From Goa to Montreal, from Manaus to Los Angeles, the essays in this volume have covered a lot of ground, geographically, chronologically, and thematically. But we do find that the same characteristics emerge in so many frontier cities, as their local stories and negotiations are set into larger global and hemispheric contexts of unequal power relations and imperial ambitions. The growth of these cities was more likely to be driven by trade and local circumstances than any mythic line of settlement. And the legacy of frontier experiences has shaped these cities long after that initial frontier encounter has ended.
The essays in this volume explore an aspect of the past we think has been under studied. Frontier cities, as we understand them, were carriers of culture, in some cases explicitly shaped by imperial guidelines and points of exchange, there to facilitate and harness various forms of interaction among residents and exploit local resources which might connect to distant markets. These places, as urban expressions of settler colonialism and tools of empire and nation-building, often exerted transformative power. At the same time, frontier cities relied on Native neighbors as well as people pushed into these new spaces by migrant and immigrant labor flows to be their customers and producers, laborers and tourists. Frontier cities thereby encouraged various forms of inclusion as well as exclusion—economic, social, and cultural—in shared physical spaces shaped, to varying degrees, by all participants. As we have said, we think the study of these neglected frontier cities can connect various fields, reanimate western history, and provide a surprisingly relevant point of comparison with modern American cities.
The stories in this volume’s chapters do not exhaust the paths and legacies experienced in frontier cities. As we discussed how to close this volume, we reflected on the powerful and very different frontier city stories of the three cities where we make our institutional homes: New Haven, Connecticut; Tampa, Florida; and El Paso, Texas. Each offers yet another aspect of the frontier city—and suggests more avenues for frontier city research. It is our sense, in short, that the “frontier city” as a conceptual framework encourages us to notice aspects of the past, missing pieces of the urban puzzle, that have gone unnoticed. Moreover, we think that the change of perspective that the very notion of the frontier city suggests pushes us to reorient our narratives in ways utterly relevant to contemporary global and transnational conditions. We offer the following three brief pieces as examples of that reorientation.
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Everything about New Haven seems to conjure up the term colonial. New Haven’s first historians and chroniclers, writing in the 1830s, looked back in time to find the origins of the city’s steady habits and growth.1 What they stressed was the city’s college-educated founding duo, the merchant Theophilus Eaton and the Reverend John Davenport, representing the city’s twin pillars of prosperity and piety. They also highlighted the city’s nine-square grid plan, a landmark in the history of American town planning and the very essence of rational order imposed upon the land.2 New Haven, its past, present, and future, seemed to embody the best of the Anglo-American tradition. When industrialization and immigration transformed the city toward the end of the nineteenth century, Yankee old-timers would look back upon the city’s colonial past as a golden age.
Yet that word colonial implied a limited frame through which to view the past. In the case of New Haven, it tends to fix our gaze on those iconic well-ordered nine squares. Substitute the word frontier, and other aspects of the city’s history appear. Indeed, during the first Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–1654, New Haveners described themselves in the records in 1653 as a “fronteere plantation,” “more exposed to enemies and dangers th[a]n before.”3
Virtually unknown today is the Quinnipiac Indian reservation that existed on the town’s east shore from its founding in 1638 until 1773. Quinnipiac leader Momauguin originally reserved some twelve hundred acres on the east shore in 1638. At the time of the final sale in 1773, when the Quinnipiac community moved to Farmington, Connecticut, only thirty acres remained. Not until 1900 would a historian, Charles H. Townshend, remind his local audience—in a publication with a very limited print run—that the city had included a reservation for almost a century and a half.4 Enlarge the “colonial” frame with the concept of the frontier city and suddenly names on the land—Wigwam Point, Indian Neck, Montowese, Menunkatuck—provoke new questions about the city’s history. The town’s founders in 1638 were well aware of the opportunity that two epidemics in 1633 and 1634 and the Pequot War to the east provided for settlers looking to secure a foothold along the coast. This was no mere coincidence.5
