Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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As these expeditions moved from coast to mainland, the activity of slave hunting was transformed from the Italian compañía to the Iberian reconquest tradition of compaña or band of men (sometimes called “soldiers”).¹³ The leader(s) and ordinary men would finance the entire expedition and be whole or partial shareholders, with each man receiving a share of the booty (slaves, gold, encomiendas, etc.) based on the size of their share and their importance for the mission. For example, a powerful leader might receive several shares, while a horseman would only get one share and a foot soldier a half share. Many of these conquerors had personal servants, often Indians, whose skills, including slave hunting, were in high demand. These auxiliaries were known as naborías and were also a prelude to the history of slavery and the slave trade in Sonora and New Mexico.¹⁴ It was a blending of these Italian and Spanish heritages that was used to conquer the Greater American Southwest.

The most common arrangement between conquered and conquerors in the sixteenth century was known as the encomienda. The first conquerors who received a royal grant of encomienda to the labor and tribute of the conquered Indians were known as encomenderos. Encomienda Indians were not technically slaves since they lived in their own villages or sedentary communities. They could not be sold as individuals or separated from their own ethnic group to live under direct European influence. Yet, in the early sixteenth century, as a group they owed the encomendero both personal service and tribute. The encomienda also furnished Spanish men with Indian concubines. Although the New Laws of 1542 tried to limit the encomienda to tribute only, outlawed Indian slavery, and guaranteed the ecomienda’s existence for the life of its present holder and one successor, the encomienda (usually as a subterfuge for slavery) continued to exist well into the eighteenth century in the frontier areas of Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, the Mexican Yucatan, and the Spanish borderlands of the Greater American Southwest. And even though the Spanish state had a stake in curtailing the owning of slaves by colonists, cannibals (such as the Caribs of the West Indies) or rebellious Indians (e.g., the Chichimeca [Apaches] of northern Mexico) could be enslaved, the latter by military personnel in the presidios.¹⁵ The institution of the encomienda was one of the major grievances that led the Indians to rebel in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico and Arizona.¹⁶