Race Relations in Upper Louisiana

Introduction

In 1767, Spanish general and the imminent governor of Louisiana, Don Antonio de Ulloa arrived with his men near the Missouri River. He intended to establish two fortified settlements on both sides of the river, ensuring Spanish dominance in the newly acquired territory, following the ceded land agreements of the Treaty of Paris. Along with Ulloa’s expedition came a set of projected guidelines that were meant to facilitate the construction of an ideal society. Unfortunately, Ulloa underestimated the trials that the land and his own soldiers would present, as many disputes between officers arose due to the instability of power and control over the fort’s development. His unsuccessful efforts were eventually saved by outside Spanish reinforcements following his arrival in Upper Louisiana. While Ulloa’s envisioned regime was short-lived, his instructions with regard to the legal system and code of conduct clearly denote the racial dynamics towards neighboring tribes of the Osages and Kikapus. Ulloa and his successors, each attempted to evoke and enact the authority of the Spanish empire, yet their efforts only produced an unstable and weak government. The Spanish government’s insecurity can be attributed to the physical distance from the colony to the metropole, along with a lack of civilian Spanish population in Upper Louisiana. 

The Upper Louisiana region consisted of a diverse population of Indigenous people and European settlers. The majority of inhabitants were French residents (pushed west by Euro-Americans), Africans (free and bonded), and Native tribes, who considerably outnumbered the Spanish. Yet, Spanish authorities were able to exercise their dominance through their conceptions of the other. The Spaniards had their own agenda, devising a systematic and formulated approach to what constituted the most acceptable and quintessential way of living Upper Louisiana. Their records present conflicting profiles of the Native Americans, where the Spanish governors express both admiration and horror in the same breath. In Antonio De Uolla’s own words, 

“In what concerns the savages, what they require is that they be treated as brothers, and that not the slightest affront, jest, or mockery be shown them, and especially that no one offend them through their women. For they are especially touchy on this score, and consider it an injury, even more serious than do the most cultured nations. When they go to excess, and they do that, either through their inclination to theft or because they are so fond of intemperance…” (Houck 1909, 10-11)

These words, which are compiled as a set of instructions, depict Native communities as solely savage. However, Uolla’s reading of “savages” as cultured in this context, stems from reading Native gender relations through the lens of private property. In other words, the racial and gendered biases of the Spanish in Upper Louisiana crept its way into written exchanges between governing officials and census reports. This section examines the racial sentiments of Spanish authorities towards Native traders and French settlers in eighteenth-century Upper Louisiana. For instance, Ulloa’s and Cruzat’s methodical instructions, set thirteen years apart, sheds light on the ways in which colonial expectations and idealized settler behaviors shift, depending on who is in power. These sets of behavioral criteria, build upon preceding bio-political colonial documents but have differing notions of commerce, free and bonded labor, marriage, and religion. The following sections examine how the lexicons of authority illuminate shifting conception of race and gender in the fluctuating corporal landscape of Upper Louisiana, by focusing on the shifting usage of Indian/Savage and the tonal inflections of “Company”, “settlements”, and “Time”. These terms suggest the instability of racial categories, constructed in order to relegate the Natives as a group that can be admitted or ousted at Spanish will. In order to ensure a thorough investigation of the authoritative inflections percolating the language of colonial documents, the researchers respond to the following research questions: 

1. How did the terms “Savage” and “Indian” inform the wavering racial dynamics between the Spanish and the Natives? 
2. How does the usage of “Settlement”, “Company” and “Time”, inform shifts in European imperial powers? Moreover, what does it say about its relationship to the land? 

In order to analyze this question, we gathered various primary and secondary sources on the Spanish history of Missouri and utilized the Voyant Tools program which allowed us to then compile these documents and quantify the text into extractable data so that we could take a better look at the specific terms we wanted to study. With the use of Voyant Tools, we then could further our textual analysis of the keywords “Savage” and “Indians” through the different interactive features.

