The Spread of Firearms among the Indian Tribes on the Northern Frontier of New Spain

Abstract

T HE INTRODUCTION OF FIREARMS AMONG THE TRIBES of the Spanish frontier drastically altered the balance of power there in favor of Spain's Indian enemies. Indians had engaged in intertribal wars long before the coming of Europeans, but the acquisition of guns intensified these traditional rivalries as various tribes incorporated this product of European technology into their conflicts. As guns became more common among the nomadic tribes of the Spanish frontier, the Spanish technological superiority that had made possible the conquest of the Antillies and the Aztecs disappeared. Thereafter, Spain was forced to fight her Indian enemies on an equal basis and with limited success. Hostile tribesmen had first used firearms during the Chichimec War (1550-1600). During that conflict, tribesmen in northern Mexico had used guns and swords as well as native weapons in their struggle with European invaders.1 Unlike tribes in the eastern United States, most Indian nations on the Spanish frontier never abandoned their native weapons. Guns remained of secondary importance after the bow and arrow among the Chichimecs and Apaches, for example, and were never the primary weapon of any southwestern tribe.2 This was due in part to the relative scarcity of firearms in the southwest, as well as the shortcomings of harquebuses in general: their range and rate of fire were inferior to the compound bow used by Native Americans. Only on the Louisiana frontier did guns replace bows and arrows as the primary weapons used by Indians. In that area of Texas, called the Piney Woods, the thick forest terrain diminished the effectiveness of native weapons. Nevertheless, all the Indians of the Spanish borderlands eagerly sought firearms for hunting and warfare because of the medicine attributed to such weapons as well as their striking power. The Spaniards who entered New Mexico in the sixteenth century discovered that the Indians in the southwestern United States had little fear of European-made weapons. In 1601, for example, Juan de Ofiate invaded the southern plains in search of the Seven Cities of Gold and was attacked by the Escanxaques, a Tonkawa band that occupied western Oklahoma.3 Apparently unimpressed by the noise

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