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.

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.”

Was Lincoln a Douche?

On Presidents’ Day it is customary to laud Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of These United States, as the greatest of all American leaders. The man saved the Union, ended slavery, told good jokes, had nice legs - what’s not to like? Historians in a recent poll affirmed their profession’s usual ranking of Lincoln as the Number One guy, well ahead of the current incumbent (No. 14) and his predecessor (No. 45). Old Abe of course has his critics, and not just among unreconstructed neo-Confederates. President Lincoln’s policy toward Native Americans - a combination of military repression and malign neglect - proved so destructive that Congress temporarily took over the conduct of Indian Affairs after Appomattox. Closer to our own time, Bobby Wilson, a member of the 1491s, assessed Lincoln’s relationship with his own Dakota nation in a short, pointed video, “Lincoln Was a Douche.” Reviewing the president's record, I kind of have to agree.

A few years ago, the organizer of a podcast called Lincoln Log asked me to offer my scholarly assessment of Number Sixteen on his show. In his invitation the podcaster asked me how Lincoln had affected my life personally, which suggested that the show’s attitude toward Mr. Rail-Splitter was not merely reverential but theological. In my reply, which I offer below, I effectively declined the invitation:     

 

“My recent scholarship endeavors to place Indigenous Americans at the center of their own stories, and to move white policy-makers toward the background…My views on Abraham Lincoln are shaped by the impact on Native Americans' lives of policies for which Lincoln, as president, bore ultimate if not always proximate responsibility.

Navajo prisoners at Bosque Redondo (Wikimedia Commons)

"The years of Lincoln's presidency were ghastly ones for tens of thousands of American Indians. Your listeners are probably familiar with the story of the Dakota Sioux* rebellion of 1862 and the 38 men Lincoln hanged for insurrection; they are probably less familiar with the hundreds of Minnesota Ho-Chunks deported after the Sioux War (even though they had nothing to do with it), and with John Pope's deadly punitive campaign against the Lakota[s]...who also had nothing to do with the Dakota rising. Lincoln was less directly responsible for the California and Arizona militias' war of extermination against the Apaches, the Colorado militia's infamous attack on the Cheyenne encampment at Sand Creek, and Kit Carson's forced removal of the Navajos to Bosque Redondo, where 4,000 people died in four years. All of these military actions occurred, however, in the course of a...war with the Confederacy which Lincoln was determined to prosecute to unconditional victory, and all occurred in regions where Lincoln or his subordinates feared that Native American warriors might become recruits or catspaws of the CSA. (Not without some justification: the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory did become formal allies of the Confederacy in 1861.) I have found little to no evidence that President Lincoln intended his Western commanders to fight a frontier war with kid gloves on.

"It is worth noting that the intense, nearly genocidal character of the Indian Wars of 1862-65 generated growing criticism from white Americans. At the end of the Civil War Congress endeavored to wrest control of Indian policy away from the Executive Branch, setting up its own peace commission and initiating its own peace treaties with the Plains nations. A few years later President Ulysses Grant, taking back a leading role in Indian policy-making, called his new approach the "Peace Policy," to distinguish it from the more bellicose actions of his immediate predecessors - including Lincoln. Perhaps if he had survived his fatal trip to the theater Lincoln would have embraced a similar policy a few years earlier, but I haven't found much support for this counterfactual speculation.

"…In an interview or conversation about 'Lincoln and the Indians,' I would emphasize the experiences of Native Americans, and while I could certainly try to explain the actions of President Lincoln and his subordinates, I would not be inclined to excuse or justify them. This approach to the subject may be too pitiless for your audience. If not, I would be glad to talk with you further about taking part in an episode of your podcast.”

 

I didn’t appear on the Lincoln Log. 

I rather like Lincoln as a person, and think he did some remarkable things as president, but the responsibilities of a modern historian - to tell the truth about the past - differ considerably from those of a hagiographer or professional moralizer.

 

* I would not use this term today, as many people find it offensive.

In the Army Now

When in 1948 the American ambassador to Egypt, Stanton Griffis, asked for an estimate of army strength in a nearby Southwest Asian country*, his attache replied “five thousand men under arms, half…usually absent without leave, and other half looking for them. When they find them they change places.” This seems an eminently sensible strategy to me, applicable to service in many non-military institutions as well.

 

Sources: Stanton Griffis, Lying in State (1952), p. 215; Douglas Dixon, Beyond Truman: Robert Ferrell and Crafting the Past (Lanham, MD, 2020), 135.

 

* The ambassador did not identify the country in question, but I suspect it was Lebanon, whose army was then new, small, and underfunded.

 

 

More Dairy, Less Empire

“I will moo harder!” says Comrade Cow.