Literature Review

Our research is comprised of many arguments from accredited historians and scholars studying the Spanish reign over 18th century Upper Louisiana. In his essay on the Spanish legal system in Upper Louisiana, Stuart Banner defends his claim that the origins of the Spanish legal system can be found in a nonpositivist legal culture. However, this nonpositivist approach was able to persist, despite the lack of written legislation, which was heavily criticized as informal by the Americans. Furthermore, Patricia Cleary focuses her attention on the responses of Spanish officials in relation to affairs, interracial relationships, and sexual misconduct. She describes the faltering efforts of these authoritative figures as inconclusive and unconfident, which can be attributed to the weak institutional policy of the government. On the other hand, both of Abraham Nasatir’s works contend the idea that the Spanish had to compete with the invasive English in order to keep their trade and peace relations with Native tribes in Upper Louisiana intact. The competition between the Spanish and English resulted in the formation of exclusive alliances and also produced unwarranted insurgences. While these authors attack the social aspects and effects of the Spanish regime in Missouri, it is important to consider the racial biases that the Spanish leaders and government officials possessed toward these coexisting groups of people. 

Evidently, there has been little research conducted on the racial constructs molded by the Spanish governing officials of Upper Louisiana during this time period. As we examine each authoritarian figure’s approach to interacting with other groups of people, we can conclude what that might indicate in terms of how others were received or treated. Our research attempts to contribute to the understanding of how a racist lens of the Spanish authority could misconstrue the true identities and experiences of the Indians and French alike, according to Spanish sources. The universal stereotypes that the Spanish fabricated in reference to their encounters with Natives and the French demonstrate that people in history are quite often, contradicted. They are represented in a manner that does not accurately describe them. The misrepresentation of people in history is problematic because the danger of oversimplification accounts for the misheard voices, social injustices, and unknown sides to the better half of the story. Therefore, race itself, is not a static concept by any means. 

The rigid conceptions of race have continuously changed throughout history. For example, while natives were characterized by the Spanish as barbarous people, it appears that was not the case for all Native people. There were many tribes that were friendly and engaged in intimate affairs with the Spanish. Our intervention in the literary world is to track the fluidity of race and how the definition of race is constantly changing depending on the time and place. Thus, the racial sentiments of the Spanish must be further investigated in order to understand the motives and outlook of their attempt to maintain a homogeneous society while simultaneously underestimating the Native and French people in the Missouri region.

Sources Examined

The primary documents undergirding this research project are sourced from Louis Houck’s text The Spanish Regime in Missouri Volume 1 & 2. Houck’s volumes offer a myriad of documents, ranging from statistical census reports to letter exchanges between governors and lieutenant governors. We selected the following documents through topic modeling and term frequencies of the keywords “Indian”, “Instructions”, “Report” and “Savage”. The selections made from those respective keywords were further narrowed down, based on how they operated as collocates for the titled entries under the table of contents. A visual of the topic model used for this project is presented below:

Volume 1:

• Ulloa sends an Expedition to the Spanish Illinois Country to Establish a Fort and Settlement and the Rules for the Government of the Same 
• Local Ordinances for St. Louis and General Ordinances Published by Lieutenant Governor Don Francisco Cruzat From October 7, 1780 to November 24, 1787

Volume 2: 

• The Spanish Commercial Exploration Company — Organized by St. Louis Merchants—1794 
• Instructions given by Clamorgan and Riehle approved by Lieutenant-Governor Zenon Trudeau to Jean Baptiste Truteau in command of the first expedition of the Company
• Clamorgan’s report of the operations of the commercial company. —1795
• Additional powers granted the commercial company —1796
• Mackay’s journal of a voyage up the Missouri toward the south sea, 1794
• Mackay’s journal of a voyage up the Missouri toward the south sea, 1794
• Mackay appointed commandant of san andrés
• Trudeau’s Report concerning the Settlements of the Spanish Illinois Country – 1798 
• The boundary of Louisiana on the upper Missouri and Mississippi under the cession

​We specifically chose these documents because they are the most likely to have descriptions of the existing racial and cultural landscape of Upper Louisiana in the late 18th century. Additionally, the analysis of these documents is supplemented by an 18th-century Spanish-English dictionary. John Stevens’ The New Dictionary, Spanish and English, first printed in 1706, provides a glimpse into the cultural and moral economy of Spain and the Spanish empire at large. 

Analytical Techniques

The study is employing a text mining approach to analyze the primary source documents. This analytical technique allows researchers to identify topics in a large corpus, and detect patterns such as term frequencies, correlations, and collocations. For this project, the researchers employed a combination of Mallet, Tableau and Voyant tools, to ascertain the topics that emerge in the corpus and decide which terms correspond with which topic. Using Mallet and Tableau specifically, the researchers created a Topic Model, which they established to be coherent, by the clarity of the word groupings under each Topic ID. Below is the visual of the Topic Model used for the second portion of the findings. 

