How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A colonial sun belt.

LONG AGO, IN 1541, THE WESTERN AND EASTERN PORTIONS OF THE southern regions of the present-day United States were oh-so-briefly connected. That year, expeditions of two different Spanish explorers, one from the southwestern reaches of the continent, the other from the southeastern edges, came within three hundred miles of one another--separated by only the expanse of northern Texas. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado moved northeast out of Pueblo territories--more than fifty years before the region was claimed by Spain as the province of New Mexico--in search of the fabled lands of Quivira. At the same time, Hernando de Soto led men westward out of Florida across the Mississippi River--twenty-four years before it was claimed by Spain--in hopes of reaching the Pacific Ocean. The link between the two groups came in the form of an enslaved Plains Indian woman, one who had been "acquired" by one of Coronado's men, slipped his clutches as they crossed Texas's Llano Estacado, and then fled eastward with amazingly bad luck into the waiting arms of Soto's party. The story of this ill-fated woman suggests a striking notion--that the greater South was first brought together, albeit momentarily, not by the forebears of Confederate loyalists but by a slave, and an Indian one at that. (1)

If asked today where the Spanish borderlands fit within the historiography of the colonial South, the most likely answer from either southern or borderlands historians would be, "well, they don't." Until recently few scholars have seen the two regions as kindred. Traditionally North American history does not recognize the existence of a domain called "the South," with a capital "S," until the sectional tussles of the nineteenth century that ultimately separated the states into the Union and the Confederacy. So is the "colonial South" the same nineteenth-century region traced back in time? Is it simply the seventeenth-or eighteenth-century precursor to the "Old South"? That certainly seems to be the traditional approach, as textbooks of southern history often cover the colonial period by looking primarily at Anglo colonies. Florida, Louisiana, and Texas hover on the peripheries due to their Spanish and French associations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Florida is mentioned vis-a-vis its conflicts with the British colonies to its north, and Louisiana makes an appearance in reference to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By a nineteenth-century standard, Texas comes closest of all the southwestern regions of the Spanish borderlands to making the cut; if Texas was part of the Confederacy--and thus part of the South with a capital "S"--then surely one could argue that eighteenth-century Texas was part of the colonial past of that region? Yet in southern history, Texas generally does not merit inclusion in discussions of the colonial period, as the "colonial South" stops short of crossing the Louisiana-Texas border. All in all, the colonial South, even with Frenchmen and Spaniards added for a little spice, remains predominately an Anglo Southeast; it does not include the Southwest. (2)

In contrast, the historiography of the Spanish borderlands--though originally conceived by Herbert E. Bolton to include all of New Spain's provinces in North America, from Florida in the East to California in the West--more typically imagines its domain as primarily one in the Southwest (with the notable exception of David J. Weber's 1992 Spanish Frontier in North America). (3) It thus ignores the Southeast. The histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries here too have most often determined the scholarly attention focused on the regions of the Spanish Southwest. Contacts, conflicts, wars, and immigration that influenced the movement of Anglo-Americans into the "American West" and along what would become the U.S.-Mexico border reorient the colonial storyline. The search for beginnings there often becomes an effort to explain the state of the southwestern lands and peoples when they confronted and were subsumed by Anglo-American hegemony in the nineteenth century. Or, when that has failed, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pasts of the Spanish and Indian Southwest have been simply ignored altogether. Signally, the span of years between 1821 and 1848 disappears almost entirely, as the period between Spanish and Anglo-American invasion has bedeviled all but a talented few historians. (4)

