Prior to 1833, Euro-American travelers depicted a rapacious
Catholic Church run by lewd and licentious padres. Later travelers, however, perceived
the secularization of the missions as the loss of Mexico’s moral compass. These later
travelers were beginning the process of racializing Mexicans as non-white. By using the
Church as a symbol of European-ness, they argued that Mexico’s secularization law
5 proved Mexicans’ non-whiteness. For the most part, however, Euro-American travelers
throughout the first half of the nineteenth century maintained the narrative that their
predecessors created.
After the Texas revolt in 1836, Euro-Americans began to actively advocate for
U.S. expansion into Northern Mexico. Post-1836 travel writers employed the discourse
that had been created in the previous thirty years about Northern Mexicans to justify
expansion. They appropriated all manner of descriptions to show that Mexicans were
unable to adequately govern in Northern Mexico, and to call for American intervention in
the region. For instance, travelers used the narrative that purported a lazy Mexican
populace to advance their belief that the region required U.S. innovation and industry. By
the time John O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in 1845, the pages of U.S.
travel accounts about Northern Mexico had already been arguing for “the fulfilment [sic]
of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free
development of our yearly multiplying millions.”9
Mary Louise Pratt has argued that the same people who wrote and published
travel accounts were those who maintained economic interests in Latin America. She
argues that early-nineteenth century European travelers “were often sent to the ‘new
continent’ by companies of European investors as experts in search of exploitable
resources, contacts, and contracts with local elite, information on potential ventures, labor
conditions, transport, market potentials, and so forth.”10 Pratt calls them the capitalist
vanguard; throughout their accounts they identified raw materials and areas for
cultivation, and they helped create a narrative of Latin Americans, in which Latin
Americans are non-European, non-Protestant, and non-urban. Some of the more common
6 stereotypes created by travel writers depicted Latin Americans as lazy, unproductive,
uncivilized, unclean, akin to animals or children in intelligence (recall Orville Platt),
unscientific, strong and athletic, exotic, backward, heathen, barbarous, immoral. In short,
Pratt argues that travel narratives helped create a colonial discourse that justified
European domination by constructing an image of Latin Americans as naturally inclined
to subordination, and by depicting the land in the Americas as paradisiacal.
Pratt’s analysis of the capitalist vanguard will be used as a lens through which to
view European-American travelers’ accounts about Northern Mexico. In what ways did
travelers help create a discourse that justified European-American domination in
Northern Mexico? Edward Said provides a clear definition of imperialism: “At some very
basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do
not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others.”11 Traditional U.S.
History has not treated early westward expansion as imperialistic. This research,
however, will rely on Said’s definition of imperialism to clearly show that these travelers’
accounts employed a discourse of Latin Americans in a definitive effort to rationalize
American expansion into Northern Mexico.
Since the publication of David J. Weber’s The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846 in
the early 1980s, historians have begun to examine the processes of republican politics,
the secularization of the missions, and the establishment of a free market under Mexican
authority in California and New Mexico. Lisbeth Haas, in Conquests and Historical
Identities in California, 1769-1936, looks at the issue of land control in determining
ethnic and national identities in Southern California beginning in the Spanish Period. In
Refusing the Favor, Deena J. González examines the role of women in New Mexican
7 society and their ability to negotiate the legal and social changes that occurred with the
signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Intimate Frontiers, by Albert L. Hurtado,
explores issues of class, gender, and sexuality among the diverse population of
California’s early history. In Land of Necessity, several borderlands historians contribute
essays that “explore social and cultural formations that develop[ed] as a result of the
coexistence of national and transnational forces” in Northern Mexico, both before and
after the U.S.-Mexico War.12 Following Weber’s lead, these and other historians are
focusing more and more on New Mexico and California’s late-Spanish and Mexican
periods. In part, this research will be an extension of this growing historiography.
In his preface to The Mexican Frontier, Weber notes that when “American
historians have dealt with Mexicans during these years, they have too often reduced them
to stereotypes.”13 There is no doubt that American historians have relied heavily on
European-American travelers’ accounts to support these reductions. Other scholars have
made attempts to historicize these stereotypes, for example: David J. Langum
investigated the European-American observation that all Californios were indolent, a
term Langum claims appears repeatedly on the pages of travel narratives on Mexican
California. Langum rejects the notion that these observations are linked to the historical
processes of militant Protestantism, Anglo-American racism, and Manifest Destiny.14
Weber, in a separate article, disputes Langum’s thesis, claiming that religion, racism, and
nationalism “should continue to be understood as distorting the images that AngloAmericans perceived.”15 The following research also relies on travel accounts to illustrate
the ways that stereotypes functioned as strategic tools used to promote an imperialistic
agenda.
8 Following Weber’s reasoning, this research will contribute to the corpus of
borderlands history in that it will elucidate the ways that historical processes like
Manifest Destiny, republicanism, and religion informed and influenced the ways that
European-Americans depicted Northern Mexico and its inhabitants. While these
narratives show that neither the European-Americans who traveled to Northern Mexico
nor the Mexican and native populations that they encountered were a monolithic people,
they also reveal that European-Americans actively sought ways to justify United States
imperialism. What follows should not be construed as an accurate portrayal of Northern
Mexico and its Mexican inhabitants; rather, these travel accounts contribute to what we
know about the European-Americans who travelled to the region at the end of the
Spanish period, throughout the Mexican period, and at the beginning of the American
period.
Ernesto Chávez argues that the U.S.-Mexico War “laid the foundation for how the
U.S. government would deal with other countries later in the century and into the next.”16
Chávez is referring to several instances of U.S. intervention in Latin America, including
the Platt Amendment. While this is certainly the case, it is also true that the U.S.-Mexico
War, and the subsequent annexation of New Mexico and California, would not have been
possible without a discourse that assumed Euro-American dominance over Northern
Mexicans. The following research examines the evolution of this discourse and how
Euro-Americans used it to justify U.S. imperialism.
9 CHAPTER TWO
The Spanish Period:
Jefferson, Pike, and The Beginnings of Westward Expansion
…to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred
millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is
impossible… I would still say, let us try the experiment.
John Adams, 1786
Spain’s initial interest in the region that now encompasses Northern Mexico and
the American Southwest began in the sixteenth century when Alvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca returned to Mexico City after visiting the region. Cabeza de Vaca, along with his
Africa slave, Estevan, claimed to have seen cities of gold. His story sparked Spain’s
explorations of the region. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, for example, set off in search
of the seven cities of gold the year following Cabeza de Vaca’s return. Sixty years later,
the Spanish were still motivated by their search for gold. In 1598, the conquistador Juan
de Oñate embarked on his own pursuit of the legendary cities. Rather than finding gold,
Oñate founded the first Spanish settlement in New Mexico when he conquered the
Pueblo Indians at the Acoma Pueblo and established a mission. Over the next two
hundred years, Spain slowly established missions in New Mexico, Texas, and eventually
California.
The primary purpose of these outposts was to serve as a buffer against other
colonial powers. In 1682, the French founded Louisiana in the Mississippi Valley, and
Spain, suspicious of the French, desired a means of protecting their resources in New
Spain, whose “root assets were rich silver deposits and dense, sedentary Indian
populations having intensive agriculture and highly developed tribute and labor
mechanisms.”17 Paul Mapp argues that the “same advanced positions making Spanish
10 missions, settlements, and presidios in provinces like New Mexico, Baja California,
Sonora, and Texas vulnerable to attack and difficult to supply also made them potential
springboards for western exploration.”18 In the late 1700s, Spain began to colonize Alta
California to safeguard its resources against the incursion of the Russian empire via
Alaska. In addition to protection, the mission system was an integral tool for converting
Native Americans to Catholicism, for populating the Spanish empire, and for providing
cheap labor.
While the colonization of New Mexico, Texas, and California remained minimal
in comparison to Spain’s settlements in Mexico and Peru, the process did result in the
hispanicization of the some of the region. The primary tool used to disseminate Hispanic
culture was the mission. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were nineteen
missions in New Mexico and eighteen in both Texas and California. Along with
missions, the Spanish established presidios and pueblos around the northern reaches of
their American territory. The hispanicization of Northern Mexico was evident as early as
1680 when Popé, a Pueblo Indian from San Juan, led his revolt against the Spanish. After
successfully ousting the Spanish from New Mexico, Popé attempted to ban all Spanish
culture from the Pueblos. He was met with resistance from some of the Pueblo Indians, as
they had established friendships and kinships with the Spanish, and others were devoted
Catholics. Furthermore, the Spaniards’ abilities to resist attacks by the Apache and
Navajo (rivals of the Pueblos) made their presence, if not welcome, at least tolerated.
Therefore, Governor Diego de Vargas’ reconquest of New Mexico in 1692 was met with
some acquiescence. The Spanish would not lose their power in the region again until
Mexican Independence in 1821. This scene, depicted by a smattering of Spanish allies
11 among the native population, a contingent of Indian neophytes, and small Spanish
population (both peninsulares and criollos), a strong mission system, and a few mestizo
towns characterized New Spain’s northernmost territory when the first Euro-Americans
travelled there beginning in the early nineteenth century.
In 1803, the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory from France. It has
been well documented that Thomas Jefferson, the president responsible for purchasing
the Louisiana Territory, supported the idea of western expansion from an early age. Eric
Jay Dolin is one such historian who points out that Jefferson’s understanding of
geopolitics were “sown in the early 1750s when Jefferson was still a boy in colonial
Virginia, surrounded by men who believed that America’s future lay to the west.”19 As
Jefferson grew, so did his fascination with the West. He envisioned an evolving America
settled by yeoman farmers. Jefferson was not the only person with an imperialistic vision
for the United States by the end of the eighteenth century. Jedidiah Morse, a minister
from Massachusetts, could not help but anticipate the time “when the American Empire
will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.”20 According to Morse, it was
unnatural and illogical for people to be ruled by a monarchy 4,000 miles away. EuroAmerican travelers to Northern Mexico during the Spanish period echoed Morse’s
sentiment and largely wrote in terms of freedom, sovereignty, and independence for
Mexicans. Back east, men like Thomas Jefferson prepared to conquer North America for
the United States.
While President Thomas Jefferson believed that his country now maintained
control of the Mississippi River and all of its tributaries, Spain held a different position.
After the Louisiana Purchase, the United States government openly sought to establish
12 trade relations with their southern neighbor; Spanish colonial policy, however, strictly
forbade such a treaty. Dolin notes that Spain established its closed-border policy because
trade between Euro-Americans and New Mexicans “would not only threaten New
Spain’s profitable monopoly on the supply of goods within its domain, but it might also
generate interest in Spanish land and inflame America’s expansionist ambitions.”21 This
mindset is consistent with Spanish worries about the proximity of French Louisiana or
the encroachment of Russians along the California coast.
Spanish authorities had good reason to worry, especially after the transfer of the
Louisiana Territory to the United States. In 1786, Jefferson expressed his interest in
Spain’s American colonies. Writing to a friend from France, he insisted: “Our
confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be
peopled. We should take care too, not to think it for the interest of that great continent to
press too soon on the Spaniards.”22 Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, a London-based
newspaper printed an editorial about the potential consequences for Spanish America as a
result of the transaction between France and the United States. The author argued in his
piece, which was widely circulated throughout American papers: “No axiom can,
however, be more self-evident than that it will, at no very far distant period, transfer the
stewardship…of the South American treasures, from the Spanish government into other
hands.”23 Spanish officials who met with Euro-American travelers took the closed-border
policy very seriously. Papers were required for legal travel, and many such travelers were
detained and/or escorted out of the country upon their capture. Dolin argues that the first
Euro-Americans to travel to Northern Mexico during this time period did so at great risk.
13 One of those early risk-takers was Zebulon Pike. In 1806, the United States
government commissioned Lieutenant Pike to explore the southwestern portion of the
Louisiana Territory. The Pike Expedition, like the more famous Lewis and Clark
Expedition, was charged to accumulate scientific and geographic information concerning
the southwestern region of the Louisiana Territory. Pike’s mission was to “determine the
extent of the Louisiana Purchase and to make peace with various Indian tribes along the
way.”24 When he ventured too far into New Spain (he was found on the Rio Grande, but
maintained that he believed he was on the Red River, which is a tributary of the
Mississippi), he and his men were taken into custody by the Spanish military, and
escorted to New Mexico, Chihuahua, and back to the United States through Texas.25
Pike’s capture is significant because it enabled him to intimately observe some of
Northern Mexico’s society and culture, as well as survey a great deal of the land.
Although Pike discussed a wide range of issues in his narrative, his critique of Mexican
society related primarily to the two fundamental institutions of Spanish authority: the
Catholic Church and the monarchy. Perhaps Pike was merely echoing the discourse of
what would be termed the Black Legend? La Leyenda Negra, or the Black Legend, was a
term coined in 1914 by a Spanish intellectual, Julián Juderías. According to Joseph P.
