Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe

William E. Unrau

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780700619146, 9780700619146
• eBook ISBN: 9780700623655
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Santa Fe Trail Association Award of Merit

In the culture of the American West, images abound of Indians drunk on the white man’s firewater, a historical stereotype William Unrau has explored in two previous books. His latest study focuses on how federally-developed roads from Missouri to northern New Mexico facilitated the diffusion of both spirits and habits of over-drinking within Native American cultures.

Unrau investigates how it came about that distilled alcohol, designated illegal under penalty of federal fines and imprisonment as a trade item for Indian people, was nevertheless easily obtainable by most Indians along the Taos and Santa Fe roads after 1821. Unrau reveals how the opening of those overland trails, their designation as national roads, and the establishment of legal boundaries of “Indian Country” all combined to produce an increasingly unstable setting in which Osage, Kansa, Southern Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Comanche peoples entered into an expansive trade for alcohol along these routes.

Unrau describes how Missouri traders began meeting Anglo demand for bison robes and related products, obtaining these commodities in exchange for corn and wheat alcohol and ensnaring Prairie and Plains Indians in a market economy that became dependent on this exchange. He tells how the distribution of illicit alcohol figured heavily in the failure of Indian prohibition, with drinking becoming an unfortunate learned behavior among Indians, and analyzes this trade within the context of evolving federal Indian law, policy, and enforcement in Indian Country.

Unrau’s research suggests that the illegal trade along this route may have been even more important than the legal commerce moving between the mouth of the Kansas River and the Mexican markets far to the southwest. He also considers how and why the federal government failed to police and take into custody known malefactors, thereby undermining its announced program for tribal improvement.

Indians, Alcohol, and the Roads to Taos and Santa Fe cogently explores the relationship between politics and economics in the expanding borderlands of the United States. It fills a void in the literature of the overland Indian trade as it reveals the enduring power of the most pernicious trade good in Indian Country.

1

Before Becknell

Within the history of U.S. territorial expansion during the first half of the eighteenth century, William Becknell of Franklin, Missouri, is renowned for skill in trading with Mexican merchants in a distant and sometimes precarious setting; for blazing new routes across Kansas, Colorado, and northern New Mexico; and for publicizing the profits to be realized from the overland trade. Some historians have characterized him as the “father” of the roads to Taos and Santa Fe. In 1821, and again in 1822, he was the first to journey along routes that other traders followed to Mexican markets more than 800 miles southwest of Franklin. A practical man, Becknell also demonstrated the value of mules over horses for drawing heavily loaded wagons across arid, often sandy terrain.¹

George C. Sibley, head of the government’s Indian trade factory at Fort Osage near modern Kansas City, apparently had met Becknell there in 1821. The celebrated Missouri trader, recalled Sibley in 1825, was simply one of those “hardy enterprising men who … in the true spirit of western enterprise directed [his] steps westward to the settlements of New Mexico, from whence [came] many strange and marvelous stories of inexhaustible wealth in precious metals.”² Thus it was not just the timing of Mexican independence in 1821 and the demise of the despised Spanish tariffs, or simply being at the right place at the right time, that allowed Becknell and his companions to be ushered into a land of milk and honey. Becknell clearly knew what he was about and without hesitation, according to Sibley, went directly to the market plaza in Santa Fe.³

Less than a century earlier, certain individuals of more modest certitude sought to establish commercial relations between Louisiana (land drained by the Mississippi River, as claimed for France by Cavelier de La Salle in 1682) and the upper Rio Grande country claimed by Spain. Possibly the most dedicated of these were the brothers Pierre and Paul Mallet, who with the blessing of French Louisiana governor Jean-Baptiste LaMoune de Bienville set out from Illinois country in 1739 with seven men to determine if the Missouri River would eventually lead to the Spanish settlements in and around Santa Fe. According to traditional accounts, the Mallet party ascended the Missouri to the Arikara country of present central South Dakota, but more recent research has them traveling not far beyond the mouth of the Platte River, up the south fork of that river to the Front Range of the Rockies, south along that range to Taos by way of the Raton Pass utilized by William Becknell’s party in 1821, and then on to Santa Fe.⁴

The Missouri River obviously did not lead to the upper Rio Grande, but this disappointment was lessened by the guarded welcome extended the Mallet party members, who were allowed to remain in Santa Fe or return home. The Mallet brothers and two others opted to return to New Orleans, in part by way of the Canadian and Mississippi Rivers; two chose to remain in Santa Fe, and the remaining three traveled back to Illinois country. Governor Bienville was impressed to the degree that in 1741 he authorized a large commercial expedition to Santa Fe, this time to travel by boats on the Canadian River, commanded by Fabry de la Bruyère. But after receiving advice from some Osage hunters some 80 miles southeast of present Oklahoma City that it was impossible to navigate the Canadian all the way to Santa Fe, La Bruyère and his crew gave up and turned back. The venture, which cost the French crown 22,600 livre, was a disappointment for French officials in New Orleans.⁵ But their appetite for commerce with Santa Fe had been whetted, and by no means did news of La Bruyère’s failure squash all French efforts to open up trade there. The fatal blow was the French and Indian War in 1756; the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended that war and virtually expelled the French from North America.

