The American West Read online

  Yet, while human ugliness cast dark shadows across North American frontier history, the participants also generated glimmers of optimism. Power carved frontiers, but frontiers created possibilities. The behavior and ideas of frontiersmen and women of all kinds can and should make us wince, but their conduct can also open our eyes to new inventions, arrangements, and opportunities. The colonization of the North American continent fostered a multidimensional world inhabited by peoples of diverse backgrounds, including many of mixed ancestry, the offspring of a process of interaction that spanned many generations. Frontier history tells the story of the creation and defense of communities, the use of land, the development of markets, and the formation of states. It is filled with unexpected twists and turns, sad endings but also grand openings. It is a tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, and the merging of the peoples and the cultures that gave birth and continuing life to America.

  Instead of lopped heads and spilled guts, let’s end this beginning with a series of images that better capture the blending of power and possibility that fueled history along the seams. Cut to entwined lovers, traders dickering over beaver pelts, diplomats brokering an alliance in a forest clearing, a child of blended parentage planting corn in the sun of springtime. The frontier bred hope as well as hostility. We seek to understand it all.

  . . .

  Frontier and West are two of the keywords in the American lexicon, and they share an intimate historical relation. From the perspective of the Atlantic coast, the frontier was the West, and that could be Kentucky or Indiana. The West moved on with the frontier. Where then is the West? The question has puzzled Americans, for its location has changed over time. A survey of western historians, writers, and editors found that about half believe that the West begins at the Mississippi or the Missouri River, while others propose the eastern edge of the Great Plains or the front range of the Rockies. Most consider the Pacific to be its western boundary, but a sizable minority insist that the states of the “left coast” are not part of the West at all. “I wouldn’t let California into the West with a search warrant,” the western historian Robert Athearn cracked. East is East and West is West. But consider other perspectives. For Latino settlers moving from Mexico, the frontier was the North; for métis people moving onto the northern plains of the Dakotas or Montana, it was the South; for Asian migrants headed for California, it was the East.9

  Whatever its boundaries, in American history, the West is not only a modern region somewhere beyond the Mississippi but also the process of getting there. That may make the western story more complicated, but it also makes it more interesting, more relevant. The history of the frontier is a unifying American theme, for every part of the country was once a frontier, every region was once a West.

  1

  A New World Begins

  A dash of outlandishness resides in every human being. No matter their place of birth or their station in life, all individuals function as spinoffs rather than distillations of the larger collectives to which they belong. No single person embodies the entirety of their culture or society. This fact—that all of us are oddballs to a greater or lesser degree—is crucial to an understanding of Spain’s attempts to possess and rule the Western Hemisphere. The catchphrases of colonial history exaggerate the unity of the peoples involved. Overblown concepts like New Worlds and Old Worlds, Christians and savages, and Indians and Europeans distort the past. It’s impossible to tell the story of the frontier without deploying some of this misleading shorthand, but the uniqueness of the encounters and the quirkiness of the actors carried as much weight.

  Europeans did not suddenly appear to overwhelm the Indians. A Genoese captain named Christopher Columbus, sailing under the authority of the Spanish crown and in command of several dozen men on three small vessels, appeared on a string of islands called home by a people known as the Taínos. The Taínos grew corn and yams, made brown pottery and cotton thread, and whittled lethal darts from fish teeth and wood, which they used to fend off their aggressive neighbors, the Caribs (for whom the Caribbean Sea is named). Island dwellers had to be nimble to survive. Columbus, however, ignored the unique human beings in front of him. He measured the Taínos he met against the fantasies he held and found them wanting in nearly everything. The Taínos, he reported, had no weapons, no religion, and no shame. “They are all naked, men and women, as their mother bore them,” he condescended in his report to the Spanish monarchs. The Indians’ missing clothing symbolized an absence of civilization that destined them for servitude. “All the inhabitants could be made slaves,” Columbus wrote, for “they are fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs.” His impression of natives as a people vulnerable to conquest is clear in the oddly proportioned image produced to accompany one of the published versions of his report. The fleeing Taínos look like giant, ripe targets. Before he sailed for home Columbus kidnapped a selection of native men and women to display at the Spanish court.1