Sánchez, Juderías argued that “anti-Spanish propaganda and misconceptions were deeply
rooted in the lore of Protestant Europe” and that these “misconceptions had continued
unabated long after their usefulness as propaganda had been served.”26 After the
Protestant Reformation in 1517, Christendom was divided and “the resulting CatholicProtestant antagonisms stimulated a new challenge to Spain.”27 In 1542, Fray Bartolomé
de las Casas submitted a report to Charles I of Spain depicting violations against Indians
14 in Spain’s American colonies. In Brevisima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (A
Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies), Las Casas recommended that the license
to conquer be restricted. A few years after its publication, Relación was translated into
Dutch, French, English, and German, and it circulated throughout Protestant Europe.
Sánchez argues that Protestant Europe appropriated Las Casas’ report as proof of Spain’s
bigotry and inserted an anti-Catholic slant to the anti-Hispanic propaganda. Sánchez
wrote: “Predicated on a simplistic and faulty analysis of historical information, the
propaganda promoted the falsehood that historically Hispanics were uniquely cruel,
bigoted, tyrannical, lazy, violent, treacherous and depraved.”28 Ultimately, the Black
Legend provided a kind of shorthand for describing and explaining the cultural and
political “backwardness” of the region.
Pike’s analysis of Mexican society calls to mind the prejudice of the Black
Legend. In Santa Fé, for example, Pike observed: “there are two churches, the
magnificence of whose steeples form a striking contrast to the miserable appearances of
the houses.”29 Here he has portrayed the church’s wealth as an abuse on the people. He
noted of the Spanish priests that, though cordial and inviting, they were corrupt and
practiced a false model of Christianity. To that effect, he reported that one priest’s
behavior was such that the Americans would have seen it “sufficient forever to have
banished him from the clerical association,” due to his flirtations with the young women
in town.30
Pike certainly understood there to be value in the Catholic Church in terms of its
ability to “civilize” the native population. Throughout his tour of New Mexico, he
distinguished the “civilized” Indians from the “savages.”31 Nonetheless, his reverence for
15 the Catholic Church may have ended at its ability to convert Indians. To make this point
clear, Pike repeatedly noted his refrain from greeting the priests in the same manner as
the Mexicans did. While “all the poor creatures who stood round strove to kiss the ring or
hand of the holy father [sic],” Pike “saluted him in the usual style.”32 Pike is using
multiple meanings of “poor” in the previous sentence. Certainly, the villagers lacked
wealth; however, he could also be saying that these people who gathered to pay homage
to their priest were deserving of pity or sympathy. Pike’s “usual style” of salutation
(which he does not mention, but may have been common knowledge to his
contemporaries) was used here to distinguish his religion from that of the Catholic faith.
The fact that Pike rebuked the actions of those who honored the padres illustrates his
discontent with the Catholic Church, as well as what he perceived to be the inequalities
cultivated by Catholic culture.
Pike’s denouncement of the Spanish government was similar in nature.
He
remarked that under Spanish dominion, the Indian populations, which dominated the
landscape, were “bowed to the yoke of their invaders.”33 His depictions of the Spanish
monarchy showed it as being tyrannical and an impediment to Mexico’s progress. He
observed:
here an idea struck me as extraordinary, how a man who appeared to be perfect
master of the ancient languages, a botanist, mineralogist, and chemist should be
so ignorant of the powers of reflection and the first principles of mathematics; but
my friend explained that enigma by informing me of the care the Spanish
government took to prevent any branch of science from being made a pursuit
which would have a tendency to extend the views of the subjects.34
Pike also reported on a visit he made to “an old invalid Spaniard,” who “made many
inquiries as to our government and religion.”35 The Spaniard thought it amazing that the
United States elected and changed their presidents. Pike felt obliged to tell this man of the
16 “perfect freedom of conscience permitted in our country,” echoing the sentiments of
other Euro-Americans (like Jedidiah Morse) who thought it unnatural for a people to be
ruled by a monarchy thousands of miles away.36 Pike also commented on the inefficiency
of Mexico’s political situation, noting that it had cost the monarchy more than $10,000 to
lodge Pike and his men, and to have them escorted back to the United States. According
to Pike’s account, this expense was the result of “a mere accident and the deception of the
governor.”37 Presumably, Pike believed that the U.S. bureaucratic system would prohibit
such a costly endeavor without first ensuring its necessity, as he explained that this sort of
thing was unheard of in the United States.
Once Pike had established well enough that the foundation in Northern Mexico
was corrupt and oppressive, he was able to introduce his audience to the idea that
prevailed throughout his discourse: Northern Mexicans desired a change. To be sure,
however, his uneasiness with the Catholic Church is not projected onto the local
populace; the change that he claims is so desirous among the people relates primarily to
politics and economics. He described a discussion he maintained with a Mexican army
captain who spoke against the favoritism played toward the peninsulares:
After supper Captain D’Almansa related to me that he had served his Catholic
majesty forty years to arrive at the rank he then held, which was a first lieutenant
in the line and a captain by brevet, whilst he had seen various Europeans
promoted over his head…my friend and myself sat up for some hours, he
explaining to me their situation [and] the great desire they felt for a change of
affairs and an open trade with the United States.38
Pike’s observation that the people of Northern Mexico desired further interactions with
the U.S. was rooted in his own belief that Euro-American institutions were preferable to
those he witnessed in New Mexico. Still, it may very well be the case that New
17 Mexicans, due to situation on the frontier of New Spain, truly did covet trade with the
United States and disliked peninsulares because they controlled positions of power.
Leaders of the independence movements throughout Latin America used these
kinds of complaints to rally support for their campaigns. Pike certainly took note of these
burgeoning sentiments and wrote positively about the potential for such an event. Upon
entering the town of San Fernandez, Pike was greeted by a lieutenant in the Mexican
army, Don Faciendo Malgares, who was one of the men charged with escorting the
Americans out of Mexico. Pike noted Malgares’ indignation at the degraded state of the
Spanish monarchy and wrote that Malgares could conceive of separating Mexico from
the mother country if France gained control of the Spanish throne. Pike hoped that there
were others in Mexico, like Malgares, “who possess[ed] the heads to plan, the hearts to
feel, and the hands to carry this great and important work into execution.”39
Pike was clearly laying the groundwork for further U.S. involvement in the
region, though he could not have known at the time what form that involvement would
take. On his march back to the United States, Pike was allowed a tour of a mineral mine
in Mapimí, Durango, and although he noted that the “mass of the people were naked and
starved wretches,” he also proclaimed “they excited my laughter, as there were
disaffected persons sufficient to serve as guides should an army ever come into the
country.”40 Here, Pike anticipated future U.S. military action in Northern Mexico, and
subsequently depicted the Mexican population as future allies against Spain.
Though he allowed for a potential future conflict over the land, Pike did not seem
to anticipate that the United States and Spain would go to war over the region. Rather, his
examples of Spanish oppression and Mexican desires for change speak to the idea that
18 further contact between Euro-Americans and Northern Mexicans would be the result of
an open border. His narrative helped to formulate the notion that Northern Mexicans
would greatly benefit from this contact, as they would undoubtedly learn and appropriate
European-American principles of government and economic institutions. He wrote that
some were already eager for such an interaction:
Don Melcher was a man of very large fortune, polite, generous, and friendly. He
had in his service a man who had deserted from Captain Lockwood’s company,
First Regiment of infantry, by the name of Pratt. From this man he had acquired a
considerable quantity of crude undigested information relative to the United
States, and when he met with us his thirst after knowledge of our laws and
institutions appeared to be insatiable.41
Here, Pike described the “thirst” in Northern Mexico for Euro-American laws and
institutions as “insatiable.” His travel account is filled with anecdotes that explain why
such a “thirst” exists: the Spanish monarchy is tyrannical and oppressive, and their form
of governing is set up to obstruct the progress of the people; at the same time, the
Catholic church is corrupt, and their need for excess is achieved at the expense of the
poor Northern Mexicans.
The years between the Pike Expedition and Mexican Independence did not
produce much intercourse between Euro-Americans and Spaniards in Northern Mexico.
One reason for this is that the border remained legally closed. In addition, Mexicans
began their long fight for independence in 1810, so their country was in turmoil. North of
the border, the United States was caught up in its own conflict, the War of 1812. It was
not until peace was restored in 1815 that European-American interest in the exploration
of the Southwestern Louisiana Territory was once again piqued. In 1817, a Washington
newspaper reported on Mexico’s push for independence from Spain, claiming that “She
has a thousand times stronger inducements to resist the Spanish monarchy than we had
19 that of the English.”42 The idea presented here is that the Spanish were more repressive
toward their colonies than the English had been to theirs. The author concluded as much
from the discourse that had thus far been created about Mexico.
Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, men like Thomas Jefferson, John
Adams, and Zebulon Pike set their gazes on the West. Jefferson and Adams, because of
their positions in government, were able to establish expansionist policy, purchase
western territory, and organize expeditions to the West. Pike, the leader of one such
expedition, was able to observe the cultural and political situation in Mexico’s
northernmost territory. The perception that the United States would one day advance
further west, thereby putting themselves in contact with this Northern Mexican
population, influenced the ways that travelers to Mexico described their southern
neighbors. They described an avaricious Catholic Church, a tyrannical Mexican
government, and a people desirous of change. Mexico’s independence movement
confirmed the belief in the U.S. that the two nations would soon be drawn closer together.
The author of the 1817 newspaper article predicted that an independent Mexico
“will rely upon us to transact for them their foreign commerce, and…will look to our
country probably for a century to come, for supplies of the coarser articles of
manufactures, which they much stand in need of, and in which we shall abound.”43 After
Mexican independence, contact between Northern Mexicans and Euro-Americans
certainly did increase, especially after the opening of the Santa Fé Trail in 1821. The next
chapter will explore the evolution of the discourse that Euro-American travelers helped
create about the newly independent Northern Mexicans.
20 CHAPTER THREE
The Early Mexican Period:
Euro-American Responses to Mexican Independence
And now we might extend our view
And far from home our course pursue,
We might in roving even go
And take a peep at Mexico—
Show how the South Americans
Marshall-d their brave and boasting bands
And with intoxicating glee
Almost resolved that they’d be free,
And then again in thoughtless hour
Bow’d humbly to despotic power,
And cried, with mouths extended wide,
“Long live the Emp’ror Iturbide!”
T.S. Hannon, 1823
In September 1821, Spain and Mexico signed the Treaty of Córdoba, which
established Mexican independence from Spain. In 1822, Agustín de Iturbide became the
Constitutional Emperor of Mexico. Iturbide was an army general who fought for the
Spanish side in the Mexican War of Independence until 1820, when he became convinced
that independence was the only way to protect criollo interests in Mexico. Antonio López
de Santa Anna deposed Iturbide in 1823, leading to the adoption of the 1824 Constitution
of the United States of Mexico, a federal republic. Given the turbulent start to the newly
independent country, people in the United States had mixed reactions to Mexico’s status
as a free nation. As early as 1822, American newspapers were reporting on the success of
Mexico’s democracy, stating that it was established “on as free and rational
principles…as our own.”44 However, the poem that begins this chapter clearly illustrates
that Americans kept a watchful eye on the fate of the Mexican nation, and some were not
certain that it would succeed. The increase in Euro-American travel accounts throughout
the 1820s shows that more Euro-Americans were going to see Mexico with their own
21 eyes, and to determine whether or not there were opportunities for Americans in this new
society.
Travelers to Northern Mexico were greatly aided by the opening of the Santa Fé
Trail in 1821. That year, William Becknell pioneered an overland route between
Independence, Missouri and Santa Fé, New Mexico. This route became the key
commercial passage between Mexico and the United States in the years following
Mexican independence. In 1824, the Mexican government issued the National
Colonization Law, which aimed to encourage foreigners to populate Mexico’s northern
territories. Coahuila y Texas, one of the states of the newly formed United States of
Mexico, augmented the National Colonization Law in 1825, giving further incentives to
foreigners who settled there. That same year, the United States sent its first American
minister, Joel Poinsett, to Mexico City. The American focus on westward expansion and
Mexico’s independence from Spain, then, propelled increased interactions between the
peoples of the two republics.
Most Euro-Americans traveled to Northern Mexico free from any official
exploration or trade accord. Instead, those who traversed the Santa Fé Trail, who settled
in Texas, or who traveled around Cape Horn or overland to California looked to make
personal inroads into the Northern Mexican markets. Given the wait-and-see mentality
that Euro-Americans had in regard to Mexico’s political situation, travel journals to
Northern Mexico during the 1820s fell short of advocating for U.S. expansion into the
region. That being said, it is important to keep in mind that they traveled with an
established exemplum of Northern Mexicans, as well as with an imperialistic
understanding of their own country, which they gained from the previous interactions
22 between the two countries. Inasmuch, their narratives are important to a comprehensive
understanding of the evolution of the Euro-American discourse on Northern Mexico and
the later justifications for U.S. expansion into the region.
In 1820, Major Stephen H. Long led an expedition to the Rocky Mountains.