Such historical gerrymandering of the colonial worlds of North America reflects a view framed by political, economic, cultural, and social forces created only later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This, in turn, shrinks the much larger, global perspectives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to fit into a limited and distorted model of a proto-Confederate South and a proto-American West. Of course, to respond with the charge that all the regions that constitute the current southeastern and southwestern zones of the United States should be studied as one united colonial region is equally problematic. Part of the problem with letting later periods define the way we study early America is that it actually creates more distance and separation between the regions of the Spanish Southwest and the British Southeast. Consider, for instance, that using the nineteenth century as a baseline means linking the geographical Southeast with the historical slave South, thus depicting it primarily in terms of African American enslavement and an agriculturally oriented plantation economy. The same nineteenth-century baseline links the geographical Southwest primarily to the history of the U.S.-Mexican War and U.S. conflicts with Plains Indians. Thus for the first region we lose sight of both the European-Indian interactions that play an intrinsic part in the history of the Southeast through the present day and recognition that race relations were never simply black and white. At the same time, the second becomes a region where race relations, devoid of slavery, coalesce around nineteenth-century Anglo-American migration that transformed Spanish Mexicans and American Indians into minorities. Yet recent historiography tells us that both caricatures are far from accurate. (5)

What might we get if we leave the nineteenth-century approach behind and try to unite the narratives of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Southeast and Southwest into a new colonial South--a colonial Sun Belt--sweeping from the Atlantic to the Pacific? Specifically, we create a new north-south alignment along which one might link together the southern regions of early native North America, be they subject to Spanish, French, or English colonization, using the Gulf of Mexico rather than the Atlantic Ocean as a starting point. In turn, we also might broaden--and define more accurately--a colonial North, one far more expansive than merely the areas of the northeastern and middle colonies claimed by England, by stretching it westward to encompass the upper reaches of the French province of Louisiana as well as New France (Canada) as a whole.

A newly aligned north-south axis for early America also gets us out of another directional blind of traditional American historiography: an east-west, manifest destiny design that mandates that the West only be studied once Anglos arrive on the scene. Traditional models of colonization (or invasion) inevitably locate us in the East (and in this case the Southeast), standing among European immigrants freshly arrived and looking westward to the "new" worlds awaiting conquest. The passage of events, as well as people, then flows from east to west, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the East always remains the center of America. Thus the history of early America has regularly been told from a perspective that not only geographically faces west but also teleologically looks forward to the "emergence of an aggressively expansionist Euro-American United States." A growing chorus of historians, among them Daniel K. Richter, David J. Weber, Alan Taylor, and Colin G. Calloway, calls for reimagining colonial North America from not only the perspectives of New Spain and New France but also that of American Indians. If we are to understand how the multiple peoples and cultures who populated this early world helped to define the nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds that followed, these scholars persuasively argue, we must divest ourselves of a view of early America as situated only in the East, only with Europeans, only among British Americans, and only as a staging ground for the inevitable expansion of Anglo supremacy across the continent. Yet it is not enough solely to face east--we must also look south to see the first invasions by Europeans. (6)

As James Axtell reminds us, all of early America was Indian not European, so it is Indian-European contact and interaction that sets in motion patterns of European exploration, settlement, contact, conflict, and competition across the Southeast and Southwest. (7) It is no coincidence that the civilizations of Anasazis, Hohokams, and numerous Mississippians all enjoyed a climate zone that allowed the most extensive development of agriculture and thus the rise of populous societies and expansive political economies. The earliest European arrivals to these worlds were Spanish, moving from south to north either from the Caribbean or from Mexico. Spanish colonial endeavors got a jump on their British and French rivals whose settlements arose to meet, cut off, and replace that Spanish expansion. They were drawn there by stories of fountains of youth, hoards of gold, and cities of Cibola and Quivira, but current historiography tells us that Spaniards (like Frenchmen and Englishmen) found labor, not mineral wealth, to be key to their pursuit of settlement and profit in the lands that had been productive for Indian nations before them. Jamestown and Santa Fe are more closely linked by slavery than merely by contemporary competitions to designate the first settlements and first thanksgivings of popular history. Indeed, if we return to the story of that enslaved Plains Indian woman in 1541, her dire situation was far more prescient than we might first imagine. To reconstitute the colonial South as a colonial Sun Belt and bridge the historiography of the Spanish borderlands and the colonial Southeast, we must begin with that beginning--with Indians and with slavery.

