The Spanish colonial presence in the area now encompassed by the southern United States, especially its late eighteenth-century manifestation, is attracting long overdue attention from scholars. With this book, independent historian Charles A. Weeks has contributed in important ways to this growing literature. He describes and analyzes a series of diplomatic meetings between Spanish officials and American Indian diplomats that occurred in the lower Mississippi Valley in the late eighteenth century. More than any previous scholar, Weeks reveals the motivations and actions of Spanish and Indian officials as they forged new relationships, competed for status, and furthered various agendas.
The first meeting at Natchez in May 1792 settled a dispute between Spanish governor Gayoso de Lemos and Choctaw and Chickasaw chiefs over the construction of a new Spanish post at Nogales, where the Yazoo River emptied into the Mississippi River (also called the Walnut Hills, and later Vicksburg, Mississippi). Subsequent...