As evidenced in the image, the researchers, focused on Topic 14, which they labeled as “Trade with Trudeau”, to investigate human-land relations near the end of the 18th century. 

Voyant Tools, on the other hand, is directly influenced by the data discovered within the Topic Model. The curation of the documents in Voyant Tools is dictated by the information provided in the Topic Models.  Sinclair’s and Rockwell’s ingenious and accessible software is able to take large sets of structured texts and reveal gender or racial bias, along with displaying graphical representations of dips and jumps in keyword usage throughout the text. A mix of corpus and document tools is used to illuminate the emergence of modern conceptions of race in 18th century Upper Louisiana. Primarily using the ‘terms’, ‘collocates’, ‘context’, and ‘phrases’ tools to parse through the corpus, the researchers highlight the messy borders between race and caste in Spanish colonial official exchanges.

“Indian” or “Savage” – Unstable categories of Race/Casta in Spanish Illinois Country

The documents examined in this section, illustrate the gradual change in the prescribed treatment of Natives and French Inhabitants at the hands of Spanish governing officials populating the Spanish Illinois country. The first document is a set of instructions written by the first Spanish Governor of Louisiana, Antonio De Uolla in 1767, to aid in the installation of a Spanish cultural and moral economy within these new French and Creole subjects. The second document is written by the Lt. Governor Don Francisco Cruzat from 1780 to 1787, issuing orders regarding alcohol consumption, distribution, and slave sociality. Cruzat began writing the ordinances in 1780 and finished it in 1787, long after the end of both the Anglo-Spanish and Revolutionary wars. The continued publications of ordinances, can be attributed to the unruly tenor St. Louis had taken near the end of the 1780s. As Patricia Clearly notes, the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, resulted in St. Louis becoming a hub of indigenous traffic. Several Native tribes and nations visited St. Louis in the hopes of establishing allyship with the Spanish, in the face of American migration into Illinois country. Accounting for the volatile time in St. Louis, Cruzat continues to provide prescriptions on how to maintain good trading relations with the Natives, how to dress and behave in public, and how to arm oneself, when fear of an attack is always looming. Both documents are uploaded on Voyant Tools below. 

To begin this analysis, we suggest using the bubblelines tool to visually decipher potential relationships that emerge among different words. 

Using the bubble lines tool, we ascertained how the usage of ‘Savages’ ‘Friendship’, and ‘Slave’ differ between the two documents. It suggests a change in racial sentiments, depending on who is authoring the document. Moreover, it indicates which document calls for more harmony amongst the three groups of political actors, thus suggesting the fluidity of informal human taxonomic rank constructing racial difference. Examining the term ‘savages’, Uolla’s document displays a higher usage of the term in comparison to Cruzat’s document. The dwindling use of ‘savages’ near the end of Cruzat’s document, is informed by a spike in the term ‘slaves’. On the other hand, near the end of Uolla’s document, the frequencies of the term “savages’ and ‘friendship’ are in the same range. Moreover, the close proximity of the bubbles depicting ‘friendship’ and ’savages’, suggests that they may be each other’s collocates. It also signals what kind of content Uolla was writing about at this point in this text. It is most likely, that Uolla was writing about how to foster friendships with ‘savages’. We infer that this particular location of the three terms in both documents is where we will discover a change in the racial categorization of Native tribes.

“SAVAGES WHO SHALL”

The term “Savages” appears 25 times throughout the corpus, deeming it a significant within the two documents. It is important to keep in mind these documents have been translated from Spanish to English, which means cultural meanings and context is likely to be lost in translation. Using John Stevens’ New Spanish and English Dictionary as a reference, we find “salvage” means “savage, wild…of the woods” (Stevens 1726). The phrase “of the woods” characterizes Native Americans as primitive, suggesting a temporal distance between Spaniards and “Savages”. If we think about this term through a taxonomical lens, “wild” and “of the woods” both suggest an informal arrangement, where Spaniards are positioned higher on the taxonomic hierarchy, compared to “savages”. It further indicates a difference in anatomy and physical characteristics, intimating “Savages” closer proximity to animality than to humanity. The implicit polarities of humanity and animality undergirding Spanish colonial documents illuminate the authority afforded to its’ authors. The examination of pronouns and modal verbs in these two documents, reveal the enlightenment values informing its authors. 

