This book represents a branching out for Dr. Rittenhouse, previously known for his outstanding work on the details of Aztec ceremonial life. Dr. Rittenhouse brings his considerable scholarship to bear on the later history of Spanish Mexico in this outstanding work.

The first couple of chapters introduce those of us who are not MesoAmerican scholars to the background of the French invasion. Dr. Rittenhouse points out the important role of the circle of spoiled sons of conquistadores loosely grouped around Martin Cortes, the illegitimate son of the famous conqueror in precipitating the French invasion. These conspirators apparently hoped that French intervention would allow them to establish an independent conquistadore-run state in what was then called New Spain. They played a major role in making the French attack possible by providing the French with information on Spanish defenses and vulnerabilities, as well as on the geography of northern Mexico.

Dr. Rittenhouse’s background in Mexican Indian affairs allows him to delve deeply into the roles of the various Indian military allies of New Spain. He points out that in 1562 those allies still played a very important role in the security of New Spain. He looks at the roles of the politically sophisticated Tlaxcallans, with their excellent grasp of Spanish politics. He also looks at less sophisticated Spanish allies such as the Otomi, and the groups like the Tarascans and the Cazcanes who were looking for other options even before the French invasion. He points out that in the New Spain of 1562, individual Indian polities like the Tlaxcallans still had larger populations than all of the Spaniards of New Spain.

The chapter on the Chichemic Indians of the deserts north of civilized Mexico is probably the weakest in the book. It misses several important new sources of information on the Chichemics, including my 1998 book The Shifting Frontier: Chichemic Versus ‘Civilized’ Indians in pre-Spanish Mexico. Dr. Rittenhouse does do a good job of clarifying the confusion that might have resulted from the fact that the famous conquistadore had two sons named Martin Cortez, one his legitimate son with a Spanish noblewoman, the other the result of an officially acknowledged encounter with an Indian woman during the conquest.

Dr. Rittenhouse also does a good job of explaining the decision-making process of the French in making the decision to go directly to the source of Spanish wealth in the America, rather than nibbling at the peripheries. France and Spain had fought a series of wars in Europe, extending off-and-on for nearly fifty years. Those wars officially ended in 1559 with both powers forced into bankruptcy by the heavy expenditures. King Henry of France was now watching the Spanish quickly rebuild their power as the flow of gold and silver from Mexico and Peru renewed their financial muscle. France had no similar source of new wealth, and Henry feared that Spain would build up its power to the point where France could no longer compete if Spain renewed the war. As Dr. Rittenhouse correctly points out, from the French point of view the strike against Mexico was an essentially defensive operation.

This is a fascinating, but little known period of history, and Dr. Rittenhouse covers it in rich detail. That attention to detail is apparent from the background in New Spain and in Europe, to the founding of the first French bases on the northeast coast of New Spain. Dr. Rittenhouse guides us through all of the plots and counter-plots that unfolded as the various Indian political groups of New Spain and the Indians of the wild deserts on its edge assessed the opportunities and dangers presented by this new major competitor to the Spanish government. He is noticeably less effective when he discusses the intrigues of the various Spanish factions, but one can still understand the basics of the conspiracy that led to the death of the Spanish Viceroy and the devastating Spanish defeat in front of the French base at Fort Henry.

As he moves further into the thirty-year campaign that culminated in the seizure of Mexico City by a French led, but primarily Indian force in 1593, Dr. Rittenhouse is somewhat less effective, but he still makes the period come alive for readers. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the Spanish period of Mexican history and the process by which "New Spain" became a French colony.

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Book Review: Choctaw Genesis 1500-1700

From the time Europeans first started arriving in the area to stay in the late 1600’s until Indian removal in the early 1800’s, the Choctaws were one of the most prominent Indian tribes in the southeastern United States. They were one of the ‘five civilized tribes’, on the same level as the Cherokees and Creeks. They had a large population for an Indian tribe of the time—usually 20,000 people or more. There is one major problem in Choctaw history though. As far as archeologists and historians can figure out, they didn’t exist until the late 1600’s. Archaeology says that the Choctaw homeland was nearly empty until then. The few historical sources on the area before the late 1600’s are compatible with it being almost empty.

That raises some puzzling questions. The answers to those questions are important to anyone trying to construct alternate histories involving Indians.

Where did the Choctaw come from? How did they become one of the most prominent tribes of the southeastern United States? The author does a careful search of archeological and historical sources and concludes that the Choctaw tribe was a conglomeration of refugees from at least four sources. Some of them were apparently from a tribe or tribes closely related to the Natchez Indians. They may have been fleeing the collapse of their chiefdoms from waterborne and mosquito-borne European diseases that were devastating the remnants of Mississippian Mound Builder culture along the Mississippi river. Other refugees who would become Choctaws were fleeing slave-raiding tribes armed with guns by English traders from South Carolina, where Indian slavery was prominent in the early history of the colony.

