This article examines two incidents of Quechan and Tohono O’odham mobility across the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 1890s. Contrasts between the incidents reveal the influence of international relations on U.S. Indian policy, as federal officials responded to local events in ways that were shaped by issues ranging from extradition laws to customs protections to diplomatic pressures. More broadly, the incidents shed light on some of the variety inherent to Indigenous relationships with the border and some of the textures of Anglo-America’s conceptions of the border as an instrument of cultural assimilation, capitalist development, and territorial surveillance and control.
Within the ecologically diverse Sonoran Desert, the homeland of the Quechan (or Yuma) runs along the Colorado River near its confluence with the Gila River in the southeast corner of California and the adjacent corners of Arizona and Baja California. There, the Quechan farmed the river bottoms and, following the California Gold Rush, ferried people, goods, and livestock across the lower Colorado. To the east, the territory of the Tohono O’odham (Desert People) covers a vast swathe of the highest and coolest part of the Desert. Across a territory spanning east from the Gulf of California to the San Pedro River and south from the Gila River in Arizona to the Río Magdalena in northern Sonora, they adapted Spanish longhorn cattle to this arid landscape, known for its iconic saguaro cacti. As affirmed in the sacred histories of both peoples, these lands were bequeathed to them by culture heroes and creators and conceived as intrinsic components of their collective identities. Yet Europeans and Euro-Americans have ignored and erased Indigenous norms of land use and occupancy by means of a spectrum of violent strategies, including boundary-making as an instrument of nation-state formation.1
By one historian’s account, much of the history of Mexican-American relations following the conclusion of the Mexican American War in 1848 revolved around ending the “state of border lawlessness” by strengthening institutions policing the movement of people and property and enforcing permanent residence in ways that threatened Indigenous peoples.2 In the 1850s, the U.S. military’s failure to quell Apache resistance to the settlement of southern Arizona Territory and northern Sonora compelled the United States to purchase the lands south from the Gila River to the present international border.3 From the perspective of the region’s Indigenous peoples, however, the Gadsden Purchase (1854) divided and violated their territories without regard to their sovereignty or their lifeways. In the words of Tohono O’odham today, “the border separates our family and defiles our traditional way of life given to us by our creator I’itoi.”4 As explored below, the differing perspectives on and relationships with the southern border bring into relief important questions regarding Anglo-America’s efforts to naturalize it as a tool and symbol of state power.
This article examines two incidents of Native American mobility between 1896 and 1898 and contextualizes the differing federal responses to these cases in light of U.S.-Mexico relations. In the first incident, in which Quechan families from the Yuma Reservation in California fled to Baja California in 1896–97 to escape mandatory schooling and the tyranny of the local superintendent, newspaper headlines and the federal response were temperate. Federal investigations of extradition precedents quelled the efforts of the superintendent and the Mexican landowner to remove families by force.5 In contrast, in April of 1898, a group of Tohono O’odham attempting to retrieve their cattle from Sonora and return to Arizona found themselves facing an aggressive response to their border crossing. Headlines blared “Frontier Towns in Danger of Being Raided,” and some in the press blamed the Indian Office for its lack of control over the “predatory practices” of borderland Native Americans.6 In a mirror image of the Quechan incident, the local Indian Office officials called for calm while the press sensationalized the incident and the federal government launched an investigation aimed at punishing the O’odham, especially the four alleged “ringleaders.”7 Between April 1898 and April 1899, the federal reaction involved not only the Interior Department (home to the Indian Office), but also the State Department, the War Department, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Justice. In both cases, the demands of international relations shaped local and federal responses.
Evidence provided by government records, media coverage, and Quechan and O’odham testimonies and oral histories suggests that the federal government responded severely to the Tohono O’odham in 1898 as a result of intersecting economic and political contexts. Economically, cattle were big business in Arizona, and Anglos launched persistent complaints that O’odham cattle raiding was inhibiting “the settlement and development of the country, keeping away and driving out capital.”8 Politically, the so-called raid on the Sonoran town of El Plomo occurred one week before the beginning of the Spanish American War. The timing heightened State Department and Mexican pressure on the Indian Office to punish the offenders and end cross-border mobility perceived as a threat to security. The contrasts in federal and local reactions to the two cross-border incidents reveal the context-sensitive ways that the Indian Office implemented its policies. Where scholars including Walter L. Williams and Stefan Aune have explored the influence of Indian policy and Indian wars on international affairs and colonial expansion beginning with the Spanish American War, this article argues that international relations also influenced Indian policy as federal officials in Washington, D.C., reacted to local events in ways that were shaped by international issues ranging from extradition laws to customs protections and diplomatic pressures.9 More broadly, the incidents shed light on the variety inherent to Indigenous relationships with the border and on Anglo-America’s conceptions of the border as an instrument of cultural assimilation, capitalist development, and territorial surveillance and control.
Fixing the Border and the Making of Nations
The Mexican American War (1846–48) cost the United States approximately $100 million and thirteen thousand lives. With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States increased its own territory by a third when it annexed the northern half of Mexico in exchange for $15 million dollars and accepted claims of U.S. citizens against Mexico for up to $3,250,000. With Article XI, the United States also assumed responsibility for keeping peace among Indigenous peoples and protecting American and Mexican citizens’ lives and property on both sides of the border.10 Under the assumption that Native American hostilities would dissolve in the face of Anglo-American strength, General Stephen Watts Kearney and his Army of the West marched into Santa Fe, New Mexico, in August of 1846 and announced U.S. occupation in terms of a liberation, as opposed to a conquest: “From the Mexican government you have never received protections. The Apaches and Navajos come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep, and even your women, whenever they please. My government will correct all this.”11 But mid-century maps illustrating the vast territories controlled by “HOSTILE TRIBES of APACHES” (fig. 1) exposed Anglo-America’s hubris in agreeing to secure the region. From the outset, Mexican envoy Luis de la Rosa found himself referring helplessly to “the terms of the 11th article of the treaty of peace” in his letters to the State Department seeking help in locating Mexican nationals captured “by the barbarous Indians” and sold as peons or slaves in the United States.12 Apache raids for human captives provided one of many sources of conflict as Comanche, Ute, Diné (Navajo), Kiowa, and Yaqui communities continued to capitalize upon and resist Euro-American expansion by raiding settlements for slaves and, in some cases, building livestock empires of their own.13
Map of the Gadsden Purchase Sonora and Portions of Mexico Chihuahua & California, Herman Ehrenberg, dated 1858, Cartographic Records, 38, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. The author has added the arrows and enhanced the international border line in California and Arizona Territory and the territorial labels for the “YUMA,” “PAPAGOES,” and “THE HOSTILE TRIBES of APACHES.”
Map of the Gadsden Purchase Sonora and Portions of Mexico Chihuahua & California, Herman Ehrenberg, dated 1858, Cartographic Records, 38, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. The author has added the arrows and enhanced the international border line in California and Arizona Territory and the territorial labels for the “YUMA,” “PAPAGOES,” and “THE HOSTILE TRIBES of APACHES.”
