ATLAS
 
 

GALLERY
 
 

OVERVIEWS
 
 

TIMELINES
 
 

PEOPLE
 
 

PLACES
 
 

Paper presented at the Third Annual Anza Conference in Arizpe, Mexico, March 1998

By Phil Carson

Today I will describe for you an aspect of Juan Bautista de Anza’s career as governor of colonial New Mexico that illustrates his military and diplomatic skills: his defeat of the Jupe Comanche in 1779 and his subsequent treaty with the entire Comanche nation in 1786 on New Spain's far northern frontier. These certainly are critical events in the history of colonial New Mexico, but they have greater implications.

I wish to credit Anza with playing a significant role in the westward expansion of the United States. This is a role, to be sure, that Mexicans today may regret, as that expansion came at Mexico’s expense. But Anza’s dealings with the Comanche assisted the United States in its subsequent expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a development that has shaped our modern world. It is only natural that we should seek to understand and appreciate the events that led to the present configuration of our two nations.

* * *

First, a bit of background.

As many of you know, Spain’s acquisition of Louisiana from France in 1763 eventually pushed the Spanish Crown to reorganize its administration of New Spain. With New Spain’s northern frontier now stretching from the Pacific to the Mississippi, the Crown understood that administrators in Mexico City could not react in a timely or well-informed way to events on the distant frontier. So King Carlos III created the Internal Provinces, which gave local administrators an opportunity to respond to the special conditions inherent in El Norte.

Teodoro del Croix, the first commander-general of the Internal Provinces, recognized that isolated New Mexico needed to be linked to this very spot, Arispe, Sonora. And New Mexico suffered grievously from attacks by both the Apache and the Comanche. Del Croix displayed astute judgment in appointing Captain Juan Bautista de Anza to govern New Mexico and meet these challenges.

As you know, Anza had already proven himself a strong soldier, a leader, and a frontiersman of great intelligence and practical wisdom. He had recently led settlers from Sonora to upper California, another significant contribution to United States history.

Upon his arrival in New Mexico, Governor Anza realized that his first priority would be to stop the deadly Comanche raids that threatened his province’s very existence. The Jupe Comanche, one of three major divisions of that Indian nation, posed the gravest threat. Led by Cuerno Verde, whose father had been killed during a raid on New Mexico in 1768, the Jupe Comanche seemed obssessed with not only procuring horses, livestock, guns, and human captives, but with destroying all things Spanish.

Anza learned that previous Spanish forays against the Comanche had crossed east over the Sangre de Cristo mountains and north over the Raton Mesa to reach the high plains where the Comanche made their home. But the Comanche always spotted those expeditions out on the plains and retreated before the Spaniards could attack.

Anza displayed his intelligence and grasp of military strategy as he questioned New Mexico’s most experienced frontiersmen and learned the geography of the province’s northern frontier. He determined that a surprise attack could be mounted against the Comanche by traveling north through the mountains, then east over a pass by today’s Pikes Peak, where I live, more than 1,000 kilometers northeast of here. That pass, used by the Ute Indians to reach the plains, could allow the Spaniards to make a surprise attack on the Comanche. In this way Anza hoped to confront and defeat Cuerno Verde and bring peace to the region.

"I am directing the present expedition along a route and through regions different from those which have been followed previously," he wrote in his war journal. "Thus I shall not suffer what has always happened so often, that is, to be discovered long before reaching the country in which the enemy lives, as they inform me this is very common and is the reason for the failure of most of the campaigns."

In August 1779 Governor Anza gathered 80 soldiers, more than two hundred settlers, and several hundred Pueblo Indian allies. The expedition’s horseherd numbered more than one thousand. On August 17 he led this enormous army north across New Mexico’s northern frontier.

Let’s look at a map of his route to help you visualize the expedition’s progress. Then I’ll show you a few scenes from the country Anza passed through, for it is magnificent.

In modern terms, Anza’s route took him into present-day Colorado’s San Luis Valley, where he crossed the upper Rio del Norte, today’s Rio Grande. Anza traveled at night to avoid raising dust clouds that might be seen by Comanche scouts positioned in the mountains to the east, on his right flank. And he forbade his men from lighting fires on the chilly nights, for the same reason.

Soon 200 Ute and Apache warriors joined the Spaniards, as these two Indian nations also opposed the Comanche.

Anza’s use of geographic terms already in place when he passed this way establishes that New Mexico’s frontiersmen were intimately familiar with this land, and probably had been for more than a century.

Anza and his men crossed Poncha Pass, which leads from the San Luis Valley to South Park. From South Park the expedition headed east over Ute Pass, just north of Pikes Peak, and descended to the plains, where the Spaniards battled with an encampment of Comanche. Cuerno Verde was absent on a raid to New Mexico so Anza headed south and encountered his nemesis just east of today’s Greenhorn Mountain.