The phrase “Savages who” appears five times throughout the corpus. Using the context tool, we find that “who” operates as a relative pronoun for savages in three instances, which does not hold much significance. However, the phrase “savages who shall”, informs a tone of authority when discussing specific racial groups. In this case, the phrases “all the savages who shall be slaves” and “3 or 4 savages who shall go lay”, both express order and instruction. It is also clear that the order and instruction are coming from a third party entity i.e. Uolla or Cruzat, whose words are backed and supported by the Spanish Empire. This need to order or manage savages through Spanish colonial documents, suggests a skewed power dynamic between the Spaniards and the “Savages”, where the colonists adopt a paternal role, and the native tribes are accorded the position of a child. These instructions to manage native tribes are further evidenced by examining the term “like*” through the contexts tool.

“They are Like…” 

The use of “like” in Uolla’s document holds significance, especially as a preposition. The ‘like’ in  “they are like” functions as a preposition followed by nouns such as “wild beasts” or “brute beasts” in Uolla’s document. The ‘they’ in this phrase is referring to “savages”, as evidenced in Context Tools. This confirms that Uolla assigned native tribes infantile characteristics by detailing disagreements and conflicts likely to take place on an intra-tribal level. Moreover, “like” suggests not a similarity to a particular identity,  but is the identity. In other words, Uolla’s statements can be reread as “they are wild beasts/brute beasts”.   

Casta according to John Stevens’ Spanish-English dictionary is defined as follows: “a race, a breed, a progeny, a flock”. By this definition, it means that casta is a technology of categorization, sorting individuals under the Spanish Empire, based on their degree of blood purity or lineage. “A breed” suggests a group of individuals who share the same physical and socio-cultural characteristics. In other words, we argue that “Indians” in this corpus functions as both caste and racial categories. When the term “Indians” or “Indios” appears, the colonial authors are referring to a homogenous ‘breed’ of humans. Cruzat’s repeated invocation can also be attributed to the changing corporal landscape of St. Louis after the Revolutionary war. This increase in Native bodies in St. Louis, caused anxiety and fear amongst French and Creole settlers in the settlement, thus indicating a rise in the usage of “Indians”. As the historian, Patricia Cleary suggests, after the attack of St. Louis and the American Revolution, St. Louis and Spanish upper Louisiana, experienced a surge in Indigenous traffic. Several notable chiefs of various tribes populating the Mississippi valley, passed through St. Louis, in hopes of gaining protection from Americans and American settlers encroaching on native land in Illinois country. There are racial connotations attached to the word, but they operate more as legal categories for the Spanish colonial officers. Furthermore, Cruzat’s increased usage of “Indians” may indicate that Indians were considered to be subjects of the Spanish empire, as Cruzat agreed to offer protections to their native patrons, to a certain degree. This is claim is supported by Americanist scholar, Ruth Hill, who shares that unmixed castas such as ‘Indians’ or ‘Negroes’ all belong under the casta “espanoles”. On the other hand, Uolla’s usage of the word “savages”, suggests the temporal, cultural and religious distance of native tribes, thus illustrating their identity outside of the Spanish empire.

Human-Land Relations 1790-1800

Early July 1779, Spain ended peace relations and declared war on England, which came to be known as the Anglo-Spanish war. Locked in a power struggle to establish full control over the Mississippi valley, England’s launched an attack on St. Louis in 1780, which eventually proved to be unsuccessful. After the attack on St. Louis by British and Indian forces, the inhabitants both at the center and the outskirts, were shrouded in a cloud of grief, mistrust, and anger, especially towards Indian tribes.  This section looks at a set of documents selected under the Topic Label “Trade with Trudeau”.

Using the Summary section, we selected the terms “Company”, “Settlements”, “Capital”, “Father”, and “Government”, based on their significant frequencies and level of distinctiveness within the corpus. Beginning with “Company”, the term occurs, 170 times in the corpus, often accompanied by collocates “general” and “members”. Further investigation of these two collocational connections through the interplay between the context, collocates, and phrases tool, reveals the significance of the following phrases: 

• “Company in general” (Count 2)
• “Members of the Company” – (Count 8)

Using the context tool, we discover the rigid definition of “Company” in this corpus. For all three phrases, “company” functions as a legal entity that only comes to fruition by organizing a group of individuals, who have been incorporated into the company. The phrase “company in general” appears strictly in document 1, which contains a list of articles constituting the Spanish Commercial Exploration company. The addition of “in general” suggests a notion of “wholeness”, where if members of the Company decide to resign from the Company, their discoveries and profits will be subsumed by the “company in general”. Here “in general” also signals that the large extent of the power and authority of this enterprise lay within the infrastructure of the Company, rather than specific individuals. 

