Journal of Southern History

Francis X. Galán's new book is more than just a history of the Spanish community that was established around a presidio and a mission in the midst of Caddo country—on the ostensible border with French Louisiana—and that served as the capital of the Spanish province of Texas for much of the eighteenth century. If it were simply that, that would be enough, as Galán offers the most deeply researched study ever of Los Adaes, with an endless supply of entertaining, fascinating, and revealing stories of the mad and maddening range of characters who populated its ranks. Yet the book does so much more, providing through its numerous tales of imperial and individual rivalry and chicanery one of the most persuasive portraits yet of the ephemeral nature of borders claimed and drawn by wishful European empires in early America.

Really, this is a "people's" history—featuring soldiers defrauded by a long line of Spanish governors who transformed them into debt peonage laborers (p. 8); Franciscans who at best ran their own smuggling rings in hopes of inveigling Native nations into trade ties that might finally lure neophytes into their lonely, long-empty missions (or, at worst, defied Spanish law by running guns and ammunition to Caddo neighbors in exchange for the humble bear grease essential to their households); Bidais and Orcoquisas who entertained any trader no matter their imperial affiliation as long as they produced the most desirable goods, especially French tobacco for their pipes; and Caddos whose sovereign power remained unquestioned through the eighteenth century—proved again and again in fine details such as the fact that it was Adaeseños (Spanish residents) who became conversant in the Caddo language (not the reverse) and who found employment as interpreters for Caddo leaders' diplomatic exchanges with Spanish officials well into the 1780s. And, oh those machinating governors, who reimagined the impoverished province as a petty fiefdom for personal aggrandizement, repurposed presidial forces as minions in illegal trafficking, and reduced the missions to mere storage facilities along supply routes connecting Caddo communities to New Orleans and Saltillo. Local Spanish and French officials did not use trade to expand imperial borders. Rather, they claimed borders to expand their personal trade or impede that of their rivals; accusations of border violations were really excuses to confiscate the others' goods. In such a world, the trade partnerships, kinship ties, church attendance, and desertion rates of community members told a tale of everyday people who had no recourse but to make common cause with others, no matter if they be French, Caddo, Bidai, or later British, and whose daily lives defied and denied any claim to reality for the borders drawn by officials in faraway lands. [End Page 517]

Sharpening this community study still further, Galán engages with current historiography throughout the text, providing context for the happenings in Los Adaes through comparisons with other communities across New Spain's northern provinces and Latin America—thus not only Florida, Louisiana, and New Mexico but also Peru, Mexico, and the Yucatan. These well-timed and well-placed contrasts put Los Adaes on a stage far more expansive than that of provincial Texas and, in so doing, illuminate how events across North America and Bourbon Spain could reach into the quotidian struggles of Adaeseños or could measure such distance between them and the imperial core that it might as well have been on the moon.

All in all, such compelling tales and arresting comparisons give the reader a far better understanding of what made the Los Adaes community unique and, equally often, what made it typical of Spanish colonial life in the Americas.