While the United States blamed Mexican incompetence for the continued cross-border raiding and Mexico blamed the United States for its inability to commit sufficient resources to uphold its treaty obligations, Sonora suffered above all other provinces as its citizens abandoned farms, mines, and entire towns.14 De la Rosa charged the United States with failing to establish reservations to control domestic boundaries, and thereby to repress “the inroads…made upon [Mexico] by the wild Indians now inhabiting the territories ceded to the United States.”15 His charge highlighted the fact that the federal government was surrendering its responsibility to a patchwork of temporary and, from Mexico’s perspective, counter-productive “calico” agreements that locals made with Apache bands to keep peace to the north while sacrificing the south.16 As of 1850, Congress had failed to appropriate funds necessary to increase the number of Indian Office personnel in the Southwest, and no more than six hundred troops were posted within reach of the border at any given time.17 In response, de la Rosa complained of America’s “ineffectual” military and continued his pleas for the protection promised in Article XI.18 Apache raids compromised state security and America’s reputation in Mexico; after just six years, the federal government had little choice but to buy itself out of its obligation. The Gadsden Purchase, for which the United States paid Mexico ten million dollars, abrogated Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.19
After the Gadsden Purchase, Native American raiding continued into the 1880s and 1890s, as the number of settlers and the regional impetus for security grew.20 Thus, as the Purchase signaled the emergence of America’s transcontinental empire, it also embodied the humiliation of security failures.21 Although the U.S. government had forced the majority of Apache bands onto reservations by the mid-1870s, groups led by Victorio, Nano, and Geronimo continued to use the border to escape chase by troops and militias.22 In response, diplomats bypassed Congress by signing reciprocal agreements, as opposed to treaties or laws requiring congressional approval. Between 1882 and 1896, these agreements confronted problems locally by allowing troops to “cross the boundary line of the two countries, when they are in close pursuit of a band of savage Indians” engaged in raiding.23 Meanwhile, between 1870 and 1900, Arizona’s white population grew from ten thousand to ninety-three thousand.24 The mining industry grew, ranching developed in the wake of the Desert Land Act (1877), and the Southern Pacific Railroad crossed the Territory between its first stop in Yuma in 1877 and its connection with the Texas Pacific four years later, ushering in a new era for the Territory and providing the impetus for local self-determination.25
With growing rigor after separation from New Mexico in 1863, Anglo Arizonans sought to differentiate their territory from New Mexico and its Hispanic heritage. Although the Anglo population was small compared to Texas or California and immigrants included Euro-Americans, Chinese, African Americans and Mexicans, the Mexican people—who included mestizos—became a primary target of racial prejudice.26 Foreshadowing the reactions of elites such as Senator Albert Beveridge, whose reaction to immigration was to establish a racial hierarchy descending from Anglo-Saxons through Germans, Slavs, and Mexicans (including Spaniards), Arizona’s business boosters campaigned to whiten the Territory’s reputation in the East and create a “socioeconomic pecking order organized largely along racial lines.”27 In 1859, Sylvester Mowry, speculator and later Indian Agent, insisted that Arizona’s future depended on agreeing that the Apache “must be fed by the government, or exterminated.” In September 1881, citizens of Phoenix rallied around a banner reading “Removal or Death for the Apache,” signaling the vehemence of Anglo-American fears and hostilities regarding perceived threats to their security.28
As the border between the United States and Mexico became increasingly fixed, borderland communities like the Quechan and Tohono O’odham found themselves subject to a new international boundary that increased pressure on them to remain on one side of the border or the other and abandon their patterns of mobility. After all, since Mexico and the United States arose not as homogonous “nations”—peoples united by characteristics such as shared ancestry, culture, or language—but as aggregates of immigrant and Native populations, territory served as an important symbol and tool of assimilation for the nation-states.29 In this ideological context where neither borders nor national identities were necessarily natural or inevitable, government officials on both sides labored to consolidate peoples and territories. Both states depended upon well-defined borders to establish citizenry and solidarity and to erode Native American cross-border sovereignty.30
The Yuma Reservation, Quechan Mobility, and the Investigation that Followed (1896–1897)
Events precipitating the 1897 diplomatic intervention regarding Quechan “trespassing” in Mexico began in the 1850s as the Quechan needed to defend their families, their economy, and their right of mobility across ancestral lands.31 During the California Gold Rush, the Quechan capitalized upon the Anglo migrants passing through their territory by transporting them across the Colorado at the quarter-mile narrow called Yuma Crossing.32 However, once Anglo-Americans established competing ferrying businesses, the Quechan retaliated by killing the interlopers, an act that resulted in Major Samuel Heintzelman’s military campaign against them.33 The dual impact of Heintzelman’s violent assault and the environmental degradation caused by settler livestock resulted in food shortages. As a result of malnutrition, epidemic diseases, and conflict with age-old enemies, the Quechan population plummeted by nearly 50 percent through the second half of the nineteenth century, from approximately 1,700 to 900 persons.34 An official inspection conducted in 1869 captured the loss and suffering: “This once powerful tribe…has become diseased to such an extent…that there is not now a physically sound person in the tribe.”35 Yet the Quechan fought to preserve their lifeways and refused to relocate in the decades following the establishment of Camp Yuma (later renamed Fort Yuma) in their territory in 1850.36 Through a generation of self-advocacy, they compelled the Indian Office to campaign for a reservation in their aboriginal territory and succeeded in securing an executive order establishing the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the California side of the Colorado River in 1884.37
The Yuma Reservation’s first decades were filled with conflicts that included the strategic use of migration. Soon after the Indian Office coordinated with the Catholic Church to establish the Fort Yuma School in 1886, clashes emerged over the behavior of its superintendent, Sister Mary O’Neil. O’Neil’s dual crusade to enroll children in the school and compel the Indian Office to arrange irrigation for family farms grew from her belief that education would not yield the desired result of assimilation unless “the home life of these people [were] more civilized.”38 Part of a new generation of educators, she scoffed at the ideals of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, who believed that students would “return to their communities as ‘missionaries of civilization.’”39 To such ideals, she argued that “a strong natural tendency in the Indian character to a life of idleness” prevented children from transforming their households.40 Using the international border as a shield, some families fled to Mexico to avoid sending their children to school.41 According to the later testimony of Patrick Miguel, son of Quechan Chief Simon Miguel (1887–1893), “the inhuman punishments meted out by the nuns” drove his father and his allied leaders to hire an attorney, George M. Knight, to assist them in drafting a petition of protest against O’Neil to send to President Grover Cleveland and Congress.42 Animosities intensified between Simon Miguel and O’Neil as schooling demanded that children leave their families for extended periods of time, her staff inflicted corporal punishments on the children, and O’Neil grew in power over local leaders like Miguel himself.43 Meanwhile, as Anglo-American settlers were showing interest in developing irrigated agriculture along the Colorado River, engineers surveyed the reservation and surrounding areas, threatening Quechan lands. Seeking to channel water from the Colorado into what would later be called California’s Imperial Valley, the Colorado River Canal Irrigation Company secured a right-of-way through the reservation.44 According to Patrick Miguel’s 1935 critique of the “so-called agreement of 1893” regarding land dispossession and the accompanying allotment process, the agreement’s illegitimacy had roots in the “antagonistic” relationship between the agency staff and the Quechan leadership over the Fort Yuma School.45
As soon as Quechan leaders learned of the scheme, Indian Office officials preempted any organized response by turning to physical violence and legal fraud against possible challengers. Agent Francisco Estudillo of the Mission-Tule River Agency and two marshals accosted Chief Miguel at Knight’s office and imprisoned him in Yuma County, where others were already being held.46 In a 1935 testimony, Walter Scott, the first to be taken into custody, provided a detailed account of the brutalities he endured. Armed with guns and blacksnakes, the officers beat Scott with such vehemence that the first one exhausted himself at the thirteenth lash, when a second officer took over.47 In a later investigation, Patrick Miguel summarized the experience of the accused group after they had been transferred back to the Fort Yuma guardhouse, despite Knight’s protests: “After a few days in the guard-house, four of the men, Miguel, Scott, Joaquin and Shum-thule, were flogged on the bare back with a black snake whip (25 strokes apiece).”48 Within the next few days, the remaining headmen were imprisoned, and a U.S. marshal transported all of the prisoners to Los Angeles, “under what charges the prisoners never knew.”49 Given O’Neil’s need to fill the so-called Agreement with signatures, removing the headmen who opposed it may have been the first step in her scheme to compel the Quechan into agreeing to allot the reservation and cede so-called surplus lands to the Anglo developers.50 Once her adversaries were in prison, agency police “dragged” Quechan “from all directions” to the Yuma Agency and “forced [them] to hold the end of the pen” and make their marks.51 By Patrick Miguel’s accounts, only 77 of the 203 signatures on the Agreement actually belonged to adult male residents of the Yuma Indian Reservation; the balance consisted of “forged” scrawls and “fictitious names.”52
Against this local backstory, a prominent Mexican developer’s allegation that the Quechan were “unrightfully occupying” his ranch turned previously local conflicts between the Quechan and their agents into an international affair.53 In 1882, Guillermo Andrade had joined forces with fellow businessmen to purchase a property in the northeast corner of Baja California along the west bank of the Colorado River. Rancho de Los Algodones encompassed populated areas including the Quechan settlement of Xuksíly, located near today’s Los Algodones about ten miles west of Yuma, Arizona.54 After taking ownership of this ranch on the Colorado River delta in 1896, Andrade requested that the Mexican government remove the Quechan (and Diegueños) from his ranch. Twelve months later, when the local court in the village of Algodones called each family to testify, the majority argued that they had lived on the lands in question for generations, evoking their own models of self-determination and territoriality. To Andrade’s dissatisfaction, the court ruled in favor of the Indigenous families, deporting only two individuals.55 Although two U.S. Indian agents were present, the incident did not merit mention in the Indian Office’s annual reports for 1896 or 1897; nor do the Indian Office’s archival records include communications between the Indian Office and the State Department on the trial. The State Department became involved only after Andrade turned to Minister Matías Romero, Mexico’s envoy stationed in Washington, D.C., to launch a complaint. On March 1, 1897, Romero wrote to Secretary of State Richard Olney, complaining that “a number of Yuma Indians…have crossed into Mexico territory and established themselves on the ranch called ‘Algodones,’ situated in the territory of Lower California and owned by Senor Don Guillermo Andrade, without the consent of the latter,” thus beginning international communications in pursuit of a less porous border.56 Olney forwarded Romero’s request to the Secretary of the Interior Cornelius N. Bliss with a prefatory note explaining that the “Government of Mexico desires to know whether this Government cannot induce [the Quechan] to return.”57
Olney’s successor, Secretary John Sherman, responded to Romero by explaining that he would consult with the Department of the Interior and its Indian Office before acting on Andrade’s (and O’Neil’s) desire to make fixed and permanent nationals of the Quechan. The inter-departmental efforts began when the Indian Office dispatched Agent Francisco Estudillo to investigate the complaint’s legitimacy and the legality of Andrade’s request. At the end of his visit, Estudillo “found the Indians opposed to leaving their old homes. They claim that they have lived where they now live for ages; that they never knew any difference as to what Government owned the country.” The land, they added, “was always theirs, and is theirs yet.” He detailed that they showed him paperwork affirming their claim and, through a translator, articulated their refusal “to leave their native land and remove to American soil.” As he also reported to a local newspaper, he had “no doubt they had lived on the Colorado River, without reverence as to what Government they were under or answerable to, for many years.” Given their explanations, he acquiesced that nothing “can be done further than to let them remain as they are and where they are.”58 His findings, based on Quechan testimony and Mexican documents in their possession, did not lay the matter to rest, but they set the tone for media coverage and the U.S. federal government’s examination of past practices.
