The Villasur Expedition

The story of Pedro Villasur’s last expedition can begin, as so many contemporary European military stories began, with a royal inheritance. More precisely, it stemmed from the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718-20), and the determination of Elizabeth Farnese, royal consort to King Philip V of Spain, to secure a territorial legacy for her sons, who stood in the line of succession behind the children of Philip’s first marriage. The Treaty of Utrecht had obliged the Spanish Bourbons to give up most of their kingdom’s holdings in the Mediterranean. Farnese proposed to find out how vigorously the other European monarchs were prepared to defend that treaty clause. A Spanish invasion of Sardinia and Sicily followed. Britain, France, Austria, and Holland declared war; the first two of those kingdoms pursued it vigorously enough. France, in particular, sent troops into northern Spain and seized the overseas Spanish outposts of Pensacola and Los Adaes.

French expansion in North America had in previous years become a matter of some concern for officials in Madrid and Mexico. The new colony of Louisiana had driven a wedge between the older Spanish provinces of Florida and Texas, threatening Spain’s control of both. Up the Mississippi River, from their settlements in Illinois, French traders reportedly did business with the Pawnees and Apaches (Nde) on Mexico’s northern frontier. Those nations could, in turn, resell French guns and ammunition to the Comanches, a nation recently arrived in the southern Plains whose warriors had raided Spanish outposts in New Mexico. With France and Spain now at war, the possibility that French agents might directly arm and incite Comanche raiders became one that local Spanish officials could not dismiss.

In the spring of 1720 the governor of New Mexico ordered Pedro Villasur to take a body of troops into the northern Plains and arrest or expel any French traders he might find. The general set out in June, riding several hundred miles northeast of New Mexico to the Platte River in modern Nebraska. His command included a dozen Nde scouts, 40 light Spanish infantry, and sixty Pueblo warriors captained by Jose Naranjo. Villasur invited local Pawnee leaders to a parlay, but they declined. When one of his messengers failed to return, the general decided he was over his head, and began his withdrawal. Too late: early on August 14 a party of Pawnee and Oto-Missouri warriors, armed with guns and bows, attacked the Spanish camp near the Platte-Loup River confluence. Fifty of the defenders, including Villasur, were killed; a few Spaniards with horses, and most of the Puebloans (who had been in a separate camp) escaped. The northern Plains remained Native ground. 

“We are Unfond of Pedro Villasur,” unk. artist.

Survivors of the battle reported that they had seen European-style shelters on their route of march, and believed the French had been nearby when the battle began. Certainly the Pawnees and Otos had acquired their firearms from French traders. One may therefore consider this engagement to have been a late and minor battle of the War of the Quadruple Alliance. 

The Loup River battle had no impact on that larger conflict, but it did leave an unexpectedly large historical footprint. Following the Spanish defeat, an unidentified artist painted the battle, or at least New Mexicans’ memory of it, on bison hide. A generation later, Father Philipp von Segesser von Brunegg sent the painting back to Europe; art historians subsequently named the painting for the priest. The Segesser painting included white men in European dress fighting alongside the Pawnees. Apparently, the artist believed that French colonists had taken part in the battle. Native American memories of Villasur’s incursion similarly acquired, over time, an element of fiction. Four decades after Villasur’s death the English explorer Jonathan Carver, visiting a Ho-Chunk community in present-day Wisconsin, heard a story from chief Ekharrimonyk about a Spanish silver caravan his people had overwhelmed 40 years earlier. The timing of the account, and the absence of other contemporary Spanish parties in the area, indicates the “caravan” was probably Villasur and his companions. Carver added that the Ho-Chunks, not then familiar with silver, had traded the captured bullion to the French for a pittance. That part of the story may have been true, but Ekharrimonyk had misheard or misremembered an important detail: none of his countrymen had taken part in the 1720 battle. Other sources suggest the Ho-Chunks obtained the plunder as a gift or trade good from their Iowa or Oto allies, which seems the likeliest explanation. It would seem that the victorious Otos and Pawnees placed little value in silver coin and plate - certainly not compared to the glory they won defending their homeland - and that the ripple effects of this fairly isolated battle extended into the Great Lakes region and half a century into the future.

*

Sources: Jeremy Black, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I (Ashgate Publishing, 2014), esp. 87, 108-12, 116-19; Thomas Chavez, “The Segesser Hide Paintings: History, Discovery, Art,” Great Plains Quarterly 10 (Spring 1990): 96-109; Alfred Thomas, ed., After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696-1727 (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1969); John Parker, ed., The Journals of Jonathan Carver (Minnesota Historical Society, 1976), esp. 80-81.