Looking with new eyes on the city’s past, we find Native people in a variety of places. In 1748, young scholar Samson Occom prepared to become Yale’s first indigenous student, but eyestrain forced a change of plans. When a Wampanoag man, Moses Paul, was convicted by a jury of killing a white man in a tavern in nearby Bethany, Connecticut, late in the year 1771, Occom returned to New Haven at the request of Paul—who felt that racial bias had shaped the verdict—to preach an execution sermon. Joanna Brooks, the editor of Occom’s collected writings, has noted how Occom’s sermon, “using sin as a leveler of racial and class distinctions,” indicted all those present (‘Indians, English, and Negroes’) . . . as sinners in need of redemption.” The sermon, published in October of 1772, went through nineteen editions and established Occom’s reputation as a leading preacher and author.6 As Brooks notes, “Occom’s writings comprise the most extensive Native-authored commentary on colonialism to survive the colonial era.”7
Samson Occom’s sister, Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon, stayed in Uncasville, Connecticut. Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon, her daughter, and her granddaughter deeded a plot of land on Mohegan Hill to the tribe “for the building of a community church.”8 That church became and remained the center of Mohegan life. In 1978, Gladys Tantaquidgeon was still giving visitors (including our Yale-based editor) a tour of the museum she had co-founded in 1931. Due in part to her work preserving her community’s history and traditional knowledge, the Mohegans received federal acknowledgment in 1994. That same year, Yale awarded her an honorary doctorate. She died in 2005 at the age of 106.9
For several years now, the Native American Cultural Center at Yale and our growing body of Native students have honored graduating Native seniors with a wonderful reception at Mohegan Sun, the tribe’s casino and luxury hotel. Mohegan leaders have been extremely welcoming and Native elders from around the state have taken pride in our students and have looked after them during their years at Yale away from their own families and communities. At ceremonies at Yale, we have once again heard the words of thanks—táput ni—in a local Native language that Yale students might have heard in New Haven in the eighteenth century. As it has become increasingly obvious in the last two decades that Connecticut is a place on the map of Indian country, part of what Samson Occom called “this Indian world,” it becomes even more appropriate to re-envision New Haven’s past as a frontier city.
Viewing New Haven as a frontier city produces an enhanced and altered historical narrative. Clearly, New Haven remained a frontier city for at least a century and a half after its founding. New Haveners in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries retained an interest in western lands in Ohio and Mississippi,10 pursued trade in the West Indies, and exploited resources in the South Atlantic.11 While later generations might look back and venerate the genteel virtues of a mature colonial culture, their ancestors long maintained what Elliott West describes in this volume as a “frontier mentality.” In 2007, New Haven—responding to the transnational flow of people across ineffective borders—decided to offer municipal services and an Elm City Residence Card to protect an estimated ten-thousand-plus undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere (many of them of overwhelmingly indigenous Central American backgrounds).12 In issuing this first municipal identification card in the United States, we may fairly say that New Haven, balancing local realities and national regulations, continues to “see like a city.”
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Like New Haven, Tampa is not typically thought of as frontier city. In fact, since the early twentieth century its identity as a place has been constructed around the public display of a mythic history that shuns frontier pioneers in favor of pirates. Tampa’s pirate-oriented past is given its fullest expression at the annual Gasparilla Festival, begun in 1904 as a side event to larger promotional extravaganzas. In recent years, Gasparilla has evolved into a Mardi Gras–like celebration during which the mayor surrenders the keys of the city to an invading flotilla of rogue pirates. That Gasparilla commemorates the murky legend of the Spanish pirate Jose Gaspar, who is said to have patrolled the West Coast of Florida in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—but who has eluded all efforts at historical documentation—is not enough to dull the city’s enthusiasm for this ritual event. By 1974, when Tampa was awarded a National Football League franchise, Tampans had so thoroughly associated pirates with their city that calling their team “the Buccaneers” was a natural choice.13
Yet despite its love affair with mythic pirates, Tampa is a city that emerged and has continued to develop in the context of varied and shifting frontier conditions and processes. From the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, Florida underwent repeated colonial incursions from Spain, France, and Britain, making the region as a whole an unstable, multivalent frontier of encounter for Europeans, Indians, and African-descended people. If there were a real, historical Jose Gaspar, this was the world that produced him and in which he lived most of his life. Tampa’s founding as an urban place came at the end of this long period of rivalries between European states and begins with the United States’ acquisition of Florida in 1819 and the establishment of Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay in 1824. In the Gasparilla legend, Jose Gaspar is said to have jumped from his ship to his death rather than be captured by conquering Americans.