The governments of Mexico and the United States agreed that the Quechan should be removed, even, in Romero’s words, “expelled…by force” if necessary; but ultimately, a reasoned examination of precedents prevented further violence.59 Reflecting its belief in America’s unique capacity and its alleged duty to advance civilization, the Indian Office held that an Indian territory in Mexico “would be another anomally [sic] among the nations of the earth.”60 Despite Romero’s wishes and U.S. assimilationist policies supporting mandatory education, crossing an international border to repatriate the Quechan by force was not legal.61 Neither O’Neil’s crusade nor the complaints from Mexico moved the federal government to make this an international repatriation effort.62
Between Romero’s March 1 letter and Sherman’s detailed response of May 19, 1897, the secretary of the interior had tasked Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas P. Smith with investigating similar incidents involving the possible extradition of Indigenous peoples. Finding precedents on the northern border, Smith first examined the fate of the “refugee Sioux” after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.63 The war was the most violent in Minnesota’s history, with a toll of up to 600 soldiers and settlers and 100 Dakota warriors dead.64 Following the U.S. army’s victory over Dakota forces led by Little Crow (Taoyateduta), over 1,600 men, women, and children endured a forced migration of 150 miles from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling.65 Others were able to escape to territories in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which Dakota scholar Leo J. Omani affirmed “has always been a part of Indigenous tribal homelands of our Dakota people.”66 Although some of the refugees were alleged to have been participants in the War and, therefore, guilty of insurrection from America’s perspective, none were extradited legally into U.S. jurisdiction. However, as the result of collaboration among local officials, two leaders—Little Six and Medicine Bottle—were drugged, manacled to a toboggan, and removed, while the majority remained to continue their efforts to secure reserved lands in the Dominion of Canada.67
The second precedent Smith examined involved Plains Cree who, following the Northwest (or Riel) Rebellion, fled Canada and settled in the United States in 1885. As Smith documented the event, the Interior Department had hoped to force their return until Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard explained that they could not be removed because the Cree did not qualify as fugitives from the law. Without a Canadian demand supported by an extradition treaty and legal warrant of surrender, “the Indians in question can not be returned by us to Canada, nor can the United States authorities, military or civil, properly connive at their being kidnapped and sent over the line.”68 In his probable allusion to the kidnapping of Little Six and Medicine Bottle, Bayard confirmed the legal and moral foundations upon which the State Department had refused to extradite those who sought refuge in the United States. While he offered that the Quechan could “be carried to the border line” by Mexican officials and induced, but not forced, to stay, he also affirmed Estudillo’s findings regarding the Quechan claim to the territory in question.69 Contemporary media coverage reiterated that the Quechan claimed to have “lived upon the land for many years without knowing or recognizing any difference of government.”70 Newspaper coverage was sympathetic, as exemplified by the Arizona Sentinal’s “Yuma Indian Lands. Indians Claim Ownership of Their Holdings” and the Los Angeles Herald’s “Yuma Indians: Object to Being Put off of Their Lands.”71
Combined with Estudillo’s on-site investigations, Smith’s examination of past practice exemplified a reasoned approach to border crossings. In the end, neither the Canadian or Mexican extradition treaties authorized the forced removal or the punishment of Native Americans having crossed international borders in search of refuge or means of survival. Enclosing the reports into his response to Romero, Sherman brought the matter to its end on May 19 and resolved that, without the involvement of a crime, the U.S.-Mexican extradition treaty of 1861 did not cover that case and that “no demand on the part of this Government for the return of these absentee Indians seems warrantable.” The commissioner of Indian Affairs confirmed that since “there is no authority of law” under which to confine the Quechan under guard, “it has been found impracticable, if not impossible, to return Indians to and confine them upon a reservation against their will.”72
Although O’Neil persisted in her efforts to compel the Indian Office to order the local Mexican judge to force the removal of the Quechan, families kept their options open by applying for allotments on the reservation while they remained in Xuksíly to keep their children out of school.73 As of the 1905 Fort Yuma census, eighty-two individuals still resided in aboriginal territory in Mexico; over half of whom were under twenty years old. Indeed, the superintendent complained of “an epidemic of running away to Mexico, which took place among the larger pupils just before school opened in the fall.”74 It was not until 1910–1911 when a new dam along the Colorado brought drought to the settlement and the Mexican Revolution made cross-border migrations dangerous that the Quechan of Xuksíly moved onto the reservation.75 Through 1896 and 1897, acts of violence had been perpetrated at the hands of local agents for local reasons. O’Neil exemplified the idea of local superintendents as embodiments of “the greatest concentration of administrative absolutism in our governmental structure.”76 Although the Quechan were vulnerable to her power and to the influence of international relations on Indian policy, they prevailed, succeeding in adapting the border to their own needs by using it to defend themselves against the brutal imposition of assimilation that O’Neil represented.
Tohono O’odham Border Crossing Turned “Crisis” in 1898
Like the Quechan, the Tohono O’odham had resisted settlement in their homeland but, after the mid-century, found themselves overrun. Although many Tohono O’odham had adopted Spanish introductions and some settled in Jesuit missions, the converts rebelled against forced labor and other grievances throughout the Hispanic period. Organized rebellions against the missions in 1695, 1751, and 1841 resulted in the abandonment of missions, as well as nearby mines and ranches.77 After the Gadsden Purchase brought about two-thirds of historic Tohono O’odham territory into American jurisdiction, the U.S. government attempted to keep peace by establishing the San Xavier Reservation south of Tucson in 1874.78 As the O’odham note in their history, the “reservation was only a small fraction of O’odham land,” and its population of about nine hundred accounted for relatively few of the more than seven thousand Desert People spread across their homeland.79 The Gila Bend Reservation was added in 1882 and later, in 1916, the much larger Papago Reservation (today’s Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation), which sits directly on the border.80 Following the Civil War and the development of the railways in the following decades, Arizona attracted more miners, farmers, and ranchers.81 By the 1880s, ranchers joined the mining communities already encroaching on O’odham territory, at times trespassing on reserved lands and generating competition over land and scarce water resources.82 Despite booms and busts, droughts and range degradation, Arizona boasted a cattle industry whose exports valued nearly three million dollars by 1896 and nearly four million in 1897, providing a compelling motive for eliminating international rustling.83
Among the O’odham, mobility played a role in virtually every aspect of their cultural life, including ranching. “Our people traveled extensively, throughout the lands that now include Arizona and Mexico, hunting and gathering food, trading with neighbors, and visiting family,” they explain.84 From annual pilgrimages to the Gulf of California for salt to trading events where they exchanged items including salt, cactus fruit, and cattle with their allies, mobility has been critical to their survival as a people.85 As explained to ethnographer Gwyneth Harrington, until 1910, with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, O’odham cattlemen regularly travelled to roundups in Sonoran villages including El Plomo, located about 100 miles south of Tucson. During her fieldwork in the 1930s, Harrington interviewed O’odham who recalled how the roundups “Used to make close feelings between the Mexicans and Papago—ate at each others chuck wagons and loaned horses when their horses needed rest.”86 One explained, “‘From time immemorial we have traded with Mexico, traded for food supplies mostly, and cattle too.’”87 In his 1967 oral history, Francisco Johnson summarized, “There was no line as there is now.”88
Moving—or smuggling—cattle across domestic and international borders revealed the capacity of the O’odham to navigate a system of constraints and laws that were not their own. Ignoring or evading government systems of surveillance and regulation fundamental to reservations and customs ports exemplified what historian Eric V. Meeks called “the persistence of certain transnational and interethnic cultural practices [that] challenged U.S. laws designed to solidify both national and racial borders.”89 The Tohono O’odham refused to occupy their allotments following the General Allotment or Dawes Act (1887), which imposed individual land allotments and sold off so-called “surplus” lands, and they continued to move their cattle in ways that embodied their right to traverse and occupy their homeland.90 In practical terms, their cattle drives also allowed them to adapt to dwindling water supplies as competition with settlers increased.91 Infamously, cattle rustling was an ecumenical profession in the Southwest and northern Mexico. In Arizona, rustling operations were so extensive that they threatened friendly relations between the United States and Mexico.92 In the 1880s, Apache and O’odham depredations, settlers cheating permitting systems, and the development of organized gangs of American rustlers prompted both countries to establish roaming customs patrols.93 But in the 1890s, the Tohono O’odham gained a reputation for particularly aggressive and successful thieving.94 The governor’s report for 1896 claimed that “nomadic Papagos” were responsible for depredations costing the cattlemen of Pima County along the border $300,000 over five years.95 By the decade’s end, the Arizona Republican charged that the Tohono O’odham “are themselves cattle raisers, but their more important industry is stealing from their white neighbors.” Citing the fact that cattlemen Maisch and Driscoll of Tucson had abandoned a ranch worth over fifty-thousand dollars as evidence of O’odham aggression, the newspaper charged the Indian Office with the responsibility to put an end to O’odham mobility.96
Exacerbating the competition and conflict over grazing land and water, the O’odham living north of the border experienced a series of deadly events in the early 1890s. A severe drought beset Southern Arizona in 1892. Through the next year, officials estimated that ranchers lost no less than 50 percent of their herds.97 Two years later, a flood uprooted trees, carried off soil, and erased irrigation ditches across the San Xavier Reservation, and years of hardship and endemic hunger followed.98 The O’odham suffered further when smallpox erupted in Sonora in 1896, and the local Indian agent found himself assuring the Arizona Republican that he was maintaining quarantine by sending “a squad of policemen to patrol the border to drive back all Indians.”99 His efforts had little effect, and by January of 1897 forty-eight deaths had occurred across Arizona reservations home to O’odham people. An investigator warned, “these Indians can be controlled” only “if not driven by hunger to wandering about.”100 Reasons for mobility now included not only pilgrimages and seasonal movements, but also a wider-ranging quest for safety, food, and water sources. In short, an atmosphere of want and need set the local backstory to the 1898 conflict in El Plomo.