 

Some time ago on This Here Blog I wrote very favorably about Yegor Gaidar’s 2007 paper “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil.” In that essay Gaidar attributed the fall of the Soviet empire to a shortage of the one and a worldwide oversupply of the latter. More specifically: Soviet agriculture stagmated in the 1960s, and the USSR had to import grain to feed a growing population. Lacking hard currency, the Soviets sold oil and gas to pay for the imports. This worked until the oil price collapse of the mid-1980s. Thereafter Soviet officials made up the difference by borrowing abroad, which made their government an economic dependency of West Germany. When Bonn decided it didn’t like the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe, Gorbachev had to agree; Deutschmark uber alles.

 

Gaidar’s explanation was oversimplified, but not incorrect. At any rate, it had the advantage of attributing the Soviet collapse to economic crisis and bad political decisions, a more believable explanation than the dolchstoss theory favored by Vladimir Putin and his minions, or the Victory-through-Star-Wars narrative of American neoconservatives. Mr. Gaidar underestimated, however, how much bad political decisions accounted for the USSR’s later food shortages. I refer here not to the collectivization of agriculture - which, admittedly, didn’t help - but to something just noted by historian Ian Sheldon: Moscow’s decision in the early 1970s to ramp up domestic meat and dairy production. This was part of an overall effort by Eastern Bloc nations to quash political discontent by raising living standards. In the Soviet Union, government ministers believed that more beefsteaks and sour cream would pacify the population and head off challenges to Moscow’s authority.

 

The peoples of the USSR got a temporary improvement in their diets, but the cost was the reallocation of grain to livestock, and substitution via an unstable raw-materials market and then excessive borrowing. It proved a dumb decision in the long run, but the Soviet system (five-year plans to the contrary) prioritized short- and medium-term fixes. Such are the consequences of filling one’s leadership cadre with decrepit septuagenerians, lifelong drunkards, and great shambling bags of Lorezepam (looking at you, Leonid).  

 

In his article “Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe” (link above), Sheldon reports that the fall of the USSR ended Moscow’s subsidization of the meat and dairy industries, and the larger republics (like Ukraine) began privatizing most of their farms. Corn and wheat production took off, and by 2010 Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine exported more grain that the entire Soviet Union had imported in 1990. By 2020 many other nations had become dependent either on Russian and Ukrainian foodstuffs or Russian hydrocarbons, which is what made the outbreak of war between the two former Soviet republics so economically devastating. 

The price of eliminating communism was finding something to fill the ideological gap, in this case a combination of regional authoritarianism and neoliberalism, both of which have proven widely damaging to a vastly more interconnected world.

Of Calligrams and Force Protection

 

The Islamic rule against graven images did not prevent early-modern Muslims from developing capacious traditions of representational art. It merely required them to develop an extra measure of creativity. Some artists kept to the prohibition’s letter (so to speak) by adapting the acceptable, even praiseworthy, art of calligraphy to the goals of the painter. Calligrams, drawings comprised of skillfully curved and interwoven Arabic verses, first appeared in Islamic art at least one thousand years ago. By the early modern period artists had developed the form to a high level. 

One skillfully executed calligram, drawn in 1766 CE (A.H. 1180) by Abd al-Qadir Hisari, now reposes in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, golden Arabic letters trace out the hull, gunports, and windows of a three-masted Ottoman galleon. The artist has drawn in grey the sails, rigging, and two other warships in the background. Tiny “dust-letter” inscriptions in Ottoman (Arabic letters, Turkish words) run around the outside of the painting and adorn the edges of the waves, describing there the art and vicissitudes of sailing. The ship itself bears the monographic seal (or tughra) of Sultan Mehmet III, and a flag at the stern bears the Quran’s “throne verse,” which reads, in part, “Allah is He besides whom there is no god…His knowledge extends over the heavens and the earth; the preservation of them both tires him not.” The flag declares the ship’s owner a humble servant of God and invokes the supreme being’s protection. 

"Calligraphic Galleon," Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is not the only protective device in the painting: the calligraphic letters that form the ship spell out the names of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” righteous men whom the Abrahamic deity protected by immuring them asleep in a cave. To some early-modern Muslims, including the artist, these names (which appear in the Quran) had almost magical protective powers; the Sleepers served the same function as saints in Christianity. Hisari’s painting is thus both aesthetically pleasing and practical: it twice asks for God’s blessing upon the sultan and his fleet.

God, it seems, helps those who help themselves, and reserves much of his aid for the prudent and humble. Mehmet III did not number these traits among his virtues. In 1768 the sultan, incensed by Russian troops’ border violations and goaded by his French allies, declared war on neighboring Russia. Mehmet perhaps believed that Ottoman forces would fare as well in this conflict as they had in the 1714-15 campaign against Venice or in the 1735-39 war with Austria and Russia. If so he believed wrongly. At the Battle of Cesme (1770), Catherine II’s Mediterranean fleet sank an Ottoman naval force twice its size. Four years later, facing ongoing Russian incursions and Russian-inspired rebellions in Greece and the Levant, the Porte and the Empress signed a treaty ceding the Crimea to Russia (first as a protectorate, later outright) and ending Turkish dominance of the Black Sea. There’s only so much that good art can do.