Borderlands of Slavery. William S. Kiser

to learn that Indian captives brought to Santa Fe were “sold as slaves,” with prices ranging from $100 to $400 worth of trade goods each. According to Jones, exploitative Mexican slave traders “were fully established and systematic in this trade as ever were the slavers on the seas.” They especially targeted southern Utah’s starving Paiutes, who sometimes swapped a child for a horse and then killed the animal for food.¹⁵

      Many masters placed a monetary value on their Indian servants, whom they sold and traded with greater frequency than the indebted peons being similarly held in bondage. The “domestication” of indigenous captives increased their market value, providing an incentive for assimilation through baptism and further exacerbating the frequency with which masters initiated intimate interethnic relationships and fostered filial connections. Writing about Paiute slaves in 1852, one Indian agent explained that their adoption into New Mexican families effectively bound them to that society and precluded most attempts at running away.¹⁶ The practice of selling and trading assimilated captives continued well beyond the initial American occupation of New Mexico in 1846. “There is no law of the Territory,” Steck confessed in 1864, “that legalizes the sale of Indians, yet it is done almost daily, without an effort to stop it.”¹⁷

      New Mexico’s captive exchange favored females as the more valued commodity, owing not only to their usefulness as domestic servants, but also because of their appeal as potential wives and childbearers. Governor Calhoun attested to the value of women as both servants and concubines, noting that men purchased them based on their physical appearance. “The value of captives depends upon age, sex, beauty, and usefulness,” he explained. “Good looking females, not having passed the ‘sear and yellow leaf,’ are valued from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars each,” while boys typically brought only half that amount, a testament to the value that masters placed on a servant’s sex appeal.¹⁸ Thomas Farnham, a traveler during that time, reiterated that “the price of these slaves in the markets of New Mexico varies with the age and other qualities of the person,” alluding to sexual availability when noting that younger captives fetched higher prices. Once abducted, the Englishman wrote, captives “are fattened, taken to Santa Fe and sold as slaves … a ‘likely girl’ in her teens brings often £ sixty or £ eighty.”¹⁹ As Judge Benedict noted in 1865 when asked to testify about the nature of slavery in New Mexico, “a likely girl of not more than eight years old, healthy and intelligent,” would be valued around $400, because “when they grow to womanhood” they could be forced to serve in sexual capacities.²⁰

      The phrase “likely girl” implied a direct correlation between Indian slavery in the West and chattel slavery in the Southern states. In nineteenth-century parlance, professional slave traders and auctioneers used terms like “fancy girl” and “likely girl” to indicate sexual availability when advertising upcoming slave auctions in local newspapers. Whenever a potential buyer read an advertisement describing a slave woman as “likely” or “fancy,” he could be fairly certain that she was young, physically attractive, and vulnerable to being raped. Once purchased, such women took on a twofold purpose in that they not only labored as slaves, but also provided sexual services and, in many cases, bore children and future servants for their master.²¹ By using this terminology in reference to New Mexico’s Indian captives, Farnham and Benedict implicitly acknowledged two critical similarities between nineteenth-century America’s regional systems of slavery. First, that indigenous captives could be bought and sold like chattel slaves in the South, and second, that Hispano masters had sexual exploitation in mind when purchasing Indian girls.

      Years of slave trafficking and ransoming had a noticeable cultural and demographic impact on the Southwest. Like many enslaved families in the antebellum Upper South, where a mass redistribution of chattels to the more southerly Cotton Belt propagated forced migrations that broke filial bonds through spatial disassociation, countless Indian families, whose kinfolk were forcibly redistributed among households across a large geographic area, underwent an indelible psychological imprint from this form of captivity.²² One U.S. special agent, writing to the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1867, lamented that he would not be able to locate and redeem many of the captives recently taken from the Navajo tribe. The abductees, he explained, were scattered throughout the northern New Mexico settlements of Tierra Amarilla, Ojo Caliente, El Rito, Arroyo Seco, and Taos, as well as Los Conejos in the Colorado Territory.²³

      As New Mexicans variously hoped and feared, the system of captive slavery that developed over the course of three centuries began to wane following the arrival of American troops in 1846. After New Mexico’s conquest in August of that year and the subsequent implementation of the Kearny Code (a set of civil regulations that his officers devised), the territory became subject to the laws of the United States.²⁴ At that time, national slavery debates proliferated and required the undivided attention of federal officials. Ultimately, the appointment of Anglo-Americans to fill many of New Mexico’s political offices would have a pronounced impact on indigenous slavery and the regional societies of dependency that it propagated. As territorial governor David Meriwether stated in his 1853 inaugural address, “The elevated and the lowly, the rich and the poor, the native-born and the immigrant, are all alike entitled to the protection of the laws.”²⁵ Sectional developments, coupled with the increasing vigor with which the United States military implemented and enforced Indian policy in the West, altered the fundamental characteristics and severity of local slaving practices.

      Whereas civilian militias typically avenged—or at least tried to avenge—Indians’ captive raids during the period of Mexican sovereignty, the task of punishment fell to federal troops after the midcentury American conquest. In 1853, territorial governor William Carr Lane revealed the lofty goals of civil and military officials when informing Steck that the southwestern tribes “shall eschew violence and bloodshed, and the law of retaliation shall be forever annulled.”²⁶ With permanent army outposts at Abiquiú, Albuquerque, Cebolleta, Doña Ana, Las Vegas, Los Lunas, Rayado, Santa Fe, Socorro, and Taos, the Indians’ propensity to take captives decreased during the 1850s as the Apaches and Navajos concentrated instead on stealing livestock for subsistence purposes. In 1851, when Colonel Edwin V. Sumner oversaw a complete reorganization of the military department, troops were redistributed to newly established forts constructed in the heart of Indian homelands. Fort Defiance monitored the Navajos, Fort Union watched over the Southern Plains tribes, Fort Massachusetts policed Ute country, and Forts Fillmore and Webster supervised southern New Mexico’s Apachería.²⁷ As the commanding officer at Fort Defiance pointed out in 1853, the placement of troops closer to Indian villages and encampments had a “controlling influence” and discouraged captive taking during depredations.²⁸

      Figure 6. New Mexico military posts and towns, c. 1850.

      Contrarily, captive raiding did not immediately begin to wane among New Mexicans, as civilians continued to exact a heavy toll on Native groups and in so doing perpetuated the tradition of enslavement and blood feuding. In 1861, Miguel A. Otero, a New Mexico congressional representative, referred to Indians as nothing more than “sullen and reluctant” slaves, and the territorial secretary noted that “the people obtain possession of their children by purchase or otherwise, whom they rear in their families as servants, and who perform a lifetime servitude to hard task masters and mistresses.”²⁹ The 1850s and 1860s would be a tumultuous time for relations between New Mexicans and Indians, with increasing violence and frequent military campaigns inflicting tremendous demographic hardships on both sides.

      Because multilateral warfare carried on even after the American occupation, southwesterners continually memorialized Congress on the subject, claiming that “hostile Indians penetrate the country in every direction and rob, and kill, and carry into captivity” New Mexico’s women and children.³⁰ Civilians’ independent pleas to federal politicians echoed the many resolutions that local legislators approved relative to the issue. During the 1849 constitutional convention at Santa Fe, representatives adopted numerous instructions for New Mexico’s delegate to present in Congress, one of which bewailed that “many of our citizens of all ages and sexes are at this moment suffering all the horrors of barbarian bondage,