The build-up to “A Raid by Papagos,” as the Florence [Arizona] Tribune called the roundup of April 14, roused concerns among Sonoran officials before the Tohono O’odham ranchers had crossed the border.101 On April 11, Emilio Ferreira, the consul at Altar, sent a telegram to Ramón Corral, governor of Sonora, to inform him that forty O’odham had gathered in Chukut Kuk, southwest of Tucson and ten miles north of the border. In the all-capital font typical of telegrams, he warned, “THEY ARE GOING TO ATTACK PLOMO.”102 Corral responded by deploying ten armed men to El Plomo. On April 14, Ferreira reported that forty O’odham carrying American flags had perpetrated a fifteen-minute “attack” on El Plomo.103 Fearing a second incident, Corral telegrammed on April 15 with orders for the troops in El Plomo: “SEND ORDERS TO PLOMO THAT THEY ARE NOT TO AWAIT THE ATTACKS BY THE PAPAGOS, THAT THEY ARE TO PURSUE THEM UNTIL THEY ARE DESTROYED OR DISPERSED.”104 As reported by Corral and repeated in Arizona newspapers, the troops repulsed the O’odham, who retreated to Arizona.105 O’odham accounts tell a different story, one of a routine cattle roundup aborted by violence. According to the account of Two Days, identified by the Indian Office as one of the leaders, their purpose was not to attack or raid, but to round up “my cattle and horses at my old home” and the stock of the others at their homes.106 El Plomo was, after all, in their territory and a site of routine trade.
Two Days and other O’odham added further detail to the history of the fifteen-minute confrontation.107 After fleeing El Plomo, Two Days and some of his companions found shelter in the home of James G. Blaine, “an intelligent and reliable Papago,” according to Superintendent Henry J. Cleveland, who oversaw the Pima Agency including San Xavier and Gila Bend.108 Blaine penned a summary letter to Cleveland, explaining that when the O’odham had arrived at El Plomo, they found themselves facing three Mexican squatters, who reminded them that “when [Mexicans] find any Papago…they must kill them right away.” In response to the Mexicans’ fire, Two Days “told his men to fith [fight] them. He said they have 5 minutes fith and than [sic] the Mexicans run away to their homes.”109 The Arizona Republican reported no casualties, and even at the year’s end, Cleveland affirmed that the gunfight had resulted in no deaths or injuries.110 However, Antone Lewis, whose father and grandfather were involved in the incident, recalled injured men, including Two Days. Lewis’s oral history painted a more serious portrait of the confrontation’s consequences among the O’odham than U.S. officials’ reports. “All of them were wounded in some way,” he recalled, explaining the need for over a week’s respite in Blaine’s home.111
Anglo, Mexican, and Tohono O’odham accounts differ not only in terms of their descriptions of the events at El Plomo, but also in the motivational and historical contexts provided. Two Days had expected to follow the O’odham way of life, which they define as rooted in a history of having “traveled freely…without regard for the boundary.”112 He was, however, chased from land he considered his own. While recovering in Blaine’s home, he worked on his April 22 letter to Cleveland. Picking up the story where Blaine’s letter had left off, Two Days explained that the Mexicans had not allowed him to round up his horses and cattle “at my old home.” He insisted that “They wants to fith [fight] me and kill some more of my men.” Rallying Cleveland’s support, he concluded with an allusion to a possible security breach and a border war, promising to inform Cleveland “if the Mexicans should come across the U.S. line and have a war to us as we hear every day that they must come across the line in a short time.”113 Two Days added that the Mexicans were killing O’odham stock and concluded his letter with a request for Cleveland’s protection. Emphasizing his knowledge of the situation—knowledge he knew Cleveland needed—Two Days sought to strike a deal, promising an exchange of information for the latter’s support. In his letter’s content and tone, Two Days thus revealed his effort to maintain his sense of self-determination while negotiating with the fact that he now depended upon American officials to confront the Mexicans he saw as unlawful occupiers of his land and to keep him and his allies safe from unjust charges and punishment.
While local Indian Office personnel attempted to ensure the O’odham would not be the victims of unfair prosecution, the economic context of smuggling and, especially after the beginning of the war with Spain on April 21, security concerns combined to pressure them into an aggressive, punitive response. As indicated in the first correspondence from a State Department representative to the Department of the Interior, “Papagoes from United States attacked village of Elplomo [sic] one hundred miles west Nogales.…Supposed object frightening settlers, robbery of cattle smuggling them to United States.”114 This interpretation, from the Third Assistant Secretary of State Thomas W. Cridler, citing a communication from the consul in Nogales, Mexico, was repeated verbatim in the Arizona Republican’s article, “Trouble with Papagoes.”115 Multiple burdens fell on the shoulders of the new agent, Samuel L. Taggart, who replaced the ailing Cleveland. First, he needed to address the fact that Arizona’s ranchers felt “preyed upon by the Papago Indians” and held the Indian Office responsible for protecting “their interests against the ravages of these thieving, wandering bands of Indians.”116 Second, he faced U.S. customs officers’ charges of corruption and conspiracies among Indian Office employees they alleged were “aiding and abetting the Papagoes.”117 In an effort to answer charges and ascertain the truth, the Indian Office dispatched an inspector to San Xavier. By April 27, Inspector C.F. Nesler had completed his investigation, which identified thirty-three alleged smugglers led by Two Days, El Gato, Cachora, and Napoleon. All of the men, according to Nesler, were residents of Mexico who had fled to the United States after participating in an 1897 conflict in El Plomo.118 He recommended that the U.S. consulate in Nogales put the matter to rest by informing Corral that punishing the offenders was Mexico’s responsibility.119
However, when Governor Corral learned of Nesler’s conclusions and insisted that the accused were American nationals, the former’s objections launched a brief flurry of correspondence regarding potential dangers and addressing which country would proceed with an investigation.120 In the correspondence between Mexican and U.S. officials, concerns over “trouble from persons of pro-Spanish affiliations” pointed to broader security issues related to the Spanish American War.121 Some also expressed specific concern regarding the Free Zone (Zona Libre), a duty-free zone running the length of the border where smuggling thrived.122 The Treasury Department added its voice to the chorus calling for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones to punish the offenders, as customs collectors from the border town of Nogales claimed that the O’odham had stolen six hundred cattle and accused them of duplicating Mexican brands to avoid detection.123 Communications between the consuls and the secretary of state and between the latter and the secretary of the interior signaled the importance of complying with Corral’s insistence that the U.S. take responsibility.
