that Mormon settlers and authorities were in the center of many of these events that took place in Utah, southern Idaho, Arizona, southern California, western Nevada, Sonora, and Chihuahua.
The year 1863 is a mid-century marker between the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the enforcement of which led to the removal of several Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw from their eastern homelands to Indian Territory in eastern Oklahoma, and the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890. The latter symbolizes the end of the Indian wars when the US Army killed as many as 150 men, women, and children at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.5
Finally 1863 is a time of civil war in the United States when northern Union soldiers fought their southern Confederate brothers in the bloodiest of conflicts. The inhabitants of the Southwest were not unaffected by events in the East. Many troops were reassigned to either northern or southern armies, and fighting between non-Indians and Native Americans stopped in some places, while elsewhere inter-tribal warfare ensued6 and volunteer forces initiated the massacre of many indigenous groups.
The Civil War marked the end of that phase of Indian removal between 1830 and 1860 when land was expropriated from the native inhabitants of the lower South, stretching from South Carolina to east Texas (the “Cotton Kingdom”) and the original proprietors were sent west of the Mississippi. Millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States, a privatization of the public domain that created one of the greatest economic booms up to that time. The expansion of cotton and the movement of slaves and slavery south and west continued the general trend of western expansion (and westernization) in general.7 Surprisingly, the year 1834 also saw the passage by the US Congress of the Intercourse Act in which most of the land west of the Mississippi, excluding Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, was declared to be Indian country.8 The Civil War years would witness a diminishment of that promise.
With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, “argonauts” travelled across southern Arizona through the Yuma crossing at the Colorado River headed for the gold fields of California. They soon backtracked through Nevada and Arizona, and by 1863 were encroaching on the lands of the Paiute, Mojave, Yavapai, Apache, and O’odham nations. Lust for precious minerals, arable lands, and water would soon lead to the almost inevitable confrontations between industrialized and non-industrialized peoples.
Until the nineteenth century most of the world boundaries between states were not fixed. Most treaties were accords designed to prevent conflict or solidify alliances. Until the Treaty of Greenville (1795) in which annuities were institutionalized, treaties with the Indians of North America were primarily used to maintain a balance of power between France and England. After Greenville, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the discovery of gold in Georgia (1828), and the initiation of Andrew Jackson’s policy of forced ethnic cleansing (1829), treaties were negotiated between the US and the indigenous population in order to acquire the land of the latter. In 1871 Congress stopped negotiating treaties, and by 1924 extended citizenship to American Indians.
Throughout all of this, because the Commerce Clause (Section 8) of the US Constitution reserved to the federal government the right to regulate commercial relationships and land ownership “… with the Indian Tribes,” questions and issues concerning the use and ownership of the lands of the native peoples was left up to the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, D.C. to decide. This has been the situation from 1790 onward to today.1
By the nineteenth century Europeans and Americans began to arrange treaties between themselves or with local rulers, and from the early to mid-nineteenth century mapmaking and the map were essential to this process. The survey maps of the General Land Office made relevant the shape of the territory, and that shape would eventually gain tremendous political importance.
Akin to the Cotton Kingdom, the Greater Southwest was surveyed and mapped before the conquering troops arrived, only to be followed by gold seekers, farmers, entrepreneurs, Protestant missionaries, and Mormon settlers. And the US government was very busy negotiating treaties with Mexicans, Navajos, Shoshones and others. Treaty-making had taken on a new role, that of paving the way for settlement and development of indigenous lands, and the formalization of the subordination of tribal peoples. While the treaties may have failed from the indigenous perspective, these accords did meet the needs of the newcomers.9
The Indians, as obstacles to development, had to be removed. By mid-century the US government had already developed the concept of the reservation. Derived from English Indian policies, this treatment of segregating tribes in separate communities differed sharply from the Spanish and Mexican ideas of assimilation and incorporation of the Indian as a national citizen. In 1858, the commissioner of Indian Affairs described the reservation system this way: “concentrating the Indians on small reservations of land, and … sustaining them there for a limited period of time, until they can be induced to make the necessary exertions to support themselves.”10
As noted earlier, the geographical area under study is called the Greater Southwest, territory that is often referred to by geographers and ethnohistorians as the Gran Chichimeca. Anthropologist Charles Di Peso defined the Gran Chichimeca as comprehending all of that part of Mexico that is situated north of the Tropic of Cancer to 38 degrees north latitude, including Baja and Alta California, New Mexico, southern Utah, southern Colorado, and western Texas (see map, Figure 0.2). This writer would extend the line north to 42 degrees north latitude or the northern boundaries of California, Nevada, and Utah (including the Great Basin area) with the northern boundary extending from California to 97 degrees west longitude near Wichita, Kansas (see maps, Figures 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5).
Figure 0.2 Charles Di Peso’s La Gran Chichimeca: The Greater Southwest (including Central Rockies and Great Basin).
Figure 0.3 Indigenous Communities of the Greater Southwest. Abridged from Map 1-a, Native Tribes of North America, Map Series No. 13 (University of California Press).
Figure 0.4 Tribal Communities of the Northwestern and Central Parts of the Greater Southwest.
Reproduced from “Key to Tribal Territories” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 11, Great Basin, ed. by Warren L. D. Azevedo (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1986), p. ix.
Figure 0.5 Tribal Communities of the Southern Part of the Greater Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico).
Reproduced from “Key to Tribal Territories” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9, Southwest. ed. by Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1979).
More importantly, this is an ecological and historical zone of cultural interaction. It was here that Mesoamerican societies made commercial contact with the Indian cultures of the US Southwest. For example, in pre-contact time turquoise and buffalo hides came from Chaco Canyon to be exchanged for Macaw feathers and chocolate from Guatemala and Mesoamerica. This was where Anglos first confronted Spaniards in North America. This was the homeland of the Tejano–Mexicano conflict prior to 1845, or the area where Geronimo roamed freely between two nation states after 1850.
For the purposes of this study history does not stop at the border, even though there has been an international boundary since 1848. Not only did Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches fight, hunt, and raid in this region (paying no heed to the boundary), but treasure