  King Ferdinand takes possession of the New World. From Giuliano Dati, Isole trovate nuova-mente per el re di Spagna (Florence, 1495). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  He also carried home delusions of the Taínos’ material wealth. “There are many spices and great mines of gold and other metals,” he reported. Columbus had promised his backers Far Eastern delights and treasures, but in fact none of the Asian spices familiar to Europeans grew in the Caribbean, and only small quantities of precious metals in the islands’ riverbeds. Some of the Taínos wore little gold ornaments, which excited Columbus tremendously. More than anything else, it was the possibility of setting the natives to work mining gold that convinced the monarchs to finance a large return expedition. “The best thing in the world is gold,” Columbus confided to his diary, “it can even send souls to heaven.” Along with religious conversion, the search for gold and silver would come to define the Spanish mission. “We Spaniards suffer from a disease of the heart,” wrote Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, “the specific remedy for which is gold.”2

  Many conquistadors came down with gold fever. Yet their desire for precious metals arose from the system used to fund their expeditions rather than from some derangement. European nation-states were puny by modern standards. The newly crowned king and queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, helped Columbus reach the Taínos, but they couldn’t afford much more. To send him and others back to claim territories and subjects, they granted titles and encomiendas—rights to Indian labor—to strongmen who recruited their own armies. These conquistadors funneled private wealth (supplied mainly by Italian merchant investors) into expeditions and expected massive returns for their pains. This method would be employed by virtually all the European states that ventured across the seas. Nation-states envisioned and encouraged the creation of colonial empires, but for the most part private individuals and companies would play the starring roles.

  To make colonization pay—and Europeans always believed that it should pay, even though the schemes they launched drained as many coffers as they filled—these men resorted to coercion and expropriation. The invasion of the Americas spurred frightful violence. In the wake of Columbus, conquering armies marched across the islands of the Caribbean, plundering villages, slaughtering men, and capturing and raping women. The strongmen and their armies drew on their experiences fighting so-called infidels in Iberia. In 1492—that most extraordinary year—Granada, the last Muslim territory in Iberia, fell to Christians led by Isabella and Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon. United, Spain’s attention turned outward; ambitious upstarts loaded boats with followers and chased after Columbus. They hoped to enrich the home country and spread the true religion even as they empowered themselves. At least that was the plan. In practice, the dreams of monarchical splendor, religious enlightenment, and individual social advancement rarely meshed. The crown, the church, and
the conquistadors squabbled endlessly.

  To add to the tumult, the pagans they had come to subdue, instruct, and put to work refused to obey. The encomienda system, a feudal arrangement that cast Indians as serfs and conquistadors as lords, placed native labor at the disposal of crown-appointed grandees, who set them to dredging streams for gold, plowing fields, and building new colonial towns. Some natives answered encomienda coercion with self-destruction. Rumors filtered back to royal authorities of entire villages who took their own lives rather than submit to their Christian lords. Others chose to attack the Spanish. The Caribs—from the more southeasterly islands of the West Indies—successfully defended their homeland until the end of the sixteenth century, ruthlessly killing soldiers and missionaries. One chronicler of the conquest told of a torture that some Indians invented for captured Spaniards with a thirst for gold. They heated the metal to its boiling point and poured it down their prisoners’ throats.

  Indians pour molten gold down the throats of conquistadors. From Girolamo Benzoni, La historia del mondo nuovo (Venice, 1565). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The Spanish colonized the Taíno islands in 1493, including one they renamed Hispaniola. After depleting the meager supply of alluvial gold, they invaded Puerto Rico and Jamaica in 1508, then Cuba and Central America in 1511. Over the next few years, several expeditions reached the Yucatán, reporting back that people there lived in splendid towns and even had libraries of handwritten, illustrated books. One mainland native reacted with surprise when he saw a Spaniard reading a European book. “You also have books?” he exclaimed. In 1517 a small group of Spaniards entered a coastal Mayan town, the first European contact with a major agricultural power. The residents offered them many treasures, wrote the chronicler of this expedition, “and begged us kindly to accept all this, since they had no more gold to give us.” But pointing westward, “in the direction of the sunset,” the Indians insisted that the Spaniards would find plenty. “They kept on repeating: ‘Mexico, Mexico, Mexico,’” reads the account, “but we did not know what Mexico meant.”3

  . . .