As a result of pressure from the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who was in turn subject to pressures via the Treasury Department and the State Department, whose personnel in turn considered accusations by Mexican officials and the U.S. military, both local Indian Office officials acquiesced to a punitive response. Nesler reversed his original recommendation to charge Mexico with responsibility over the matter and capitulated to the consul in Nogales that the U.S. “Government should mete out the punishment.”124 The absence of certainty regarding the basic facts of the raid/roundup thrived, and reports of its impact varied widely, with Taggart insisting that the Mexican assault had “obliged [the O’odham] to flee without obtaining their stock,” and U.S. customs and Mexican officials insisting that they had stolen six hundred head of cattle.125 The army had launched its own, separate investigation, which repeated the charges of local Mexicans claiming that the O’odham had stolen the six hundred head.126 Managing the disparate perspectives of the two states and the Indian Office’s need to assert its authority, Nesler assured the U.S. consul in Nogales that the Indian Office would prevent future attacks.127 On May 18, he sent twenty-five Tohono O’odham, including the four alleged leaders, to prison in Tucson to await trial.128 Attempting to deflect pressure from Jones, who had to answer to the secretary of the interior and the secretary of state regarding the necessity of Taggart’s responsibility to maintain “friendly relations” with local Mexican officials, the latter at first reiterated his conclusion that the events of mid-April were “somewhat exaggerated” and critiqued the incarceration of the men as “unnecessary and unjust.”129 However, his pleas went unacknowledged in a bureaucratic atmosphere committed to ensuring order and discipline. After detailing the prisoners’ need to tend to crops that would sustain their families through the winter, he finally acquiesced that it was “desirable for reasons of state to hold these Indians as prisoners.”130 Shortly after the secretary of the interior had received Nesler’s report and Taggart’s overview, Secretary of State William R. Day wrote to the secretary of the interior of his “gratification that the law is to be allowed to take its course.”131 Although neither Nesler nor the army’s investigator found any physical evidence of theft, Corral’s charges of an armed “invasion” of Sonora demanded redress.132
Through May, as the brief wars raged in the Philippines and Cuba, civilian and military leaders apprised of the conflict in El Plomo feared that smuggling would transform into an invasion of the United States by “Spanish sympathizers” from Mexico aor Arizona.133 On April 9, after the Navy had deployed the battleship Oregon toward Cuba and war seemed inevitable, Arizona Governor Myron H. McCord telegrammed the secretary of war to request weapons and ammunition.134 In case of war and a subsequent withdrawal of troops, he explained, Arizona’s southern border would be vulnerable “to raids by brigand bandits and Indians to say nothing of possible trouble from Indians within our borders.”135 The same week that Congress finally declared war, McCord wrote to President William McKinley in reference to his request for border defenses. “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind,” he wrote, “but that during a state of war, Spanish sympathizers in Mexico, knowing the comparatively unprotected state of our borders, would make frequent raids into the Territory; and that cattle thieves and desperados would also embrace the opportunity to plunder and steal.” Among the thirty-seven thousand Native Americans he counted within Arizona’s borders, as well as those living in Sonora, “renegade Indians” simply awaited the withdrawal of troops to “give trouble.”136 McCord cited the attack on El Plomo as an example of the dangers of cattle rustling and of conflicts ripe for escalation without a strong military presence to deter the development of dangerous synergies and alliances.137 Commissioner Jones expressed similar anxiety about the impact of war and an unprotected border on southern Arizona’s Indigenous peoples. Also referring to the alleged El Plomo attack as an example of broader susceptibility to security risks, he speculated that it “may possibly have been instigated” by “evil-disposed” whites, possibly “Spanish sympathizers,” seeking to provoke the O’odham.138 The secretary of state and the Adjutant General’s Office sent similar warnings down their chains of command.139 The press disseminated such theories, stirring fear by growing the number of O’odham involved from forty to seventy-five and warning of a “conspiracy” involving “Mexican bandits, Indians and Spaniards.”140
Scaling out to the broadest level of impact of international relations on Indian Affairs, Mexico’s commitment to maintaining neutrality in the war added to the Indian Office’s obligations to maintain order and restrict Indigenous mobility. Emphasizing the U.S. role in ensuring Mexico’s capacity to remain neutral, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Powell Clayton, sent to the secretary of state various statements and circulars summarizing Mexico’s position and recommending U.S. vigilance in maintaining peace along the border.141 Moreover, Mexico’s secretary of the interior communicated with the governors of all the border states, calling on them to redouble peace-keeping efforts that would enable Mexico to maintain neutrality during “el lamentable conflicto de los Naciones amigas” (the unfortunate conflict of friendly nations).142 Letters forwarded to the commissioner of Indian Affairs from the Nogales consul through the secretary of state and the secretary of the interior passed on responsibilities typically in the realm of diplomacy to the local Indian Office personnel and emphasized their critical role in supporting Mexico’s neutrality.143
As the Indian Office negotiated these responsibilities, the accused O’odham served varying prison sentences. Taggart succeeded in arranging for the release of eleven of the twenty-five on June 10; and another ten served out a longer sentence of unpaid labor, making bricks for the nearby Phoenix Indian School until they were paroled on July 27.144 Defending the remaining four O’odham as best he could, Taggart reported to the commissioner that the charges had been “malicious and wholly unfounded” and added that he held “the opinion that very little if any smuggling is done by the Indians, and that what is or may be done, is by whites, both American and Mexican,” who duplicated Indian brands.145 In an effort to assuage his superiors in Washington and avoid a repetition of the current circumstances, Taggart recommended that the departments of the Treasury and the Interior initiate a joint inspection in order to formulate rules and regulations regarding ranching. Agent E. T. Stokes from the Treasury and Agent G. B. Pray from the Interior conducted the investigation and on November 14, 1898 submitted their long-term recommendations for economic security serving “the best interest both of the Indians and of the revenue service.”146 While the matter of the property was put to rest, at least officially, Nesler had arranged an agreement with the assistant district attorney to enter a nolle prosequi and release Two Days, Napoleon, Cachora, and El Gato as soon as the court reconvened in September.147 The secretary of the interior approved the agreement, but for unknown reasons, no release took place.148 For four months after the war ended, the O’odham languished in prison away from their farms even as officials acknowledged that their families were “suffering for something to eat.”149
Winter and yet another planting season passed before the trial finally came to an anticlimactic conclusion that nevertheless reflected the intersection between international relations and Indian policy. After months of stasis, on April 8, 1899, the Indian Office learned that the four O’odham were about to be tried without counsel. Although the newest agent, Elwood Hadley, sought instructions from the Department of Justice, the trial proceeded without legal representation for the defendants.150 The Indian Office requested that the Department of Justice instruct the district attorney to enter a nolle prosequi, and this time, delay resulted from a late telegram. By the time the district attorney received the Department of Justice’s instructions, a jury trial already had commenced and, on April 12, found the defendants not guilty. One week later, the Department of Justice informed the Indian Office of the verdict and the defendants’ release.151 Bearing witness to the interdepartmental and international scaling of the regional events, Jones composed a lengthy follow-up letter to Hadley in which he referred specifically to communications from the secretary of the interior, the secretary of state, and Mexico’s U.S. ambassador.152 Jones stressed that the “Indians should…remain within the limits of their reservations” or risk imprisonment by U.S. or Mexican authorities.153 Finally, Jones sent a letter summarizing his directives and aims for maintaining “friendly relations” with Mexico to the secretary of the interior.154 Still under pressure from both sides of the border, the four Tohono O’odham ranchers presumably returned to their communities in Arizona to provide for their families, tend their cattle, and negotiate their future with Anglo-American administration, regulation, and surveillance.
Conclusion
The federal responses to Quechan and Tohono O’odham mobility between 1896 and 1898 involved interdepartmental communications that obliged the Indian Office to act according to the rules or exigencies of international relations. Both cross-border incidents involved domestic pressures to assimilate Native Americans through schooling or by imposing sedentary lifeways, and both involved Mexican accusations of Native American trespass, instigating scaled responses spanning from the local through the federal to the international level. As the Quechan and Tohono O’odham attempted to maintain their own models and ideals of territoriality and sovereignty along the borderlands, part of the project of “Americanizing the American Indians” included the destruction of such ideals.155 Mexico and the United States sought to assert and naturalize the hegemony of nation-state models over all others, so that scales of power intersected and clashed in varying degrees of intensity. The Quechan succeeded in evading local forces of assimilation by using the border as a shield against O’Neil’s domination, exemplifying the victory of what historians Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett called “living life as usual” in resistance to the power of nation-states.156 The conflict in El Plomo also began with the assertion of Indigenous self-determination, but it evolved into a performance of state power over peoples, borders, and border-related violence. Allegations of cattle rustling and coincidence with the short-lived war during which some in the United States feared that domestic and/or foreign “Spanish sympathizers” could jeopardize security intensified the local conflict, so that federal-level interventions escalated the response rather than mitigating it as had the examination of precedents accompanying the Quechan incident.
As historian Elliott West has shown in his examination of race in the Southwest, Anglos considered Native Americans (and Mexicans) threatening because they were “inside the nation’s borders” yet outside the influence of social control and, sometimes, the law.157 Given the economic and political contexts of the El Plomo incident, both federal governments committed themselves to eliminating forms of violence or border violation (including cattle rustling) except their own, thus concentrating or monopolizing violence in state hands.158 In the context of real, potential, or imagined economic and political security risks, the U.S. government turned Two Days, El Gato, Cachora, and Napoleon into scapegoats in an interdepartmental and international exercise of power aimed at fixing a unified identity for and within a territory and, thereby, strengthening the bonds between nation and state. Moreover, strengthening the border and debilitating Native American mobility and non-state concepts of territory served to naturalize the conflation of territory, nation, and state; occlude alternative perspectives; and bind ideals of sovereignty with territorial borders and their surveillance to such an extent that they appeared immutable.159
Notes
I extend my gratitude to the librarians at the National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of the Interior, the readers and editors at the Pacific Historical Review, and my former student, Mariana Becerra, for her tenure as my research assistant.
Content from the O’odham section of this article has been adapted from a previous publication: Jennifer Bess, “The Tohono O’odham ‘Attack’ on El Plomo: A Study in Sovereignty, Survivance, Security, and National Identity at the Dawn of the American Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2020): 137–60, by permission of Oxford University Press, https://academic.oup.com/whq.
This article is informed by scholarly concepts of state and nation. For Benedict Anderson, the “state” is the political apparatus that functions to benefit the dominant class, while the “nation” is composed of cultural and historical relations among the people. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6.
Robert D. Gregg, The Influence of Border Troubles on Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1876–1910 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 11.
J. Fred Rippy, “The Indians of the Southwest in the Diplomacy of the United States and Mexico, 1848–1853,” Hispanic American Historical Review 2, no. 3 (1919): 396.
Tohono O’odham Nation, It Is Not Our Fault: The Case for Amending Present Nationality Law to Make All Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation United States Citizens, Now and Forever, eds. Guadalupe Castillo and Margo Cowan (Sells, Ariz.: Tohono O’odham Nation, 2001), 15. As Eric V. Meeks explains, “for most Tohono O’odham, the border meant very little, and they had no clear identification with either the Mexican or U.S. nation-states.” Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 76. Through today, the Haudenosaunee Passport, dating to 1923, embodies Indigenous efforts to resist national identities and prioritize their own.
