 Hello, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss. This lecture looks at the northern frontier of New Spain from about 1540 to 1820. Now, this is after the time Columbus landed and the Spanish are beginning to explore and set up settlements. And so what we want to look at three things. One, we're going to analyze the legacy of Spanish settlement in the New World and look at the effects this had on other empires in Europe who also wanted to come to the New World. And finally, we're going to look at the role New Spain played in the northern frontier. That's basically North America, the North American continent from Mexico to the United States by the end of the 18th century. So after Columbus, I mentioned in the last lecture that people were able to repeat what Columbus was doing. And Columbus himself had established his headquarters. He made four trips. He established his headquarters at Hispaniola, the island of Hispaniola, what's today Haiti and Puerto Rico. And Ponce de Leon was the governor there and was sent to also establish and look at Florida. Now, in those days, Florida wasn't just the piece of the land that sticks out into the Gulf. As we know it today, that state, but Florida was what they call the entire Gulf of Mexico region. In 1513, that same year, Spain and the Catholic Church established a procedure, a requirement, that stated that people had to be given the ability to submit to Spanish rule. Now, how this played out was oftentimes very volatile. I mean, somebody comes in, reads a prepared statement in Spanish to Native Americans who have no idea what they're talking about. They're given time to convert, to submit to Spanish rule. They don't understand. They don't hear this person. They don't see this person. They may dismiss the person who's reading this statement. And then, of course, that gives Spanish soldiers the ability to overrun and conquer that village. So it was maybe a good idea with the right intention in mind, but it certainly was not executed very humanely. And people were just cut down for not submitting to Spanish authority. This gave rise to what's known in Europe as the black legend, the dark legend of Spain's crimes in the New World. How they murdered, tortured, pillaged, how they raped and killed innocent children and women. It was a long list of crimes against the human people living in the New World. This gave other European crowns, the French, the English, the ability to say, we're going to go over there, we're going to do a better job than the Spanish did. Of course, many times they committed the same crimes themselves. Let's look at the conquest of the Aztec. In 1519, the story goes that Hernando Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, tricked Montezuma into believing that he was the reincarnation of a god, Quixaquatl, who had returned to the Spanish Empire and that they should submit to him. Now, whether or not this is true is probably not accurate. A lot of historians question this. It's really kind of believed to be more of a myth today than anything else. The Aztec ruler pretty well was assured that Cortes was not a god, but this assuaged Cortes's ego and the Spanish were happy to repeat this myth. What instead happened was the Spanish were able to mix in and to live among the Aztecs and take over, and by 1520 the Aztecs rebelled. And this led to a siege of Tenochtitlan, the Mexico cities we call it today, but the capital of the Aztec Empire, and finally in 1521 it fell. And the Spanish were able to effectively eradicate the traces of the Aztec religion and force everybody to become Spanish citizens and to convert. Now, how did they do it? Simple. Not really. It took a lot. I mean, there were only about 500 Spanish and there were millions of Aztecs. So how were they able to defeat them? They had better weapons, of course. They had steel weapons and they had gunpowder and guns that could shoot projectiles. And so this defeated because the Aztec had nothing like this. The Aztec had also accumulated a large number of enemies in the region. They had themselves conquered other native groups. And so these groups were eager to find somebody to ally with and it happened to be the Spanish. And finally, disease. Disease cannot be overlooked because when Europeans came to the New World, they infected many Native Americans accidentally with disease that they were not used to. And so they were what's called virgin soil epidemic victims. They had no resistance to a lot of European diseases. And these were diseases that today are easily cured by inoculations as infants. And simply the Aztecs had no immunity to because they had been so isolated for so many thousands of years in the New World from European diseases. And so disease spread rapidly. If we look at Hispaniola and the Caribbean where the Spanish came in within 20 years, within two decades, it killed somewhere among 80 to 95% of the native population. So you have only a small remnant of the people who once lived there who survived. Now there were other reasons why they died because the Spanish killed some of them to be sure. But many were dying because of disease and this spread not only to the people that the Spanish had contact with, but it also spread among people further inland who were traveling or trying to escape the disease and then they would carry it with them. So disease was a big factor in the Spanish's ability to defeat the Aztecs. And finally, one thing that we don't often talk about that probably does need to be mentioned is the Spanish tale of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Now this is an apparition of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who had been seen many times, many apparitions that appeared in Europe, but this was the first one in the New World that was reported. And