  The Spanish conquest of Mexico was a clash of heavyweights. After gathering strength and knowledge in the Caribbean, the Spanish hit the mainland with enough momentum to take down a maize-fed superpower. Unlike the Taínos or the Caribs, the Aztecs resided in cities that rivaled Europe’s best efforts at urbanization. The rule of their emperor, Moctezuma, stretched from the central valley of Mexico to the coast. His wealth, splendor, and dominion outmatched Ferdinand and Isabella’s. He not only served at the pleasure of a god, Moctezuma took pleasure in being one.

  The Spaniards land on the Gulf coast of Mexico, an image produced by an Aztec scribe shortly after the invasion. From “Florentine Codex,” c. 1550. World Digital Library.

  The Spaniards’ island skirmishes with the Taínos and Caribs looked like preliminaries for the main event. Still, peripheries figured large in the fall of Moctezuma. The Aztecs fell in part because their frontiers turned against them, and the invaders’ leader, Hernán Cortés, acted with suicidal (or homicidal, from his men’s perspective) daring because he expected his superiors to cancel his conquest and send him home at any moment. A rogue underling, he toppled an empire with the help of rogue underlings.

  An officer in Cortés’s army, Bernal Díaz, described his commander as handsome and strong, with a broad chest and shoulders, slow to anger but sometimes roused to speechless fury, the veins throbbing in his neck and forehead. He demanded absolute obedience from his men, though he himself had a reputation for bucking authority. A lawyer by training, he had left Spain for the Caribbean to rehabilitate his honor tarnished by an adulterous affair with a powerful man’s wife. He participated in the invasion of Cuba and served as the secretary to Diego Velázquez, the island’s colonial master. The two had a stormy relationship, with Cortés cycling in and out of Velázquez’s favor. When the news of the Yucatán and Mexico reached him, Velázquez appointed his secretary to lead the follow-up voyage. To grasp the ultimate prize, he needed a representative on the ground quickly. Cortés wasn’t his first choice, but the need for haste overcame his better judgment.

  He may not have been the man of Velázquez’s dreams, but Cortés fit another ruler’s visions remarkably well. Moctezuma stood at the heart of a civilization made up of several dozen tributary cities under the domination of his Aztecs, the inhabitants of Tenochtitlán in the central highlands. Built on an island in a large lake, the Aztec capital impressed with stepped pyramids, stone temples, golden vessels, and causeways with dams and irrigation canals, built and maintained with the tribute that the Aztecs demanded from the conquered people they governed. Proud and confident, the Aztecs were as full of themselves as the Spanish.

  But Cortés appeared at a moment of doubt. For several years Moctezuma and his head priests had witnessed evil omens—strange comets, heavenly lights, monstrous two-headed births, foaming lake waters, an insane woman wailing through the night, “My children, we must flee far away from this city. My children, where shall I take you?” Word of strange invaders from over the waters reached Moctezuma and his priests as they puzzled over these alarming signs. The reports added ominous news to the list of depressing tidings. The strangers looked alien, with bushy beards sprouting crazily from their faces. They rode equally weird creatures, bulked-up deerlike animals with fierce dispositions and thundering hooves. They donned thick helmets and covered their bodies in armor. They carried iron-tipped spears and wielded rods that spit deadly fire. The date of their landing also boded ill. The year 1519 was 1-Reed in the Aztec calendar. In the words of one of their old books: “They knew that, according to the signs, if he comes on 1-Crocodile, he strikes the old men, the old women; if on 1-Jaquar, 1-Deer, 1-Flower, he strikes at children; if on 1-Reed, he strikes at kings.” Had Cortés come to fulfill Moctezuma’s worst dreams?4

