From the Spanish Collection: Overlapping Sovereignty and Private Property on the East Texas Frontier
In May 1810, a few months before Father Miguel Hidalgo raised his famous “Cry of Liberty” and ignited the Mexican independence movement, a man named Vicente Micheli appeared before municipal authorities in Nacogdoches, in the Spanish province of Texas. Unfortunately for Micheli, there was a paperwork problem — one which can be studied today in the records of the Spanish Collection of the General Land Office.
Over a decade earlier, in 1797, Micheli “purchased” a large rancho on the Neches River from the Bidai chief known to him as the “Son of Lefty”[1] and the captain of the Ais Nation. In exchange for the land, which ran “from Bidai Creek to where the aforesaid Lefty is located,” he gave Lefty’s son “one long blue cape, one white shirt, eight brass handles, one measure of vermillion, and a fathom of red ribbon.”[2] He also gave the Ais chief a rifle and fifty shots of powder with bullets. But Micheli found himself unable to make proper use of the land (or sell it), because the deed document in his possession “lacked the formalities of law.”[3] He therefore asked the governor of the Province of Texas, Manuel de Salcedo, to formally authorize his possession of the land and order a survey.
The governor quickly agreed to name a special commission to survey, assess, and convey the land, whose value was later fixed at 30 pesos. After the survey, however, Salcedo named a special team of appraisers to assess the value of the trade items that Micheli had given the Ais and Bidai leaders in exchange for what the governor called “the excessive portion of land he has illegally possessed for so many years without cultivating it.”[4] It seems that Salcedo was intent on making sure Micheli paid the Indian leaders what his own surveyors told him the nearly 9,000-acre rancho was worth. He also made it clear that Micheli had not followed the proper protocols to obtain and retain the land, including Spanish requirements for permanent settlement and cultivation of lands granted by the king.[5]
Micheli’s case, just one of several dozen Spanish-era land claims whose records are housed in the GLO’s Spanish Collection, raises intriguing questions about the nature of sovereignty and the formation of private property in the southwestern borderlands during a key moment of territorial transition in North America. Properly speaking, was Micheli’s claim a royal land grant or a “purchase” from an Indian nation or individual? If it was the former, why would Micheli need to pay the Son of Lefty at all? Under Spanish-American property law, all land that was not part of a recognized indigenous pueblo or that had not expressly been granted out to an individual or corporation belonged to the King’s royal patrimony. Indeed, it appears that it was Micheli’s lack of royal approval that was keeping him from disposing of the land as he wished. In this light, we could say that Salcedo sought to assert royal sovereignty over lands conveyed by independent Indian chiefs. If, on the other hand, Micheli’s rancho was simply a private conveyance, why did the Spanish governor need to intervene? Wasn’t the Son of Lefty free to dispose of his land as he wished? If so, does that mean the Bidai retained a measure of sovereignty in the area they controlled? Or had Lefty (father of the seller, whom Micheli described as the original owner) gotten the land from the Spanish king? Who should we consider the grantor in this situation? The Spanish king? The Bidai Nation? The Son of Lefty? Ultimately, which kind of sovereignty — Spanish or indigenous or some combination of the two — was at play here?
These questions may be ultimately unanswerable, but they should alert us to the complexity of historical claims to sovereignty and private property in the southwestern borderlands.[6] Put simply, in Micheli’s case the line between European and Indian sovereignty — and between “Indian” territorial claims and “European” private property rights — seems to have blurred. Such blurring is perhaps befitting a place like the Nacogdoches area. What we now know as East Texas was, at the time of Micheli’s petition, a complicated and mixed place: a meeting ground of empires (Spanish, French, American) and peoples (Bidai, Wichita, Karankawa, Caddo, various European-descended, African-descended, and mixed-race people).[7] It was also on the bleeding edge of a major geopolitical transformation — the Louisiana Purchase of 1804. In the Spanish borderlands, the Louisiana Purchase reshuffled populations, redrew boundaries, and prompted the Spanish government to establish new towns along its eastern frontier as a bulwark against the expansion of the United States.
