Captives for Horses

Slavery is an economic transaction. It requires at least one merchant, some customers, and rules for doing business.

Españoles had relied on native and captive labor before the Pueblo Revolt of 1690. Diego de Vargas legitimized its reintroduction in 1694 when he gave 342 captive Cochití women and children to settlers and soldiers.

The business relationship between buyers and the providers of captives became asymmetric. Sellers had an unlimited supply of valuable captives, but Nuevo México had little of value to offer in return. In the east, English and French traders imported metal tools and utensils, but Spanish goods were scarce and deemed inferior.

When the French ran short of inventory, the more ingenious began fabricating desirable items. To encourage native conversions, northern Jesuits had given away brass finger-rings embossed with symbolic letters or the Mexican bleeding heart. After they became valued, the rings were taken over as trade goods by the coureurs. Judith Hauser hasn’t found references to where they were manufactured, but thinks the cruder ones used in the fur trade after 1700 must have been made in home workshops.

Charles Town merchants converted guns into currency. In 1700, a native near Mobile Bay told Charles Levasseur, an aide to Henri Tonti, "men take the women and children away and sell them to the English, each person being traded for a gun." Thomas Nairne discovered a higher exchange rate in 1708: Chickasaw and Talapoosie claimed they received "‘a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet, and suit of Cloathes’ for just one slave - a whole year’s worth of deerskins."

Nuevo México refused to trade weapons, partly for religious reasons, partly from memories of the Revolt. In 1696, Plains Apaches came to San Juan to sell Ute women and children. No notice was made if other Shoshone speakers were among the captives. Gerald Betty didn’t report what they took in exchange, but in July of that year de Vargas acted to stop colonists from selling arms to natives in July. In October, he gave 84 women and children to soldiers.

De Vargas unintentionally created the substitute exchange medium when he confiscated horses from the pueblos. To regain their livestock, natives raided and traded. Settlers from Taos began visiting Apache villages to trade "two or three horses for a captive boy or girl." In 1703 he prohibited such activities, but two years later his successor, Francisco Cuervo, issued a new set of bans.

The complaints to de Vargas and Cuervo didn’t come from the friars, but from the cabildo in Santa Fé. This implied they were more concerned with the potential development of a competing trade center, than with the ethics of the business. Unlike, the English and the French, Nuevo México didn’t develop a true merchant class that could have organized the trade to the benefit of all.

The closest the city had was a captive reared in the same northern trading culture as many of the coureurs. Jean l’Archevêque was born in Bayonne, France, in 1672 to a Huguenot family that had moved there when his grandfather converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1650s. Jean’s parents subsequently moved to Saint Dominique on the western side of Hispañola.

A French pirate, Jean le Vasseur, had established a Huguenot colony on Tortuga, a small island off Hispañola’s northwest coast in 1640. The Spanish ousted them, but Bertrand d’Ogeron retook control and moved onto the main island where he encouraged tobacco plantations. Saint-Dominique was just converting to sugarcane when La Salle’s flotilla of colonists landed at the port of Petit-Goâve.

At some time, l’Archevêque was apprenticed to Pierre Duhaut. Sources disagree if the merchant was already on the island, or arrived with La Salle. The boy, just shy of twelve years of age, joined the expedition. When disaster follower disaster, Duhaut murdered La Salle in 1687 by using the lad as a decoy.

After he was allowed to retire from the presidio, probably in 1714 when he joined the council of war, l’Archevêque became a merchant banker importing goods from México.

Notes:
Axtell, James. The Indians’ New South, 1997.

Betty, Gerald. Comanche Society, 2002; quotation on Taos transaction.

Cabildo de Santa Fé. Petition, complaining about sale of horses, 26 November 1703; petition, relative to bartering with the Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.

Cuervo y Valdés, Francisco. Decree, relative to bartering with the Apaches, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.

De Vargas, Diego. Bando, prohibiting sale of arms, 31 May 1696; bando, prohibiting soldiers from gambling for their horses, 3 November 1703; decree, regarding sale of horses, 26 November 1703; in Twitchell.

Hauser, Judith Ann. Jesuit Rings from Fort Michimackinac and Other European Contact Sites, 1982.

Lafleur, Gérard and Lucien Abénon. "The Protestants and the Colonization of the French West Indies," in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, 2003.

Levasseur, Charles. Voyage de M. de Sauvole, 1701, translated by Vernon J. Knight, Junior, and Sherée L. Adams in "A Voyage to the Mobile and Tomeh in 1700, with Notes on the Interior of Alabama," Ethnohistory 28:179-194:1981; quote by Axtell.

Nairne, Thomas. Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, edited by Alexander Moore, 1988; quoted by Axtell.

Páez Hurtado, Juan. Letter, relative to bartering with Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914.

Weddle, Robert S. The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle, 2001; thinks Duhaut was with La Salle.

Wikipedia. "Jean l'Archevêque;" thinks Duhaut was in Saint-Dominique.