Although Long and his regimen traversed a considerable portion of Spanish, and later
Mexican, territory, they never met with any Spanish-Americans. John R. Bell, the official
journalist for the Stephen H. Long Expedition, described U.S. interests in establishing
trade with the Indian populations in the region before such trade was allowed with
Mexico. Relating the events of one such accord, he wrote: “they replied that they were
happy to see the Americans, that we were the first party they had ever seen—and that I
saw their situation, and if our Father should prosper to send traders among them, they
should be well treated.”45 Bell’s observations function as a marker for U.S. interests in
Northern Mexico at the end of the Spanish Period: he promoted trade relations, indicating
that the U.S. maintained economic interests in the region, not necessarily expansion. The
analysis that follows illustrates this focus on trade and economic motivations, as well as
descriptions of Northern Mexicans as inferior to their northern neighbors. Because of the
isolation of New Mexico and California in terms of their relation to each other, this
chapter examines these regions independently of one another. The discourse created in
the various regions, however, exemplifies the common U.S. interests in Northern Mexico.
Not much is known about the adventurer Jacob Fowler, who journeyed into
northern New Spain only months before Mexico’s independence. Fowler worked as a
surveyor for the United States during the early years of western exploration, mapping out
the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains for his government. By the time he traveled into
23 Northern Mexico in 1821, however, it appears as though he was self-employed as a
trapper. The Introduction to his published journal claims that his “is simply a story of the
trader and trapper, unsupported by the soldier, unimpeded by the priest, and in no danger
from the politician.”46 Though he was by no means the first Euro-American trapper in the
region, Fowler’s journal is the first Euro-American account of the area between Taos,
New Mexico and Pueblo, Colorado.
When Fowler entered the country in September 1821, Spanish and Mexican
authorities had already signed the Treaty of Córdoba, though it took more than five
months for this news to reach Fowler in New Mexico.47 Fowler’s first mention of
Mexican Independence is very telling of Euro-American interests in the region: “We now
understand that the Mexican province has declared independence of the mother country
and is desirous of a trade with the people of the United States.”48 Spain had maintained a
firm embargo on trade with the United States, but an independent Mexico not only
welcomed trade with its northern neighbor, according to Fowler, but also relied, to a
certain extent, on it for manufactured goods that it once received from Spain.
The United States was keen to fill the void left by the Spanish and become
Mexico’s primary trade partner; however, the British also sought to take advantage of this
situation. The first American minister to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, advised the U.S.
government to keep smuggling and illicit trade to Mexico in check “because it seriously
injures the fair commerce between the two Countries.”49 Establishing and maintaining
this “fair commerce” was certainly a priority for the United States. As previously
mentioned, Fowler wrote in his journal that this was also a priority for the people of
Mexico. Could Fowler have been aware of the wants and desires of the newly
24 empowered Mexican government, especially given his distance from the capital city?
Was he speaking solely about the Mexican population he encountered in the upper
reaches of New Mexico? Or was he merely echoing a discourse that originated east of the
Louisiana Territory and supported U.S. interests?
To be certain, Fowler was familiar with Pike’s Expedition of 1806. While
describing his ascension up Las Cumbres Españolas (Spanish Peaks), Fowler observed:
“this must be the place where Pike first discovered the mountains.”50 Knowledge of
Pike’s journey is understandable, since Fowler had been under the employ of the U.S.
government as a surveyor of western land probably around the same time that Zebulon
Pike was himself surveying portions of the Louisiana Territory. Whether or not Fowler
read Pike’s journal is impossible to know, but one can find similarities in their
descriptions of Mexican society. For instance, Pike observed a certain amount of
wantonness among the women of Albuquerque, who “converted our wine to nectar and
with their ambrosial breath shed incense on our cups.”51 Perhaps convinced of the
promiscuity of New Mexican women, Fowler wrote that one woman had embarrassed his
friend, “taking hold of him and drawing him to the bedside, [she] sat him down with her
arms round his shoulders, and gave him a kiss…and slipped her hand down into his
britches.”52
Fowler’s observations of Mexicans and their lifestyles indicate that his framework
for perceiving Northern Mexicans had largely been shaped by the narrative that had been
written by men like Pike in the United States regarding Spanish rule. The stories he
shares of his interactions with Mexicans highlight their lack of modernity and immoral
behavior. He refers to the Mexican village of San Fernandez de Taos as a “wretched
25 place” where there was “no bread stuff to be got.”53 Fowler stops short, however, of
making the claim that the United States would be better suited to “civilizing” the people
than the Mexican government. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Fowler had no great
interest in the Mexican people and their culture, as indicated by his numerous mentions
of rain and few observations of people in his diary.
It is reasonable to conclude that Jacob Fowler did not write under the scope of
Pratt’s capitalist vanguard, as he was in the area to trap beaver, not to promote EuroAmerican imperialism, per se. That being said, Fowler certainly functions as a
predecessor to that group. With his background as a surveyor, and his current occupation
as a trapper, Fowler examines the land with great detail. It is during this early Mexican
period that Euro-Americans began to view the land in Northern Mexico with more of a
capitalistic eye. In noting the potential of a particular clearing, Fowler wrote: “grass is tall
and I think from every appearance this plain would make a good settlement for
farmers.”54 It is uncertain, however, whether or not Fowler anticipated those farmers to
be American or Mexican.
Fowler’s journal is significant in that it occurred during the transition from the
colonial to the national period, and his interest in economic opportunities is indicative of
this transition. Fowler’s observations of the Mexican population’s “wretchedness” speak
to a clear Hispanophobia. Nonetheless, his journal stops short of suggesting that Mexico
needed guidance from the modern and pious United States. Later, beginning in the 1830s
as more and more merchants traversed the Santa Fé Trail, a clear push for U.S. expansion
into the region enters the discourse. These later travelers used the observations made by
men like Fowler as evidence to support their claim that the U.S. would be a better
26 administrator in Northern Mexico than the Mexican government was, but Fowler and his
contemporaries were not yet openly advocating U.S. expansion. Fowler merely suggests
that the people of Mexico desired an established trade between the two countries. Fowler,
at least, seemed to agree that such an accord would be favorable to the previous ban.
Alta California was the furthest frontier in the newly independent Mexican
nation.55 As such, it was not until January 1822 that Californios finally got work of
Mexico’s independence from Spain, an event that occurred five months earlier. As
previously noted, this was roughly the same amount of time it took Jacob Fowler in New
Mexico to learn of the successful fight for independence. On April 11, Monterey’s
Mexican population officially took the oath of allegiance to the new government and
replaced the Spanish flag with Mexico’s banner. During its first years as a newly
independent republic, Mexico attempted to alter its society in significant ways. In 1826,
for example, Mexico emancipated all natives from the missions. The next year, it
expelled all Spaniards under the age of 60 from its territory. In California, where most of
the Mexican population was localized in the missions and where the majority of the
padres were Spanish-born, these measures had a great effect on the social order. The
European-Americans who traveled to California during this period witnessed a society in
transition.
In 1826, Jedediah Smith became the first European-American to enter California
via an overland route. Crossing the Mohave Desert and entering the San Bernardino
Valley, he encountered his first signs of Mexican civilization, cattle. Smith wrote his
narrative from memory at some point after these events took place, so it is not known
whether or not he arrived in California with the following preconceptions about Mexico
27 and its people, or if he established this discourse after experiencing Californian society.
Nonetheless, he wrote about his first observations of Mexican California:
As those sure evidences of Civilization passed in sight they awakened many
emotions in my mind and some of them not the most pleasant. It would perhaps
be supposed that after numerous hardships endured in a savage and inhospitable
desert I should hail the herds that were passing before me in the valley as
harbingers of better times. But they reminded me that I was approaching a
country inhabited by Spaniards. A people whose distinguishing characteristic has
ever been jealousy a people of different religion from mine and possessing a full
share of that bigotry and disregard of the rights of a Protestant that has at times
stained the Catholic Religion.56
Here, Smith is clearly hesitant about encountering the Mexican population in California.
He refers to them as jealous bigots and suggests that they maintained some prejudice
against Protestants. This last observation is quite ironic, as it is Smith who is writing a
derogatory description of Catholics before meeting them in California.
Smith, like Jacob Fowler, was probably familiar with Zebulon Pike’s journey.
Pike, you will recall, portrayed the church’s wealth as an abuse on the people. He noted
that the Spanish priests, though cordial and inviting, were corrupt and practiced a false
model of Christianity. Smith may have also been influenced by the prejudices of the
Black Legend. Whether Smith was drawing from the Black Legend or other EuropeanAmericans’ experiences in Northern Mexico, or both, his anti-Catholicism is used to
question the value of Mexican rule in California. The question remains, did Smith use
this language in order to promote European-American expansion into California?
We know from his journal that Jedediah Smith advocated European-American
imperialism. He wrote:
Meeting in a distant country by routes so different gave an instance of that restless
enterprise that has lead and is now leading our countrymen to all parts of the
world that has made them travellers [sic] on every ocean until it can now be said
there is not a breeze of heaven but spreads an american [sic] flag.57
28 Here, he is recalling his encounter with Captain William H. Cunningham, a Bostonian
engaged in the hide and tallow trade in California at the time of Smith’s arrival. More
importantly, Smith describes the “restless enterprise” of imperialism that was driving
Euro-American travelers in the 1820s.
Furthermore, when Smith described the landscape on his journey to Northern
California, he used the language of the proto-capitalist vanguard. Smith, like Jacob
Fowler in New Mexico, found himself in California as a trapper. It is, therefore,
understandable that he details the variety of game that flourished in California, such as
black-tailed deer, elk, antelope, and beaver. However, he also makes an effort to
enumerate the kinds of timber that were available, which is only useful if one were to
settle in the country. Why should a trapper who has been ordered out of California by the
governor recall that “near the Mt [sic] there is a good deal of Oak timber the trees having
large trunks but Low and spreading tops so that it is not of the most valuable kind for
building or fencing?”58 One reasonable explanation is that the imperialistic impulses of
the United States colored the way that Smith described the land. If European-Americans
were to control California at some point in the future, they should be made aware of the
availability of resources.
At the same time that Smith was traveling, Joel Poinsett was actively pursuing a
peaceful negotiation with the Mexican government for control of Texas. Only a few years
earlier, in 1819, Spain ceded Florida to the United States because it had become a
financial burden to them. The United States hoped to attain other parts of Mexico’s
frontier in similar fashion. We know this to be the case based on a letter written in 1835
by Poinsett’s successor, Anthony Butler. Butler wrote that Poinsett “received instructions
29 as early as 1826…to open a Negotiation for the purpose of obtaining a Transfer of the
province of Texas to the United States.”59 Because Poinsett had been given instructions to
negotiate for control of Texas, he used a discourse that strongly argued in favor of U.S.
expansion.
The language that Poinsett used in his own letters to describe Mexico and its
population sustain the belief that the United States would be a better administer of
Northern Mexico. In a letter to Secretary of State Henry Clay, dated 1826, Poinsett refers
to the impediment of “the old, ignorant, and bigotted [sic] priests.”60 Three years later, he
penned a more explicit representation of Mexican society:
The want of means of acquiring knowledge, the absence of all excitement to
exertion, the facility of procuring the means of subsistence almost without labour,
a mild and enervating climate and their constant intercourse with the aborigines,
who were and still are degraded to the very lowest class of human beings, all
contributed to render the Mexicans a more ignorant and debauched people than
the ancestors had been.61
Here, Poinsett claims that the lack of educational institutions, miscegenation between the
Mexicans and the natives, and the climate all combined to stunt Mexico’s progress. The
assumption is that the United States, due to its liberal institutions, its treatment of the
native population (that is to say, its removal of the native population from desirable land),
and its northern climate, is a more industrious and civilized society, and one that is better
suited to governance.
As has been shown, Jedediah Smith used similar language in his narrative. There
is a tacit comparison occurring in Jedediah Smith’s narrative between the “bigoted”
Catholic Church and the “capricious” governor of California, and the corresponding
religious and political institutions in the United States, just as Poinsett’s letters assume
European-American superiority. When Smith described the absolute power that the
30 mission padres held over the Indian neophytes, including the right to prohibit marriage
“without the consent of the father (padre),” it is implied that the United States had dealt
with their native population in a much more humane and civilized manner. It can,
therefore, be concluded that Smith’s descriptions of California deliberately created a
discourse of Northern Mexicans that justified American domination, though he did not
openly advocate for expansion.
The early Mexican Period saw a trickle of Euro-American travelers enter
Northern Mexico. The Santa Fé Trail opened in 1821, serving as a vital artery connecting
the Mexican and U.S. trade economies. California, once a completely isolated frontier of
New Spain’s, was becoming an important borderland and drawing the attention of not
just the United States and Mexico, but also England, France, and Russia. Texas, which
had served as a buffer zone between New Spain and New France in the eighteenth
century, was now a desired location for many Euro-American settlers.
