About two months after Johnson’s declaration a Hopi woman staggered into Fort Wingate. She said that she and her daughter had been attacked on the road from Cubero to Fort Wingate, and that she had been beaten and battered and her daughter kidnapped. She knew that some men in Cubero held her daughter, and she requested aid from the US military in retrieving her child. The military caught up with the man who had taken her daughter, but he protested that “he had assumed a debt which the woman contracted” and had initially taken both the woman and child as security or collateral against the debt. The matter was dropped. The merger of peonage and slavery was the way the Hopi woman and child had become servile workers in the home of the man from Cubero. Involuntary servitude was the norm and American reformers could not eliminate debt bondage, let alone slavery.25
In the first half of the nineteenth century, from California, through New Mexico, to Texas, gente de razón (literally “people of reason”), that is, people of any race whose way of life was Hispanic and not Indian, maintained the Spanish practice of taking, purchasing, and ransoming Indian captives. These captives, so-called gente sin razón (“people without reason”), became involuntary members of Mexican households. Rarely called esclavos or slaves because they were legally and theoretically free, the bondage was always justified on the grounds that these pagans were baptized and received the blessings of Christianity.26
In 1927, Amado Chaves recalled the traditions of his family of frontiersmen by saying that:
To get Indian girls to work for you all you had to do was organize a campaign against the Navajoes or Utes or Apaches and kill all the men you could and bring captive the children. They were yours … . Many of the rich people who did not have the nerve to go into campaigns would buy Indian girls.27
If the Indian servants were fortunate enough to work off their ransom or become acculturated adults, they might be released from their masters and mistresses. But as “detribalized” peoples they found themselves in between Indian and non-Indian societies, and on the bottom perch.
Obviously, many of the gente sin razón did not view peonage and the kidnapping of their children as a blessing of civilization. In 1852, Armijo, a Navajo headman from Chuska, voiced to the regional Indian agent the feelings of the Diné: “My people are all crying in the same way. Three of our chiefs now sitting before you mourn for their children, who have been taken from their homes by the Mexicans. More than 200 of our children have been carried off; and we know not where they are … . My people are yet crying for the children they have lost. Is it American justice that we must give up everything and receive nothing?”28
Historian L. R. Bailey has coined a term for this process of assimilating alien individuals. He uses the rather formidable word transculturalization to describe “the process whereby individuals under a variety of circumstances are temporarily or permanently detached from one group, enter the web of social relations that constitute another society, and come under the influence of its customs, ideas, and values to a greater or lesser degree.”29 This process is a universal one, and applies equally to the white captives that become “Indianized,” such as the Oatman sisters under the Mojave (see Chapter 6), non-Athapascans (white or Indian) who became members of Navajo or Apache “alien clans,” or Native Americans who became acculturated peons of their Spanish and Mexican masters. It is in this context that Indian slavery, involuntary servitude, and the slave trade in the American Southwest must be understood.
The foundation for Indian slavery in the borderlands was obviously a rigorous slave trade that continued throughout the Spanish colonial era and into the nineteenth century. In the 1620s and 1630s New Mexicans looked eastward and traded iron knives, cattle, and sheep for plains products, including bison hides, robes, and Apache slaves. Backed up by a provincial government that claimed the Apaches were a menace, by the 1640s most Spanish households in New Mexico possessed Quiviran, Ute, or Apache slaves. In the early 1660s 40 colonists and 800 Pueblo Indians under the direction of the Governor of New Mexico brought over 70 captives to Santa Fé. Those who were not sold locally were sent to work the silver mines of Nueva Vizcaya (today’s Chihuahua and Durango in northern Mexico).30
When the Plains Apache raids declined in the eighteenth century, the Comanche attacks increased. By 1750 the mounted Comanches were the most formidable military force on the southern plains, driving the Jicarilla Apaches westward to the protection of the Rocky Mountains and subduing Lipan Apaches, Mescalero Apaches, and Navajos. Chiricahuas were pushed west and south, where they roamed Arizona and New Mexico and raided the ranches of Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya. With Comanches joining up with the Utes to conduct raids, the Navajos and Paiutes almost feared their Indian brothers more than their Mexican and white neighbors.31 These were the conditions that continued through the Mexican era and into the modern American period of Southwest history. Expanding trade meant a dynamic Indian slave trade, and this meant additional peons and slaves and involuntary laborers for the economic and social projects of the Southwest.
Before leaving the topic of Indian slavery, mention should be made of the correlations between slavery and sexism and racism. It could be argued that the southwestern traditions of involuntary servitude were accompanied by patriarchy and gender oppression. Certainly Spanish overlords, the gente de razón of Mexican times, and American military elites considered the non-sedentary and semi-sedentary inhabitants of the Southwest (that is, the “wild Indians”) to be racially and culturally inferior to themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century most Americans considered the Indians to be “a vanishing race,” and therefore the conquest of their lands was justified. As an “absent” people their Native bodies were polluted, or as white Californians described them in the 1860s, Native Americans “were the dirtiest lot of human beings on earth … . [they wear] filthy rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin.”32
Or as a Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap
that appeared in 1885 illustrated:
We were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
From buffalo meat and settlers veins.
Through summer’s dust and heat content
From moon to moon unwashed we went,
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way …
And now I take, where’er we go
This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see.33
Because Indian bodies are dirty and impure, they are considered “rapable,” since the rape of polluted bodies does not count. Or, as scholar Andrea Smith goes further to note, “For instance, prostitutes are almost never believed when they say that they have been raped because the dominant society considers the bodies of sex workers undeserving of integrity and violable at all time. Similarly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.”34
One example can be used to illustrate the aforesaid. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century a small number of trappers known as the La Bonté group were hunting and trapping southwest on the outskirts of the Great Salt Lake. The expedition of five men led by a Colorado trapper named Rube Herring soon left the safety of the lake and headed across the desert. Although Rube supposedly knew the country and was an experienced guide, his ignorance was soon apparent as the group lost their way across the waterless desert of the Great Basin desert. Late one evening several Paiutes crawled into their camp and stole two of their horses. The next day La Bonté and his men followed their tracks to the Indian village. The following morning the trappers, discharging their rifles at close quarters, killed nine Indians and captured three young girls. They also retrieved their stolen horses and acquired two more. After proceeding to scalp the dead bodies, the