Even so, a number of Frenchmen continued to search out or actually visit Santa Fe. In 1748 some Jicarilla visitors at Taos told resident missionary Fray Antonio that thirty-three French traders had visited their village east of Taos. The following year three Frenchmen, with some Comanche traders, were reported at the Taos fair. Pierre Mallet and four companions returned to the upper Rio Grande in 1750 but were arrested at Pecos, and in 1752 two more Frenchmen were arrested and had their trade goods confiscated by Spanish authorities in Santa Fe. And as late as 1806 or early 1807, Manuel Lisa (or some employees of his St. Louis Missouri Fur Company) made it all the way from St. Louis to Santa Fe. Lisa had been awarded a federal license to trade with the Osages in 1806 and was known to have used alcohol as a trade item; the actual merchandise and other details of his journey to Santa Fe, hundreds of miles west of the Osages, are uncertain.⁶

Concerned that the buffer lands of Louisiana that had shielded their estates, missions, and mines for well over a century were in danger of being overrun, Spanish officials resorted to more restrictive tariffs and other regulations to ward off foreigners. In fact, the matter became of greater concern after ownership of most of Louisiana, with the sweep of a pen, was transferred from France to Spain by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762. Even so, traders with little awareness or concern regarding European politics and diplomacy continued to knock on the gates at Santa Fe. By the time Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States, in 1803, the “profane and aggressive Anglo-Saxons”—as one historian of exploration and empire described them—were eager and ready to lead the charge.⁷ They knew only too well how slow and expensive it was for residents of the upper Rio Grande to be supplied with cottons, silks, blankets, leather goods, hardware, foodstuffs, spices, and other consumer goods from distant Mexico City and Veracruz.

In 1804 William Morrison of Kaskaskia, Illinois, outfitted Jeannot Metoyer and Baptiste Lalande for a business expedition to Santa Fe; Spanish documents note their presence in Santa Fe the following year but are unclear regarding actual transactions. The same records tell of a Lorenzo Durocher who came down to New Mexico and Santa Fe from the upper Missouri Indian Country in 1805. Other arrivals a year later were St. Louis fur traders Jean la Croix and André Terien, as well as the businessman James Purcell of Baird’s Town, Kentucky. Like the experiences of Morrison’s men, the details of these visitations to Santa Fe are unknown. Less uncertain are the experiences in Santa Fe, in 1812, of Robert McKnight, James Baird, Michael McDonough, Samuel Chambers, and perhaps as many as four other Missourians. They were arrested as spies, their goods were commandeered by Spanish officials, and most (perhaps all) were incarcerated in a Chihuahua prison until Mexican independence nine years later led to their release. More evidence that Spanish authorities, in the decade preceding Becknell’s journey to Santa Fe, were tightening up on foreign traders working their craft among their own people was the arrest of Auguste Chouteau and Jules de Mun, in the spring of 1817, in the upper Arkansas Basin somewhere west of present Pueblo, Colorado. Like Manuel Lisa a decade earlier, Chouteau and de Mun could produce an official trade license issued by the U.S. government authorizing them to engage in trade with “Arapahoes, Comanches, etc.” in that area. But all that got them was 48 hours in a Santa Fe prison and the confiscation of $30,000 worth of furs and other personal property. Three years later another trader, David Meriwether, was arrested and jailed in Santa Fe.⁸