The combination of these events had a great impact on the region and influenced
the ways that Euro-Americans wrote about Northern Mexico. However, the effects of
these policies were not immediately felt. Rather, travelers would largely note their impact
in the successive decades. In the 1820s, as has been shown, Euro-American travelers
maintained the earlier discourse that purported the tyranny of Spanish rule and the
corrupted Catholic Church, which implied a call for U.S. expansion, but fell just short of
explicitly advocating for it. Instead, these travelers helped to reinforce a narrative that
would eventually be used to argue for Manifest Destiny. Fowler’s observation of the
“wretched” state of society in Taos, Smith’s depiction of the “bigoted” Catholic Church
in California, and Poinsett’s exclamation about a “debauched” Mexican polity bolstered
31 the argument that the United States would do a better job of governing the region than the
Mexicans had done.
Taken together, these travelers took a major step toward the discourse of Manifest
Destiny in their journals. This is most obvious, perhaps, in the travel journal of Jedediah
Smith. His observation of the various kinds of timber available in California signifies a
move toward the kind of narrative employed by the capitalist vanguard. Likewise,
Fowler’s assurance that “this plain would make a good settlement for farmers” indicates
that these men were beginning to envision the region settled by their countrymen, even if
they did not outright promote such a thing.62
32 CHAPTER FOUR
The 1830s and 1840s:
Reactions to Texas Independence
When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people,
from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose
happiness it was instituted; and so far from being a guarantee for the inestimable and
inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their
oppression…
Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836
The colonization laws enacted by Mexico in the 1820s prompted many EuroAmericans to settle in Texas. According to Ernesto Chávez: “there were 12,000 U.S.
citizens living in Texas” by 1827.63 The next year, Mexico set up a commission, headed
by General Manuel Mier y Terán, to survey the state of affairs in Texas. Mier y Terán
recommended that Mexico take action to protect its control of Texas. In his report, he
wrote: “The department of Texas is contiguous to the most avid nation in the world. The
North Americans have conquered whatever territory adjoins them.”64 He goes on to
describe the manner in which Americans were gaining control of Texas, not by “armies,
battles, or invasions,” but by “silent means”.65 His advice to the Mexican government
was that they limit Euro-American immigration to Texas. The Mexican government
complied and made it illegal for Americans to enter Texas in 1830, though many ignored
the ban and settled in Texas illegally. When Texans began their war of secession in 1835,
Texas claimed 20,000 American-born citizens, compared to 5,000 Mexican-born citizens.
Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836 greatly informed the ways that
European-Americans wrote about California and New Mexico in the successive decade.66
As discussed in the previous chapters, the established Euro-American discourse on
Northern Mexico purported a “backward” society that had been stunted by the tyrannous
33 Spanish monarchy and avaricious Catholic Church. Euro-American travelers also relied
on monolithic depictions of a “lazy” Mexican populous in order to suggest that Northern
Mexicans might benefit from experience with American institutions. After 1836,
however, travelers to Northern Mexico began to openly advocate for U.S. expansion into
New Mexico and California. This shift in the discourse is most dramatically seen in the
ways that these travelers observed the economic opportunities in the region. Whereas
earlier travelers may have noticed varieties of timber or other available resources, the
travelers of the 1830s and 1840s reported on specific industries in which Euro-Americans
could prosper. Mary Louise Pratt’s capitalist vanguards finally arrive on the scene.
This open call for U.S. expansion still needed justification. In large part, travelers
relied on the established discourse to justify American imperialism. There was, however,
one aspect of Mexican society that received a bit of a makeover on the pages of the 1830s
travel journals, the Catholic Church. Earlier representations of the Catholic Church were
based on the Black Legend, and were utilized to place Northern Mexicans in an inferior
position to Protestant Americans. However, during the 1830s, the Mexican government
decided to secularize the missions. Travelers to California, where the mission system was
very strong, used this situation as an opportunity to further call to question Mexico’s
ability to govern in their northernmost territories.
A final element that distinguishes the travel narratives of the 1830s and 1840s
from those that came before is the way that they treated Mexico’s ability to defend
California and New Mexico from domestic or foreign aggressors. Certainly Mexico’s
inability to quell the rebellion in Texas influenced the way these men depicted Mexico’s
military. As a result, these travelers devoted more pages to a discussion of military
34 leaders and their leadership qualities. The conclusion they made is that there did not exist
much of a threat to a U.S. military campaign in the region, should one occur. As will be
shown in Chapter Four, the United States government later used this discourse to promote
the U.S.-Mexico War.
Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies (1844) is perhaps the most important
travel account written before the outbreak of war between the United States and Mexico.
Gregg set off along the Santa Fé Trail in 1831, ten years after William Becknell
pioneered the route between Missouri and New Mexico. Commerce is fundamentally the
story of the Santa Fé trade, although it also provides an exhaustive account of the
historical, cultural, economic, political, social, agricultural, and intellectual observations
made by Gregg throughout his nine years in Northern Mexico. Most notably, Gregg’s
narrative illustrates the clear transition to the capitalist vanguard mindset that occurred
among the travel writers during the 1830s. Gregg, as well as the other travelers in the
years following Texan independence, pointed out areas suitable for cultivation, took
careful note of past mineral production, and raved about the territory’s superior
pasturage. At the same time, Gregg condemned the Mexicans for not making the most
(according to his standards) of these natural advantages.
Earlier travelers, like Jedediah Smith and Jacob Fowler, observed the advantages
of the natural resources in Northern Mexico; however, the language they used was fairly
benign compared to that used by Gregg and his contemporaries. Recall that Fowler
remarked of a particular clearing: “grass is tall and I think from every appearance this
plain would make a good settlement for farmers.”67 Compare Fowler’s observations to
those made by Gregg, in this case regarding wool production in the country: “from the
35 superiority of the pasturage and climate, New Mexico might doubtless grow the finest
wool in the world. In conformity with their characteristic tardiness in improvement,
however, the natives have retained their original stocks, which are wretchedly
degenerate.”68 Both men see the potential in the land; only one actively condemns the
Mexican population for the supposed lack of production.
Gregg’s sentiments regarding the mineral production in New Mexico were written
with similar condescension. Regarding the gold mines, he blamed antiquated mining
techniques and a jealous government for the arrested operations. He proclaimed:
Could any dependence be placed in the integrity of the government, I have no
doubt that, with sufficient capital and the aid of machinery…the old mines of this
province might be reopened, and a great number of the placeres very extensively
and profitably worked.69
Wool and mining production are but two examples found in Commerce. What Gregg laid
forth about New Mexicans was that their government lacked integrity and their society
lacked modernity. New Mexico’s problems, he asserted, were due to this injurious
combination, and the effects could be seen in every aspect of society, whether it be
medicine, architecture, education, or mechanical arts. These observations merely provide
the reader with the symptoms and diagnosis; fortunately for the historian, Gregg supports
these claims with his perception of the causes.
According to Gregg, the causes of New Mexico’s archaic infrastructure were
inherent and monolithic. That is to say, there was no variance among the people with
respect to those qualities that Gregg perceived as being the cancers, to keep with the
medical metaphor. Through methods he does not mention, Gregg ascertained that New
Mexicans possessed the following characteristics: cruelty, bigotry, fanaticism, artifice,
subservience, cunning, and superstition, to name a few.70 He did, however, distinguish
36 military leaders for their cowardice and priests for their avarice. In keeping with the
Euro-American discourse, Gregg attached most of the blame to Mexico’s government.
He described the popular representation that governed New Mexico as a mere “shadow”
of democracy, and held visceral contempt for their legal system. “The administration of
the laws in Northern Mexico,” he wrote, “constitutes one of the most painful features of
her institutions.”71 Interestingly, Gregg was more concerned by how the legal system
affected European-Americans rather than the Mexican populace, observing that the “evil
consequences arising from maladministration of justice in New Mexico are most severely
felt by foreigners.72 Gregg was probably familiar with Zebulon Pike’s arrest in Northern
Mexico, and his concern for his countrymen, rather than for the Mexican populace, is
reflected in his discussion of New Mexico’s legal system.
In maintaining his unease for the treatment of European-Americans, Gregg
complained that Governor Manuel Armijo was instrumental in obstructing EuroAmerican trade relations in New Mexico. He claimed: “few men, perhaps, have done
more to jeopard [sic] the interests of American traders, or to bring the American character
itself into contempt, than Armijo, the present arbitrary governor of New Mexico.”73 In
fact, on the pages of travel accounts, Armijo became the biggest enemy of the United
States and the greatest impediment to progress in New Mexico. Subsequent travelers
expanded upon Gregg’s accounts of Armijo’s injustices, but it must be noted that at the
time that Gregg traveled, in the 1830s, the governors of Northern Mexico are all called
out for their oppression and tyranny.
The combination of a repressive government, the lack of civil freedoms, an
avaricious Church, and an inept military, Gregg argued, resulted in the continued stifling
37 of New Mexico’s progress. “No wonder,” he concludes, “that the people of Northern
Mexico are so much behind their neighbors of the United States in intelligence, and that
the pulse of national identity and liberty beats so low.”74 Before Gregg, U.S. travelers
openly displayed their Hispanophobia in their writings, and they helped to create the
premise that the authority in Mexico had impeded progress in the country’s northernmost
territories. However, Gregg’s predecessors attributed this to a legacy of Spanish tyranny
and Catholic oppression. In Gregg’s writings, these shortcomings become fully
entrenched in Mexican society. Accordingly, Gregg depicted the Mexican authorities as
the impediments of progress in Northern Mexico. The failures of their mining operations
and wool productions provide evidence to this fact. These supposed failures also, as has
been mentioned, provide examples of the kinds of industry that Euro-Americans could
“repair” if they were given the opportunity to do so.
Josiah Gregg was less resolute than was Zebulon Pike about New Mexicans’
desires for governmental and economic change. This is no doubt due to Mexico’s
independence from Spain. It is also possible that traveler writers in the 1830s assumed
that the discourse created by their predecessors was well established and, therefore, they
need not convince their readers of this fact. George Wilkins Kendall, who traveled with
the Texan Santa Fé Expedition in 1841, wrote as if a desire for governmental change was
a foregone conclusion. The following is an example of this assertiveness in Kendall’s
writing: “[Mirabeau B. Lamar] was led to conceive this project by a well-founded belief
that nine tenths of the inhabitants [of New Mexico] were discontented under the Mexican
yoke, and anxious to come under the protective flag to which they really owed fealty.”75
In this case, the flag of which he speaks is the Texas flag, as the expedition was the
38 project of Texas’ president, Mirabeau B. Lamar. Still, the Texans were Anglo-Protestants
with American customs and values, and it was these qualities that the New Mexicans
were “anxious” to appropriate. Kendall maintained that his experience in Mexico
convinced him “that such was the feeling with the larger part of the population.”76
Kendall traveled as an American with the Texan expedition because he sought
adventure on the Western frontier. He did not carry with him articles to trade in the Santa
Fé markets, nor did he participate as a member of the military escort. Rather, his
incentive was such that he was “to pass over a portion of country entirely unknown to the
white man, and might reasonably expect to meet with a larger share of adventure than
usually falls to the lot of the Western travelers.”77 As will be shown with those travelers
who destined for California during the 1830s, Euro-Americans de-Europeanized the
Spanish in Mexico. Kendall has done the same thing here. How else could he travel
across a land “entirely unknown to the white man”, a land that men like Hernan de Soto
and Juan de Oñate explored, a land colonized and settled by Spanish clergy, unless the
Spaniards were not white?
Kendall’s adventure turned out to be more than he bargained for; his account of
the failed Texan expedition was written from memory, as the Mexican authorities
confiscated his notes upon his capture in that country. Still, his narrative reproduced the
characteristics that distinguished travel accounts during the 1830s and 1840s. He wrote
pejoratively about the Mexican authorities, he projected an allegiance to U.S. institutions
onto the Mexican populace, and he regarding the landscape through the lens of the
capitalist vanguard. On his inspection of the valley of the Brazos, for example, he noted:
“grapes, plums, and other fruit were found in profusion; honey could be obtained in
39 almost every hollow tree; trout and other fish were plentiful in the small creeks in the
neighborhood; and the woods and prairies about us not only afforded excellent grazing
for our cattle and horses, but teemed with every species of game.”78 In short, he described
the land as ripe for civilization. Notably, he envisioned the civilization that would take
hold as being the one established by the United States, as he is keen to note the “excellent
grazing for our cattle and horses.” However, the circumstances of his journey cut these
kinds of musings short, and, after the hardships of the expedition, it is rare that he
mentions any benefits of the land. When he approached a large flock of sheep in New
Mexico, after his capture by Mexican authorities, he merely mentions their numbers and
a few peculiarities of shepherding; absent from his account were the declarations made
by Gregg and others regarding the excellent climate and pasturage New Mexico provided
for such endeavors.
Instead, Kendall devotes his prose to an examination of the forces that led to the
perceived corruption and tyranny in New Mexico. Descriptions of the destitute living
conditions give credence to the supposition that the Mexican government had failed to
provide for the common people. The following description is said to apply to all villages
in New Mexico: “We entered the largest house in the place. It had but two rooms, the
earthen floor and scanty furniture of which gave them a prison-like and desolate
appearance.”79 The use of the term “prison-like” here is not only meant to describe the
atmosphere, but also to position the people who lived there as on par with prisoners; in
this case, they were prisoners of a corrupt government.