Anza and Cuerno Verde clashed and the Spaniards used sound military strategy and superior numbers to win the battle. The Spanish expedition reached home via Sangre de Cristo Pass. Afterwards, Anza worked to secure a peace treaty with the entire Comanche nation.

* * *

The 1786 treaty and its major aspects:

• Anza required the end of hostilities against the Spaniards;

• Anza insisted that the three Comanche divisions -- the Jupe, Yamparica, and Cuchanec -- designate one individual to represent all Comanche nations (the Comanche selected Ecuerecapa, a Cuchanec leader);

• Anza also insisted that the Comanche make peace with neighboring tribes, most importantly the Utes;

• Comanches met at Casa de Palo, House of Wood, on the Arkansas, then met with Anza at Santa Fe and Pecos in 1786 to approve the peace treaty and articulate commercial relations between the two peoples.

Anza’s patience, subtle diplomacy to encourage a hierarchical structure, and his reassurances to other tribes which had been allied with the Spaniards much longer all played a role in these successful negotiations, which brought peace for a full generation.

* * *

Finally, to my broader thesis.

Anza’s defeat of the Comanche, his treaty with them and the Comanche’s subsequent movement south and east of Colorado’s high plains made way for the largely peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians to occupy the former Comanche homelands. This created an opportunity for westering American trappers and explorers to more-or-less safely ascend the Platte and Arkansas rivers and learn the geography of western North America.

These events in turn helped establish the Santa Fe Trail and, later, the Oregon Trail, both trails of commerce and settlement for United States citizens. This provided an environment in which the Bent brothers could establish their adobe fortress on the Arkansas and work the Indian trade for a decade. Bent’s Fort, of course, in turn became a staging ground for the United States Army in the war between the U.S. and Mexico in 1846-1848, another important milestone in the U.S.’s westward expansion.

Note that one important exception to this "more-or-less safe environment" was the death, in 1831, of the great American explorer, Jedediah Strong Smith, on the Cimarron Cut-off of the Santa Fe Trail in present-day Oklahoma -- not incidentally at the hands of several Comanche hunters.

Yes, there were other barriers to the United States’ westward expansion not affected by this chain of events. The Arikara and, later, the Blackfeet on the upper Missouri posed a challenge. The Comanche in Texas were not universally docile. The great mountain chains and arid deserts of the western U.S. posed a challenge.

But Anza’s defeat of Cuerno Verde on Colorado’s high plains in 1779 and hisremarkable treaty less than a decade later with a people who previously had no hierarchal structure certainly created an opening of strategic importance to westering Americans that has yet to be fully examined and appreciated.

Anza’s military victory and diplomatic peace may be credited in part to his proud Basque lineage and its contribution to his fortitude and practical intelligence, as well as its implication of nobility, which, along with his family history of service to the Spanish Crown on New Spain’s frontier, played a role in his successful career.

Anza’s achievements as governor of New Mexico may also be credited to the nature of Spanish colonial activity in northern New Spain. Unlike westering Americans who sought first to trade with Native Americans, then dispossess them of their lands, the colonial Spaniards settled the land on their northern frontier (though they did so through brutal practices), then sought symbiotic relations with their native neighbors that did not require genocide or removal.

Governor Anza, in simple defense of his hard-won province of New Mexico, had to stop Cuerno Verde and the Jupe Comanche from their reign of terror. In so doing he eliminated a great barrier to the United States’ western expansion -- an act, of course, that had profound repercussions for Spain and then independent Mexico.

For that, perhaps, Mexicans might have reason to curse a native son. To be fair, Anza could not have known that his heroic defense of New Spain’s northern frontier would have such far-reaching effects. But citizens of the United States can only thank Governor Anza for his incalculable contribution to their western expansion. The only shame is that Americans continue to remain unaware not only of the governor’s specific contribution, but of the role of Spanish colonial activity in the American Southwest as a whole.

Sources:

Carson, Phil. Across the Northern Frontier: Spanish explorations in Colorado (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1998)

Garate, Don, "Basque Names, Nobility, and Ethnicity on the Spanish Frontier," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 2(Winter 1993)77-104

Kessler, Ron. Anza’s 1779 Comanche Campaign (Monte Vista: Adobe Village Press, 1994)

Thomas, A.B. Forgotten Frontiers: A Study of the Spanish Indian Policy of Don Juan Bautista de Anza, governor of New Mexico, 1777-1787 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932)

[ sitemap ] [ archives ] [ collateral materials ] [ reference books ] [ search ]
[ atlas ] [ gallery ] [ overviews ] [ timelines ] [ people ] [ places ] [ help ]