A thoroughly frontier character himself, Micheli was swept up in these momentous changes. He described himself as a resident of the legendary Santísima Trinidad de Salcedo, one of the new Spanish towns founded in 1806 near present-day Madisonville but abandoned shortly thereafter during the Mexican Independence wars. However, Micheli was no Spaniard but rather a French-speaking Italian immigrant. A native of Brescia, he had lived in New Orleans and Natchitoches before settling in Texas in the 1790s with his French-creole wife. [8] A merchant who had apparently gotten his start in the once-bustling Natchitoches Indian trade, Micheli soon transitioned to the more lucrative world of agriculture, ranching, and speculation. Shortly after arriving in Texas, he began attempting to acquire various tracts of land in the borderlands region, and he also tried his hand at other enterprises, including establishing a cotton gin in San Antonio. His 1797 deal with Bidai and Ais chiefs seems to have formed part of a larger strategy involving cattle ranching, land speculation, or both.[9]
Micheli could and did acquire land via purchase from private owners already established on Texas soil. But formally untitled lands in New Spain — those not granted out to an individual or claimed “since time immemorial” by a recognized (sedentary, Christianized) indigenous pueblo like those of central Mexico — would have been considered realengas, or royal lands. Since the unconverted, non-sedentary Indian nations of northern New Spain did not constitute pueblos in the Spanish system, their traditional lands were thus considered part of the king’s domain. Yet Micheli initially chose to purchase the lands from the Ais and Bidais chiefs, thus implicitly recognizing Indian sovereignty over the territory. Notably, that sovereignty was neither singular or straightforward. We cannot tell if the Ais and Bidai chiefs owned the property outright, in the modern, Western sense of absolute personal dominion over a piece of land, or if they were simply ceding part of a larger traditional territory to the Italian businessman. We cannot even establish hard boundaries between Ais and Bidai sovereignty since neither the chiefs nor Micheli attempted to identify which pieces of the new ranch belonged to whom. Even Micheli’s description of the location of the rancho (running “from Bidai Creek to where Lefty is”), which he copied from the 1797 conveyance document to which the Son of Lefty and the Ais chief “El Negrito” were party, seems to owe much to indigenous forms of territoriality. [10]
Perhaps Micheli was unfamiliar with New Spain’s long-established traditions of land tenure. After all, Spanish Louisiana was a world away from central Mexico, with its landscape of bounded Indian pueblos and Spanish haciendas. Further, even though Louisiana had passed from French to Spanish control in 1763, its residents and officials probably still felt a strong French influence. The French tended to see North American Indians as trading partners, and French colonial expansion often allowed for a measure of Indian sovereignty over lands not granted out to corporations or individuals.[11] Likely, then, Micheli was simply doing what he would have done in Louisiana: trading with independent Indian groups.
What is more noteworthy, however, is the extent to which Spanish, French, and indigenous notions about land seem to blend in Micheli’s title document. Moreover, this blending seems to have been tolerated by all involved, including the Spanish official, Manuel de Salcedo. After all, even if Salcedo disapproved of Micheli’s initial, “illegal” occupation of the tract, he was still prepared to recognize the Italian immigrant’s ownership after he subjected himself to the formalities of Spanish law. Further, his demand for a careful appraisal of trade items suggests Salcedo had adjusted Spanish procedures to the frontier practice of purchasing land from independent Indian groups. After all, why demand an appraisal of items already given to the Indian chiefs if this was simply a transaction between Micheli and the agent of the Spanish crown?
A full “untangling” of the competing notions of sovereignty and property in Micheli’s (later invalidated) title is beyond the scope of this post. But historians may find fertile terrain for future studies on these matters in the records of the GLO’s Spanish Collection, which contains several dozen titles and unfinished titles to lands in the Nacogdoches area in the Spanish period.
[1] Literally, “el hijo del Surdo [zurdo],” or the “son of the Left-handed One.”
[2] Appraisal of trade items included with Vicente Micheli’s title, 31 May 1810, Box 113, Folder 3, Records of the Spanish Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[3] Vicente Micheli’s petition for confirmation of title, 15 May 1810, Box 113, Folder 3, Records of the Spanish Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[4] Manuel de Salcedo’s order of appraisal, n.d., Box 113, Folder 3, Records of the Spanish Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[5] On the relationship between Spanish notions of “proper” land use and property rights, see Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
[6] On “property formation” in early America, see Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[7] See Patrick J. Walsh, “Living on the Edge of the Neutral Zone: Varieties of Identity in Nacogdoches, Texas, 1773–1810,” East Texas Historical Journal Vol 37: No 2 (1999), 3–24; Todd Smith and H. Sophie Brown, Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008).
[8] See Phil W. Hewitt, The Italian Texans (UTSA Institute for Texan Cultures, 1973), 5; Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721–1821 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 475–479; Smith and Brown, Colonial Natchitoches, 164, 199n31.
[9] See “Micheli, Vicente. Letter requesting permission to establish a cotton gin in San Antonio, 1801,” Box 8, Folder 1, and “Micheli, Vicente. Contracts and leases for pasture land and care of livestock, 1803–1806,” Box 8, Folder 12, Lois Foster Blount Papers, East Texas Research Center, Ralph F. Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University.
[10] Following historian Allan Greer, we might say that property on the Nacogdoches frontier constituted a tangled set of claims over resources, rather than absolute personal control. See Greer Property and Dispossession.
[11] Plenty of French-Indian conflict over territory did occur, of course, and French and indigenous notions of sovereignty were often characterized by mutual misunderstanding. See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