His treatment of Governor Armijo and the soldier in charge of arresting Kendall
and his companions, Dimasio Salezar, were particularly scathing. He used an abundance
40 of uncomplimentary phrases to describe Salezar (“a courteous tone foreign to his nature,”
“the scoundrel,” “bloodthirsty,” etc.).80 To distinguish Salezar from the men he
commanded, Kendall described the men’s frightened appearance in response to Salezar’s
order to have them execute the Texans and Americans. This comparison between the
qualities of the military leaders in New Mexico and those of the rank and file reflects
Gregg’s perceptions on the same subject. Regarding Governor Armijo, Kendall reports
that the people of Cuesta, New Mexico “took every means to inform us [that Armijo] was
a brutal and unfeeling tyrant, delighting in every act of cruelty which might impress his
subjects with fear, and ever anxious to show off his great influence and power by acts of
the most atrocious persecution.”81 By attributing this opinion to the people of Cuesta,
Kendall has given further support to his earlier premise of Mexican discontent.
The abhorrent attributes that Kendall used to describe Armijo were, according to
his text, inherent to all Mexican leaders. He closed his discourse on Armijo with the
following summation:
It may be thought singular that no attention is paid to Armijo’s tyranny by the
general government; but his policy is only part of that which has obtained in many
of the departments. In our own confederacy, we regard intelligence as the great
bond of union; the reverse is the case in Mexico—a sufficient test to prove that
the so-called Republic is no Republic at all.82
Kendall’s claims supported the Euro-American discourse that asserted that the people of
New Mexico desired to be freed from the “yoke” of inadequate Mexican rule and that
they purported allegiance to another flag. The perils with which he met in the country
provided a structure for promoting this message.
George Wilkins Kendall traveled to New Mexico as a member of the Texas Santa
Fé Expedition, organized by President Mirabeau B. Lamar. Lamar hoped to convince
41 New Mexicans to align themselves with Texas and claim their independence from
Mexico. Around the same time, the United States directed its own expeditions in the
Pacific Northwest and along the Pacific Coast. On August 14, 1841, Charles Wilkes
arrived in Yerba Buena (now San Francisco) with a party from the United States
Exploring Expedition.83 He traveled from the Bay Area to the Sacramento Valley and
finally to Santa Clara and San Jose before returning to the Columbia River in Oregon. In
his narrative, Wilkes reinforced many of the stereotypes given to the Californio and
native populations. For example, he referred to the California population as ignorant and
barbarous, he called their children naked and dirty, and he described the government as
imbecilic and rapacious. Additionally, Wilkes explained that the degraded state of society
in California was, in part, due to the miscegenation between the Spanish and native
populations. This is reminiscent of Poinsett’s rationalization of Mexico’s supposed lack
of progress.
Charles Wilkes’ narrative, however, demonstrates a new element to the discourse
on Mexican California; he argues that the secularization of the missions negatively
affected Mexican rule. In 1833, the Mexican Congress passed a law calling for the
secularization of the missions. The secularization of the missions enabled the government
to repossess most of the mission land. Mission property was later divided and given out
as land grants to wealthy Mexicans. Beginning in 1834, the ranchero class (the group of
Californios and New Mexicans who had been gifted land grants) began its ascendency in
Northern Mexico’s society, politics, and economy. This period in California history is
known as the rancho period. Wilkes described “the moral degradation to which the
people have fallen since the missions have been robbed by the authorities, and the old
42 priests driven out.”84 According to Wilkes, one of the consequences of this act was the
decline in the care of the native population, specifically the failure of the missions to
provide blankets and clothing for the former neophytes. Furthermore, Wilkes argues that
the aggressive behavior of the natives is a direct result of their having lost access to the
land that they had cultivated since the time that Spanish colonization in California began.
More broadly speaking, Wilkes portrayed the secularization of the missions as a loss of
the morality that once guided California, noting: “the padres and rulers of the missions
were men well adapted for their calling: good managers, sincere Christians, they exerted
a salutary influence over all in any way connected with them, practising [sic] at the same
time the proper virtues of their calling.”85
This discourse is ubiquitous on the pages of Wilkes’ travel account, but he was by
no means the only European-American traveler to make these observations. Josiah
Belden, who traveled to California with the Bartleson-Bidwell Party in 1841, echoed
Wilkes’ praise of the original padres: “Some of them were very good men…I think their
influence over the Indians generally was pretty good, and they succeeded to a
considerable extent in civilizing and Christianizing them.”86 William Dane Phelps, who
traveled up and down the coast of California between 1840-1842 as the captain of a
trading vessel, was perhaps the most commendatory toward the former mission padres:
these pious and indefatigable men maintained an almost constant warfare against
hordes of wild and cruel natives, but in all cases exhibited a pious humble and
meek demeanor, and were always averse to shedding the blood of the Indians, and
it was only in defence [sic] of their lives that they would permit the few soldiers
which Mexico had sent to protect them to resist the aggressions of the
Indians…untill [sic] the whole of California, with most of the natives, came under
the temporal & spiritual dominion of the Missionaries.87
43 In addition to crediting the former mission system with civilizing California, these
men were implying that the change to an autonomous Mexican authority had negative
results. Faxon Dean Atherton visited the Mission San Luis Obispo in 1836, noting that it
was under new management due to the secularization of the missions. He observed that
the mission was in a decrepit state and held “nothing in comparison to what it formerly
possessed.”88 Atherton provided a colorful description of the mission’s new
administrator, General Manuel Truxillo, and his wife: “all he appears to know is about
the City of Mexico and his yellow, fat, cigar smoking, squab built wife is of the same
stamp.”89 Here, Atherton has produced an image of California’s new administrators as
being completely ignorant of the wants and needs of the region. The assumption is that
Mexicans were ill-suited for governance of California. Charles Wilkes was more overt in
his judgment: “Thus, at the same time with a change of rulers, the country was deprived
of the religious establishments upon which its society and good order were founded.
Anarchy and confusion began to reign, and the want of authority was every where felt.”90
European-American travelers during the rancho period in California did not
include in their writings the same enmity toward the Catholic Church as men like
Jedediah Smith and Joel Poinsett.91 Instead of attributing Mexico’s supposed lack of
progress to a religious institution that desired to keep its practitioners ignorant of liberal
ideals, these men insisted that the Church’s loss of power ushered in a new avaricious and
inept ruling class, one far less suited to governing California than the former mission
padres had been. This change in the depiction of the Catholic Church has racist roots.
European-Americans “inherited and routinely relied on eurocentric [sic] cultural criteria,”
argues Tomás Almaguer, “to hierarchically evaluate and racialize the various cultural
44 groups they contended with in California.”92 During the rancho period, Euro-Americans
met with a ruling class in California that was Mexican, rather than Spanish. These
travelers understood Mexicans as the product of Spanish and native miscegenation.
Wilkes wrote that the Californios, having “(d)escended from the old Spaniards…are
unfortunately found to have all their vices, without a proper share of their virtues.”93
During the 1830s, then, the missions became symbols of European-ness. Thusly, the
travelers who wrote about these missions in the 1830s held them in high esteem, and they
criticized the demise of the missions as a result of the new mestizo Mexican nation.
Most of the European-Americans who traveled to California in the 1830s and
1840s came to participate in trade. Faxon Dean Atherton, who arrived in 1836, observed
the nascent capitalism that was taking root in California. As a participant in the
international trade, he was made aware of the fact that “the value of a dollar here is full as
well understood as elsewhere.”94 Euro-American travelers during the rancho period
scrutinized California in terms of the administration and production of its resources.
These travelers, therefore, are the first true members of the capitalist vanguard who
journeyed to California. Josiah Belden summarized the pervading capitalistic perspective
when he wrote that the peons in California lacked foresight and ambition.95 Belden
concluded that Californios were primitive and lazy in their commercial endeavors.
Like Belden, John Bidwell traveled to California in 1841 as a member of the
Bartleson-Bidwell Party, the first overland excursion to California by a group of
European-Americans.96 Bidwell devotes a great deal of his journal to enumerating the
various resources available in the Sacramento Valley. For example, he gives a complete
list of the variety of timber he had seen, making an effort to note where it is found and
45 what kinds of uses it might have. Noting that the majority of the wealth in the country
was held in horses, cattle, and mules, Bidwell then proceeds to list the current cost of
each. More important than these various lists, however, are Bidwell’s observations of
what is lacking in California.
In noting the absence of industry, Bidwell was advertising available markets for
European-American entrepreneurs. He wrote, for example: “but little butter and cheese
made in this country… What a chance there is in this line of business for industrious
Americans.”97 Bidwell saw in California the possibilities for prosperous industries.
Charles Wilkes, too, commented on the absence of industry in California: “The salmonfishery, if attended to, would be a source of considerable profit, yet I was told that the
Californians never seem disposed to attempt to take them.”98 Honeybees, mills, cattle,
and, of course, butter, cheese, and salmon-fishery were all perceived to be promising
endeavors for European-Americans. Why would Bidwell and Wilkes report on the
absence of business if not to advertise the opportunities for European-Americans to make
a profit in California?
They certainly did not believe the Californios were capable or industrious enough
to progress these industries on their own accord. Bidwell reported: “a Spaniard will not
do anything which he cannot do on horseback…he labors about a week, when he sows
his wheat, and another week, when he harvests it. The rest of the time is spent riding
about.”99 Wilkes would have concurred with Bidwell’s observations of the Californios’
habit of “riding about,” as he called the Californios “too indolent to bestir themselves.”100
Bidwell and Wilkes are examples of the capitalist vanguard, commenting on exploitable
resources while providing a description of Northern Mexicans that projects European-
46 American superiority. At the same time, they promoted, if somewhat tacitly, the idea of
European-Americans entering the country to produce what, in their minds, the
Californios could not and would not produce themselves.
Additionally, Bidwell faulted the Mexican government for the presumed lack of
progress in California. He predicted that it would “be sometime before districts can be
organized, schools established” if Mexico remained in control of the region.101 Recall that
the Catholic Church was no longer the object of European-American derision. Instead, by
the early 1840s, Mexican governance and a population wanting of utility had become the
main culprits in creating California’s “backwardness.” The capitalist vanguard believed
that European-Americans were better equipped to manage the land, the people, and the
resources. Beginning with the Bartleson-Bidwell Party, in fact, Euro-Americans set out
overland to settle in California and to participate in California’s burgeoning economy.
One question remains: is there evidence in these narratives that tells us whether or not
they embarked on their journeys with the notion of taking control of California in the
same way that European-Americans had done in Texas?
Throughout their narratives, these travelers certainly reacted to the Texan
Independence and the subsequent revolt in California, led by a Californio, Juan Bautista
Alvarado. In their reactions to these events, they discussed the possible separation of
California from Mexico, but they were quiet about any designs they may have had of
replicating the Texas situation in California. In fact, most seemed to believe that it was an
inevitability that California would come under the dominion of the United States within a
few years, but they maintained that the U.S. would gain the land by treaty or war,
although a few did discuss the possibility of a revolution. It is understandable that these
47 European-American travelers believed in the inevitability of U.S. control in California:
they maintained the concept of Manifest Destiny (even though it was still a few years
before the term was coined by John O’Sullivan).
Faxon Dean Atherton was in California at the time of Texas independence, and
witnessed the Alvarado revolt. In response to the latter, he described the lackluster effort
by the Mexican military to protect California from such incursions, noting that Monterey
fell after one day, “taken by 15 riflemen and about 100 rancheros of which but very few
had any arms but pikes.”102 He also remarked that the Mexican forces that had been sent
to Texas to fight the insurgents there had meekly returned to Mexico “without arms,
clothing, food, or anything else.”103 Whether or not Atherton desired the United States or
its citizens to attempt to take California by force, he certainly described the situation in a
way that would make it seem like an effortless endeavor.
William Dane Phelps regarded the Mexican forces in California similarly,
describing the majority of them as thieves who had been rounded up in Mexican prisons,
and maintaining that “California will rue the day she permits these ragamuffin
freebooters to set foot on her soil.”104 He also believed that a revolution was imminent:
The miserable policy pursued by the local government causes strong
dissatisfaction among the people and there is evidently a storm brewing that will
soon burst upon the heads of the “powers that be” who now rule and misgovern
the country.105
While Phelps understood the people of California to be dissatisfied with their current
leadership, he also held a strong conviction in the certainty of U.S. dominion in
California. Throughout Phelps’ time in California, he noticed a significant increase in the
number of European-Americans that settled in the country. In part, he attributed the
potential annexation of California by the United States to this emigration. However, he
48 also points to the negotiations for California that the American ministers to Mexico,
beginning with Joel Poinsett in 1826, were charged with accomplishing. He believed
these negotiations would be successful and that in “a few years (we) will see this
beautiful country in the possession of a people who can appreciate its natural
advantages.”106
Charles Wilkes also clearly advocated for the separation of California from
Mexico. He wrote: “the Mexicans hold so little authority over this territory…(that it) will
cause (California’s) separation from Mexico before many years.”107 He then proceeded to
discuss the beneficial location of California on the Pacific Coast and the prospects of
trade with South America, Polynesia, China, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Japan.
