Bridles and Biscuits: Contraband Culture in Spanish East Texas

Breakfast and his horse’s bridle: these were what a Spanish soldier in 1790s Spanish East Texas traded for the unregulated goods found in his possession. Here Gary L. Pinkerton uncovers the true nature of contraband trade and why it was so pervasive. “This poor soldier,” Pinkerton writes, “was willing to ride bridle-less on horseback to Béxar and risk arrest so he could give his wife a gift. No nation on earth could stop that kind of trade.” The soldier’s confession further reveals that while some smugglers dealt in arms and livestock, most illicit trading at the time was carried out for convenience and economic survival rather than profit.

Bridles and Biscuits: Contraband Culture in Spanish East Texas explores the complex economies and shifting structures of a borderland environment. In 1773, as residents of Los Adaes were abruptly forced to relocate to Béxar, the Spanish retreat from the region created a greater opening for unregulated trade among French, American, and Italian settlers. For five years before Spanish subjects resettled Nacogdoches in 1779, the people forced out of Los Adaes forged a new existence on the Trinity River in a place they called Bucareli. There, Antonio Gil Ibarvo solidified his role as a key figure in contraband trade. Through the story of Ibarvo’s rise to become the leader of Nacogdoches and his subsequent arrest and removal from that post, Pinkerton demonstrates how the region that hosted the exiled Adaeseños “became the entry point for those with bigger goals than trading horses and skins.”

As Pinkerton concludes, borders are porous, and over time more was at stake than horse tack and breakfast. Bridles and Biscuits delivers new insights into this relatively unexplored era of colonial Texas history.