First, how might a unifying ethos across the Southeast and Southwest bring a new sense of order to disparate regions in terms of Indian reception of European newcomers? Or, more specifically, what happens when we remove the Spanish borderlands from the brackets that set it aside as an exception to the larger narrative of the colonial South associated with the story of Jamestown? Looking at the entirety of the colonial Sun Belt strengthens an emerging picture of early America where Indians were never truly colonized. Along some parts of the Atlantic littoral, one might be able to trace a decline in equitable relations between English and Indian peoples by the eighteenth century as native worlds were inexorably chipped away by dispossession and disease and as the balance of power began to shift to increasingly numerous and powerful Europeans. Americans know well the story of Jamestown--not the real story, mind you, but the one that serves as a central mythological origin tale for America--the one in which "noble savages" see something equally noble, if not superior, in their new foes and serve to aid the European climb to hegemony before quietly disappearing by the end of the seventeenth century. We might write for eternity about the "people Captain John Smith barely saw" and still not beat that Goliath of an American origin myth. And no matter how Disney and filmmaker Terrence Malick may wish to sugarcoat the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, the iconic myth of Jamestown's beginning is really one more chapter in the story of American Indians' demise. Wars may be fought, noble stands made, but the story tells us that it was only a matter of time--and not that long after all--before the Powhatan Confederacy would be destroyed (whether by germs or steel was almost beside the point). And even if we know and recognize that far more conflict and a far longer period will be needed before groups of Cherokees, Creeks, and many others are removed from the maps of the colonial South, the story nevertheless conveys the inevitability of that end. (8)

Adding the Spanish borderlands to the landscape of the colonial South complicates the picture considerably. Regions of native interaction with Frenchmen and Spaniards were zones of inclusion, as both Indians and Europeans sought to incorporate one another into their economic and social endeavors. Where large populations of native peoples deterred Anglo settlement, they attracted Spanish missionaries and French fur traders to live among them. These were worlds that gave rise to models of colonial relations quite different than those pursued by Englishmen, ones that included "frontier exchange economies" and "middle grounds." Inclusion did not necessarily carry with it solely beneficial outcomes for Indians, as it might involve coerced labor, missionary proselytizing, and most importantly demographic losses due to disease; nevertheless, it created more self-aware metis populations and cultures. Colonial English development meanwhile rarely wavered from an ideology of exclusion, extermination, and removal, creating in its wake a world of Anglo domination and African enslavement, where a black-white dichotomy admitted no others, either from its own admixture or from the presence of different nationalities or ethnicities. Yet if inclusive zones balance out if not outweigh exclusive ones across the colonial Sun Belt, then the story of American cross-cultural interaction and identity begins to look substantially different. (9)

To bring that picture into better focus, the view from the Spanish borderlands forces us to question the assumptions we bring to a history of European-Indian relations in the colonial South that, despite our best efforts, is often still freighted with a prevailing plotline of Euro-American dominance and Indian resistance. Sixteenth-century Spanish conquests in Mesoamerica and South America also might lead us all too willingly to assumptions that the Spanish borderlands were yet more regions where Spanish imperial control went unquestioned. Yet as David Weber reminds us, those in the United States tend to associate Spanish-Indian relations with only the narratives of the earliest conquistadores like Christopher Columbus, Hernando de Soto, and Hernan Cortes, never in fact realizing that in 1790 more than half of so-called Spanish America remained in native hands. More tellingly, Europeans in the provinces of New Spain that stretched into North America rarely dealt with Indian peoples who had been first conquered militarily or devastated by disease. Instead, more often than not, they found themselves playing by native rules of political and social interaction on playing fields where they had equal or lesser footing. In such situations, Spaniards struggled to persuade Indians into alliance, and subjugation was out of reach. Treaties were just as common to eighteenth-century Spanish diplomacy as they were to that of the English--a commonality that looks all the more significant when the native regions of the Southeast and Southwest are considered as a whole. (10)