To be certain, Wilkes believed that California, “possessed as it must be by the AngloNorman race, and having none to enter into rivalry with it but the indolent inhabitants of
warm climates,” would one day be under the dominion of the United States.108
Wilkes’ description of the “indolent inhabitants of warm climates” reflects the
discourse that Joel Poinsett helped create about Mexicans in the 1820s. As has been
discussed in Chapter Two, Poinsett argued that a “mild and enervating climate” stunted
Mexico’s progress.109 Twenty years later, Wilkes used this discourse to argue in favor of
Euro-American expansion into California. At the same time, however, Euro-American
travelers depicted the climate as beneficial to agricultural endeavors. Josiah Gregg
offered this evaluation of the climate when he wrote: “from the superiority of the
pasturage and climate, New Mexico might doubtless grow the finest wool in the
world.”110 Somehow the climate in Northern Mexico was partially to blame for Mexico’s
49 supposed deficiencies, and, at the same time, provided opportunities for Euro-American
settlers.
The reason that Euro-Americans could be productive in a climate that had made
Mexicans listless, according to the discourse, is that Euro-Americans were “naturally”
industrious. Euro-Americans would not allow the climate to dictate their lives; instead,
they would take their industry to the West and cultivate the land. As Mary Louise Pratt
argues: “unexploited nature tends to be seen in this literature as troubling or ugly, its very
primalness [sic] a sign of the failure of human enterprise. Neglect became the touchstone
of a negative esthetic that legitimated European interventionism.”111 The capitalist
vanguard, therefore, described the landscape and resources as only wanting of EuroAmerican industriousness.
Furthermore, according to the narrative, the United States could easily gain
control of New Mexico and California. Florida was purchased and the revolt in Texas
was led by Euro-Americans. Travelers from the United States during the 1830s and 1840s
easily envisioned similar outcomes for the rest of Northern Mexico. However, if it came
to war, these travelers assured their fellow countrymen that the army in Northern Mexico
could be defeated with little difficulty. George Wilkins Kendall wrote about a frightened
rank and file in New Mexico who were brutally controlled by the tyrant, Governor
Armijo. In California, Faxon Dean Atherton noted the ease with which the Alvarado
revolt was carried out. This discourse, then, does not only justify expansion, it also
promotes the idea.
50 CHAPTER FIVE
The U.S.-Mexico War and the Early American Period
We’ll cross the famous Rio Grande,
Engage the villains hand to hand,
And punish them for all their sins
By stripping off their yellow skins.
Song of the Volunteers, 1846
When James K. Polk ran for president in 1844, his platform was a push for the
annexation of Texas. Polk’s victory over Henry Clay induced expansionists in congress
to act as if they had a mandate to annex the republic. Lame-duck president John Tyler
jumped the gun and the resolution for annexation was passed by congress in February
1845. Shortly after taking office, Polk made a couple of key moves that would lead
Mexico and the United States to war with each other. First, he sent John Slidell to Mexico
as the minister plenipotentiary to negotiate the Texas border dispute and, secretly, to
negotiate for New Mexico and California’s annexation.112 As minister to Mexico, then,
Slidell was charged with a similar purpose as Joel Poinsett in the 1820s. Slidell wrote to
the Secretary of State, James Buchanan, that Mexico was incapable of stable, selfgovernment, and that it “must soon cease to exercise any control over the remoter
Departments,” namely California, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Durango.113 In addition
to sending Slidell to Mexico City, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor and his army to the
Mexican border. War between the United States and Mexico officially began on April 23,
1846.
Historian William Goetzmann has argued: “The Mexican War presented new
opportunities for exploration in the Southwest, and the army explorers who went out as a
result of the conflict returned with new data, and new points of view concerning the West
51 that shaped national policy for years to come.”114 Contrary to Goetzmann’s assertion,
these points of view were not new; rather, they were a continuation of a discourse that
was already years in the making. Military men who entered the country during the U.S.Mexico War were eager to advance the perception that Mexico had been unable to
adequately govern in Northern Mexico. Lieutenant James Abert, who joined the U.S.
army in Santa Fé, noted upon entering the trading center shortly after the Americans had
taken it in 1846: “the banner of freedom now waves over the poor and once oppressed
Mexicans.”115
The big questions that travelers asked on the pages of their journals during this
period with regard to the Mexican-American population related mainly to the latter’s
abilities to adapt to American institutions and culture. Mexican-Americans were,
according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, citizens of the United States. Therefore,
Euro-Americans wrote about their trust that American judicial, educational, and
economic institutions would liberate Mexican-Americans from their supposed
backwardness. Their cultural observations, however, remained hinged to their notions of
the Black Legend. In later years, especially in California during the Gold Rush, as several
groups were competing for legitimacy in the new society, Euro-Americans used this
long-held discourse to delegitimize Mexican-Americans’ claims to citizenship.116 The
fact that New Mexico did not receive statehood until 1912 also speaks to anti-Hispanic
sentiments in the United States.
Those who traveled to New Mexico and California after the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo no longer needed to justify Manifest Destiny; the United States now stretched
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. California became a popular destination for people
52 around the world seeking riches in the gold mines. Certainly in California the capitalist
market economy that the travelers of the 1820s sought, prevailed. New Mexico did not
have the mineral wealth of California; therefore, it did not draw as much attention from
potential emigrants. Still, the travel narratives of Euro-Americans in both California and
New Mexico in the late 1840s and early 1850s are remarkably similar in their plea for
westward migration.
Susan Shelby Magoffin entered Santa Fé around the same time that James Abert
did. She was the first known Euro-American woman to traverse the Santa Fé Trail,
accompanying her husband, a commercial trader from Kentucky, into Northern Mexico
during the U.S.-Mexico War. Her travels took her from St. Louis, Missouri to Santa Fé,
southward to Chihuahua, and ending in Saltillo and Monterey. This route put her directly
in the path of the crisscrossing armies from both sides. Upon her arrival in Santa Fé, she,
like James Abert, noticed the presence of the U.S. flag flying over the capital, though she
withheld any pretense that the city had been converted to Euro-American habits or
customs.
Though her husband traveled for trade, Magoffin rarely mentioned his
occupation; instead, her writing focused more on news of the ongoing war, as well as the
social and cultural landmarks of Northern Mexico (i.e., food and religion). In addition,
she remarked on the pasturage, the presence or absence of trees, the availability of water,
the manners in the markets, and the values of certain goods. Her description of the grass
that is found in New Mexico, for instance, is an example of how detailed she got at times.
She wrote: “the grama-grass is what they [the grazing animals] are fond of from its being
very sweet and slightly green near the roots, it grows in bunches all over the Mountains,
53 has jointed stem with curling blades & growing out from each joint.”117 Here, Magoffin
sounds like George Wilkins Kendall describing the excellent pasturage or John Bidwell
reporting on the variety of timber. In short, Magoffin maintained the rhetoric of the
capitalist vanguard.
Magoffin understood that the people with whom she was interacting in New
Mexico were soon to become U.S. citizens. The way she wrote about the customs of a
people who were about to be brought into the American fold illustrate her belief that New
Mexicans could make contributions to American society. She remarked about the
“refinement” of some of the women with whom she visited, though it must be noted that
Magoffin was predominantly observing the habits and manners of the elite women, just
as her male counterparts predominantly interacted with upper-class men, such as padres,
rancheros, or military leaders. Therefore, when she described the people in New Mexico,
she was mostly referring to the upper-classes, rather than the peons.118 Still, Magoffin
found much about their lifestyles that surprised and impressed her. She was particularly
fond of the Mexican cuisine and wished that she could recreate their recipes for her
friends and family in the United States. In addition, she applauded the attention that
Mexican women gave to raising their children and praised their six-year-olds for
behaving lady-like. Perhaps Magoffin was signaling that such women would not be a
burden on American society.
To be sure, however, she maintained that American influence was needed to
perfect the scene: “a Yankee’s ingenuity and Kentuckian’s taste is wanting to make it a
beautiful place.”119 Later in her journal she is shown the Mexican method of knitting, and
remarks: “On showing her the much easier mode of the U.S. she seemed much surprised
54 and delighted.”120 This passage indicates that she perceived the Mexican women as eager
and capable pupils of Euro-American customs, just as the men would be portrayed as
equally able to adapt to American laws and institutions.
Despite her close observations and interactions with women inside their homes,
Magoffin’s narrative does not stray too far from the American discourse that had been
created by male travelers. She alleged that Armijo’s cowardice was to blame for Mexico
losing Santa Fé. She wrote that she believed the people to be sincere in their Catholic
faith, but she reserved judgment of the priests and leaders on the subject. By “reserving
judgment,” she actually insinuated that the priests and leaders were less than sincere in
their faith, a common Euro-American perception of New Mexicans by the time Magoffin
traveled.
When the New Mexican Territory was incorporated into the United States with
the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Euro-American travelers to the region
were no longer crossing a foreign border. However, when they entered New Mexico, they
were still traveling among a people who had grown up and identified as Mexicans. Travel
accounts from this period depicted New Mexicans as eager to integrate Euro-American
laws and governmental institutions into their society. To be sure, New Mexicans were
still portrayed as novices in democratic politics; they had, according to the established
narrative, been held down for too long by their former rulers in matters of government
and education to fully appreciate the laws and technological advancements of the United
States.
William Davis, who traveled to New Mexico at the beginning of the American
period as the United States Attorney for New Mexico, was optimistic about the abilities
55 of New Mexicans to adopt the American system. Traveling the region extensively and
interacting with people from all levels of society, he wrote: “Every thing convinced me
that they are an orderly and respectful people.”121 He also wrote about the sea change in
New Mexico as a kind of experiment to see whether or not the U.S. could “improve” the
country:
We claim that our free institutions make men better, wiser, and happier; then let
us endeavor, through their agency, to work out the regeneration of the people of
New Mexico, morally, socially, and religiously, and the triumph will be a greater
one than any we can achieve upon the field or in the cabinet.122
Here, Davis sounds like John Adams, who in the 1780s, envisioned the United States as
“an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen,
without one noble or one king among them.”123 The pursuit of this “great experiment”
pushed Euro-Americans to explore the west throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century. Now, in the 1850s, the west belonged to the United States. As such, New
Mexicans were legally Americans. While Davis could still contribute and develop the
rhetoric regarding Mexicans, even Northern Mexicans living on the U.S. border, he was
required to shift the way he portrayed New Mexicans. He could still call into question the
value of New Mexican culture, but Davis shifted the onus of “fixing” the problems he
perceived to the new administrators of the region, the Americans.
This is an important step in the discourse, because for fifty years Euro-American
travel writers had argued that Mexicans were eager, even desperate, for Euro-American
laws and economic institutions, and that it was the absence of these that had forestalled
progress in Northern Mexico. In the 1850s, it was finally time to execute this promise.
For this reason, primarily, Davis portrayed New Mexicans as reaping of the benefits of
Americanization, even at that early stage. According to Davis, one of the benefits already
56 having a positive effect was the American education system. He noted that schools were
a “means of disseminating, to some extent, a knowledge of our country and institutions,”
and that those educated thusly “can do much toward the regeneration of New Mexico.”124
However, the “benefits” of Americanization, Davis claimed, did not cross the
border as other commodities did. On the Mexican side of the border he observed:
Upon this side of the river I found every thing purely Mexican, and even the near
proximity of the Americans, without the advantage of their institutions, had failed
to start the inhabitants from the Rip Van Winkle sleep in which they have
slumbered for centuries.125
Davis’ narrative illustrates the discourse that had, up to the 1850s, been created by travel
writers about Northern Mexico. This discourse asserted that Northern Mexicans could
only improve and modernize their society through close interaction with, and supervision
by, Euro-Americans. Northern Mexicans who remained on the Mexican side of the
border would continue to suffer the subjugation of the Mexican authorities.
In January 1846, as tensions were building on the Mexico-Texas border, President
Polk ordered John C. Fremont and an army to California in order to strategize a plan for
taking control of the territory. The Mexican officials in California ordered Fremont and
his men out of California; however, before he reached Oregon, he learned of the
impending war between the two countries and headed back for Monterey. Before news of
the outbreak of war actually reached California, a group of European-Americans
organized the Bear Flag Revolt against the Mexican government. The Bear Flag Republic
declared their victory over Mexico on July 4, 1846, though they never instituted a new
government. When the flag of the United States was raised over Monterey six days later
(when Fremont received word that the war had actually begun, he claimed California for
the United States), the Bear Flaggers abrogated their “republic.” Over the next two years,
57 several skirmishes were fought in California between Californios and the United States
military forces (sometimes Euro-Americans living in California joined the fight). As with
the other battles fought throughout Northern Mexico, the United States won a majority of
them. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the United States’ victory in the
war, was signed on February 2, 1848, less than two weeks after the discovery of gold at
Sutter’s Mill. Based on the terms of the treaty, Mexico officially ceded Alta California to
the United States. California received statehood on September 9, 1850.