  He could have crushed the several hundred Spaniards as they struggled to survive amid the sand dunes and mosquitoes of the Gulf coast. But Moctezuma hesitated. Instead of a strike force, he sent emissaries with presents intended to win the strangers over. The items only whet the Spaniards’ appetites for more. In the words of the Aztec account: “They gave them ensigns of gold and ensigns of quetzal feathers, and golden necklaces. And when they were given these presents, the Spaniards burst into smiles; their eyes shown with pleasure; they were delighted by them. They picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys. . . . Their bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous; they hungered like pigs for that gold. They snatched at the golden ensigns, waved them from side to side and examined every inch of them. They were like one who speaks a barbarous tongue; everything they said was in a barbarous tongue.” This remarkable description captures the native perspective of the dramatic encounter between civilizations. To the Aztecs, the Spaniards were outsiders, barbarians, perhaps barely human.5

  Moctezuma observes an evil omen in the form of a comet in an image produced by a native artist soon after the conquest. From Diego Duran, “Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de la tierra firme,” c. 1580. Biblioteca Digital Hispánica.

  . . .

  To reach the capital and seize the booty, Cortés needed information and allies. His first assistance came from one of the cleverest—and most mysterious and controversial—women in history, a girl by the name of Malintzin who is best known by the Hispanicized version of her native name, La Malinche. Born in a Nahuatl-speaking village but sold into slavery as a child, Malinche was gifted to Cortés by a local Mexican chief hoping to curry favor. Doubly marginalized by her gender and her captivity, Malinche would seem an unlikely leading actor in the male-dominated pastime of military conquest. But her willingness to aid the Spanish proved crucial, and she anticipated the pivotal role women would play in borderland diplomacy for the next three hundred years. On the frontier, captive women with linguistic skills and interpersonal panache often steered groups toward peace and war.

 
La Malinche translates for the Spaniards. “Florentine Codex,” c. 1550. World Digital Library.

  Possessing an enormous talent for languages—perhaps the heritage of a childhood among strangers—Malinche quickly mastered Spanish and made herself into Cortés’s prized interpreter. And she did more than translate other men’s words; she advised Cortés, offering him a window into Aztec intentions. According to Bernal Díaz, Malinche was “the great beginning of our conquests.” In Aztec images of the conquest, Malinche is nearly always shown by Cortés’s side.6

  Malinche’s reputation has proven as dexterous as her mind. The Mexican people have never ceased arguing over her meaning. Her name symbolizes the betrayal of native culture, synonymous with the worst traitor. She shared her body as well as her wisdom with Cortés and bore him a son, before eventually marrying another conquistador. Other Mexicans, however, see Malinche as the mother of la rasa, the new people that arose out of the blending of Indian and Spanish, native and European, and ancient gods and new. Thus she symbolizes not only betrayal but also the mixing of cultures and peoples that is the essence of modern Mexico. An ambivalent icon, Malinche stands for the muddled legacy of the frontier. The image of Malinche, at once a slave and a provocateur, a duplicitous whore and a founding mother, whipsaws between the nausea of exploitation and the thrill of possibility. It’s hard to know how to feel about her, which makes her an even more fitting symptom for an American history told from the margins.

  Though she lent a shove, Malinche certainly didn’t cause the fall of the Aztecs by herself. A combination of sheer happenstance, political brinkmanship, ruthless violence, and killer microbes toppled the empire. Cortés pushed into the interior, invading Tlaxcala, a city-state that lived under the heavy heel of Aztec domination. The Tlaxcalans put up a fierce defense, then offered peace. They “prefer slavery amongst us to subjection to the Mexica,” Cortés remarked cynically. With the support of the Tlaxcalans he was able to fill his army with native allies sick of Tenochtitlán’s domination. Cortés arrived at the capital, appearing more like a radical new addition to the native political scene than an outside conqueror. Moctezuma, still hoping to swing the Spaniards to his side, welcomed them into the city and put them up in plush quarters complete with a shrine to the Aztec gods. The sources describe Cortés’s reaction. “I do not understand how such a great lord and wise man as you are,” he said to Moctezuma, “has not realized that these idols are not gods, but bad things, called devils.” He knocked them to the ground and set up a Catholic altar. Moctezuma was shocked. “We have worshipped our own gods here from the beginning and know them to be good,” he replied. “No doubt yours are good for you also. But please do not trouble to tell us any more about them.”7