U.S. Congress, House, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, with the Annual Message of the President, 55th Congress, 2d sess., Doc. 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1898), 391–94. (Hereafter, FRUS, 1898).
“Frontier Towns in Danger of Being Raided,” San Francisco Call 26 April 1898, 3; “Trouble with Papagoes,” Arizona Republican 21 April 1898, 4.
C. F. Larrabee to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, LB 382, vol. 191, p. 28, Letters Sent, 1870–1908, Land Division, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA, Washington, DC. (Hereafter, LS-NARA.)
Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: GPO, 1896), 49. Regionally, the term “Anglos” applied to peoples of European descent and stresses the impact of Anglo-American culture and Anglo-Saxonism in assimilationist policies and racial hierarchies.
Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins for American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (1980): 810–31; Stefan Aune, “Indian Fighters in the Philippines: Imperial Culture and Military Violence in the Philippine-American War,” Pacific Historical Review 90, no. 4 (2021): 419–47.
Mexico lost approximately fifty thousand lives and over half of its territory. Michael Scott van Wagenen, Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 5; Karl M. Schmitt, Mexico and the United States, 1821–1973: Conflict and Coexistence (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 67; Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western-U.S. Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 22; J. Rippy, “The Indians of the Southwest,” 366.
Quoted in Brian DeLay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexico War,” American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 59. See also: Robert F. Castro, “Liberty Like Thunder: Race, Article XI Enforcement, and the Odyssey of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848),” Journal of Legal History 53, no. 3 (2013): 314; André Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 253.
Luis de la Rosa to J. M. Clayton, 14 March 1849, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Notes from the Mexican Legation in the United States to the Department of State, 1821–1906, M54, roll 3, NARA, College Park, Md. Generally called debt peonage in the Southwest, forced labor was part of the fabric of regional culture. William S. Kiser, Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
On mutual blame, see: Rippy, “The Indians of the Southwest”; DeLay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexico War,” 52. On and abandonment of properties in Sonora, see: Stuart F. Voss, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Sonora and Sinaloa, 1818–1877 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982); and Thomas E. Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’odham (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008).
U.S. Congress, Senate, Message from the President of the United States, 31st Congress, 1st sess., Ex. Doc. 44 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1850), 1–2. See also: Rippy, “The Indians of the Southwest,” 379. From 1866 to 1872, temporary reservations for Apache bands were established on military camps. Most of these were replaced by a series of “permanent” reservations, many of which were consolidated in decades to come. Henry P. Walker and Don Bufkin, Historical Atlas of Arizona, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 42–45.
Joseph F. Park, “The Apaches in Mexican-American Relations, 1846–1861: A Footnote to the Gadsden Treaty,” Arizona and the West 3, no. 2 (1961): 129–46; Charles D. Poston, Building a State in Apache Land, preface and notes by John Myers (Tempe, Ariz.: Aztec Press, 1963), 67; Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 41.
Rippy, “The Indians of the Southwest,” 367, 378.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Message from the President of the United States, 2.
See Article II of the Gadsden Purchase Treaty, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/mx1853.asp.
By percentage increases, population growth in the Southwest was second only to the Mountain region in the 1880s and topped the Mountain region in the 1890s, expanding by over 50 percent in both decades. Harvey S. Perloff, Edgar S. Dunn, Jr., Eric E. Lapard and Richard F. Muth, Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), 13.
Rippy, “The Indians of the Southwest,” 396; William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 25; Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” 67.
Janne Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 26–27; Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 31–32.
U.S. Congress, House, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, with the Annual Message of the President, 47th Congress, 2d sess., Ex. Doc. 1, part 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1883), 396. See also: Shelley Bowen Hatfield, Chasing Shadows: Apaches and Yaquis along the United States-Mexico Border, 1876–1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 53, 114.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), I. 24.
Thomas E. Sheridan, Arizona: A History, revised ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 122–30; Walker and Bufkin, Historical Atlas of Arizona, 46–47. More important than the Homestead Act to arid-land development, the Desert Land Act offered claims of 640 acres for $1.25 per acre. Between 21,000 and 22,000 entries resulted in the conveyance of title patents in Arizona. R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History, revised ed. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2002), 185–89; Pat H. Stein, Homesteading in Arizona, 1862–1940: A Component of the Arizona Historic Preservation Plan (Phoenix: Arizona State Historic Preservation Office, 1990), 8.
Sheridan, Arizona, 175; Meeks, Border Citizens, 24–25. Meeks also detailed how the Indian Office drew artificial distinctions between Native Americans and peoples of Mexican and Indigenous ancestry. Ibid., 51, 87–88.
Sheridan, Arizona, 177 (quotation). On Beveridge, see: Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 78–79.
Sylvester Mowry, “Address before the American Geographical and Statistical Society, New York, February 3, 1859,” in Arizona and Sonora: The Geography, History, and Resources of the Silver Region of North America, 3 rd ed. (New York: Harper & Bros., Publishers, 1859), 32. The banner was described in local media quoted in Bradford Luckingham, Phoenix: A History of a Southwestern Metropolis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 33.
Paglo Mijangos y González, “Civil War and Nation Building in North America, 1848–1867,” in Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s, eds. Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 64.
James J. Sheehan, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2006): 1–15; Marcela Terrazas y Basante, “Indian Raids in Northern Mexico and the Construction of Mexican Sovereignty,” in Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s, eds. Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 154. Julian Lim examines the “messy” nature of the borders and the role of race in federal efforts to transform multiracial identifications into more distinctly national identities. Lim, Porous Borders, 6.
U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 388.
Robert A. Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project: Irrigation, Indian Allotment, and Settlement along the Lower Colorado River (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2009), 30.
Robert L. Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado: The Impact of Government Policy on the Quechan Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 18; Sheridan, Arizona, 70. Comparatively, race and economics intersected in the “cart wars,” Anglos reacted violently to Tejano freight haulers in San Antonio, Texas, fearing competition over jobs. Larry Knight, “The Cart War: Defining American in San Antonio in the 1850s,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 109, no. 3 (2006): 319–36.
Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project, 30–35; Eugene J. Trippel, “The Yuma Indians,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 6, no. 2 (1884): 156; Clifford E. Trafzer, “Invisible Enemies: Ranching, Farming, and Quechan Indian Deaths at the Fort Yuma Agency, California, 1915–1925,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 3 (1997): 85–86.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1869, 216.
Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project, 30. As summarized a half-century later by their attorney as they continued their fight over their homeland, reduced by reservation boundaries and allotment, “What they want is a…title to the land they have occupied since time immemorial.” U.S. Congress, Senate, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma Reservation, California, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 94th Congress, 2d sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), 47.
Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project, 34.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1896, 360. Despite her critiques of Indian policy, Mary O’Neil’s basic trust in Christian education as an agent of assimilation mirrored that of the majority in the late century. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 687–94.
Wilbert H. Ahern, “An Experiment Aborted: Returned Indian Students in the Indian School Service, 1881–1908,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 2 (1997): 226. Ahern quotes Richard Henry Pratt.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1897, 343.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 21.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma Reservation, 84. On Chief Simon Miguel (Sacred Eagle or Spah-got-err), often called Ex-Chief Miguel, see: Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 29; Trippel, “The Yuma Indians,” 159. On Patrick Miguel, who graduated from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and became a prominent leader, see: Ian Michael Smith, “From Subsistence to Dependence: The Legacy of Reclamation and Allotment on Quechan Lands, 1700–1940,” (Master’s thesis, University of Montana, 2010), 96. Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers, 472, https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/472.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 20–28. On the use of corporal punishment in the Indian schools, see: Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, “Introduction,” Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, eds. Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller and Lorene Sisquoc (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 21–22. For an historical comparison, see: Benjamin Madley, “California’s First Mass Incarceration System,” Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2019): 25–26.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 33; Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project, 31, 38–40.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma Reservation, 84.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 31, 20. Jurisdiction over the Quechan changed several times, from the Colorado River Reservation to the Mission Agency to the Mission-Tule River Agency, which consolidated the two agencies; Edward E. Hill, Guide to Records in the National Archives of the United States Relating to American Indians (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1981), 160–61.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 32.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma Reservation, 85.
Ibid.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 32.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma Reservation, 94, 85. For the petition, see: U.S. Congress, Senate. Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, Transmitting a Copy of an Agreement with the Yuma Indians, with a Report from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Accompanying Papers, 53rd Cong., 2d sess., Ex. Doc. 68 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1894), 15. In reference to allotment, the Quechan ultimately secured ten-acre lots as the result of their resistance, but the Indian Office’s cooperation with irrigation developers continued. Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation Project, 105.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma Reservation, 95, 88. In 1951, the Indian Claims Commission took depositions in which those present at the alleged signing said that some of the signatures were made by Dr. W. T. Heffernan (the school physician) and that only one signature was made voluntarily. U.S. Department of the Interior, Decisions of the Department of the United States Department of the Interior 84 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978), 12.
Richard Olney to the Secretary of the Interior, 5 March 1897, #8912, Letters Received, 1881–1907, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA, Washington, DC. (Hereafter, LR-NARA.)
Robert Bee called the settlement “a haven for conservative Quechans.” Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 41.
Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 19–20; W. O. Hendricks, “On an Attempt to Expel Some Yuma Indians from Baja California: Part II,” Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1970): 49.