this is 1531, just outside of Mexico City, where an Aztec Indian reports that he's seen images of a woman dressed in blue. And so when this is reported to the bishop, the bishop doubts, but then the Indian brings in a bunch of roses that only grow in Europe. And so this was seen as a miracle and the vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe became enshrined in Aztec culture and Mexican culture and now Mexican American culture. She has become the patron saint of the Americas. In 1537, the Catholic Church issued a statement. The Pope said in this statement, some of us dear, that God created human beings in the New World. So these Native Americans were human beings, they had ration and thought, could accept the Catholic Church. If they could accept the teachings of the Catholic Church, then they could become Spanish citizens and Spanish citizens could not by church law be enslaved. So this is going to have tremendous impact because it's going to give the Catholic Church the ability to proselytize, to try to convert the Indians. And it's also going to give the conquistadors in Spain the reason to say, well, if we're not really supposed to enslave Indians, although they did, we can also bring in other people as slaves. And this begins the importing of African slaves into the New World. As they began exploring the frontier, by 1528 there was a shipwreck off the coast of Texas, somewhere maybe around Galveston. And the survivors of this shipwreck were actually survivors of another shipwreck that landed in Florida and was supposed to reconnoir to the region. But when storms tore apart their ships, they built rafts, and a lot of people died. The survivors were trying to sail back to Mexico City, but the group got lost and lost at sea. And the few survivors included a man by the name of Cavesa de Vaca. From 1528 to 1536, he and a handful of companions traveled with Native Americans across Texas and into northern Mexico. And when they were finally rescued, they brought back tales of cities of gold. And so other expeditions were authorized to go and see if they could find these cities of gold. So you have DeSoto and Moscoso who sail over to Florida and then come across as far probably as what's today Waco, Texas before Moscoso turned around and went back. DeSoto died somewhere around the Mississippi River, we believe. But this was one expedition looking for gold and they didn't find any. In 1539, a priest named Marcos Deneza came up from Mexico and he said that he indeed had seen cities of gold. But the next year, when a much larger expedition under the leadership of Francisco Coronado came up from Mexico, he went as far as the Grand Canyon over to Wichita, Kansas. And he saw no gold cities, but he saw gold-thatched Indian huts. And he was very angry about this, killed his Indian guide. The Spanish, also around the same time, established a fort in San Augustine, Florida. In 1598 by 1600 almost, Juan de Añate and others were establishing posts in New Mexico, taking Christianity with them and oftentimes treated people quite harshly. In fact, Añate was rounded up and sent in chains back to Mexico for his treatment of Indians and other settlers. In their settlement, the Spanish relied on five institutions. Of course, they had Spanish authority to back all of this up, but they had missions and protecting the missions were prosidios. This is where the soldiers lived. You also had other types of settlements, towns, farms and ranches. In each of these, and in each of these, many times in the town you had citizens living who may have been related to either the soldiers or were native Indians who had converted. But you also had people who were running the government who formed the town. Merchants. You also had farms and ranches. And at these, the people who lived in farms and ranches were growing things to support the townsfolk. And they were often in economic competition with the Indians living in the missions and the soldiers living in the prosidios. They were also selling to the soldiers too. So there was a lot of competition over land who was going to get the best land, who was going to sell to whom, and this went on throughout the Spanish period. In settlement, the law of the Indies decreed that towns had to be drawn up in a grid fashion with a town plaza at the center and surrounding that businesses and government offices. And so you see some examples of this and pretty much wherever the Spanish settled, you'll see something like this. The settlement also led to ethnic mixing, mestizaje, we call it. And this just means the mixing. And it's a mixing of African Americans, European Americans, and Native Americans, as well as Asian Americans. Now I say Americans beyond all that because they were living in North America. You had Asian immigrants, you had African immigrants, you had European immigrants, and you have Native people. And they were all mixing with one another. And this is cartoons from a book that shows this mixing and how the races were organized hierarchically. The big threat to New Spain was other European countries trying to come in and get their territory. But there was also internal threats as well. And in the 1680s, they saw both of these. For one thing, Native Americans in Arizona and New Mexico really had had about enough of the Spanish by 1680 and launched a revolt. This drove the Spanish out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, all the way down the Rio Grande, to a small town called Corpus Christi de Isleta, which we know today as El Paso, because it was at the past. And they kept Spanish out of New Mexico for several years. There was also a threat from the French. Coming down the Mississippi River, Robert Cavalier, the Sur de la Salle, had claimed the Mississippi and all of its watershed for