The Apache Frontier: Jacobo Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain, 1769-1791 (Civilization of the American Indian Series)

Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good +/very good. A very good plus first edition. Yellow cloth boards with brown, black and white titling on spine. Top right corner bumped. Very small spot of soil on page fore edge. Top edge painted yellow. From the private library of Larry Southwick, collector's marginalia pencilled near front hinge. Text is clean and bright. Binding is sturdy and square. In a very good, original, price-clipped dust jacket. Dust jacket showing sunning to spine and rubbing at fore edge. Dust jacket now protected in a clear, removable, archival cover. 309 pp. including index. Octavo. When the tide of Spanish settlement in America reached the range of the Apache nation, it was abruptly halted. For two centuries Apaches baffled the defending Spanish troops and exacted a fearful toll from the terrorized colonists.This book relates how Commandant General Jacobo Ugarte faced the problem and the extent to which he was able to solve it, using a new Indian policy adopted by Spain in 1786. Political circumstances prevented Ugarte from completing the pacification of the Apaches, but it is significant that his stratagems were essentially the same as those employed with complete success by the Americans a century later.Ugarte himself was an unusual Spanish administrator, a soldier by profession but a diplomat by inclination. The courage of his convictions bordered on insubordination, but in the end history proved him right.Utilizing correspondence from officers in the field, post commanders, governors, viceroys, and royal administrators, the author reveals how the policy of 1786 worked in practice and how the Apaches reacted to it.