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In 1759, due to a directive from the king of Spain, a new policy was implemented wherein groups of armed settlers, known as "presidios", were sent North to fortify, after a fashion, a perimeter that was considered to be more or less defensible. The Rio Bravo and the Rio del Norte (actually the same river - the Rio Grande - only nobody was really sure at the time if this were so) were considered to be good markers for a definable defensible perimeter, and so Junta de Los Rios was decided on as a good place to construct a fort, and send a group of settlers organized under a military system to subdue, colonize, and defend the region. These people arrived and began the construction of an adobe fort and adjacent mission on a hill where an Indian Village known as Guadalupe was located (present day downtown, Ojinaga). When they did so, they effectively moved the administrative seat of power of the immediate region over a few miles from where it had been located before, just on the other side of the Rio Conchos in the village of San Francisco. The date from which these new buildings began to serve as the military, civil, and ecclesiastical seats of power in the region was 1760, which marked the real beginning of Spanish, and later Mexican domination and colonization of the region, and the end of the era of a mostly Indian character for Ojinaga and the surrounding landscape.
The original tribe of marauding Indians who had traditionally made life miserable for the settled, Pueblo Indians and their Spanish protectors, and Franciscan friars who attempted to maintain a viable mission presence in the area off and on since their first arriving in 1581, were the Tobosa tribe, whose homeland was centered in the area now covered by Big Bend National Park. The Tobosa were effectively wiped out by the Spanish, in one of the first effective military campaigns by the Junta de Los Rios militarized settlers, many of them killed in battle when the Spanish surrounded them, and the survivors were shipped off into slavery, where they died in mines or in the tropics cutting down trees for great plantations there.
The next marauding group of Indians were the Apaches, who had been the traditional enemies of the Jumanos, battling with them every year in the region around Carlsbad, New Mexico when a group of Jumanos would make their yearly trek between Ojinaga and Pecos Pueblo on a trading expedition. The Jumanos had tried, unsuccessfully, to lure the Spanish into making an alliance with them in order to mount an all out campaign of attrition against the Apaches, but the Spanish who were sent up to accomplish this decided that they would rather try and get rich by trading in the one valuable commodity that the region produced - buffalo hides - and they used their resources on a long and extended hunting expedition near present day Pecos, Texas, and once they had gathered together as many hides as they thought they could carry, they abandoned the Jumanos once again to their former condition, and left the region. The Jumano leader who had tried and failed through a very detailed and drawn out political policy to accomplish the bringing about of this alliance was Juan Sabeata, a now mostly forgotten, but at the time, very significant regional leader. Sabeata was given a rank and title by the Spanish government, and he wore a silk suit and rode a fine horse, such that French explorers whom he encountered on the Texas Gulf coast thought that he was a Spanish nobleman when they first saw him.
The wars with the Apaches were a critical period in the history of the state of Chihuahua, and the most extensive histories pick up with that period, because it provides the background for the events that led up to the Mexican Revolution. Apache marauding began with the introduction of the horse by the Spanish. Indians observe the Spanish style of fighting from horseback, which was mainly centered around the use of a lance, and they copied that, but also added another innovation, which had actually been the favored style of Asian horsemen such as the Mongols and Huns. This was the use of a short bow at close range, fired from a galloping horse, and quickly reloaded from scabbard, making these groups almost invincible on the open range. The only way to stop them was with musket fire, but only from a defensible location, such as a fort. |