On a similar vein, the phrase “members of the Company” is often followed up by “will” or “should”, which indicates a degree of obligation endowed upon each member of the Company. It also reveals how power flows in the context of legal commercial entities, such as the Spanish Commercial Exploration company. On a macro level, it appears that members of the company are only able to exercise their authority or will as merchants, solely through their association or incorporation into the company. It is important to note, the company’s nascent intentions were to access “barren” lands and undiscovered tribes. By subsuming themselves as part of the Company, these merchants are able to engage in the act of conquering or thieving with impunity, as they are represented not as individuals, but as a company, which is backed by the Spanish empire.  

Zénon Trudeau’s report on the rate of production in the various settlements in Upper Louisiana employs a notion of “time” that signals a sense of anxiety experienced by the author. The term “time” occurs 18 times in the document, often preceded by adjectives such as “present” or “opportune”. Analyzing this term through the context tool, the phrase “the present time” occurs six times. In each case, the adjective “present” communicates a condition (in this case time) that is occurring now. The “present” here also suggests a linear conception of time, where time is neatly sectioned off into the past, present and future. This conception of time is a European import in the New World, where the “present” indicates what the future will look like. The importance placed on the nowness of “the present” signals the shaky state of the Spanish colonial settler project. Trudeau’s sense of anxiety is informed by the stagnated levels of productivity in the settlement of San Luis under Spanish governance. The context tool shows how settlers of San Luis at “the present time” were likely to source their provisions from the towns of San Fernando and Carondelet. This shows how settler-colonial projects, are at the core motivated by the anxiety of never actualizing the future. 

The term “men” also holds significance in the report, as it reveals some of the practices that constitute White masculinity during this period. Analyzing the term through the Collocates tool, one immediately sees the crude script prescribing the behavior of men. Words such as “strong”, “ war”, “trade”, “cultivate”, “fields”, and “needed” communicate a direct relationship to productive labor and men. These collocates suggest that the report asserts “men” have control over the land. This indicates “men” here refers to Spanish, French, American or Creole men. They are the ones needed for cultivating the fields, not European women. This mastery of the land by European men deviates from indigenous notions, where land is nurtured and cared for by Native women. Moreover, these men were more interested in using the land for economic purposes, rather than establishing a reciprocal relationship. As Trudeau’s report shows, settlements that failed to demonstrate good use of land were characterized as lazy and passive, thus failing to do masculinity as prescribed by Spanish officials. 

We will now examine the term “Settlements” and the context in which it is being used. If we take a look at the contexts tool, it is apparent that “Settlements” is referring to the property acquired and owned by the Spanish. However, it is important to note that “Settlements” does not only just suggest a permanent establishment, but rather a civilized one. For instance, one line states from the contexts tool states, “we have examples of barbarous nations that have fallen upon various Spanish settlements which they have devastated,” implying that these “barbarous nations,” a crude reference to Natives, were primitive communities. The phrase “barbarous nations” evokes a condescending attitude toward the Natives, as the word “barbarous” has a negative connotation attached. Barbarism represents the uncultured, ignorant, and unsophisticated practices of individuals. This distinction between primitive and civilized societies reflects the standard of living for the Spanish. Clearly, there is a hierarchical representation of living standards in which civilized societies are preferred over uncivilized ones. 

The Spanish continues to illustrate the significance of their settlements, as we see that “tranquility”  and “quietness,” are two collocates that surround “Settlements,” describing the positive qualities of Spanish society. The words “tranquility” and “quietness” propose the idea that the Spanish settlements were stable and peaceful environments. To attract foreigners and maintain a reputable image in Upper Louisiana, the Spanish settlements were characterized by “gentleness” and “patience”, two other collocates, to demonstrate their friendliness, an appeal to outsiders. However, this warm welcoming was not always the case for all Natives and foreigners.