The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 107, July 2003 - April, 2004 Page: 504
660 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
3rd-On the necessity and advisability of establishing a flying artillery4 in those
provinces as part of the system for making war, as the one presently established in
those places is a little less than useless.
4th-On the [system] that should be established in the Floridas in order to
maintain ourselves there without losing ground.5
The plan presented below is the first element of Murillo's proposal.
The author divided the plan into two parts. The first consists of twenty-
four sections and contains a broad description of current conditions on
New Spain's northern frontier, with a detailed analysis of the problems in
the presidio system, down to the wastefulness of having drummers in cav-
alry companies. Like many officers brought up during the Age of En-
lightenment, Murillo could not fail but include a direct assault on the
Franciscan religious program, or as he titled section 23: "On how futile
and wasteful it is to the royal treasury to send missionaries to Western
America."
The second part of the plan consists of Murillo's solutions to all the
problems. In this section he raised the radical idea of replacing the tradi-
tional presidio companies with hussars and the flying companies with
chasseurs. In each case, Murillo found the dress and equipment of the
military on the northern frontier inadequate when compared with Euro-
pean models. For Murillo the soldado de cuera was a useless relic of the past
that needed urgent replacement if Spain was to successfully hold off the
challenges of hostile Indians and Anglo-Americans. To make his points as
clear as possible Murillo painted three watercolors representing the typi-
cal presidio "Soldado de cuera"" [Fig. 1], his ideal heavy cavalryman, which
he styled "Usares [Hussars] de Texas" [Fig. 2], and a light cavalryman, which
he styled "Cazadores [Chasseurs] de Nueva Vizcayd' [Fig. 3].
The separation of the watercolors from the plan has been the cause of
some confusion and misinformation.7 In 1965 J. Hefter and Francisco
Ferrer Llul presented a very brief article in Military Collector & Historian
magazine that misinterpreted both Murillo's proposal and the water-
colors that accompanied it. Instead of reading the plan as a proposal for
4 The Spanish reads artllena volante, that is, light field artillery.
5 Ram6n de Munllo to [Godoy], Aug 26, 1804, Secci6n de Gobierno, Audiencia de Santo Domingo,
legajo 2599 (Archivo General de Indias, Seville). Negative photostatic copy, Manuscript Division, mate-
rials copied from Spanish Archives, box 3845 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C )
* An excellent summary of the common soldiery on the frontier, although the analysis of racial infor-
mation has been superceded by more recent work on the imprecise and fluctuating character of racial
designations, is Max L Moorhead, "The Soldado de Cuera: Stalwart of the Spanish Borderlands,"Journal
of the West, 8 (Jan., 1969), 38-55-
7 Due to the special preservation needs of illustrative materials, maps, plats, and other special materi-
als were separated from the original documents and placed in a separate record group, Mapas y Pianos.
The watercolors associated with Murillo's plan were placed in a series titled Unlformes, although their re-
lationship to legajo 2599 was maintainedApril
504
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 107, July 2003 - April, 2004, periodical, 2004; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101224/m1/582/: accessed May 3, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.