There's Her House Behind the Barn

 

Fans of George Orwell may recall his description, in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” of his disagreeable course of study at Crossgates (real name St. Cyprian’s), the prep school Eric Blair attended as a boy. As a scholarship student, Blair’s principal job at Crossgates was to win admission to a fancy public school like Eton, thus increasing the value of his prep school to prospective students’ parents. To this end the school masters crammed him full of essay topics and cultural “facts” likely to appear on his entrance exams. Whether this differs greatly from modern American college prep I leave as a question for my readers.

Battle of Tewkesbury, by Antony Stanley

 

Like other students, Blair/Orwell learned the value of mnemonic devices to aid recall, particularly in his dreary history classes. The most baroque of these devices, “A Black Negress Was My Aunt; There’s Her House Behind The Barn,” tracked the first letters of each of the major battles of the famously complex Wars of the Roses. (“Major battles” from the examiners’ point of view, at least.) Having recently had cause to consider the Wars of the Roses - I was reading a biography of Henry VI - and of Orwell's anecdote, I decided finally to decode this complicated aide-memoire, viz:

(Saint) Albans

Blore Heath

Northampton

Wakefield

Mortimer’s Cross

(Saint) Albans, again

Towton

Hedgeley Moor

Hexham

Barnet

Tewkesbury (see above)

Bosworth Field

This tells one nothing about the battles themselves, of course, nor does it tell one anything useful except that the reciter had enough spare time to memorize an obscure historical catechism. I use the word “catechism” advisedly. Entrance exams were probably a relic of an earlier era when elite schools were intended primarily to train young men for the clergy. For them, orthodoxy mattered far more than critical thinking. Eric Blair survived his exams but, not the sort of boy one would call “clerical,” spent most of his time at Eton lazing about and trying to forget where his aunt lived.

New Book? New Book!

 

While my esteemed readers were distracted by more pressing matters, I apparently wrote another book. Hoozay!

To Be Men of Business: The Origins of Chickasaw Capitalism has been in the works for sixteen years, and I’ve written a few blog posts (here and here, for instance) about my progress and research findings. The finished product is now on sale from the University of Nebraska Press; those interested in buying a copy can obtain a 40% discount by entering the code 6AS26 at checkout.

It’s the perfect gift for the eccentric relative whose interests are well-concealed, or the college student you’re trying, for some reason, to steer away from business school and toward ethnohistory. And more power to you in either case.

Our Overdetermined Future

There is a joke about future expectations, and how they change within a society over time, and it goes like this:

Baby Boomers often seem disappointed because they were promised a future with flying cars and cities on the Moon, and got neither.

Gen Xers often seem unsurprised, because they were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and here we are.

As new aspects of that dystopia congeal into reality, many Americans my age can’t even manage a raised eyebrow. Case in point: I was only mildly surprised to learn that a tech company CEO had managed to convert 200,000 of his own stem cells into neurons and link them with a computer. The journalists who reported the story were equally unsurprised, because they buried the lede. They knew what would actually draw readers’ interest: Sean Cole, the son of one of the CEO’s friends, then taught the brain-on-a-slide to play Doom, the successor to chess and Space Invaders as our era’s archetypal computer game.

No, this doesn’t surprise me, either.
 

I suspect Hon Weng Chong’s investors will eventually want him to turn his attention to something more profitable, but I think he’s already done humanity a great service: he has determined that you can theoretically distract a disembodied brain, generative AI program, or other potentially self-aware and angry mechanical intelligence with computer games. Would that humans had tried this strategy in the Terminator universe.

Mormon Cocaine Pirates of the Caribbean

Everything old is new again. The United States appears to have entered an undeclared naval war with Venezuela, much as it fought an undeclared naval war with France in the late 1790s and an undeclared armed conflict with the Barbary corsairs in the early 1800s. Since the Defense Department has gone in search of eighteenth-century precedents for its policies, it perhaps should not surprise us that others in the American national government have recurred to the early-national era for innovations in war-making.

Avast.

 

This is perhaps the kindest way to refer to a bill sponsored by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a member of the LDS Church and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump -  indeed, he once described the 45th president as "Captain Moroni," which apart from the final syllable is perfectly accurate. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act would authorize the president to issue letters of marque to private ships seeking to join the fight in the Caribbean. The privateers could then recover their expenses by seizing and (presumably) selling the cargo of captured vessels. Until last week, the U.S. Navy has apparently limited its attacks to Venezuelan-adjacent fishing boats, which may or may not have been carrying illicit drugs - particularly cocaine, a preferred pick-me-up of the American and European oligarchies. Of late American ships have begun targeting oil tankers, which are more valuable than small drug-smuggling (or fish-smuggling) vessels but harder to capture and dispose of. There is, at any rate, money to be made in private warfare, as American and Russian mercenaries have discovered over the past thirty years, and I dare say there are even a few retiring Congressmen who might enjoy the prospect, in retirement, of hoisting the black flag.

