Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southwestern Indians. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Robert H. Jackson

Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southwestern Indians. By Jerald T. Milanich (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. xiv plus 2l0pp. $26.95).

For decades scholars have published many historical, anthropological, and archaeological studies as well as transcribed and translated documents illustrating the history of Spanish colonization of northern Mexico, missions on the Mexican frontier, and the consequences of Spanish colonization for native peoples. The literature on the so-called "Spanish Borderlands" is extensive, and the history of the region continues to attract a younger generation of researchers. The survival of ruins of Spanish settlements such as the missions sparked a strong interest in the history of Spanish settlement in what today is the United States.

The one exception was Spanish Florida, permanently settled after 1565. Spanish place names survive in Florida, often in an anglicized form, but with the exception of St. Augustine nothing remains to evoke the memory of the Spanish presence. And that presence was extensive, and stretched from coastal South Carolina and Georgia to the Florida panhandle. Franciscan missionaries established an extensive chain of missions, Spanish entrepreneurs established ranches and farms. Small settlements grew up around the major military garrisons. However, the mission, farm, and ranch buildings were generally built of wattle and daub or wooden planks, and have not survived. Florida's role as a strategic borderland led to the demise of the mission system at the hands of English colonial militias from the Carolinas, and their Indian allies.

It has been only over the past decade and a half that extensive research on Spanish Florida has been published. Until the 1970s few mission sites were known, let alone systematically studied, and only one major book had been published on Florida missions (Mark Boyd, Hale Smith, and John Griffen, Here They Once Stood: The Tragic End of the Apalachee missions. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1951). Over the last several decades archaeologists have identified many missions sites, and ethnohistorians have reconstructed many facets of the Spanish-Indian encounter. The book reviewed here offers the first synthesis of the new scholarship of Spanish Florida.

Jerald Milanich, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History and one of the major contributors to the renaissance in the study of Spanish Florida, presents his synthesis from the perspective of the experiences of the native peoples of the southeast, and the missions as an element of colonialism. Milanich skillfully blends the archaeological, ethnohistorical, and historical literature to provide the reader with a clear understanding of Spanish Florida. The author begins with a review of the study of Spanish Florida, and follows with a discussion of the societies and cultures of the native peoples the Spanish encountered, early efforts at colonization leading up to the settlement of Saint Augustine in 1565, the establishment of the missions, life in the missions including mission economics, demographic patterns, native resistance, and the demise of the missions. Milanich asserts the importance of relations between traditional Indian chiefs and the missionaries, and how the missions fit into the f ramework of Spanish colonialism. The missions provided surplus food to the garrison and town at St. Augustine, as well as labor organized through a repartimiento draft. Raids by hostile Indians and English colonial militia in the first years of the eighteenth-century destroyed most of the missions, and only a small number of survivors resettled in the immediate environs of St. Augustine. Disease had already killed thousands of Indians.

Written for a general audience as well as specialists, Milanich's volume should be the first book read by anybody wishing to learn more about Spanish Florida, and the book is easy to read (no specialized jargon). Moreover, the maps and illustrations (many of artifacts from excavations) provide the readers with a clear sense of place as well as of the material culture. One weakness the book has is the narrow focus on Florida. I would like to have seen some comparison with other Spanish mission frontiers, which is lacking in this book. That one quibble aside, this book is well worth reading.