Thus, when we look at the American Southwest, we find nothing remotely resembling the Powhatan nation's demise. In New Mexico, Puebloan peoples, who were united with some Apaches and even some Spaniards, rose up and pushed out those Spaniards whose labor demands and landgrabs had become too much by the late seventeenth century. The Puebloans allowed Spanish authority to return in the eighteenth century only under conditions that allowed for mutual accommodation. At the same time in New Mexico and Texas, Apaches were rising to territorial dominance, a position that was impeded in the eighteenth century not by Spaniards but by Comanches. And Comanches would not reach the peak of their power until well into the nineteenth century--an ascent largely attributed to their keen ability to manipulate Spaniards. In the Southwest, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave rise to periods of economic and political expansion for multiple Indian nations, and their stories are far removed from a colonial age cast only as a period of dispossession, decline, and disappearance. From a southwestern perspective, then, Euro-Americans never appeared to be an all-powerful group who would steamroll over any and all native peoples in their path so that the Indians still standing at the dawn of the nineteenth century were only those awaiting a first contact with Anglo-Americans. Rather, these native peoples had been in contact and conflict with Europeans for three hundred years and had been handling them with a fair amount of mastery throughout those centuries. (11)

Yet the Spanish borderlands do more than simply provide a contrast to a narrative of declension that associates the colonial South with exclusion and extermination. Looking across the entire spectrum from west to east reorients the position of native peoples who were exceptions to a British model of conquest--Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, and many others. Uniting the Southeast and Southwest in our portrait of a colonial Sun Belt puts such southeastern native peoples in good company with those far removed from expanding British imperialism. In this larger framework, stories of seventeenth-century native demise become the exception to the continuum of Indian peoples who came into contact with more inclusive colonial projects of Spaniards and Frenchmen. The Lower Mississippi Valley and the southern backcountry have often been reduced to peripheral frontiers in relationship to the central story of colonial southern history. But once integrated into a colonial Sun Belt, we see far more clearly the Indians who could manipulate colonial ventures to their own advantage and not merely benefit from but dictate to their European neighbors. For three centuries after the arrival of Columbus in the Western Hemisphere, Indians controlled most of southeastern as well as southwestern North America. Many populations may have been decimated in number, but native peoples recreated new nations and new communities that maintained a sense of self in the midst of environments of disease, dispossession, violence, and warfare. As this transformation of both the human and natural landscape took place, Indian-European interactions were ones of exchange and accommodation in council houses and trading posts just as often as they were ones of conflict and death on battlegrounds and sickbeds. (12)

Once the East and West are joined together, their new total for what constitutes the narrative of Indian-European interaction in the colonial South also alters our timetable for colonial relations. Many historians look at the outcomes of the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, Metacom's War in New England, and the Yamassee War in the Carolinas at the turn of the seventeenth century and see only that Europeans survived in the end. They thus cast it as a period of solidification of colonial European control in North America. Yet in the larger scheme of a colonial Sun Belt, those wars make for only the first cacophonous notes. Turning points for most Indians indeed came much later with the loss of more inclusive-minded French and Spanish imperial neighbors after the cession of Louisiana first to Spanish and then to Anglo-American control and later when the destabilization of Spanish and then Mexican governments culminated in U.S. claims to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California--opening up all regions to unrestrained expansion and invasion by people with neither respect for native sovereignty and property rights nor interest in intermingled economies, societies, or cultures.

Turning next to institutions of slavery, how might taking up the question of inclusive and exclusive zones of cross-cultural relations in turn change the traditional picture of the colonial South as the primary incubator for American notions of race as rooted in bondage and freedom? If Indians figure in that story, it is usually only as a subplot--either as groups pushed aside by the expansion of a plantation economy or as groups who become a small minority of the owners of enslaved African Americans. Thus we currently have an understanding of slavery as primarily involving African Americans and an understanding of race relations as primarily between blacks and whites. Recent historical work has brought greater attention to the enslavement of Indians in the Southeast, identified by Alan Gallay as the essential geopolitical factor shaping colonial and indigenous development in the South. Indian slavery, he argues, provided an early engine in the establishment of a plantation system for Anglo Americans while creating destabilizing forces of coerced migration and political realignment for Indian peoples and confederations. Yet in the larger narrative of American history, that story is framed as a short-term experiment used by Carolinians to advance the enslavement of Africans with the profits garnered through an exchange of Indian captives sold to the Caribbean, a brutal system that ended only when its catastrophic effects exploded into pan-Indian wars of resistance that nearly toppled the colony. In such a spirit, the southeastern Indian slave trade reflected the exclusionary model of English colonization as it displaced large numbers of Indian peoples sent into bondage far from home rather than incorporating them into labor regimes within the Carolinas. By that reckoning, knowledge of Indian slavery has been a significant addition to understandings of the Atlantic slave trade, but native enslavement seems equally suggestive for colonial scholars who study the continental frameworks of bondage and coerced labor across North America. (13)

