New Spain, Colonization of the Northern Frontier

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New Spain, Colonization of the Northern Frontier

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Spanish and later the Mexican governments were concerned over the fact that the northern frontier provinces of New Spain or Mexico were underpopulated and thus vulnerable to foreign invasion and occupation. This concern was particularly important in its impact on the colonization of Texas and Alta California, thought to be most vulnerable to foreign invasion.

In the eighteenth century the royal government organized groups of colonists to populate the sparsely settled frontier. The government also established military garrisons along the border, hoping that the soldiers stationed in the forts would establish families and remain in the area once they retired. From about 1710 to 1740 the viceregal government in Mexico City considered Texas, located on the border with French Louisiana, to be the most vulnerable part of the northern frontier. In 1716 a large expedition occupied east Texas, establishing missions and military garrisons. Then in the early 1720s the government established several presidios in the San Antonio area. In 1731 it sent a group of Canary Islanders to establish the Villa de Bexar at San Antonio.

In 1769, Visitor-General José de Gálvez, responding to the potential threat of the English and Russian presence in the Pacific Basin, organized the so-called Sacred Expedition to occupy Alta California. This expedition consisted of five Franciscan missionaries, sixty-six soldiers recruited in northwestern New Spain, twenty-seven Catalán volunteers from Spain, and several individuals of indigenous heritage recruited from the Baja California missions.

Over the next thirty years efforts were made to populate Alta California. In 1775–1776, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, a military commander in Sonora, led some 240 colonists and soldiers overland from Sonora to Alta California. The settlers established a civilian town at San José in 1777, and the soldiers formed the garrison of the presidio at San Francisco in 1776. In 1781, Fernando de Rivera y Moncada led a second group of about 230 settlers overland from Sonora. These colonists established the pueblo of Los Angeles that year. Finally, in 1797 a group of some thirty colonists recruited in the Guadalajara region of central Mexico founded the Villa de Branciforte. The three pueblos in Alta California were among a larger group of planned communities established in frontier provinces. In the 1780s, for example, the viceregal government had established another such planned community at Horcasitas in central Sonora.

After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, with the U.S.-Spanish border in east Texas in dispute, U.S. citizens posed the greatest threat to the northern frontier. The Spanish (and later the Mexican government) still felt that Texas and California were underpopulated. Organized in New Orleans, a number of filibustering expeditions to Texas only reinforced the Spanish government's growing sense of paranoia. In 1821, Stephen F. Austin received a grant of land in Texas and brought a group of colonists to settle in the eastern part of the province. In addition, thousands of Anglo-Americans migrated to Texas, New Mexico, and Alta California illegally. Because these Anglo-American settlers were a potentially subversive element, the Mexican government attempted to use incentives to attract Mexican settlers to the frontier. Two colonization laws passed in the 1820s facilitated the granting of land to settlers. In the 1830s and 1840s, following the secularization of the missions, the governors of Alta California made more than 800 grants of land in the province.

In the 1830s the Mexican government sent one last group of colonists to Alta California. A group of 250 colonists recruited in central Mexico arrived in California in 1834 to establish a town at the site of modern Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. Mariano G. Vallejo, the military commander of the northern section of the province, wanted to fortify the Mexican presence in the region to counter the Russian-American Company's outpost at Fort Ross, but the community shortly collapsed.

Ultimately, the attempt to colonize the northern frontier, especially Texas and Alta California, failed, and the pattern of Anglo-American settlement in both provinces undermined Mexican control. In 1821 the settler populations of Texas and Alta California were 8,000 and 3,500, respectively. In 1836, some 20,000 Anglo-Americans living in Texas organized the revolt that led to the creation of an independent republic in that year. And the hundreds of Anglo-American settlers in Alta California in 1846 contributed materially to the U.S. conquest of that province at the beginning of the Mexican-American War. New Mexico, also conquered by the United States during the war, was the most populous of the far northern frontier provinces, with some 28,000 settlers living there in 1821. With the failure of population politics, the frontier region of northern Mexico remained sparsely settled, and the frontier fell to U.S. expansion in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

See alsoBorderlands, The .