M. Romero to the Secretary of State, 1 March 1897, #8912, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, LR-NARA. Romero’s letter includes a list of the thirty-nine Quechan accused of trespassing. On the relationship between race and the hardening of boundaries in the 1880s, see: Lim, Porous Borders, 4–6.
Richard Olney to the Secretary of the Interior, 5 March 1897, #8912, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, LR-NARA.
U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 394. See the paraphrase in Yuma’s local paper: “Yuma Indian Lands. Indians Claim Ownership of Their Holdings,” Arizona Sentinel, 22 May 1897, 3.
U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 389.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1897, 141.
Withholding rations from families attempting to keep their children out of school and using agency police to round up hidden children were common practices in enforcing school attendance. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 211.
U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 391.
Ibid, 393.
Spencer Tucker, James Arnold, and Roberta Wiener, eds., Encyclopedia of North American Indian Wars, 1607–1890: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 227.
Colette A. Hyman, “Survival at Crow Creek, 1863–1866,” Minnesota History 61, no. 4 (2008/2009): 151; Leo J. Omani, “A Written Response from Canada,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1/2 (2004): 283.
Omani, “A Written Response from Canada,” 283.
Roy W. Meyer, “The Canadian Sioux: Refugees from Minnesota,” Minnesota History 41, no. 1 (Spring 1968): 13–15; Alvin C. Gluek, Jr., “The Sioux Uprising: A Problem in International Relations,” Minnesota History 34, no. 8 (Winter 1955): 322. Extradition treaties with Native communities vary considerably, but some include provisions for the delivery of “Indians guilty of insurrection.” Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington, DC: GPO, 1948), 40.
Quoted in U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 393.
Ibid.
“Yuma Indian Lands,” 3.
“Yuma Indian Lands”; “Yuma Indians: Object to Being Put Off of Their Lands,” Los Angeles Herald, 16 May 1897: 4.
U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 391, 390. Thomas F. Bayard referred to the Treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of Mexico for the Extradition of Criminals (11 December 1861). Thefts of livestock valuing twenty-five dollars or more provided grounds for extradition, but no formal charges were made against the Tohono O’odham. For the text of the Treaty, see: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/mx1861a.asp.
U.S. Congress, House, FRUS, 1898, 390.
Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, RG 75 Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M595, roll 165, NARA, Washington, DC; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1905, 185.
Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado, 66.
Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 175.
Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham: History of the Desert People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Printing, 1985), 10–11; Voss, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico, 106; James E. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 1536–1856 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 32–38; Winston P. Erickson, Sharing the Desert: The Tohono O’odham in History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 39–46. As these texts affirm, adopting mission life did not imply the abandonment of O’odham lifeways or values or an acquiescence to Spanish conquest.
Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 23; Bernard L. Fontana, Of Earth & Little Rain: The Papago Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 74.
Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 23 (quotation); U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1875, 77. As for the population on the reservation, in 1890 Agent C. W. Crouse received population estimates of about seven thousand but mistrusted his predecessors’ figures, complaining that their numbers “have been ‘guessed at.’” 31 July 1890, roll 347, M595, Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA, Washington, DC.
As the O’odham make clear, the Papago Reservation “was only about one quarter of O’odham country.” Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 31. Today, the 62-mile border is the site of continued frustration and sorrow as O’odham families struggle to remain connected and travel back and forth for ceremonies and services. “The Wall,” USA Today, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/border-wall/story/tohono-oodham-nation-arizona-tribe/582487001/. Accessed May 5, 2023.
Walker and Bufkin, Historical Atlas of Arizona, 46; Sheridan, Arizona, 129–30.
Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 27, 29; Erickson, Sharing the Desert, 93–94.
Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior, 1896, 51; Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: GPO, 1897), 76. For an overview, see: Sheridan, Arizona, 131–50.
“Hímdag Kí (Way of Life House),” Tohono O’odham Nation Cultural Center & Museum, Topawa, Ariz., n.d.
Following the introduction of Catholicism by Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Tohono O’odham gradually evolved a syncretic spiritual life in which the annual salt pilgrimage continued and the people added to their ceremonial cycle Catholic elements including an autumn pilgrimage to Magdalena in Sonora, Mexico, to attend the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Tohono O’odham mobility suited them to act as middlemen in a vast trade network that extended across the Southwest from ancient times into the modern period. Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 38–39; Tohono O’odham Nation, It Is Not Our Fault, 41; Michael M. Chiago Sr., Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways through Art, text by Amadeo M. Rea, The Southwest Center Series (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022), 73–74, 96–97; Fontana, Of Earth & Little Rain, 73, 99; Ruth M. Underhill, Papago Indian Religion (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 211–42.
Gwyneth Browne Harrington, “Cattle Industry of the Southern Papago Districts,” (1938), 49, folder 8, box 1, MS 24, Gwyneth Harrington Papers, 1934–1962, Arizona State Museum Library & Archives, Tucson, Ariz. See also: Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 41.
Harrington, “Cattle Industry of the Southern Papago Districts,” 44.
“El Plomo War,” Accounts related by Papago Informants, interviewed by Darrow Dolan, summer 1967, Archives A-81, transcript p. 44, Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Collection, Arizona State Museum, Library & Archives, Tucson, Ariz. Excerpts are published in: Darrow Dolan, “The Plomo Papers,” Ethnohistory 19, no. 4 (1972): 305–22.
Meeks, Border Citizens. Meeks refers to the festival in Magdalena to show how ethnic margins blurred in ways that contested and defied social prohibitions and laws.
On the Dawes Act and ranching, see: Leonard A. Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats, and the Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 124–25.
C. F. Nesler to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 4 April 1898, M1070, Reports of Inspection on the Field Jurisdictions of the Office of Indian Affairs, 1873–1900, roll 36, RG 48, Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, NARA, Washington, DC. In his report of July 31, 1890, Agent C. W. Crouse also documented their refusal to provide their names to officials organizing the allotment process. M595, Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, roll 347, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA, Washington, DC. Of San Xavier’s 71,090 acres, 42,000 were allotted. Erickson, Sharing the Desert, 92. See also: Papago Tribe, Tohono O’odham, 25.
J. J. Wagoner, History of the Cattle Industry in Southern Arizona, 1540–1940, University of Arizona Social Science Bulletin no. 20 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1952), 104. For a comparative analysis of transnational rustling, see: Lance R. Blyth, “Theft and Violence in the Lower Rio Grande Borderlands, 1866–1876,” in These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border, eds. Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 75–119.
In 1896 Pima County along the southern border established its own patrol, and Arizona organized its first mounted inspectors in 1901. Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior, 1896, 46–51; Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior, 1897, 44–45; Harrington, “The Cattle Industry of the Southern Papago Districts,” 27; St. John, Line in the Sand, 101–2.
Wagoner, History of the Cattle Industry in Southern Arizona, 114; “Report of the Secretary of War,” Annual Reports of the War Department, 55th Cong., 2nd Sess., House Document no. 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1897), 171. For sample accusations of Apache and O’odham thieving, see: [No title], Arizona Citizen, 2 March 1872, 2; “What to Do with the Indians,” Arizona Weekly Citizen, 8 April 1883, 3. James E. Ayres’s index of newspaper coverage provides dozens of examples of alleged O’odham cattle rustling. James E. Ayres Early Southern Arizona Newspaper Index, “Papago General,” box 2, MS 604, University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Ariz.
Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior, 1896, 46.
“Trouble with Papagoes.” Agent C. W. Crouse recorded a trend in which Anglo setters confiscated O’odham cattle straying off the reservation while the latter reclaimed them by force. C. W. Crouse to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 31 October 1889, Phoenix Area, Pima Agency, Letters Sent, Letterbook 1, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA, Riverside, Cal.
Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior, 1897, 47.
Erickson, Sharing the Desert, 96.
“Smallpox among Papagos,” Arizona Republican 30 October 1896, 1; Joel T Olive to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 6 January 1897, #1224, LR-NARA.
Joel T. Olive to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 6 January 1897, #1224, LR-NARA.
“A Raid by Papagos,” Florence Tribune, 30 April 1898, 1.
Dolan, “The Plomo Papers,” 306.
Ibid, 310. Repeated in: Translation of letter from Hermosillo, 3 May 1898, #23909, LR-NARA.
Dolan, “The Plomo Papers,” 311.
“The El Plomo Affair,” Arizona Republican, 23 April 1898, 4.
Two Days to Henry J. Cleveland, 22 April 1898, #21156, LR-NARA. See also: “Trouble with Papagoes.”
Content from the O’odham section of this article has been adapted from a previous publication: Jennifer Bess, “The Tohono O’odham ‘Attack’ on El Plomo: A Study in Sovereignty, Survivance, Security, and National Identity at the Dawn of the American Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2020): 137–60, by permission of Oxford University Press, https://academic.oup.com/whq.
Henry J. Cleveland to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 26 April 1898, #21156, LR-NARA.
Jas. G. Blaine to H. J. Cleveland, 14 April 1898, #21156, LR-NARA.
“The El Plomo Affair”; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1898, 88.
“El Plomo War,” 13.
Tohono O’odham Nation, It Is Not Our Fault, 9.
Two Days to Henry J. Cleveland, 22 April 1898, #21156, LR-NARA.
Thomas W. Cridler to the Secretary of the Interior, 18 April 1898, #18235, LR-NARA.
“Trouble with Papagoes.”
Report of the Governor of Arizona to the Secretary of the Interior, 1896, 50, 51. Arizona’s citizens insisted that its territorial status obligated the federal government to protect them.
