Cowboy Diplomacy in the Spanish-American War

By 1898 tensions at Arizona’s border with Mexico had waned but not disappeared. The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 had seen Mexico concede land to the US. This concession came with the promise that the US would protect Mexicans from Native American attacks; their failure to do so resulted in the border being redrawn in 1854. This new line drew the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico across the centre of the Indigenous homeland of the Tohono O’odham (Desert People). Arizona was also home to rampant cattle rustling from both sides and, following the Apache Wars (1849-86), Anglo-Americans remained wary of any activity from Native Americans that might pose a threat.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that, in spring 1898, a group of about 30 Tohono O’odham cowboys travelled across their ancestral territory from southern Arizona to northern Sonora, Mexico to retrieve their cattle, and inadvertently sparked an international incident. Two Days, one of the alleged ‘ringleaders’, described the journey as a routine one. But, against the backdrop of the Spanish-American War, which had begun brewing that February, US and Mexican consuls in Sonora and multiple federal departments responded as though it were an international ‘raid’ or ‘attack’, deploying troops and inspectors, and calling for punitive action. Wary of any hint of a revival of unrest, uprising, or conspiracy with Mexico, the San Francisco Call ran an article titled ‘Frontier Towns in Danger of Being Raided: Citizens ... Prepare to Resist Spaniards and Indians from Mexico’, circulating news of a conspiracy to ‘inflict damage on Americans’.

For at least two millennia the Tohono O’odham have lived in the northern Sonoran desert, a landscape gifted to them by their creator, I’itoi. The arid climate demands multiple subsistence strategies, such as moving between summer residences dependent on monsoons, and winter residences near permanent springs. Being able to travel in search of water, wild flora and fauna, and temporary washes suitable for farming, as well as for sacred ceremonies, was critical to life long before colonisation. When the first permanent missionaries arrived in 1687 they brought not only Catholicism, but cattle. Ranching soon supplemented native food sources and added an exchange commodity without disrupting O’odham ways of life. As Francisco Johnson, a Tohono O’odham citizen interviewed in 1967, affirmed: ‘There was no line as there is now.’   

Two Days and his companions departed in 1898, as they presumably had many times before, from the region surrounding the San Xavier Reservation (in the US) towards El Plomo (in Mexico), about 100 miles south of Tucson, Arizona. In Two Days’ words, they planned to round up ‘my cattle and horses at my old home’. But when they arrived at El Plomo on 14 April they encountered three armed Mexican squatters, and an exchange of gunfire followed in what the Mexican consul described as a 15-minute ‘attack’ on the locals. Accounts vary: Two Days related that the Mexicans ‘did not let me to round up my cattle and horses’, while US customs officers and Mexican officials insisted that the O’odham absconded with 600 head of cattle. Reports also differed regarding injuries among the cowboys, but all agreed that nobody was killed on either side. The following day, after receiving reports that the cowboys carried American flags, Sonora’s governor telegrammed for troops to pursue them until they were ‘destroyed or dispersed’. Two Days and his companions fled north. Based on his letter to the Indian Agent (the local Indian Affairs representative and overseer reporting to the Indian Office in Washington, DC), Two Days knew that he and his companions needed the protection of US officials against Mexican accusations. ‘I will let you know’, he expressed through a translator and transcriber, ‘if the Mexicans should come across the U.S. line and have a war to us.’

However, owing to the government’s desire to avoid escalating tensions with Mexico and, perhaps, the appearance of weakness, the Indian agent for the San Xavier Reservation was sent to capture Two Days and the remaining 28 alleged rustlers and imprison them, despite the fact that they had injured nobody and that the agent saw no evidence that they had returned with any stock (let alone 600). At first, the agent pleaded with his superiors for their release, criticising their incarceration as ‘unjust’, but he was unsuccessful.

Developments in the Spanish-American War escalated matters. After battles began raging in the Philippines on 1 May and Cuba on 10 June the US press doubled the number of cowboys involved, with incendiary articles with titles such as ‘Trouble with Papagoes’ (the Spaniards’ name for the Tohono O’odham) appearing in the Arizona Republican and ‘On the War Path’ in the Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner. By mid-May, as per an internal communication, the army believed that ‘Spanish sympathizers in Mexico are preparing to raid the frontier, and that renegades of reservation Indians are likely to take advantage of the partial withdrawal of regular troops’ to launch additional raids and/or join forces with Mexicans against the US.

Through the State Department and the Treasury Department, Indian Office officials found themselves managing a manufactured crisis. The accused Tohono O’odham served sentences of varying lengths and, despite a joint inspection in which the charges of cattle rustling were found to be ‘wholly unfounded’ and the approval of a nolle prosequi by the district attorney in September, the four ‘ringleaders’ continued to languish in jail. Spain had lost the war in the Battle of Manila in August, easing the sense of emergency in the southwest and, perhaps, the urgency fuelling the Tohono O’odham case with it. It was not until April 1899 that Two Days and the others appeared before a jury. In a trial so quick that the Indian Office learned of it only after it had ended, the jury found them not guilty and sent them home without further ado. Among officials, the incident was forgotten. For the O’odham, a year’s worth of tending their cattle and the planting season following the monsoon had passed.

Although security along the border has ebbed and flowed since 1898, the events of 9/11 proved a watershed moment. Security enhancements, including surveillance towers and border checkpoints, have so compromised Tohono O’odham lifeways that they speak, write, and lobby in protest against a border that ‘separates our family and defiles our traditional way of life’. At a recent Indigenous Studies conference one Tohono O’odham participant called the border patrol stations located on his homeland an ‘occupation’ and an assault on O’odham national sovereignty. The stronger security measures become, the more Mexican and US citizenship compromises the O’odham family, for whom homeland is defined by sacred stories, not state boundaries.

Jennifer Bess is an Associate Professor at Goucher College, Maryland and author of Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin (University Press of Colorado, 2021).