Farther west, slave systems denied the possibility of Indian and European peoples existing in separate and exclusive economic and social spheres. Indigenous practices of capture and European forms of servitude collided and accelerated across New Spain's hinterlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the process producing a spectrum of slaveries that challenge and complicate any single conception of American slavery. Thus slaves represented not merely a source of productive labor but also social wealth and prestige, kinship ties, and the interpenetration of economies, cultures, and societies reflective of different North American regions. In contrast to the colonial Southeast, multiethnic slave systems in the Southwest exhibited greater similarity to customs of servitude across Africa and Latin America--in the lack of racial dichotomization between slaves and owners, the plurality and mutability of slave statuses, and the assimilation of captives and slaves into their owners' families and communities. Looking across a colonial Sun Belt, the racial chattel slavery that developed in the Southeast looks like an anomaly in North America as well as within the wider scope of bound labor systems around the globe. (14)

Adding to the complexity of the story of slavery in the colonial Southwest were the varying patterns of bondage that crystallized across different Spanish provinces. In New Mexico, economies as diverse as horse and sheep pastoralism, ranching, and agricultural cultivation all put enslaved peoples to use to maintain and expand productivity and wealth. Farther west in Sonora and California, mission communities were the primary institutions to coerce Indian labor. Toward the east the burgeoning systems of Spanish slavery--to which explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca mournfully gave witness as early as 1536--never spread across the Rio Grande into Texas. The only systematized Indian enslavement there emerged as an extension of punitive policies across New Spain's northern provinces aimed at taking Apaches hostage and deporting them. Reviving sixteenth-century policies, Spanish officials turned to raids on Apache encampments in desperate bids to quash a raiding economy that profited at the expense of Spanish mission, presidial, and civilian horse herds. Technically any Indians captured in such "just wars" were to be sentenced as criminals to a finite term of enslavement, but deportation to Mexico or Cuba and perpetual servitude were increasingly touted as the only means of pacifying the Apache threat. Spanish policy in the Southwest therefore forged an additional link in the chain binding together the histories of African and Indian enslavement in the Caribbean as well as in North America. (15)

Just as the sexual exploitation of enslaved African American women in the Southeast created a population of mixed-blood people whose lineages and identities quickly confounded institutionalized racial categories of black and white, so too did the violent exchanges of Spanish and Indian women and children through capture and enslavement in the Southwest complicate culturally constructed categories of ethnic and national identity. Slave systems might initially divide people into distinct categories of alien and kin, but native and Euro-American communities assimilated the victims of capture and enslavement in a myriad of ways that broke down distinctions among their societies. Marriages between captors and captives resulted not only in mestizaje peoples but also in hybrid communities. The intersection of different southern slave-trade networks, in Indians and in Africans, between the east and west, may point us in new directions for exploring the origins and complexities of hierarchies of race in North America. In turn, the gender dynamics of the two systems merit further study. Gender essentially defined the institutionalization of African American slavery under Anglo-American colonial law--it was a status legally inherited through one's mother, thus making slavery a matrilineal system in the midst of a patriarchal society. As a result, gender functioned as a key component of the racial categorizations that distinguished between free and enslaved persons. In different ways but with similar significance, gender also defined Indian enslavement, as it was primarily Indian women and children rather than men who fell victim to captivity and enslavement in both the Southeast and Southwest.