These refugees allied to fight off their enemies, then gradually stitched themselves together to become one ethnic group. Their several languages eventually became one, though varied dialects persisted. The alliance was effective. The Choctaws found a source of guns in French Louisiana and survived to play a prominent role in the history of the southeastern United States for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

What does all of this have to do with alternate history? Quite a bit, actually. It illustrates several important points:

1. American Indian ethnic identity was weak. If it was advantageous to change that identity, individual Indians were quite willing to do so. That has two implications for alternate history:

1. If you want to change anything about the history of how Europeans settled North America, you can easily blunder into problems if you assume that the same Indian tribes would be in the same place in the alternate time-line. For example, in my last newsletter, there was a scenario where an early Spanish settlement in South Carolina survived instead of disintegrating. Would there be Choctaws in that time-line? Probably not. They were created by the pressures resulting from a particular pattern of European settlement. Change that pattern, and Choctaw country might have stayed nearly empty, or it might have been taken over by a different set of refugees at a different time. That would be a relatively trivial point except that the pattern was common throughout North America. The Creek Indians were a people stitched together from a large number of distinct groups, possibly as many as a dozen. The Seneca Indians, largest of the five original Iroquois tribes, were stitched together from almost as many sources. A whole village of Huron Indians became Senecas after the Huron Confederation broke up. So did fairly large numbers of Erie, Susquehanna, Shawnee, and many others, probably including tribes that Europeans never saw. Indian tribes that got guns before their neighbors, yet were far enough away from European settlements to avoid the full impact of disease tended to maintain their populations or even grow for a time as they absorbed people from less fortunate tribes.
2. Depopulation ratios for the various Indian tribes are somewhat exaggerated by this phenomenon. For example, in the aftermath of King Phillips War, thousands of surviving Indians fled New England. Some of them didn’t stop running until they got to Indiana. They were absorbed into the various tribes in their new homes. If a historian tries to figure out how much of their population Indian tribes lost, chances are he or she will do that on a tribe-by-tribe basis. That can mean that the same Indians can be counted as losses to two or even more populations. So the Indians that fled from New England to Indiana are counted as losses for the various New England tribes. Since Europeans hadn’t penetrated as far as Indiana, those same Indians are then counted as part of the base population of the various Indian tribes in Indiana. If their descendents flee European settlement and are absorbed by tribes even further west, then they can become part of the base population of yet another tribe. None of this says that Indians weren’t hit hard by European diseases and other European ills. They were. It does show that statements about Indians losing 90 or 95% percent of their population in an area have to be treated with caution. That sometimes happened, but often the process was much more complex than that.

1. Indians didn’t remain frozen in time until the European frontier arrived at their doorstep. The southeastern US was a very different place in 1540 than it was in 1700. The DeSoto expedition saw a very tattered but surviving Mississippian Mound Builder culture. That culture was gone in 1700 when solid European contact with the interior of the southeast was reestablished. It is very difficult to even figure out which tribes the descendents of the various groups DeSoto saw became a part of. Indians didn’t remain unchanged for 160 years until the frontier reached them, any more than Americans remained unchanged from 1839 until 1999.
2. The higher the culture, the more vulnerable the ethnic group was. Craig Neumeir and I have gone around and around on the question of how devastating epidemics would have been to Indian cultures given various sets of circumstances. To a certain extent I’ve felt that we are saying the same thing in a different way and in an argumentative tone. Choctaw Genesis does a very good job of analyzing the impact of diseases on the tribes and Chiefdoms of the Southeast. It points out that the cultures of the area consisted of at least three components. One component was a basic set of subsistence tactics that were common to most of the people in the culture. That was common to the various chiefdoms and to the less organized tribal people. Another component was the specialized religious and technical knowledge that resided among elite people in the chiefdoms. As Galloway puts it, "In a chiefdom…specialists control such realms of traditional lore as medicine, planting, and the sacred—that is, an esoteric "great tradition" has been separated from the "little tradition" of everyday life." A third part of culture was the accumulated experience and wisdom of the elders of the various tribes and chiefdoms. When I say that the cultures of southeastern Indians survived, I’m talking primarily about the first of those three components. Much of components two and three obviously did not survive. Some aspects of them, such as any proto-writing systems that may have existed, are so thoroughly lost that it is impossible to even speculate intelligently about them. The third part—the accumulated wisdom of the various elders—was often lost too. Diseases generally hit the old and the very young harder than anybody else. The author points out that a disease which killed off the elders of a tribe or chiefdom probably made that society’s response to European encroachment less sophisticated and effective. That’s something Steve Stirling and I argued back and forth about back when we were both on Genie. He felt that European culture had an experience base and world view that made it militarily and diplomatically superior to the Indians it encountered. I claimed that in most cases Indians lost a big hunk of their savvy before or shortly after they encountered Europeans, so the comparison wasn’t really valid. I’m glad to see someone else pointing out that aspect of the situation. Also, disease that killed off elite craftsmen and religious leaders in a chiefdom didn’t just turn that chiefdom into a less sophisticated chiefdom. It destroyed that chiefdom as a viable entity. Galloway says, "…when a chiefdom loses its elders, it can collapse precipitously, with all the demoralizing effects thus implied; when the same fate befalls a segmentary tribe, it merely shrinks and loses a measure of cultural richness." The Choctaws were at least partly the result of refugees from chiefdoms fleeing to less sophisticated groups which had been degraded by disease rather than having their organizations destroyed.
3. Doing Alternate Histories in eras that aren’t well documented is dangerous. Several of my scenarios involve the American Southeast during this time frame in various ways. Choctaw Genesis shoots down a lot of the things I believed about the way Indians developed in the Southeast between 1520 and 1700. It paints a very different picture of what the southeast was and how it developed than most other sources. If the author is right, then several details in my scenarios are wrong.