A. C. Tonner to the Secretary of the Interior, 12 October 1898, LB 390, vol. 195, p. 157, LS-NARA (quotation); U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1898, 88.
C. F. Nesler to U.S. Consul, Nogales, 27 April, 1898, #23909, LR-NARA. In February, 1897, a local Odham (singular for O’odham), whom most accounts called Pablo, killed a cow belonging to a Mexican citizen of the Sonoran village and mining camp of El Plomo. Following his incarceration, a posse of between twenty-five and thirty O’odham attempted to liberate him, and an armed confrontation resulted in Pablo’s death and possibly additional casualties. “El Plomo War,” 13, 7. In 1898 the national identity of the perpetrators was critical in the negotiations between governments regarding their respective obligations. Compare to the discussion of O’odham and the Yaquis in Meeks, Border Citizens, 97.
C. F. Nesler to U.S. Consul, Nogales, 27 April, 1898, #23909, LR-NARA.
Translation of letter from Hermosillo, 3 May 1898, #23909, LR-NARA. Among the packet of five letters forwarded from the Secretary of State through the Interior Secretary to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs was this May 3 letter signed by Corral, as well as letters exchanged among C. F. Nesler (Indian Office), the U.S. and Mexican consuls in Nogales (J. F. Darnell and M. Mascareñas, respectively), and the Secretary of State (dated April 27-May 16). Additional interdepartmental letters forwarded to the Commissioner include: J. F. Darnell to J.B. More, 12 May 1898, J.F. Darnell to C. F. Nesler, 9 May 1898, #23910; William R. Day to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, #26841; William R. Day to the Secretary of the Interior, 16 June 1898, #28089; William Day to the Secretary of the Interior, 19 July 1898, #33409, LR-NARA. A separate correspondence took place between Day’s successor in the State Department, John Hay, and the Secretary of War. Hay to the Secretary of War, 5 October 1898, #75334, RG 94 Records of the Adjutant General’s Office (AGO), Entry 25, Correspondence, 1800–1947, NARA, Washington, DC.
Powell Clayton to Ignacio Mariscal, 3 May 1898, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Mexico, 1823–1906, NARA, College Park, Md.
Ibid. The Free Zone was established in 1858 in Tamaulipas and later extended across the entire border. Gregg, The Influence of Border Troubles, 13.
William A. Jones to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 September 1898, LB 387, vol. 194, p. 293, LS-NARA. Jones’s letter confirmed receipt of a complaint from the Collector of Customs at Nogales, Ariz.
C. F. Nesler to J. F. Darnell, 9 May 1898, #23910, LR-NARA. In a retrospective letter to the secretary of the interior, Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones described receiving letters from the secretary of state encouraging him to take “all means to prevent future raids by his Indians on Mexico, as requested by the Ambassador from that country.” W. A. Jones to the Secretary of the Interior, 1 August 1899, LB 413, vol. 207, p. 322, LS-NARA. Interior Secretary Cornelius N. Bliss passed down the chain of command from the Treasury Department to Jones more specifics regarding preventing smuggling. Bliss to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 7 October 1898, #45523, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, LR-NARA.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1898, 88; William A. Jones to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 September 1898, LB 387, vol. 194, p. 293, LS-NARA.
John O’Shea to the AGO, 10 May 1898, #75334, Entry 25, Correspondence, 1800–1947, RG 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA, Washington, DC. John O’Shea explained that O’odham smugglers found markets for their contraband among Native Americans and whites around Phoenix.
C. F. Nesler to J. F. Darnell, 9 May 1898, #23910, LR-NARA.
W. A. Jones to Inspector Taggart, 2 June 1898, LB 381, vol. 191, p. 351, LS-NARA.
W. A. Jones to Elwood Hadley, 1 August 1899, LB 413, vol. 207, p. 316, LS-NARA; C. F. Larrabee to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, LB 382, vol. 191, p. 28, LS-NARA.
C. F. Larrabee to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, LB 382, vol. 191, p. 28, LS-NARA. According to a message from the Secretary of State forwarded to Jones by the Interior Secretary, the Indian Office bore the burden of action because Mexican locals were not empowered to enter into “diplomatic negotiations” regarding the alleged attack by American Indians. William R. Day to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, #26841, LR-NARA.
William R. Day to the Secretary of the Interior, 16 June 1898, #28098, LR-NARA.
Translation of letter from Hermosillo, 3 May 1898, #23909, LR-NARA.
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1898, 88.
By the end of March, the U.S. investigation of the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine on February 15 in the Havana Harbor had also identified a submarine mine as the cause and placed the blame on Spain. David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 118–21; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980), 457.
Myron H. McCord to the Secretary of War, 9 April 1898, #75339, Entry 25, Correspondence, 1800–1947, RG 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA, Washington, DC.
Myron H. McCord to the President, 22 April 1898, #75334, Entry 25, Correspondence, 1800–1947, RG 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA, Washington, DC. Congress actually approved the war declaration on April 25 but then declared it retroactive to April 21, when Spain broke diplomatic relations with the United States and the United States prepared its blockade of Cuba’s north coast. Traxel, 1898, 122–23.
Ibid.
William A. Jones to Henry J. Cleveland, 22 April 1898, LB 378, vol. 189, p. 227, LS-NARA.
The AGO warned that “Spanish sympathizers in Mexico are preparing to raid the frontier, and that renegades of reservation Indians are likely to take advantage of the partial withdrawal of regular troops.” AGO to Col. E. V. Sumner, 11 May 1898, #75334, Entry 25, Correspondence, 1800–1947, RG 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA, Washington, DC. The Secretary of State also wrote to the Ambassador to Mexico regarding “apprehended raids into American territory by Spanish sympathizers from Mexico” and “fear among the white people along the border.” William R. Day to Powell Clayton, 25 May 1898, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Mexico, 1823–1906, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, NARA, College Park, Md. He was referring to a gang of Spaniards and Spanish sympathizers arrested by Mexican officials before the war began. Gregg, The Influence of Border Troubles, 181.
“Trouble with Papagoes” cites forty alleged attackers. “Frontier Towns in Danger of Being Raided” cites seventy-five involved in the possible “conspiracy.” On “Spanish sympathizers,” see also: “Spanish Preparing to Depart,” Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 19 April 1898, 7. From Mexico City, El Imparcial denounced sensationalist reporting, particularly by Arizona newspapers, on the grounds that it harmed communities and businesses. “Las Excursiones en la Frontera,” El Imparcial, 7 June 1898, 1. My thanks to Mariana Becerra for her research and translation assistance.
Powell Clayton to John Sherman, 6 May 1898, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Mexico, 1823–1906, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, NARA, College Park, Md.
Secretaría de Estad, “De Gobernacion,” El Diario Oficial, 26 April 1898, 2. Ambassador Clayton also forwarded repeated requests for efforts on behalf of protecting Mexico’s neutrality from the Ministry of War and Marine and El Diario Oficial to Sherman. Powell Clayton to John Sherman, 6 May 1898, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Mexico, 1823–1906, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, NARA, College Park, Md.
J. F. Darnell to William R. Day, 7 May 1898, #23909, LR-NARA; J. F. Darnell to J. B. Moore, 12 May 1898, #23910, LR-NARA; William R. Day to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, #26841, LR-NARA.
A. C. Tonner to the Secretary of the Interior, 5 July 1898, LB 383, vol. 192, p. 450, LS-NARA. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1898, 89.
W. A. Jones to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 September 1898, LB 387, vol. 194, p. 293, LS-NARA. O’odham peoples including Akimel O’odham Chief Antonio Azul of the Pima and Maricopa Indian Reservation made the similar accusations of thievery against Anglo-Americans and Mexicans. F. E. Grossman to Geo. L. Andrews, 31 October 1869, M234, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–81, roll 3, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NARA, Washington, DC.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1899, 77. Likely in response to one local Indian agent’s refusal to allow a search for the stolen cattle, the “Rules and Regulations Concerning Cattle and Other Stock” included a mandate that Indian agents permit customs inspections when officers suspected smuggling. Ibid, 78. On the acting Pima agent’s refusal to allow a search, see: William A. Jones to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 September 1898, LB 387, vol. 194, p. 293, LS-NARA.
C. F. Larrabee to the Secretary of the Interior, 8 June 1898, LB 382, vol. 191, p. 28, LS-NARA.
W. A. Jones to Elwood Hadley, 1 August 1899, LB 413, vol. 207, p. 316–17, LS-NARA; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1899, 76.
A. C. Tonner to the Secretary of the Interior, 5 July 1898, LB 383, vol. 192, p. 450, LS-NARA.
W. A. Jones to Elwood Hadley, 1 August 1899, LB 413, vol. 207, p. 316, LS-NARA; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1899, 76.
Dolan, “The Plomo Papers,” 321; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1899, 76.
W. A. Jones to Elwood Hadley, 1 August 1899, LB 413, vol. 207, p. 316, LS-NARA.
Ibid.
W. A. Jones to the Secretary of the Interior, 1 August 1899, LB 413, vol. 207, p. 323, LS-NARA.
Prucha, The Great Father, 609.
Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 257.
Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2003): 11.
See: Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle, “Introduction: The Problem of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” in These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border, eds. Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 4–5.
See: John Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty: Beyond the Territorial Trap, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 68, 81–83.
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