Bridging these worlds, Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley offer a profitable field for comparison. A slave trade in Indian women apparently developed and existed alongside the enslavement of African Americans throughout the eighteenth century. As British, French, and Spanish colonial interests there came into overlapping conflict, enslaved Indian women and children joined Africans and African Americans as valuable commodities in colonial political economies across the region. Networks of Indian raids meant to satisfy European slave markets extended not only east but also west into the southern Plains in order to bring captive Indian women and children into Louisiana. Even as the importation of African American slave laborers rose in response to the demands of French plantation agriculture, enslaved Indian women continued to represent a significant presence within the hinterland communities of French military and trading outposts. Echoing the experiences of enslaved African American women, sexual exploitation remained a defining characteristic of Indian women's enslavement--one that helped to create an increasing number of mixed-blood families and peoples variously labeled "metis," "mestizo," or "mulatto" whose lineages and identities eluded institutionalized categories of race.

The cession of Louisiana from French to Spanish control in the 1760s confronted colonial policy makers, albeit momentarily, with a dilemma about how to codify different racial identifications and conditions of servitude for enslaved Indians and African Americans. Spanish law in the Americas had long forbidden Indian (but not African) slavery, though Spaniards used encomienda and congregacion labor systems to coerce Indian labor despite the restrictions. Nevertheless, the extension of Spanish law into Louisiana appeared to require the legal prohibition of Indian enslavement and to open up the possibility of manumission for some enslaved women and their children. In the late eighteenth century, a handful of slaves claimed blood lineage through their Indian mothers and successfully sued for freedom in the Spanish courts. The simple fact that these individuals could pursue such claims in court distinguished the colony radically from its British neighbors to the east. The fear of slave uprisings following upon the heels of the successful slave rebellion in Saint Domingue put a stop to these suits within a matter of years, but it does not negate that this was a telling moment in American history when the courts recognized racial distinctions between Indians and African Americans, groups whose enslavement had until then been deemed equally legitimate in the Louisiana province. The juxtaposition of Indian enslavement with that of Africans demonstrates that European colonists might create similar categorizations of gender, ones that cast both Indian and African American women as naturally lascivious and sexually exploitable even as they used categorizations of race to differentiate the two systems of slavery. Thus a comparative examination of practices of slavery offers an ideal opportunity to explore how Europeans used race and gender in tandem to structure different categories of identity and humanity in the early South--both east and west and where the twain met--hierarchies that have marked the United States through the present day. (16)

Why is it that at the end of the eighteenth century the Spanish borderlands do not fit neatly into a southern narrative that marks that moment as the end of an era, a juncture when colonial North America ceased to exist and was supplanted by a young and expansive United States? At that triumphal moment, racial chattel slavery had emerged as a key signifier of Anglo-American ascendancy, and it would economically undergird the growth of the new nation before nearly destroying it sixty years later. American Indians, the other racial group whose defeat was equally essential to the rise of that new nation, should have a place in the story. The key ingredients of that seeming mastery--race and slavery--were as well entrenched in the Southwest as in the Southeast. Yet the historical narrative in the Southwest did not follow the same trajectories nor lead to the same ends. The twin engines of racial hierarchy and enslavement wrought individual misery and tragic consequences. But the broad scope of Indian autonomy meant that a majority of the Sun Belt domain remained under native power and that Euro-American hegemony remained far from manifest. The end of the eighteenth century may have meant the demise of French, Spanish, and Anglo competition within the realm of southern geopolitics, but native nations were often expanding in their place. Apaches and Comanches, to name only two examples in the Southwest, would ably defend their own borders and challenge (or even invade) those of Euro-American nations--Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States--through the late nineteenth century. (17) We must redraw the map and reframe the time line across the Sun Belt if we are not to be too precipitate in calling an end to the processes that continued to command the nineteenth century and confound Euro-American teleologies.

(1) David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 54. The story of this woman was recorded by a participant in Coronado's expedition.

