Fairs

Philip V wasn’t advocating free trade when he lent his name to a cédula that expanded shipping between Manila and Acapulco in 1734. When galleons arrived in port, they still transferred their cargos to warehouses where they stayed until the viceroy opened the feria.

As mentioned in the last post, limits on quantities of imported goods were ignored. Both shippers and port officials accepted shippers’ statements at face value. Giulio Alberoni had tried to implement physical inspections in 1720, but the ways goods were packed in crates and barrels made them impractical. As William Schurz said, "tradition and gentlemen’s understanding" were the "guiding principles of the commerce after the early traders had established the rule of illegality."

The cédula of 1734 eliminated the pretense of inspection. The crown was more interested in the flow of silver than it was in smuggled merchandise. All sales had to be registered, as did all silver brought by buyers. Again quoting Schurz, "so great was the anxiety of the official regulations to keep the trade within bounds that scarcely a peso was permitted to circulate about Acapulco without being registered somewhere."

Officials were less concerned with the great influx of traders to the fair. Men from Ciudad de México came to buy for the local market or to tranship to Spain via Veracruz. Despite injunctions against haggling, they often cooperated to keep Philippine prices low. Merchants came north from Perú to send goods home. Since they usually had more silver, they often were able to circumvent local attempts at price fixing.

During the short period of the fair the port was filled with polyglot members of galleon crews, muleteers and porters who would be taking lots inland, and all those who come to provide food and other services to fair attendees. The port was in such a disease plagued location that few lived there permanently.

The great ferias at Acapulco were so much a part of the ways of commerce in the New World, that men who lived away from the frontiers habitually described local fairs as if they fit that ideal. In 1749, Andrés Varo, a Franciscan living in Santa Fé, noted: "These infidel Indians are accustomed to come in peace to the pueblos, and bring buffalo and elk skins, and some young Indians from those that they have imprisoned in the wars that they have among themselves. These they trade to the vecinos, gente de razón, Spanish, and Pueblo Indians for horses, mules, knives, awls, clothes, beads, and other things."

The next year, a friar who spent most of the years after 1735 in the Río Abajo wrote that, of deer and buffalo hides, "there is an abundance of the skins of these animals when the Comanche Indians and other heathen nations bring them to the annual fair; and at that time not only the Indians but also the rest of the inhabitants provided themselves with them."

It’s possible that fairs were annual events when Carlos Delgado was at Taos in the 1720s. Then Apache were the ones bringing goods to trade. They were agricultural people who would have had fairly set schedules. However, when they were forced from their traditional homes, and the Comanche took their place, trading times may have become more erratic. The Shoshone speakers not only were full-time hunters, but their social organization also was looser.

Thus, in 1730, Benito Crespo said the Natives living in the pueblos he visited were "bartering and trading" with the pagans on their borders "every day." In 1735, during the tenure of Gervasio Cruzat y Góngora, Juan García de la Mora accused Diego de Torres of bartering "with the Comanche before the time set for the regular trades."

Enrique de Olavide, a governor born in Navarre, tried to exert the same control the viceroy exercised in Acapulco in 1737. In a bando "on trade with the wild tribes," he forbid any trade done without a licence. More seriously, he made it illegal to go to their encampments. As Elizabeth Johns noted, that disrupted the rituals of trust building that preceded trades.

Cuartelejo Apache who used to come to trade began bartering buffalo meat, hides, and finished teepees to Natagé Apache who were stealing horses and mules from El Paso and Nueva Viscaya.

No doubt the situation changed during the dry years. No one has noted if the number of hides decreased, but everyone in the north knew both the Utes and the Comanche turned hostile. The latter attacked Pecos in 1746. The governor, Joaquín Codallos, responded by banning them from all access to the kingdom, which meant no trade.

The Comanche bands turned east to barter what they stole with the Wichita. In 1731 a French commander had expanded his post upstream from the confluence of the Arkansas river with the Mississippi. Johns said, local villages throve on trade with the French, who brought manufactured goods like hoes, kettles, needles, awls and knives for food. The Comanche exchanged horses and captives for both French goods and Wichita food. The captives were put to work in the villages producing food and goods for all three groups.

The man who replaced Codallos in 1749 sought to undermine the new alliances between the Comanche and the French. In July of 1750, Tomás Vélez Cachupín told 130 Comanche they could trade hides and captives in Taos, so long as they didn’t later attack Pecos or Galisteo.

In November, another Comanche band did attack Pecos. Vélez pursued with a presidio force, finally killing many, but letting those who surrendered return home. He warned them, if they attacked again, "the trade fairs at Taos would be cut off."

Trading times remained adventitious. Each band may have appeared only once a year, but there were more groups so there were more markets. The Comanche were late at Taos in 1752 because, John said, pelts and captives were scarce. The same year, the Utes arrived outside San Juan and sent a message to Vélez. He went to their camp north of the pueblo for the sale.

In 1754, after more very dry years that brought little currency into the kingdom, bartering became inflamed, with the pueblos and Spanish often trying to fix prices. Vélez couldn’t undo the damage done to trading rituals by Olavide. Instead, he set fair prices for hides "to a fixed equivalent of New Mexican commodities."

When his term ended in 1754, Vélez left procedures for his successor to follow. He warned Francisco Marín the only way to handle the Comanche at the Taos fair was to be present with men from the presidio and not to allow anyone enter the pueblo when he wasn’t there.

Notes: Giulio Alberoni was the financial advisor to Philip V mentioned in the post for 14 February 2016. Diego de Torres is the same man mentioned in the last post who sold land to José Antonio Naranjo. His grant in what is now Chamita was discussed in the post for 21 Oct 2015. Chávez said Mora also was known as Manuel Dias del Castillo and he lived in Santa Cruz del Ojo Caliente in Río Arriba. First Ensign Pierre Louis Petit de Coulange was the one who expanded Arkansas Post in 1731.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

Crespo y Monroy, Benito. Letter to the viceroy, Juan Vásquez de Acuña, 25 September 1730; translation in Eleanor B. Adams, Bishop Tamarón’s Visitation of New Mexico, 1760, 1954.

Delgado, Carlos. Report to our Reverend Father Ximeno concerning the abominable hostilities and tyrannies of the governors and alcaldes mayores toward the Indians, to the consternation of the custodia, 1750; in Adolph F. A. Bandelier and Fanny R. Bandelier, Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, volume 3, 1937, translated and edited by Charles Wilson Hackett.

John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds, 1996 edition.

Schurz, William Lytle. "Acapulco and the Manila Galleon," The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 22:18-37:1918.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 2, 1914.

Varo, Andrés. "Informe del estado de la Nuevo México su Majestad según su cédula de 1748," 1749; quoted by Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen, 2000. Translation of Spanish seems redundant with vecinos; perhaps the original was Españoles who were a separate class.