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David A. Beirne
HIST 571T
Dr. Shrout
31 August 2016
The Early Republic: A Look Into the Comanche Empire and French Louisiana
Two histories pertaining to developments in early eighteenth-century North America are Sophie White’s article “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans” and Pekka Hämäläinen’s book The Comanche Empire. White, highlighting French Louisiana between 1729 and 1731, and Hämäläinen, addressing the surrounding decades that marked the height of the Comanche Empire (notably not ‘tribe,’ ‘peoples,’ etc.), successfully offer alternative analytical approaches that reveal a region anything but dominated by the whims of encroaching colonial interests. In these narratives, there is no guarantee that the British colonies that would form the United States were destined to march across the continent, nor were the land’s competing powers solely European. The Comanche and Natchez prove that there was nothing inherently manifest about Manifest Destiny.
The title of White’s 2013 article, “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans,” represents the three demarcations of Marc-Antoine Caillot’s account of his time as a clerk for the Company of the Indies in French Louisiana from 1729 to 1731. (White 497) Caillot began by recounting the 1729 Natchez Indian massacre of French colonists that claimed 237 lives, continued by providing “[t]he earliest known account of a Mardi Gras masquerade in New Orleans,” before cutting immediately to the torture of a Natchez woman by a communal gathering of the Tunica tribe and French settlers. (White 497) Though one may not expect the telling of The Big Easy’s first Fat Monday dress-up to commence and end with scenarios of massacre and torture, White effectively illustrates how integrally linked incidents of “hedonism, feasting, and cross-gender disguises” were in the origins of an American tradition enjoyed nearly three-hundred years hence. (White 497)
Rather than an arena where European colonial powers steamrolled backwards indigenous populations, both White and Hämäläinen present Native American populations as competitive and not infrequently victorious players in power relations in the early eighteenth-century North American southwest. In matters of trade, territorial politics and cultural influence, tribes like the Comanches and the Natchez exercised significant agency in their contact with French, Spanish and intertribal interests across a borderlands incessantly in flux. While some of these engagements were fruitful for both sides, this region, in Hämäläinen’s words, “was a violent and traumatic place where Natives and newcomers saw one another more as strangers and adversaries than as co-creators of a common world.” (Hämäläinen 8)
Both authors focus on objects and the material world in the lives of colonists and Indians, manifesting a growing trend among cultural historians in employing contemporary understandings of the meanings and usages of ‘things’ to illustrate broader period leitmotifs. Hämäläinen displays, for instance, how different interpretations of the material world contributed to a differing concepts of power between the Comanches and Europeans. “The idea of land as a form of private revenue-producing property was absent in Comanche culture, and livestock and slaves in a sense took the place of landed private property.” (Hämäläinen 5) White continues with another analysis of ‘things,’ declaring that “[c]lothing is never simply the blandly functional or frivolously fashionable covering of the body,” but rather is active in “creating, affirming, and upholding identity on a daily basis.” (White 499) What one dons is especially significant during times of change or ambiguity, and life was nothing if not uncertain in the Comanche Empire and French Louisiana. A constant French anxiety in the New World regarded their ability to maintain their “precarious Frenchness” in spite of the threat of “creolization,” or the gradual adopting of native culture. (White 499, 500)
The only thing worse than becoming native was being destroyed by them. The beginning of Caillot’s narrative surrounding the first Mardi Gras is his telling of the 1729 Natchez massacre. Those who were not killed and tortured were kidnapped, stripped (whereby the Natchez stole “their sartorial signs of Frenchness”) and returned for ransom back to New Orleans near-to-‘buck naked.’ (White 497) If the wearing of clothing could garner power, then the removal of clothing, particularly in being compelled, represented the removal of such. The prisoners of the Natchez massacre, upon their return to New Orleans, were gratefully transformed once again, this time to their former identities upon the receiving new French clothes (for a fee, of course). (White 498) In the Natchez stealing and appropriating of French clothing, the tribe confounded increasingly fragile boundaries of identity among the French settlers.
With French becoming captives, not to mention some African slaves being set free by the Natchez, a metamorphoses in clothing could signify a return to normalcy for a world gone mad. “When participants reverted to normative roles, as they inevitably did, the effect was to reaffirm, restore, and strengthen the status quo.” (White 500) Caillot’s next tale, another account that “alternated the passivity of being stripped with the agency of getting re-dressed (or dressed up),” was the first recorded New Orleans Fat Tuesday masquerade. (White 498) Caillot claims that the happening was his idea, and preceding its telling with his account of the Natchez massacre spoke to his understanding of the situation of his fellow countrymen. (White 497, 500) In the masquerade, class, gender, religious and racial roles were reversed (“[s]ome, like Caillot, masked as women (one as an amazon)”), which White attributes to the attempt at showing the transient nature of clothes and identity as well as the calming effect that a return to “habits ordinaires,” or ordinary clothing, can have. (White 512, 538) “Frenchness itself was a construct, and one that colonists such as Caillot. . . may have experienced more acutely once transplanted to the colonies, where they were confronted with the otherness of Indians.” (White 537)
Caillot’s story concludes with the day after Easter in 1730, where the Tunica tribe, along with some French colonists, tortured a Natchez woman hanging within a square frame of wooden beams, torching successive parts of her body while feasting on others. (White 497, 498) Referencing “the diplomatic significance of gifts of human bodies” to a number of Native American tribes, White details how the Tunica tribe had offered the captured woman as a gift to the governor of Louisiana after the Natchez had reportedly kidnapped, raped and performed various creative acts of bodily dismemberment and cannibalism upon French women. (White 521 f. 48) Like Hämäläinen’s account of the Comanches, where the Native American group was often the initiator of issues of diplomacy and commerce, the Tunica meant to use the Natchez woman as a political symbol of good will with their French allies. (White 519) on the other side of the coin, the Natchez and Comanche proved that Indian tribes could use their military prowess to exert control for land and property, “as the Natchez. . . re-exerted their authority over the land and their political and military dominance of the region,” and saw that “Louisiana’s most fertile agricultural settlement was decimated.” (White 502) These tactics could be brutal, but with cause. One contemporary author “perceived a psychological component to the torture of women, the purpose of which was to weaken the resolve of French troops stationed nearby as they laid siege to Natchez strongholds.” (White 527)
Though the governor officially denied the request, he allowed for the Tunica tribe to publicly torture the woman in front of, and at times with the participation of, the event’s numerous colonial attendees. French hostility against this woman was due to her being the wife of the Natchez chief and, with what White recognizes as the common “authority of Native women in the South in making decisions about the life or death of captives,” was thus largely responsible for the brutalization of French women. (White 519 f. 47) Caillot’s account, in which torture and anthropophagy were engaged in not only by the Tunica sauvages (the French word for Indian) but his fellow countrymen as well, would have been understood as alarming to any God-fearing French person. Even the acts cannibalism undertaken by the Tunica and the French onlookers took on a different meaning than that of their enemy. “For some Indian nations, the metaphor of consuming human flesh served as a symbol for the very act of enslavement,” while the French countrymen utilized cannibalism as a way to respond to this Natchez act, thereby giving similar activities entirely new cultural meanings. (White 529) According to White, “torture became a grotesque but also sensual act that held the promise, and the release, of gustatory pleasure.” (White 529) Clothing, nakedness and the flesh became materialized in these accounts, and were provided with underlying meanings that enabled their usage in exerting and depriving power.
Bibliography
Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
White, Sophie. “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3 (July 2013): 497-538.