Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791-1795.

Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791-1795. By Charles A. Weeks. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 292. $45.00, ISBN 0-8173-1210-2.)

Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791-1795 provides a detailed analysis of Spanish and Indian diplomacy based in Natchez, Mississippi, between 1791 and 1795. Charles A. Weeks skillfully combines a traditional borderlands approach that focuses on the Spanish with the newer orientation of works that emphasize encounters between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. The book traces diplomatic efforts between the Spanish and groups of Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees that result in the creation of two Spanish settlements: Nogales (now Vicksburg, Mississippi) and San Fernando de las Barrancas (now Memphis, Tennessee).

In 1791 Choctaw chiefs Franchimastabe and Taboca strongly opposed the Spanish establishment of Nogales, prompting extensive negotiations and eventually a treaty signed in Natchez that allowed for the establishment of Nogales in May 1792. Subsequently, the Spanish, hoping to unite various Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees in a confederation, signed a treaty at the Choctaw town of Boukfouka in central western Mississippi in May 1793 and another treaty at Nogales in October 1793. Although confederation remained an elusive goal, Spanish efforts culminated in the Chickasaw cession of land to the Spanish for the establishment of San Fernando de las Barrancas in 1795. However, Weeks argues that both Indians and Europeans lost any chance of a so-called middle-ground diplomacy--characterized by an economy and culture of exchange involving goods, people, and language--after the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo. The Spanish ceded their newly created posts as well as Louisiana to the United States. From the Indian point of view, the Spanish absence meant that politics became less competitive and thus less diplomatic, and a number of tribes lost ground to aggressive, expansionist American colonists.

Along with a number of American and British primary sources, Weeks relies mostly on unpublished materials from Spanish archive collections of the Captaincy General of Cuba and the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla as well as on documents from the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid and the Archivo General de Simancas near Valladolid. One consequence of the author's thorough research in Spanish language sources is that the book stresses the roles of individuals who have previously received less attention from Anglophone historians such as Choctaw chiefs Franchimastabe and Taboca and Chickasaw chief Ugulayacabe. Moreover, Paths to a Middle Ground publishes seventeen translations of some important primary documents, including diaries, letters, and treaties. While the book includes seven fine reproductions of original maps and diagrams, a concise regional map is needed to help the reader more easily situate the relevant Indian and Spanish towns.

Like all histories of the French or Spanish experience in the colonial Gulf South, the work is a much-needed exploration of an understudied region in a neglected period. However, because it emphasizes the diplomatic gains of Spanish Louisiana in the 1790s, this book particularly serves as a reminder that Spanish Bourbon Louisiana was not only a viable enterprise but a successful one.

SOPHIE BURTON

Dallas, Texas