Settlements from Spanish America
Updated: Oct 6
Sources in each map.
10,000+ ʘ
Figure 1:
Spanish Texas in 1789 was a large province with few people in it. It sat inside the Provincias Internas, the command Spain created in 1776 to simplify administration of its northern frontier, and Spanish authority there rested on a thin network of presidios (military forts) and missions. That network had already shrunk. After riding ~7,000 miles across New Spain, the Marqués de Rubí concluded that Spain had neither the money nor the soldiers to defend every outpost, and he advised abandoning all of Texas except San Antonio and La Bahía (Goliad). The last 3 East Texas missions closed in 1773. Their settlers were ordered to San Antonio, and they went grudgingly: the land there was hotter and drier than East Texas and could not be farmed without irrigation.
Ranching carried the Texas economy. Its roots went back to the early 1700s, when Spain planted 6 missions to guard against French incursion, and to 1721, when 4,800 head of Spanish cattle arrived with a colonizing expedition. The Franciscan priests who managed those herds were the first Texas ranchers. By 1789 Spanish ranching customs were set deep in Texas, from mounted herding and roping to the saddles and tools that went with them. The language kept the record: "rodeo" and "lariat" are both Spanish in origin. And the cattle outlasted the missions. Herds in the San Antonio River Valley kept multiplying as missions emptied, and residents rounded them up and drove them to market in New Orleans.
Raids on the ranches kept all of this fragile. Roughly a decade earlier, Governor Domingo Cabello had warned that reports of attacks arrived at every hour of the day and night, and that an unprotected Texas was headed for "the absolute destruction and loss of this province." Settlers tested Spanish control too. In early 1779 Gil Ybarbo led a group of displaced colonists back east and founded Nacogdoches beside the closed Mission Guadalupe, without official permission. Deep in the Piney Woods, the town grew up on its own terms: some of its first settlers had lived in French Louisiana, and Spain's reach that far east was limited. The missions were next to lose support. In the 1790s the crown began withdrawing its backing, reasoning that mission Indians had already become "good citizens" and the churches could sustain themselves.
Figure 2:
Spanish West Florida in 1789 answered to Esteban Rodríguez Miró, governor of Louisiana from 1785 to 1791, whose authority from New Orleans extended over the province. He was still managing the aftermath of the 1788 fire, which destroyed most of New Orleans. His response was fast. He set up tents for residents, opened the warehouses for food, sent ships to Philadelphia for aid, and lifted Spain's trade restrictions. It made him one of the most popular Spanish governors. Rebuilding started on his watch, including a new St. Louis Cathedral begun in 1789, and the brick and plaster construction that replaced the old wooden city gave today's French Quarter its tile roofs and courtyards. His record had a harder edge as well: the tignon law of 1786 required women of color to cover their hair. They answered by making the tignon elaborate.
The deerskin trade drove West Florida's economy, and one firm ran it: Panton, Leslie and Company. Its Scottish partners were British subjects, yet Spain let them keep trading from Pensacola and from a store near St. Marks. The company's strongest asset was Alexander McGillivray, the Creek leader with a Scottish father and a Creek mother, who pledged friendship to Spain in 1784. Through New Orleans and Havana, the hub of Spanish colonial trade in the Americas, West Florida was tied into the Atlantic economy. Ships from Havana carried cargo. They also carried news and ideas across Spain's New World possessions.
Miró's hardest problem was a line on a map. Britain had first set West Florida's northern border at 31° north latitude, then moved it up to 32°28' in 1764. When Britain returned the province in 1783, it recognized Spain's conquest and never defined that northern border. Spain claimed the expanded line and the United States held to 31°. Miró prepared for conflict, and in 1790 he moved to fortify Nogales (present-day Vicksburg). Spain had been building a second defense since spring 1784, when its officials set out to block American claims south of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians by allying with the southern nations. The Creeks signed at Pensacola that June. The Chickasaws and Choctaws followed at Mobile.
