Amy Turner BushnellHistory Departament, Brow UniversityThe John Carter Brown LibraryFlorida is the anomaly of the Borderlands. It has more in common with the maritime peripheries of Chile and the Philippines than with New Mexico, and its provinces came and went before the southwestern Provincias Internas were thought of. Yet the Florida archives, spanning three centuries, are a treasure to the historian of frontiers—not the Turnerian frontier of white men striking across the continent, but the older Iberian marchland, in which conquest alternated with convivencia. Florida, better known for guardacostas and missionaries than for colonists, was the setting for an experiment in coexistence, a gift-based compact between Indian chiefdoms and a Spanish presidio. The Spanish did not come up with this idea, but they were wise enough to comply with it. In Florida, the practice of gift giving survived into the mission period, articulating chiefdom to presidio and guaranteeing the colonial...