During the height of the Gold Rush, European-Americans, African-American
slaves and former slaves, Chileans, Mexicans, Chinese, French, and natives converged in
California. Travel accounts began to proliferate during this time period, as those who
remained on the East Coast demanded stories and information about California and the
Gold Rush. Much has already been written about the interactions between these different
groups, and the ways that the European-Americans described the competing groups in
California. Tomás Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines demonstrates how race served as the
central organizing principle of group life in California after 1850. He argues that EuroAmericans racialized Mexicans as “half-civilized” in California.126 This kind of
institutionalized racism made Mexican-Americans foreigners in their native land.
Furthermore, the United States denied citizenship to Native Americans, though native
peoples had been Mexican citizens.
Mere months after Fremont raised the U.S. flag over Monterey, Thomas O.
Larkin, who received the appointment as United States consul in California in 1844, after
nearly a decade of living in the region, reported: “all and every one may now flourish in
California.”127 Here, Larkin does not truly mean “all and every one;” rather, he is
58 implying that Euro-Americans could now prosper in the territory. Larkin believed that the
U.S. occupation of California would result in the commercial revival of the territory. He
was specifically interested in land prospecting, advising his fellow countrymen in
California to “ask for large tracts of land by which means they will become rich.”128
Larkin appropriated the narrative that assumed a lack of innovation and industriousness
on the part of the Californio population to illustrate the ways that European-Americans
were improving, or planning to improve, California.
In his letters, Larkin largely neglected the presence of the Californio population.
They are either entirely left out of the story, or treated as marginal characters in
California. This is in large part due to the author’s objective to promote the
Americanization of the region. By obviating the Mexican population, he presented a
territory that was seemingly uninhabited and ripe for the taking. This is clearly an
imperialistic strategy. Recall Said’s definition of imperialism: “At some very basic level,
imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess,
that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others.”129 What better way to endorse the
westward migration than to describe a land devoid of competition?
Not every traveler relied on the strategy of neglecting the Californio from the
narrative. Benjamin Butler Harris traveled to California in 1849 as a gold rusher; his
travel journal depended on the established narrative that assumed Northern Mexicans
were lazy, immoral, and uncivilized. Harris used this narrative to underscore his belief in
Euro-American superiority. Comparing the Euro-American gold rushers to the local
Mexican population, for example, he described the former as maintaining “gorgeous
visions that possessed and illumined the imagination,” while the latter occupied
59 themselves at the monte tables.130 The implication is that European-Americans would not
have to compete with the Mexican population to take advantage of California’s resources.
Walter Colton arrived in California in July 1846, aboard the USS Congress, the
flagship of the United States’ Pacific Squadron. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed
alcalde of Monterey. Though he claimed that he never desired a governmental post in
California, he did argue in favor of U.S. administration there. One of the early entries in
his diary describes the greedy and despotic Mexican officials in California who “placed
themselves, by violence or fraud, at the head of government.”131 In his estimation,
California under U.S. control was free from such undemocratic leaders and “domestic
usurpers.”132 It must be noted, however, that Colton was not present in California during
Mexican rule. Therefore, his description of an ineffectual and corrupt Mexican
government was taken directly from the established discourse. Colton, then, appropriated
this discourse and treated it as a well-established fact in his narrative, rather than as a
point of view. Colton, like William Davis (and unlike Thomas Larkin and Benjamin
Butler Harris), described his perception of the Mexican reaction to this sea change. He
allowed that some Californios preferred Mexican rule, but argued that most “are prepared
to countenance almost any government that promises stability.”133
In his journal, Walter Colton noted the progress of industrialization in California
up to that point, and his reaction is consistent with those of his predecessors. That is to
say, Colton recorded a lack of industrial progress. A few months after his arrival, he
began the first newspaper in California, The Californian. He described the lack of
printing materials available in California at the time, noting that they had to print their
first edition on papers used for making cigars, as that was the only paper on hand.134 The
60 implication here is that Mexican society valued cigar smoking more than they did a free
press. Consider the discourse that existed up to this point: it included a depiction of
Northern Mexicans as being prohibited from an enlightened education. This characteristic
dates back at least to Zebulon Pike who described a man with a great capacity for
learning, but whose education was stunted due to the Spanish government preventing
“any branch of science from being made a pursuit which would have a tendency to
extend the views of the subjects.”135 Colton, then, used the known discourse, in this case,
a lack of exchange of information in Northern Mexico, to promote Euro-American
migration to California.
Regarding the quicksilver mines of California, Colton noted that though
production had been measurable, miners had been at a disadvantage due to “the absence
of suitable machinery.”136 Here, Colton’s diary is similar in style to the narratives of
Charles Wilkes and John Bidwell in that it assumes that Euro-Americans could fill in the
gaps of those industries that were missing in California. Again, Colton is relying on the
traditional narrative that depicted a lack of industry to illustrate the advantages that EuroAmericans would have in California. Colton, like Thomas Larkin and Benjamin Butler
Harris, utilized the discourse of Latin American indolence to promote westward
migration. The lack of Mexican presence in Larkin’s letters and the inclusion of them in
Harris’s and Colton’s journal are examples of different strategies that writers used to
promote westward migration. The ultimate idea of both strategies is the same: the United
States’ new western territories lacked competition (either because there was nobody there
or because the people who did live there were inferior).
61 During the early American period, travelers to California and New Mexico no
longer needed to justify U.S. expansion into the West. That is not to say that they
suddenly dismissed the discourse that had been created by their predecessors about the
Mexican population. They still treated Mexican-Americans as inferior to Euro-Americans
in terms of economic, political, military, and cultural abilities, as Almaguer has
convincingly shown. In fact, many of the travelers during this period treated those
descriptions as well-established facts. By 1848, Euro-Americans had undoubtedly read
several newspaper and magazine reports of life in Northern Mexico. William Garner, an
Englishman who traveled to California in 1824, began publishing his letters in the North
American and United States Gazette in 1847. His letters stand as some of the most widely
read accounts of life in California before the Gold Rush. Garner’s intent was to “draw to
California a solid body of American farmers, craftsmen, and merchants who would
develop the land, break the trading monopolies, and forestall any idea of returning the
territory to Mexico after the war.”137 Journals, newspaper articles, and diaries during the
early American period promoted westward migration, since they no longer had to justify
expansion. Travel writers during this period described California and New Mexico as
only wanting of Euro-American innovation to develop the land. In order to illustrate this
point, they appropriated the established narrative regarding Northern Mexicans.
62 CHAPTER SIX
Conclusion
From the earliest time down to the secession of the colonies, it was always the policy of
the Spanish Government as well as of the papal hierarchy, to keep every avenue of
knowledge closed against their subjects of the New World; lest the lights of civil and
religious liberty should reach them from their neighbors of the North.
Josiah Gregg, 1844
The quote above by Josiah Gregg forms the core of the discourse that EuroAmerican travelers created about Northern Mexicans in the early- to mid-nineteenth
century. Spanish totalitarianism and oppression, it was written, was fundamental to their
rule in the Americas; equally stifling to Mexican progress was the Catholic Church’s
structure. The legacies of these institutions were supposedly still felt on the eve of the
U.S.-Mexico War. Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, this discourse presumes,
failed to free the government of corruption. Gregg, however, envisioned a cure for these
ailments: “civil and religion liberty” imported from the United States. Following this
logic, U.S. imperialism into Northern Mexico was justified.
Nearly forty years prior, Zebulon Pike became one of the first people to publish
an account of his travels to Northern Mexico. The men and women who followed Pike,
including Josiah Gregg, helped develop the Euro-American discourse on Northern
Mexicans. This discourse illustrates the imperialistic designs the United States held in the
region. The preceding research is important because the discourse did not go away with
the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In fact, European-Americans utilized it
well into the twentieth century to validate their actions throughout Latin America.
Euro-Americans wrote that Northern Mexicans were indolent; therefore,
industrious European-Americans should come in and work the land. Otherwise, these
63 natural resources would go to waste. Additionally, the Mexican government was depicted
as unable to modernize Northern Mexico because they were too far away to control the
capricious governors in their northern territories. Likewise, Northern Mexico’s progress
was perceived as stunted by a religion that prohibited education and liberal ideas. After
the Catholic Church lost the majority of its power in the region, the discourse evolved to
reflect this change. Suddenly, the Catholic religion was seen as the protector of morality,
and its removal from power ushered in an inept and rapacious ruling class.
In this imperialistic discourse, the Mexican military was portrayed as inadequate
and completely unable to defend Northern Mexico from foreign, or internal, attack. The
Mexican garrison was described as cowardly in comparison to the brave EuropeanAmericans. The Spanish, and later Mexican, resolution to the Indian question was to
bring them into close contact with the peninsular and criollo populations. The missions
are one example of this; miscegenation is another. When the missions were secularized,
the native population was left without the care and structure that was established to
‘civilize’ them. Without the charity of the missions, these narratives argue, the natives
returned to the ‘wild’ and began organizing raids on the Northern Mexicans to procure
what they needed. The United States, however, had a system in place to better deal with
the Indian question: reservations.138 Thusly, European-Americans would not dilute their
gene pool through miscegenation, as the Mexicans had done. Pure European-blooded
Americans, the narrative concludes, would replace mestizo Mexicans as the power-base
in California and New Mexico if the United States gained control of the region.
Therefore, the discourse created in these travel accounts assumes that the United
States, not Mexico, was fit to rule in Northern Mexico. There is a deliberate pattern here.
64 Throughout the late-Spanish and Mexican periods in Northern Mexico, EuropeanAmerican travelers fixated on those aspects of culture, society, politics, and economics
that they believed could delegitimize Mexican rule. The successful revolt in Texas
assured other Euro-Americans that the process could be duplicated in California and New
Mexico. Further research could be done in this area with respect to the United States’
imperialistic efforts in the Caribbean and the Pacific during the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.
Nonetheless, the research discussed in this paper points to the possibility that it
was not just discursive lessons that Euro-Americans learned from their experiences in
Northern Mexico. Euro-Americans also became convinced in the tenets of Manifest
Destiny during this time period. In 1851, Isaac Harding Duval, leader of the Texas
Argonaut party to California, of which Benjamin Butler Harris was a member,
participated in the last Cuban insurrection to be led by Narciso Lopez. Duval and other
Euro-Americans joined Lopez, a former Spanish General, in trying to gain Cuban
independence from Spain. Their efforts failed, but the United States would spend the
latter half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century heavily
involved in Caribbean affairs, as the Caribbean offered opportunities for the United
States to expand its dominion. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant attempted to annex the
Dominican Republic. Despite the growth of anti-imperialistic sentiment in the United
States, the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War in 1898, allowed for
U.S. occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico.
European-American travelers’ experiences in Northern Mexico may have
convinced them of their country’s destiny to control North America. Certainly they were
65 convinced that describing the people who occupied former and current Spanish colonies
as ill-suited to the task of managing the natural resources, developing the land, and
progressing as a society was an important tool in the imperialistic process. Therefore, in
1901, when Orville Platte described Cubans as childlike, he was following the blueprint
for an imperialistic discourse that began to take shape in the United States nearly a
hundred years prior, when European-Americans traversed the continent to explore the
land and people of Mexico’s northern frontier.
66 Notes
1
Platt, Orville H., “The Pacification of Cuba,” The Independent 53 (June 27, 1901): 1467.
James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America
and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 413.
3
John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, Second Edititon
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 100.
4
Ibid., 107.
5
Lockhart, Early Latin America, 415.
6
James Monroe, “The Monroe Doctrine,” in Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History,
edited by Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, 11-14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13.
7
Californio refers to a member of the group of original Spanish settlers in California and their descendents.
The travelers discussed in this paper use a variety of terms when referring to this population: gente de
razón, Mexican, Californian, Spanish, and Californio. Unless quoting a specific traveler, I will use the
terms Mexican and Californio.
8
June E. Hahner, Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel
Accounts (Lanham: SR Books, 1998), xix.
9
John L. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” in The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents by
Ernesto Chávez, 35-37 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), 37
10
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 146
11
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 7.
12
Alexis McCrossen, “Introduction” in Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico
Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), xvii.
13
David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), xvi.
14
David J. Langum, “Californios and the Image of Indolence,” The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 9,
No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 181-196.
15
David J. Weber, “Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent’
Californios.” The Western Historical Quarterly , Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 61-69, 65.
16
Ernesto Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2008), 32.
17
James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America
and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 253.
18
Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011), 34.
19
Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 166.
20
Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography; or A View of the Present Situation of the United States of
America (London: John Stockdale, 1792), 469.
21
Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire , 256.
22
Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, January 25, 1786, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of
Congress, http://jeffersonswest.unl.edu/archive/view_doc.php?id=jef.00071, accessed on April 1, 2013.
23
“Consideration on the Cession of Louisiana by France to the United States, and Its Probable
Consequences Not Only to Those Nations, but to Spain and Britain,” Poulson's American Daily Advertiser,
August 23, 1804.