By contrast, this was not the experience of people attending native trade fairs during the pre-Becknell period. Beginning in the late 1750s, Taos was a place where Indians, Spaniards, and trappers of mostly obscure nationality met annually to exchange goods. Pueblo villagers, Eastern Apaches, Plains Caddoans, and Southern Sioux traded hides, minerals, pelts, and preserved meat for beads, knives, calico, tobacco, guns, and horses. Smaller but no less noteworthy were trade fairs more sporadically convened in nearby Picuris and Pecos, as well as other, less permanent locations on plains to the east. Some of these fairs continued until the closing years of the eighteenth century, and as late as 1821—the year Becknell made his first trip to New Mexico—Western Comanches hosted a large trade fair at the Big Timbers groves along the Arkansas River in present Prowers County, Colorado. In addition to the host Comanche peoples, some 500 Kiowa, Apache, Shoshone, Cheyenne, and Arapaho households took part in the fair.⁹ But unlike Lisa, Chouteau, Baird, and other Americans only a few years earlier, no Indians at Big Timbers were arrested and hauled off to a New Mexico jail. Nor were some of the very same Indians who for decades had been engaged in trade with the “Comanchero” merchants of Santa Fe.¹⁰

By the beginning of the nineteenth century most American and Indian traders were viewed with suspicion by Spanish officials as to what such dealings might mean for the future of Spain’s northernmost province. Would an increased flow of American trade goods provide the solution to the long-standing economic imbalance between the undersupplied region surrounding Taos and Santa Fe and the more prosperous provinces to the south? Would less restrictive trade regulations provide the setting for a negotiated annexation or outright military seizure of the region by the United States? Certainly it was apparent that the arrest (and unexpected release soon thereafter) of an American military officer, Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, on Spanish soil near the confluence of the Rio Conejos and Rio Grande, in February 1807, did not improve relations between Americans and Spain’s colonial officials.¹¹ Ultimately, however, it was Mexican independence from Spain that allowed officials in New Mexico to liberalize the Spanish trade code and thereby welcome traders like William Becknell to inland ports of call like Taos and Santa Fe.

For Becknell timing was everything. The Mexican independence movement began in central Mexico nearly two decades before Becknell embarked on his venture, which he himself claimed was “for the purpose of trading for Horses and Mules, and catching Wild Animals of every description.” Becknell and his five companions left Arrow Rock near Franklin, Missouri, on September 1, 1821. Three months earlier, on May 24, representatives of the Spanish crown and the Mexican revolutionary leader Colonel Augustín de Iturbide signed the Treaty of Cordoba, ending the eleven-year revolution and recognizing Mexican independence. On September 24, Becknell and his men reached the Arkansas; on October 21 they followed a left fork of the Arkansas (most likely the Purgatoire River near present Las Animas, Colorado), then crossed over to the upper Canadian River south of present Springer, New Mexico. By mid-November, at Puertocito near present Las Vegas, New Mexico, they were intercepted by a Mexican military detachment commanded by Captain Pedro Ignacio Gallego, who advised them of Mexico’s independence and then escorted them to Santa Fe via San Miguel. At the provincial capital they were greeted with kindness and respect by Governor Facundo Melgares and, in the words of Becknell, “with apparent joy and pleasure.” They easily disposed of their goods at a profit, accompanied by requests to return with more goods of equal quality from the United States. By mid-December 1821, Becknell and his companions were back in Missouri, busily planning a return trip.¹²

Thus the year 1821 is viewed by western historians as momentous in the history of overland commerce to northern New Mexico. Other events that same year confirm this. On February 22, 1821, for example, the Adams-Onís Transcontinental Treaty negotiated in Washington two years earlier, by John Quincy Adams of the United States and Don Luis de Onis of Spain, was formally entered in force. The paramount stipulation of the treaty was Spain’s agreement to relinquish all claims to eastern and western Florida in return for U. S. recognition of Spanish sovereignty over Texas, California, and the intervening territory of present New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. More specifically, in Article 3 it set the boundary between the United States and Spain, west of the 100th Meridian, along the southern bank of the Arkansas River west to its source in the Rocky Mountains, north to the 42nd Parallel, and west to the Pacific Coast—part of the area Becknell and his men crossed on their way to Santa Fe less than a year later.¹³ As well, it was the area where major problems between the Plains Indians, the Taos and Santa Fe traders, and the federal government became manifest soon after 1821.

In 1821 Thomas Hart Benton was elected as one of Missouri’s first federal senators. Native of North Carolina, frontier lawyer, admirer of Thomas Jefferson, former aide-de-camp to General Andrew Jackson, lieutenant colonel of the Thirty-ninth U.S. Infantry during the War of 1812, caustic St. Louis newspaper editor, and champion of southern culture and values, Senator Benton in Washington was selected to be chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs and member of the Committee on Military Affai...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Before Becknell
• 2. “Vacant” Land
• 3. Cleared Land
• 4. Benton’s Road
• 5. Regulation Revisited
• 6. Benton Vindicated
• 7. On the Upper Arkansas
• 8. Tribal Annuities and Bison Robes
• 9. Trade Alcohol
• 10. Roads Unregulated
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover