The Education of Fernando de Leyba: Quapaws and Spaniards on the Border of Empires

Abstract

IN 1771, A YOUNG SPANISH OFFICER, Fernando de Leyba, traveled from New Orleans to his new post on the Arkansas River. Spain had acquired the vast Louisiana region from France in 1763, and Commandant Leyba's superiors expected him to institute Spanish control over his part of the Louisiana interior. Knowing that Indian alliances were essential to Spanish dominance in Louisiana, the governor in New Orleans had sent a Spanish medal for Leyba to give to the leader of the Quapaws, the Indians who lived near Arkansas Post. The Quapaws' great chief, Cazenonpoint, was supposed to exchange his old French medal for the new Spanish one, signifying his people's shift in alliance from the French to the Spanish. At a formal assembly, Leyba presented the medal to Cazenonpoint. But to the chief's shock, the Spanish medal was smaller than the French one. Cazenonpoint declared that the Spanish had cheated him, and he demanded his French medal back.1 Through the clumsy error of a skimpy medal, the Spanish had insulted the Quapaws and endangered their alliance. From this inauspicious beginning, Chief Cazenonpoint and Commandant Leyba became antagonists in a strained alliance between their peoples. But the Quapaws gradually converted the Spanish to Quapaw ways of diplomacy. Over the following year, Cazenonpoint and the other Quapaw chiefs demonstrated their power to Leyba and taught him the wisdom of giving the Quapaws what they wanted-frequent and generous presents and the respectful treatment that alliance partners deserved. While Leyba learned Indian relations the hard way, the two men filling Leyba's and Cazenonpoint's respective positions a decade later-- Commandant Balthazar de Villiers and Quapaw chief Angaska-quickly forged a mutually beneficial personal and political partnership. Unlike Leyba, Villiers came to his post understanding Indian power and Spanish weakness in the Louisiana interior. Furthermore, both he and Chief Angaska had stronger personal incentives for forging a dependable alliance. Each had less support from his own people than had Leyba or Cazenonpoint. Villiers was French by birth, so he was an outsider to the Spanish empire. Angaska was an ambitious young chief, not the established leader that Cazenonpoint had been in 1771. While Leyba and Cazenonpoint had tested each other's power, Villiers and Angaska reinforced each other's legitimacy. The Quapaws' education of Fernando de Leyba and the symbiotic relationship between Angaska and Villiers both reveal the importance of individuals and local circumstance in determining the fate of empires and should remind us to be cautious in generalizing about the relationships among various European and Indian groups. Examining the interactions among a few important Quapaws and Spanish officials suggests not a static relationship between Indians and Europeans but a perpetual construction and reconstruction of those colonial relations. Different personalities shaped very different relationships. Individuals affected the course of history on the edges of empires, where power was diffuse. To overlook Indians' and Europeans' personal assumptions, interests, and actions distorts the reality of Indian-white relations. Policies and decrees meant little without implementation and reveal nothing about how Indians interpreted and reacted to them. This is not to say that Indian chiefs and Spanish officers did not act within structural constraints. Officers had orders and budgets, and chiefs had pressures and expectations from their peoples. The political structures of both Spanish and Quapaw society limited the powers of commandants and chiefs. All were influenced by their cultural and religious backgrounds and beliefs. But in colonialism, the personal and the structural were always intertwined. The conventional wisdom that the Spanish did not develop as strong a Quapaw alliance as the French neglects the differing situations and goals of the French on the one hand and the Spanish on the other. …