I will close with my original title for this post: “Go home, 2025, you’re drunk.”

The Cloth-Wine Context

David Ricardo (1772-1823), in his musings on the benefits of free trade, used the relationship between Portugal and Britain to demonstrate the principle of comparative advantage. In the early modern era, Portugal could potentially produce enough fabric to clothe its own people, but since it could produce wine comparatively cheaply, the Portuguese would benefit more by specializing in and exporting wine, and using the proceeds to buy English cloth. More people could obtain more cloth in this way, Ricardo argued, than by relying on home production; the British, in turn, would gain access to a lake of cheap Iberian wine.

David Ricardo (I think)

 

The economist Cahal Moran recently demonstrated that Ricardo's observation was grossly incomplete and ahistorical. Cloth, a necessity, was much more valuable in the aggregate than wine (a luxury), and a nation that exclusively traded the latter for the former would eventually run a trade deficit and lose hard currency. This was, in fact, the purpose of the 1703 Treaty of Methuen, which lowered Portuguese import tariffs in return for British naval protection. Portugal had an abundance of specie to cover the deficit: in 1693 prospectors had discovered gold in the southern interior of Brazil. The ensuing gold rush eventually drew several hundred thousand peninsulares from Portugal to Brazil, and accelerated the forced transport of enslaved Africans to South America. It also offered an irresistible temptation to stronger nations - either to steal Brazilian gold through smuggling and piracy, or to extract precious metals from the Portuguese through uneven trade agreements, backed by military force.

Britain didn’t need to push Portugal that hard. The two nations were already bound by dynastic ties: the reigning British monarch’s step-aunt was Catherine of Braganza, regent of Portugal. And, in return for its colonial wealth, Portugal obtained from Old Albion much that the ruling classes wanted and that ordinary people needed. In October 1710, T. LeFevre informed the Earl of Dartmouth that the Brazilian fleet had just arrived in Lisbon, bearing gold bullion, tobacco, and sugar to the value of 1.8 million pounds sterling - about 270 million GBP (US$345 million) in today’s currency. All of this, wrote LeFevre, already belonged to British merchants who had sold on credit “all the dyed cloth” and 75 percent of the wheat consumed in the port city and its dependencies. Portugal’s elite thus obtained, admittedly at a high price, the luxuries they wanted (fine textiles and American beaver hats), and the necessities their depopulating country found harder to produce, and not least important, the British naval protection their overloaded merchant fleets required.

Some of the gold, at least, went for architecture.

British merchants, meanwhile, grew wealthier. There was usually a good market for tobacco and sugar in Britain, and there was always a market for gold. The latter often never even touched Portugal’s shores, instead sailing east with a British convoy and transshipping in Lisbon harbor to English merchantmen. There is a name for commerce built on stolen labor, channeled by armed ships, and structured to build up a surplus of gold in the dominant trading partner’s homeland, and that name is not “free trade.” What British traders and diplomats in Lisbon had instead created was a very successful example of mercantilism. What David Ricardo created a century later was a very influential example of economic propaganda. A lot of that going around, actually.

Sources: Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 1: 298 (Eyre & Spottiswood, 1887); (CR Boxer, “Brazilian Gold and British Traders in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (Aug. 1969): 454-72, esp. 459-60; Timothy Walker, “Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic World,” in Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 60-75.

The Yellowing-Trees Month, in Brief

 

What I’ve been reading: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, by Rabih Alameddine. A biography of modern Lebanon, from the perspective of a gay schoolteacher and his formidable mother. As is often the case with good writing, the fictional parts of the story seem more believable than the non-fictional ones.

 

Videos and films of note: 28 Years Later (2025), which is as good as people say. Since Danny Boyle has (IMO) never made two good movies in a row, I’m relieved to learn that Nia DaCosta will be directing the sequel.

 

Noteworthy remarks by one of my offspring: Addressed by my daughter to the crescent moon: “Hello, Earth’s fingernail." 

 

Quotes that make me less worried about the potential collapse of liberal democracy in America: “Truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

 

The title of this post borrows the Ukrainian word for October, Zhovten, the Month of Trees Turning Yellow. One of my students, on learning that some Indigenous nations (like the Senecas) named the months of the year for natural events, told me that the same was true of the Ukrainian language. That's the Cool Thing I Learned Lately.