Fort Brooke was one of a number of forts built in Florida in the early nineteenth century to mark new imperial realities and to mediate the multicultural landscape—just like those in other frontier regions of North America. Fort Brooke’s mission was two-pronged: to distribute the supplies and services guaranteed to the Seminole Indians following the first Seminole War and to protect white migrants and their interests, which generally meant subduing and controlling nearby African American and Seminole communities. Not only did Seminole communities often provide safe haven for runaway slaves, but the Seminoles also refused to remain contained on reservations in Florida’s interior or to relinquish their land and move west when it became a desirable commodity. Interaction with the Seminoles—whether in tense daily exchanges, periods of relative harmony, or outright warfare—configured every phase of the first decades of Tampa’s development.14
From its founding, Fort Brooke and the civilian community that grew up around it functioned as a point of connection, a place that, although designed to symbolize and effect U.S. domination, also brought Seminoles and whites together. On casual visits to the fort, Indians sometimes stayed overnight, camping at a spring about a mile away. The first Fourth of July celebration at Fort Brooke in 1824 brought Indians together with officers and men stationed there for shared oratory, food, and drink. As young men, the Seminole leaders and warriors, Osceola and John Horse, were regular visitors to the fort where they befriended, traded with, and drilled with soldiers there. Later the press tended to suggest that the two gained American military training and insights with nefarious intent. But the reality of young Seminoles, socializing and training with American troops, suggests other interpretations and possibilities.15
The civilian settlement adjacent to the fort was finally chartered as the town of Tampa in 1855. Conflict with the Seminoles, devastating hurricanes, and deadly disease routinely derailed periods of hopeful growth. At the time of the 1880 census, the population stood at a mere 720 inhabitants with challenging travel isolating it from the north until the arrival of the railroad in 1884. From the start, however, despite its small size and fragility, the frontier settlement had nascent urban characteristics: it functioned as a trading center; its population was dense relative to the areas around it; and it had amenities such as hotels, bars, a theater, gambling saloons, and eventually a church, a school, and other commercial establishments. For a southern frontier settlement, it was also atypically multicultural and cosmopolitan—with U.S. whites from both northern and southern states; free and enslaved blacks; Cubans and other Caribbean migrants; and the Seminoles, whose incorporation of African-descended people made them a racially blended group. One of its important early entrepreneurs, who moved to the town from Key West in 1839 was Odet Philippe, a mulatto originally from Haiti. With connections and encouragement from the community’s white leaders, Philippe bought lots and other property and opened a billiard hall, a ten-pin alley, and an oyster shop. He also operated the settlement’s first cigar-making facility.16
The problem with the Jose Gaspar legend and Gasparilla is not so much that it is based on myth or that it is historically inaccurate. The real problem is that it promotes a version of Tampa history that makes invisible its frontier past and the history of nascent urbanity and encounter—some of it painful and violent, all of it fascinating—that characterized it. Jose Gaspar, after all, chose to jump off the boat to his death rather than interact with the American conquerors. It also leads to a tendency to see Tampa’s history in isolated pieces rather than as part of a more interconnected story. Recognizing Tampa as a frontier city, and taking its frontier past seriously, allows for connections to be drawn between what often seem like compartmentalized and anomalous parts of its history: its origins in a remote military fort, in a newly acquired U.S. territory, central to the Seminole Wars; its rise in the late nineteenth century as an industrial frontier based on cigars and immigrant labor; and its recent allure for migrants eager to begin new lives in the Sunshine State—land of schemes and dreams—a truly volatile frontier of global credit markets and labor flows.
Seen through a frontier city lens, Tampa’s past and present can be conceptualized in new, more holistic ways, marked by the ongoing qualities characteristic of urban frontier places: intense multicultural interaction, multiple flows of migrants and immigrants, economic concentration and risk, and transnational connections. Even Jose Gaspar, a mythic figure traversing the interstices of Atlantic World empires, becomes much more interesting when seen in this light. And the presence of the multimillion-dollar Seminole Hard Rock Casinos in Orlando and Hollywood—owned and operated by the Seminole tribe—takes on new cultural and economic significance when placed in this larger historical context.
