David Weber’s richly textured, sweeping synthesis of the Spanish borderlands is a remarkable history of that region. His basic theme is the Spanish frontier as a place of both contention and transformation, but transformation of both the conquered peoples and the conquerors by “accommodation, acculturation, assimilation, syncretism, and resistance” (p. 13). For Weber the region is many of the same things Herbert E. Bolton emphasized 70 years ago: a battleground for Europeans with the native peoples and with each other, a horizon for the expansion of European institutions and religion, a stage for the heroics of missionaries and conquistadores. But Weber’s frontier also has broad new dimensions, particularly as an arena in which the Indian played a much larger, more active role and in which ecological and demographic factors often dictated the direction of historical events more than did human endeavor.
Weber paints with a broad brush. With verve and sensitivity, he narrates the saga of the early sixteenth-century conquerors, such as Juan Ponce de León, Alvaro Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and Juan de Oñate, who created the Spanish frontier from Florida to New Mexico. Weber’s hero is Cabeza de Vaca, who “came to understand the Indians on their own terms,” rather than Coronado and de Soto, who “projected their own dreams on the natives” and engaged in a process of “deculturation rather than acculturation” (p. 57). The Jesuits and the Franciscans—Weber labels the latter “conquistadores of the spirit”—had only modest success; witness the bloody Pueblo revolt in 1680 and the Indians’ defection to the English in the Southeast at about the same time. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Weber argues, Spanish policy reacted to French intrusions on the Gulf Coast and English penetration of the Southeast. By the 1760s, military force and coercion had replaced religious pacification. In late eighteenth-century California this policy succeeded, but at the Indians’ expense: as the Indian population died of European diseases in Spanish missions—one-third between 1769 and 1821—a Spanish population grew and flourished. Overall, however, Weber views Spanish frontier policy in North America as a failure.
This is a remarkably rich work in so many ways. A first-rate storyteller, Weber recognizes that history as dramatic narrative can be compelling. As an analyst—particularly in his chapters on the Franciscans and on “The Frontier Transformed”—he demonstrates how thoroughly he has immersed himself not only in the secondary literature but also in bedrock documentary sources, especially for the Southwest. Weber is not afraid to engage in moral criticism of events, individuals, and policies; observing, for example, how missions set up with the best intentions fostered ecological and demographic disaster for the Indians, as well as brutality and abuse from both conquistadores and missionaries. Without being strident or polemical, Weber reminds his reader of the costs of an excess of religiosity, of good intentions gone awry, and of human beings’ senseless inhumanity toward one another. In sum, with its array of plates and maps and 63-page bibliography, this excellent synthesis deserves the attention of all American historians as Bolton would have defined them 70 years ago.