(2) For just a few examples, see George C. Rogers Jr. "The South Before 1800," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge, 1987), 6-47; William J. Cooper Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill, The American South: A History (New York, 1990); Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (Athens, Ga., 1994); and James Axtell, The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge, 1997). Exceptions to this generalization include Amy Turner Bushnell, "The First Southerners: Indians of the Early South," in John B. Boles, ed., A Companion to the American South (Malden, Mass., 2002), 3-23; Paul E. Hoffman, "Spanish and French Exploration and Colonization," ibid., 24-37; and Boles, The South through Time: A History of an American Region (3rd ed.; 2 vols., Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2004).

(3) For example see John L. Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman, Okla., 2002); Donald Cutter and Iris Engstrand, Quest for Empire: Spanish Settlement in the Southwest (Golden, Colo., 1996); and Oakah L. Jones Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman, Okla., 1979). It should be noted that prior to David J. Weber, both Herbert E. Bolton and John Francis Bannon united the entire Spanish borderlands, east and west, in their survey texts. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven, 1921); Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513-1821 (New York, 1970); Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America.

(4) David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque, 1982); Andres Resendez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (New York, 2005); Brian DeLay, "Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War," American Historical Review, 112 (February 2007), 35-68; Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman, Okla., 1999); Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (Norman, Okla., 2005).

(5) For suggestive examples see James H. Merrell, "Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46 (January 1989), 94-119; James Axtell, "Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections," Journal of American History, 73 (March 1987), 981-96; Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville, 1979); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York, 2005): Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1350-1880 (Lawrence. Kans., 1989); Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991); James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill, 2005); Resendez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier; and Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

(6) Robert S. Weddle has long argued for greater attention to the Gulf of Mexico as the key approach for European exploration and settlement. Weddle, Spanish Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500-1685 (College Station, Tex., 1985); Weddle, The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682-1762 (College Station, Tex., 1991); Weddle, Changing Tides: Twilight and Dawn in the Spanish Sea, 1763-1803 (College Station, Tex., 1995). For more continental approaches to early American history or discussion of the need for them, see Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 7 (quotation); Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America; Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001); Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln, Neb., 2003); James A. Hijiya, "Why the West Is Lost," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 51 (April 1994), 276-92; "'Why the West is Lost': Comments and Response," ibid., 51 (October 1994), 717-54; Paul W. Mapp, "Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives," ibid., 63 (October 2006), 713-24; and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas: A Hemispheric History (New York, 2003).

(7) Axtell, Indians' New South, 1.

(8) Helen C. Rountree, "Powhatan Indian Women: The People Captain John Smith Barely Saw," Ethnohistory, 45 (Winter 1998), 1-29; The New World (2005); Pocahontas (1995).

(9) Daniel H. Usher Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 165-1815 (New York, 1991); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006).

(10) In his new work, Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, 2005), Weber offers a magisterial synthesis of these stories of native independence and resistance across the Americas. See also Weber, "Bourbons and Barbaros: Center and Periphery in the Reshaping of Spanish Indian Policy," in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820 (New York, 2002), 79-103.

(11) John L. Kessell, "Spaniards and Pueblos: From Crusading Intolerance to Pragmatic Accommodation," in David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences. Vol. 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Washington, D.C., 1989), 127-38; Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (College Station, Tex., 1975); Ana Maria Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson, 1995); William B. Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750-1858 (Albuquerque, 1988); Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Weber, Barbaros; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2007).

(12) Gilbert C. Din and A. P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley (Norman, Okla., 1983); Usher, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves; DuVal, Nutive Ground.

(13) Gallay, Indian Slave Trade.

(14) Brooks, Captives and Cousins.

(15) Ibid.; Christon I. Archer, "The Deportation of Barbarian Indians from the Internal Provinces of New Spain, 1789-1810," Americas, 29 (January 1973), 376-85; Max L. Moorhead, "Spanish Deportation of Hostile Apaches: The Policy and the Practice," Arizona and the West, 17 (Autumn 1975), 205-20; Juliana Barr, "From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands," Journal of American History, 92 (June 2005), 19-46.

(16) Stephen Webre, "The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana, 1769-1803," Louisiana History, 25 (Spring 1984), 117-35.

(17) Weber, Barbaros; Resendez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier; DeLay, "Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War."

Ms. BARR is an assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.