Figure 3:
Pedro Fages governed the Californias from 1782 to 1791, and 1789 was a good year for his career: he was promoted to colonel. Under him Alta California was organized into 4 presidio districts (San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Diego), with its capital at Monterey, which had replaced Loreto in 1777. Fages was hot-tempered and, in one description, "inclined to quarrel with anyone from his wife to the padre presidente." He was also an industrious administrator. In 1787, worried about the shortage of trained labor, he proposed that artisans imprisoned in Mexico City and Guadalajara have their sentences commuted to exile in California. New Spain's officials never acted on it.
By 1789 the missions had become a working commercial system. Most were close to self-sufficient within a few years of their founding, able to feed and house the people living in them. A few had grown to ~1,000 residents, priests and soldiers included, and were producing a surplus to trade. Supplies had first come by ship from San Blas. When it became clear that support from Spain would never be enough, the missions found their own customers in the presidios and in passing ships. All of it ran on the labor of Native Californians.
That labor came at a cost the governor did not count. Spanish California was a strict hierarchy, and the mission system broke apart Native ways of life. Writing about the Carmel mission in 1787, Fages called the local Indians "the laziest, most brutish and least rational of all the natives discovered between San Diego and San Francisco." He blamed them for the mission's slow progress, along with fog and wind, scarce drinking water, a high death rate, and language barriers. The judgment was his prejudice. The death rate was the real story. Still, the system kept expanding: Mission Santa Barbara was founded on December 4, 1786, and La Purísima on December 8, 1787, both during Fages's second tenure. Disease spread and living conditions stayed poor. The missions grew while the Native population shrank.
Figure 4:
New Mexico in 1789 was living on a peace few had expected. Juan Bautista de Anza, who governed from 1778 until Fernando de la Concha replaced him in the late 1780s, had been sent to Santa Fe by Commandant General Teodoro de Croix with one assignment above the rest: an alliance with the Comanches. Few Spanish officials thought it could be done. In 1786 Anza did it, negotiating a treaty with Ecueracapa, one of the best-known Comanche headmen, that both sides saw as a gain. The Comanches were right to believe they had given up none of their power. They had gained access to the manufactured goods that reached New Mexico through Chihuahua merchants, guns and knives among them. By 1789 the peace was Concha's to keep.
Relations with the Apaches were less settled, and the main events played out to the south, around the presidios of northwest Chihuahua. In spring 1787 the Mimbreño leader Ojos Colorados and 7 other chiefs broke from the peace establishment at San Buenaventura and led 800–900 people away, killing 3 Chiricaguis and several Spaniards as they left. Spain answered with a campaign that was still running in 1789, fought from military colonies where men who proved themselves against Apaches earned land and status. Then the pattern flipped. In 1790 Ojos Colorados came to the Janos presidio to settle terms of peace. Spanish-Apache relations worked this way: war one year and negotiation the next, depending on what each side needed.
New Mexico's economy ran on exchange between settlers and their Native neighbors, at the end of a long supply line that reached north from Chihuahua. Settlers traded sheep and cattle. Native traders brought hides, pelts, dried meat, and captives, and took home iron tools and beads. The older colonial labor systems had changed shape. Encomienda, the tribute system that had cut into Pueblo food supplies in the 1600s, did not return after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, though repartimiento labor drafts still supplied Spaniards with cheap or unpaid work. Mining barely mattered, apart from a trade in salt. Hispanic residents supported the local government and the crown through taxes and tributes, which kept Spanish rule standing in a territory this far north.
In summary
In 1789 each of Spain's North American provinces faced its own problem, and each still served the same imperial project. California under Pedro Fages was building profitable missions while short on trained labor and hard on the Native people who did the work. West Florida under Esteban Rodríguez Miró was recovering from the New Orleans fire and arguing with the United States over a border, with its Native alliances as leverage.
Texas remained thinly settled and exposed to raids, yet its ranching economy was producing customs the American cattle business would later inherit. New Mexico had found relative stability through its Comanche alliance and stayed largely self-sufficient, with few ties to other Spanish territories and an Apache peace that came and went.
The 4 provinces show 4 versions of one colonial enterprise, with different levels of control and different relationships with Native nations. They also show its limits: Spain held a frontier it could not fully fund or defend. Within a few decades, the independence movements of the early 1800s would redraw the map.