24
Raymund Paredes, “The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831-1869.” PhD Thesis
(University of Texas at Austin, 1973), 70.
25
This treatment by the Spanish authorities toward Euro-American intruders was consistent throughout the
Spanish period. In 1817, for example, Spanish troops in New Mexico escorted a group of trappers near the
2
67 Arkansas River to Santa Fé, where they were held for forty-eight days before being sent back to the United
States.
26
Joseph P. Sánchez, The Spanish Black Legend: Origins of Anti-Hispanic Stereotypes (Albuquerque:
Spanish Colonial Reseach Center, 1990), 1.
27
Ibid., 3-4.
28
Ibid., 7.
29
Zebulon M Pike, The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M. Pike, ed. Milo Milton Quaife (Chicago:
Lakeside Press, 1925), 136.
30
Ibid., 135-6.
31
Pike referred to many of the Indian tribes he encountered as “savages.” These include the Pawnee,
Osage, Apache, and Comanche, among others. Notably, those he demarked as savage were those groups
who had not been conquered by the Spanish. Conversely, Pike referred to Indians who lived in Spanish
towns and missions as “civilized.”
32
Pike, The Southwestern Expedition, 132.
33
Ibid., 167.
34
Ibid., 135.
35
Ibid., 145.
36
Ibid., 146.
37
Ibid., 159.
38
Ibid., 145.
39
Ibid., 159-60.
40
Ibid., 191.
41
Ibid., 199-200.
42
“On the Mexican Revolution,” Daily National Intelligencer, May 17, 1817.
43
Ibid.
44
“Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in Madisonville (Louisiana) to His Friend at Winchester, Dated
March 4th, 1822,” Republican Chronicle, May 1, 1822.
45
John R. Bell, The Journal of Captain John R. Bell, Official Journalist for the Stephen H. Long
Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1820, ed. by Harlin M. Fuller and LeRoy R. Hafen (Glendale: The
Arthur H. Clark Company, 1957), 194.
46
Elliot Coues, Introduction to The Journal of Jacob Fowler, by Jacob Fowler (New York: Francis P.
Harper, 1898), xix.
47
Interestingly, it took the same amount of time for news of Mexico’s independence to reach California.
48
Fowler’s journal is unedited, and the original text is written in very poor English. I have taken the
liberty of transcribing passages into proper English in order to make my work more readable. The original
text will appear in endnotes. “We now under Stand that the mackeson [Mexican] provence Has de Clared
Independance of the mother Cuntry and is desirous of a traid With the people of the united States,” Jacob
Fowler, The Journal of Jacob Fowler, Narrating an Adventure from Arkansas through the Indian Territory,
Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorada, and New Mexico, to the Sources of Rio Grande del Norte, 1821-1822, ed. by
Elliot Coues (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1898), 95.
49
Joel R. Poinsett to Henry Clay, 1825, Box I, Volume II, p 198, Justin H. Smith Collection, 1878-1929,
Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
50
“this must be the place Whare Pike first discovered the mountains,” Fowler, The Journal of Jacob
Fowler, p. 40.
51
Pike, The Southwestern Expedition, 151.
52
“takeing Hold of Him and drawing Him to the beed Side Sot Him down With Hir arms Round His
Sholders, and gave Him a Kis from [?] Sliped Hir Hand down Into His Britches,” Fowler, 107.
53
“and no Bread Stuff to be got Heare we must Soon leave this Reeched place,” Fowler, The Journal of
Jacob Fowler,105.
68 54
“grass is tall and I think from Every apperence this Plain Wold make a good settlement for farmers,”
Fowler, The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 144.
55
Alta California covered the land that is now California, Arizona, Nevada, and parts of Utah and
Colorado. However, this research paper is primarily concerned with the area that makes up the present-day
state of California, because that is where most of the travelers went. Thusly, I will predominantly use the
term California.
56
Jedediah Smith, The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to
California, 1826-1827, edited by George R. Brooks (Glendale: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1977), 9394.
57
Ibid., 128.
58
Ibid., 142.
59
Anthony Butler to John Forsyth, June 17, 1835, Box I, Volume III, pp. 81-91, Justin H. Smith
Collection, 1878-1929, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, The University of Texas at
Austin.
60
Joel R. Poinsett to Henry Clay, February 18, 1826, Box I, Volume II, p. 214, Justin H. Smith Collection,
1878-1929, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
61
The United States was between Secretaries of State at this time (James Alexander Hamilton was the
acting Secretary of State from March 4 to March 27, 1829), although the letter was received on April 17, by
which time Martin Van Buren had been appointed to the position. Joel R. Poinsett to Secretary of State,
March 10, 1829, Box I, Volume II, p. 322, Justin H. Smith Collection, 1878-1929, Benson Latin American
Collection, General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
62
“this Plain Wold make a good settlement for farmers,” Fowler, The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 144.
63
Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico, 6.
64
Manuel Mier y Terán, “Letter to War Department,” November 29, 1829 in The U.S. War with Mexico by
Ernesto Chávez, 53.
65
Ibid., 53.
66
Though Mexico did not officially recognize Texas’ independence until after the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (President José Herrera offered to recognize an independent Texas in 1845, if Texas agreed not to
join the United States, but Texas did not agree), the United States did recognize its independence in 1837.
One could describe the political state of Texas during this time period as autonomous, instead of
independent. Texans referred to their state as the Lone Star Republic. The correct nomenclature probably
depends on your historical perspective. Because the term independent, or independence, appears on the
pages of the travel accounts used in this research, I will also refer to this event as Texas’ independence or
successful revolt.
67
“grass is tall and I think from Every apperence this Plain Wold make a good settlement for farmers,”
Fowler, The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 144.
68
Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, ed. by Max L. Moorhead (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1954), 135.
69
Ibid., 122.
70
See the prejudices of the Black Legend discussed in Chapter 1.
71
Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 159.
72
Ibid., 159.
73
Ibid., 159.
74
Ibid., 143.
75
George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, Volume I (Chicago: The Lakeside
Press, 1929), 5.
76
Ibid., 74.
77
Ibid., 76.
78
Ibid., 127-8.
69 79
Ibid., 370.
Ibid., 380-5.
81
Ibid., 386.
82
Ibid., 488-9.
83
Charles Wilkes, Columbia River to the Sacramento (Oakland: BioBooks, 1958). Wilkes’ journal was
first pubished in 1845. According to Joseph A. Sullivan, “its printing was limited to one hundred copies
and studied carefully by the leaders of government, Benton, Polk, as well as by other expansionists, timely,
because of the Texas accession, it may have started the Fremont exploration, it surely influenced and
strengthened the western men” (Joseph A. Sullivan, “Forward” to Columbia River to the Sacramento, by
Charles Wilkes, viii).
84
Ibid., 51.
85
Ibid., 52.
86
Josiah Belden, “Statement of Historical Facts” in Josiah Belden, 1841 California Overland Pioneer: His
Memoir and Early Letters, ed. by Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. (Georgetown: The Talisman Press, 1962), 57.
87
William Dane Phelps, Alta California: The Journal and Observations of William Dane Phelps, Master
of the Ship “Alert”, ed. by Briton Cooper Busch (Glendale: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1983), 124.
88
Faxon Dean Atherton, The California Diary of Faxon Dean Atherton, 1836-1839, ed. by Doyce B.
Nunis, Jr. (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1964), 22.
89
Ibid., 22.
90
Wilkes, Columbia River to Sacramento, 62.
91
The rancho period in California began after the secularization of the missions and ended when the
United States won the U.S.-Mexico War. Prominent Californios during this time period pushed for access
to the land. The governors in California responded by awarding 800 land grants to Californios between
1834 and 1847. Their ranchos were the primary sources of wealth in Mexican California.
92
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 8.
93
Wilkes, Columbia River to the Sacramento, 65.
94
Atherton, California Diary, 61.
95
“The common class of people had very little thought of the future; they lived to enjoy the present day,
and seemed to have very little ambition to accumulate anything.” Belden, “Statement of Historical Facts,”
55.
96
Unlike Jedediah Strong Smith and a number of trappers and traders who happened in California due to
any number of extenuating circumstances, the Bartleson-Bidwell Party intentionally set out to reach
California. They were also the first party determined to establish permanent settlement in California.
Numbering sixty members altogether, they left Independence, Missouri in May 1841. About thirty men
crossed into California in October of that same year. Once in California, the party split up. Some, like
Josiah Belden went immediately to the Mexican towns. Others, like John Bidwell, stayed with EuropeanAmericans who had already settled in the Sacramento Valley. Still others went north to work as trappers.
97
John Bidwell, A Journey to California, 1841: The First Emigrant Party to California by Wagon Train:
The Journal of John Bidwell (Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1964), 48.
98
Wilkes, Columbia River to the Sacramento, 49.
99
Bidwell, A Journey to California, 46.
100
Wilkes, Columbia River to the Sacramento, 49.
101
Bidwell, A Journey to California, 51.
102
Atherton, California Diary, 33.
103
Ibid., 29.
104
Phelps, Alta California, 316.
105
Ibid., 122.
106
Ibid., 129.
80
70 107
Wilkes, Columbia River to the Sacramento, 61.
Ibid., 62.
109
Joel R. Poinsett to Secretary of State, March 10, 1829, Box I, Volume II, p. 322, Justin H. Smith
Collection, 1878-1929, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, The University of Texas at
Austin.
110
Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 135.
111
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 149.
112
Mexico’s president, José Herrera, refused to negotiate with Slidell because he maintained that there
were no diplomatic relations between Mexico and the United States. Herrera wanted financial
compensation for the loss of Texas before he would allow diplomatic relations to recommence. Herrera
was slow to act against Slidell, however, and his enemies in Mexico used this as a reason to remove him
from office. When Herrera ordered General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga and his troops to the U.S. border,
Paredes instead took his troops to Mexico City and ousted Herrera, leaving their border poorly protected on
the eve of war.
113
John Slidell, “Diplomatic Dispatches to James Buchanan, January 1846,” in The U.S. War with Mexico:
A Brief History with Documents, ed. by Ernesto Chávez (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), 67.
114
William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the
American West (New York: History Book Club, 2006), 250.
115
James William Abert, Western America in 1846-1847; The Original Travel Diary of Lieutenant J.W.
Abert who mapped New Mexico for the United States Army, ed. by John Galvin (San Francisco: J. Howell,
1966), 34.
116
For further reading on the social maneuverings in Gold Rush California, see Tomás Almaguer’s Racial
Fault Lines and Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush.
117
Susan Shelby Magoffin, Down the Santa Fé Trail and Into Mexico, 1846-1847, ed. by Stella M. Drumm
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), 200.
118
Unlike her male counterparts, Susan Shelby Magoffin focused primarily on interactions with women
and descriptions of the domestic sphere. June E. Hahner explains why this is the case: “Many aspects of
social life in Latin America were sexually segregated. Foreign women could enter some domestic and
other settings to which foreign men had more difficulty in gaining access… A few male foreign travelers
were received in Latin American homes, but in contrast to women’s accounts, the narratives they wrote
rarely included descriptions of houses” (Hahner, xviii). For a well-researched investigation of the specific
gendered perspective of female travel writers, see June E. Hahner, Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin
American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts (Lanham: SR Books, 1998).
119
Magoffin, Down the Santa Fé Trail and Into Mexico,142.
120
Ibid., 168.
121
William W.H. Davis, El Gringo; or New Mexico and Her People, ed. by Ray A. Billington (New York:
Arno Press, 1973), 388.
122
Ibid., 231.
123
John Adams, letter to Count Sarsfield, February 3, 1786, accessed on April 7, 2013
http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0312848/quotes.htm
124
Davis, El Gringo, 194.
125
Ibid., 384.
126
Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 73-74.
127
Thomas O. Larkin, “Larkin to Leidersdorff, LE 184” in First and Last Consul: Thomas Oliver Larkin
and the Americanization of California: A Selection of Letters, ed. by John A. Hawgood (Palo Alto: Pacific
Books, 1970), 87.
128
Larkin, “Larkin to Stearns, S. Coll.,” First and Last Consul, 69.
129
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 7.
130
Benjamin Butler Harris, The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush, ed. by
Richard H. Dillon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 115.
108
71 131
Walter Colton, The California Diary (Oakland: BioBooks, 1948), 6.
Ibid., 6.
133
Ibid., 10.
134
Ibid., 12.
135
Zebulon M Pike, The Southwestern Expedition, 135.
136
Colton, The California Diary, 187.
137
William Robert Garner, Letters from California, 1846-1847, ed. by Donald Munro Craig (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970), 1.
138
In War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, Brian DeLay examines the
ways that Indian raids in Northern Mexico affected the Mexican population in the north, their reaction to
Mexico’s authority, and the United States’ prospects of expanding their borders into this territory. DeLay’s
monograph, however, omits California from the discussion. Further research could be done with regard to
the “Indian question” in California, as this important region is missing from the existing scholarship on the
subject. See Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
132
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