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The frontiers in El Paso, Texas, have remained an omnipresent fact of the city’s history. Situated at a break in the mountains where the river now known to Americans as the Rio Grande turns north, El Paso was always a gathering place for the indigenous peoples of the region. And El Paso has prospered not just because of its local geography, but also because of its status as a place in between: at first, as between the Aztecs’ cities in central Mexico and the cities of the Pueblos, in what we now call northern New Mexico. In 1598, Juan de Oñate passed through the El Paso region, along a path that Spanish authorities would call the Camino Real del Interior, the inland route for the king’s conquerors and colonizers. He named the city for the Spanish, and held a ceremony of Thanksgiving, grateful to have founds the river’s water and green pastures after the long trek across the Chihuahuan Desert.17
Yet the Pueblo peoples of northern New Mexico were not happy to see Oñate and his successors. Close to one hundred years of contact with Europeans who styled themselves as new regional authorities had made them guarded, suspicious of the claims of benevolence from men who called themselves conquistadores. Oñate enforced his rule over the Pueblo by committing horrific acts against the populace—imprisoning women and children, and cutting off the right foot of every man he could catch as a punishment for their resistance. A few generations later, Oñate’s successor Antonio de Otermín would face the massive Pueblo Revolt of 1680, as the Native leader Popé gathered traditional enemies to stand against the Spanish order. Otermín abandoned northern New Mexico and retreated with one group of Pueblo Indians, the Tigua, back to El Paso. There, the Spanish authorities balanced new investments in the local settlement with their desire to reconquer the Pueblo of northern New Mexico, which the Spanish finally did again in 1695.18
This first El Paso was south of the river, on the wide floodplain of the Rio Grande. But that city ceased to be El Paso in 1848, when, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States acquired more than 525,000 square miles north of the river, turning it into a national border. Oñate’s settlement among the Tigua, called Ysleta after the Spanish name for these Indians—the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, both distinguishing them and linking them to the Ysleta Pueblo of northern New Mexico—would have remained in Mexico, except for the fact that the flood seasons of 1829 and 1831 had shifted the river south of their mission settlement, leaving it just to the east of the new United States city of El Paso.19 A generation later, the city on the south side of the river was renamed to honor Benito Juárez, the hero of the successful struggle for Mexico to throw off the rule of French-sponsored Emperor Maximilian.20
In its one hundred and fifty years on a permanent frontier, El Paso has been a city shaped by American traders reaching El Paso via the Santa Fe Trail and the Camino Real; by the easterners posted at Fort Bliss to guard the city for the United States, the Confederacy, and then the United States again; by the transformation brought by the Southern Pacific transcontinental railroad in 1883; and by the experience of immigrants—Syrian and Chinese, Eastern European and Mexican—who sought to profit from the deep and ongoing cross-border relationship with Ciudad Juárez.21 Together, these two cities have struggled with what it means to be a borderland metropolis, inextricably linked by immigration, trade, and family ties but often separated by opposing national policies.
The earliest frontier city history of El Paso has been resurrected in the city’s public art and architecture in the past half-century. When a group enamored of the conquistadores proposed placing a much larger than life-size statue of Oñate at the center of the city in 1989, Tigua, Chicano, and other activists protested the efforts to glorify a murderer and torturer. Though the outcry did not end city support for the statue, it did succeed in getting it moved out of downtown, the name changed to merely The Equestrian. The controversy also stymied the creation of more statues to dubious heroes of El Paso’s past.22
Even more profoundly, the Tigua Indians have reasserted their history since attainment of federal recognition in 1968, reshaping their built environment through construction of a new tribal museum, a casino, and even gas stations and health center in the style of the Pueblo architecture of northern New Mexico, reemphasizing their ancestral ties to another region.23 Today, it is an easy drive from The Equestrian statue to the Tiguas’ new adobe-like buildings, all within the United States but all within view of the massive Mexican flag just over the border. The palimpsest of cultural, political, and economic agendas continues to shape El Paso as a frontier city.
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In New Haven, Tampa, and El Paso, frontiers remain zones of interpenetration, to paraphrase another touchstone book, Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson’s The Frontier in History.24 Frontiers can be places of gaps, differences, and competitions, but frontier cities are also arenas for juxtapositions, connections, and opportunities. Frontier cities were unique places to examine and exploit political, cultural, and economic differences, and to exchange and learn from each other’s distinctive reservoirs of knowledge.
In our age of re-globalization, the everyday reality of frontier cities has become the renewed experience of the whole world, at a much greater pace. Natives, newcomers, immigrants, and migrants had much in common in the past; that is obviously even more the case today. In the global village of modern life, juxtapositions tend to be less dramatic.
Recovering the history and legacy of frontier cities is an important task all across North America. We hope the stories of these frontier cities will encourage a renewed dialogue that connects the past to the present.