Award Date
May 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Committee Member
Susan Johnson
Second Committee Member
Michael Green
Third Committee Member
Maria Casas
Fourth Committee Member
Andrew Kirk
Fifth Committee Member
Christopher Willoughby
Number of Pages
200
Abstract
“Desert Slavery: How the Old Spanish Trail Sustained Captivity and Coerced Labor in the North American West,” examines the Old Spanish Trail as a central corridor of enslavement in the North American West. Captive-taking and bondage regularly occurred along the Old Spanish Trail, which connected northern New Mexico to southern California. Indeed, the movement of enslaved people through the Great Basin helped maintain the Old Spanish Trail. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the development of coerced labor and enslavement as Spanish Mexican and Indigenous cultures intersected to create a system of slavery unique to New Mexico. However, as the Spanish empire expanded further north and west in the late eighteenth century, and then as Mexico achieved independence in the early nineteenth century, Euro-American traders, trappers, and settlers who entered the region adopted and spread these practices. The nineteenth century saw the introduction of Black chattel slavery to the area and the overlapping presence of these two systems of bondage along the trail. By the 1860s and 1870s, when the United States claimed the region, all forms of bondage were being curtailed, which helped bring an end to the use of the Old Spanish Trail. To the extent that previous historians have addressed bondage along the trail, they have focused on the Indigenous slave trade without highlighting the presence of Black chattel slavery. Yet the history of the trail is not complete without consideration of both systems of enslavement. This dissertation bridges the gap between the historiography of Black chattel slavery and Indigenous slavery along the Old Spanish Trail and the region it traversed.
Keywords
Chattel Slavery; Indigenous Slavery; Old Spanish Trail
Disciplines
United States History
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Phipps, Kristen Lynn, "Desert Slavery: How the Old Spanish Trail Sustained Captivity and Coerced Labor in the North American West" (2025). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 5317.
https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/5317
Rights
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