Point 1b has some relevance to an ongoing dialogue in Point Of Divergence. It’s convenient to assume that ethnic groups are solid entities, but they usually aren’t. If a smart, ambitious person from one ethnic group finds it advantageous to become part of another ethnic group, there is almost always a way to do that, if not for the individual, at least for his or her descendents. Ethnic lines are almost always more blurry than most of us are comfortable with. For example, most of the stories in the news recently about Thomas Jefferson having a child with one of his slaves missed an interesting point: The slave was his wife's half-sister. In the old south, of course, one drop of black blood in your ancestry made you black. But what if nobody knows about that drop? A smart, ambitious, adaptable person who was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black could become white. It wasn’t an easy process in the racially obsessed south, but it could and did happen, sometimes on a temporary basis, sometimes on a permanent basis.

The southeastern US is full of what anthropologists call "tri-racial isolates". These are groups of people, generally in isolated, not particularly desirable areas of the south, who appear to have Indian, black and white ancestry. These groups generally can’t be tied to a specific Indian tribe and have few Indian culture traits, but often consider themselves Indian. Some of them are quite large. I’m going from memory on this, and it has been a while, but I seem to recall that Robesson(sp) county in either North or South Carolina has a group of 40,000 or more "Indians". In the old segregated south, these groups were generally considered black by their white neighbors, but fought for and sometimes got a separate, somewhat higher status. I believe that the Robesson County "Indians" got their own segregated schools until desegregation.

This weakness of ethnic identification is an important point in our ongoing dialogue in POD on Mexican Indian population. Mexican Indians, and especially mixed blood Mexicans, could become Spaniards, and enough did that Spaniards from Spain often considered the Mexican Spaniards somewhat inferior, a mixed race. One factor in the inter-ethnic transfer is that Mexico had a northern frontier, with mining and cattle ranches. An Indian from the ‘civilized’ areas to the south could often head north and become a "Spaniard" from the two race ethnic viewpoint of the frontier where "Indians" were the wild tribes native to the area, and "Spaniards" were Catholics who dressed an acted like Spaniards. How many Indians took this way of rising in the social hierarchy? Thousands. Was it a large enough number to influence the depopulation ratios in a major way? I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone else does. It had some influence, but it’s difficult to quantify.

One of the fascinating but infuriating parts of this book is its discussion of various undocumented contacts between Indians of the interior of the Southeast and various European groups. English traders from Virginia were trading through much of this area by 1670, as were illegal French traders. The English actually sent some major expeditions deep into the interior. Several dozen Spaniards from Florida had crossed the frontier and were married to Indian women. They were acting as intermediaries in an undocumented trade between the Spanish missions in Florida and the tribes of the interior. English slave raiders from South Carolina were stirring up wars and selling guns to tribes in the interior from shortly after the founding of the colony in 1670. There were a lot of Europeans wandering around in the second half of the 1600’s. Almost nobody described what was going on among the Indians of the interior southeast, partly because much of the activity was illegal and partly because the various traders didn’t want to give their competitors any advantages.

Galloway also discusses disease in the Southeast in pretty good depth. Indians in the Southeast already had an endemic form of tuberculosis and a non-venereal syphilis-like disease before white contact. They probably soon picked up a variety of diseases from pigs which probably escaped from the DeSoto expedition. Galloway lists twelve diseases that can be passed from pigs to humans. There is a great deal of dispute about the timing of depopulation in the southeast, with some authors saying that it was already severe by the 1540’s and others claiming that most of it came later, possibly as late as the 1670’s. Certainly the period between 1670 and 1700 was a very tough time for Indians in this area, but whether it was the main time of depopulation, or just the most visible of several episodes is still in dispute.

This book is not for the casual reader, but if you want an in-depth study of what is known about southeastern Indians between 1500 and 1700, it is excellent.

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