France. By 1855, however, on a return trip, he was shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of Galveston, actually down by Victoria. And he and his people built a fort there and tried to walk back. Some of them tried to walk back. And it was New France's challenge that really bothered Spain because both sides were trying to compete by building alliances with Native Americans. To establish missions, a lot of these were Franciscan run. There was a man named Francisco Hidalgo, a priest who wanted to continue in East Texas, although the Spanish had started pulling out of East Texas. He wrote a letter to the French governor saying he wanted to stay in East Texas and encouraging him. At the same time, over in Arizona, you had a priest named Father Quino, who began establishing missions among the Arizona people. And eventually, this is going to blossom and he'll move into California. Meanwhile, the French are starting to threaten the Spanish control over Texas. The letter that Father Hidalgo had written to the French governor made its way to a merchant named Louis de Sondanie. Sondanie was sent by the French governor in Louisiana to the Spanish governor in Mexico. So he arrived in Eagle Pass in 1714. He met up with Father Hidalgo and they were authorized by both the French and the Spanish governors to go into East Texas. The French also established a fort in Nacotish, Louisiana. The Spanish established a fort at Los Edais a few miles away. And they began re-establishing the Spanish presence there and some cooperation between the French and the Spanish. But it didn't last very long. At the same time, Martín de Arcon suggested that the Spanish needed to pull back and re-center their efforts around the midpoint on the El Camino Real between South Texas and on across Texas into Louisiana at the midway point, which was to be called San Antonio de Bajar. So San Antonio, the mission and the Presidio were established in 1718 to be that midway point. But there were still problems between the French and the Spanish and to show you some of the mistrust, the so-called Chicken War of 1719. Some French soldiers were riding their horse. They were coming upon the Los Edais mission. It scared some chickens. When the priests at the mission saw the smoke, the dust from the horses and saw the chickens scatter, they thought they were under attack. They went and hid and they reported it. When the Spanish came out to investigate, they found out it was just chickens. It was just a couple of soldiers. Nothing was going on. And so it was called kind of in just the Chicken War, but it showed the amount of mistrust that still existed between the Spanish and the French. Meanwhile, there was still exploration. There was still mission building and Presidio building going on. In San Antonio, the Marquis de Aguayo decided that they did need to have a presence. The Spanish did need to have a presence in East Texas. And there was more settlement. There were more missions. They even brought in settlers from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, gave them titles of minor nobility and land in order to induce more settlement into the San Antonio region. Over in California, the threat of Russian fisher and fur traders and also English threatened the Spanish control of California. And so Father Sarah and Captain de Portola were sent to establish missions. And you see some of the missions that were established, San Diego. They established another royal road to Camino Real and other towns like San Jose and Los Angeles. In 1763, however, the French agreed to leave the North American continent. And this meant that they were no longer a threat to Spain. In 1767, Marquis de Ruby, his expedition said, because they're no longer a threat, we can pull back from East Texas again. We can focus our attention on San Antonio. We can prepare for fighting the Apache Native American tribe because they were the Spain's biggest threat in the Northwest territory. And they could also work on establishing trade routes to have better trade amongst the various outposts and settlements. Then in 1800, because of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Spain lost control of their throne. It was given to one of Napoleon's relatives and they decided that the Spanish should give Louisiana back to France. But there was a rebellion going on in Haiti. Napoleon wanted to use the island of Haiti as headquarters for a Caribbean empire. But with the slave rebellion going on and with France unable to put it down and fight the wars in Europe, they had to give up on that dream and the United States was waiting to purchase it. So in 1803, the US bought the Louisiana territory, which greatly increased American property. But it threatened New Spain because now the Americans were willing to expand westward and to challenge New Spain's dominance of the continent. So in this lecture, what we looked at was the legacy of Spanish settlement in North America. And there could be no question that New Spain explored the territory, they settled the land and they assimilated the people in their northern frontier of New Spain. The competition for empire in North America was great, and Spain's success did attract competition from other European powers, like from France and like from England and the Dutch, who forced Spain to establish settlements on the outskirts in order to hold on to their claims. And by the end of the 1700s and into the 1800s, Spain had a hold on that frontier, but it was tenuous at best. And in a weakened condition because of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain faced continuing challenges now from the expanding United States. And that's going to have significant repercussions in the years to come. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you soon.