In February 1909, the Mindanao Herald published a special edition “commemorating a decennium of American occupation of the land of the farthest east and nearest west.” Edited by John A. Hackett, a former intelligence operative for the U.S. Army, the small-but-influential publication served as a mouthpiece for white settler interests in the Southern Philippines. In the issue, Hackett and other prominent Americans made a sustained case for the settlement and development of what was then known as the Moro Province. Situated along maritime trade routes, Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago lay “nearer to New York and San Francisco than many of our Middle and Western States.” The world possessed ever fewer “unexplored lands,” Hackett lamented, but “Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago lay out in the open.”Footnote ¹ The U.S. “opening” of Davao, Mindanao's agricultural heartland, read “like a chapter in President Roosevelt's ‘Winning of the West.’” Much like the “early settlers on the frontier,” the men developing Mindanao-Sulu also brought civilizing influences to the “wild people” of the region, mobilizing capital to succeed where centuries of “military and missionary” efforts had failed.Footnote ² Collapsing the vast distances between the American West and the Philippine South, the Herald offered a portrait of U.S. power and mission unbound by continental or oceanic limitation. “The lamented fate of the noble red man has long since ceased to inspire our bards,” it concluded. “The forces that set to work on the bleak Atlantic coast have slowly worked their way around the world. They are here, and it is only a question of how long until the map is re-made.”Footnote ³

Remaking the map began a decade prior, when the United States assumed sovereignty over the southern islands of the Philippine Archipelago from Spain. Spanish imperial control over this large and ethnically diverse space was for centuries merely notional, standing in stark contrast to the extensively Catholicized colonial state in the north. Many of the inhabitants of the south adhered to Islam, and a variety of indigenous animist groups lived on Mindanao.Footnote ⁴ Along the coasts and waterways, the Sulu and Maguindanao sultanates maintained independent links to Island Southeast Asia in the face of growing colonial incursion, only faltering against the Spanish in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While the Philippine-American War raged further north, U.S. forces maintained a fragile peace in the south, recruiting collaborators among the Moro and Lumad leadership in order to avoid direct conflict. This changed after 1902, when the collapse of the Philippine Republic in Luzon and the Visayas allowed the Americans to consolidate rule in Mindanao-Sulu. Military campaigns aimed at eliminating indigenous opposition became a common occurrence in these early years.Footnote ⁵

Against a backdrop of armed conflict, the Philippine Commission established the Moro Province in the summer of 1903. Partitioned from the remainder of the colonial state, this Muslim-majority sub-state operated under the direction of a series of military proconsuls from 1903 until 1914. Although subject to a “Filipinization” campaign after 1914, the region remained under direct American leadership until the 1920s, and white officials and private citizens played pivotal roles there until the Second World War.Footnote ⁶ Attempts to shape the Muslim South were at their height during the decade of the Moro Province, when Americans deployed a battery of coercive techniques to repattern the peoples and spaces they governed.Footnote ⁷ Provincial officials emphasized the importance of market development and integration, attempted to standardize native labor and settlement practices, and linked the success of the civilizing mission to state-run schools, secular judiciaries, and modern health-care programs. The south presented opportunities for colonial experimentation not possible in the fractious political climate of the north. Alongside timeworn fantasies of ethnocultural reform, boosters identified the installation of a white settler class in the Southern Philippines as vital to the national-imperial agenda.

“The main thing is that Mindanao is one of the most promising lands on this terrestrial globe,” a 1907 Herald editorial declared. It was there that white pioneers were “laying the foundation stones of a mighty empire.”Footnote ⁸ Belying this grandiose language, the brief-but-concerted push to populate Mindanao-Sulu with Euro-American settlers remains an obscure topic. These episodes, however, reveal much about how the national and the imperial were bound in the imaginaries of those who came to the Southern Philippines after 1898. This article parses the relationship between colonial fantasy and praxis on the Philippines' southern frontier. In doing so, it argues that the settler project in Mindanao-Sulu cannot be understood without reference to U.S. continental expansion. Empire builders consciously modeled their interpretations of the Muslim South on frontier vernaculars and lived experiences imported from the other side of the Pacific. The push to “open” the Southern Philippines contained many of the same commercial and civilizational preoccupations of the American West. Settlers tied the establishment of market capitalism to the racial redemption of the premodern native, echoing their pioneer forbearers. Yet the project was unstable from its inception, frustrated by the inability of authorities to lure adequate numbers of white settlers, beset by frequent labor shortages, and suffused with fears of the tropical environment and the Moro-Lumad “Indian.” These disorientations reveal a colonial state beholden to a “New West” narrative yet increasingly looking to other frontiers, national and imperial alike. The following tracks the rise and fall of white settlement in Mindanao-Sulu, from the adoption of the New West leitmotif to its mongrelization in the face of practical obstacles to rule.

Much of the literature on this topic comes from scholars writing histories of the Philippine nation. Debates over the role of Mindanao in Philippine state formation, the prominence of Japanese planters in prewar Davao, and the experiences of Lumad communities in the Southern Philippines have generated compelling scholarship by Patricio Abinales, Patricia Irene Dacudao, and others.Footnote ⁹ Recent work by Christopher John Chanco assesses Mindanao's continued depiction as “a place in need of improvement” in the Philippine national imaginary, providing an intellectual genealogy of settlement in the region from the Spanish period to the present.Footnote ¹⁰ Beginning with the late Peter Gowing, American researchers have explored the interconnections between militarized governance on the U.S. and Philippine frontiers. Joshua Gedacht's writings analyze the colonial massacres at Wounded Knee and Bud Dajo in comparative context, while Michael Hawkins considers the role of Native Americans in his comprehensive account of U.S. imperial race-making in the Islamic Philippines.Footnote ¹¹ This piece consciously connects these lines of inquiry. The settler south of the post-independence Philippines began as a New West: a transoceanic frontier powered by utopian visions of unfettered wealth and violent transformation.Footnote ¹²

The ties that bind the American West and the Muslim South allow us to consider how settler formations develop between nations, colonies, and empires—and to interrogate entrenched lines of demarcation. As Margaret Jacobs observes, debates over where U.S. settler colonialism ends and nationhood begins remain unfinished, and extraterritorial possessions further complicate the topic.Footnote ¹³ Manifest Destiny proved a fungible expansionist philosophy, its language readily exported to overseas colonies. The vicissitudes of fortune among white settlers in the Southern Philippines resembled those of their kin in the American West, as did their preoccupations with environmental management, racial dominance, labor acquisition, and “universal commodification and capital accumulation.”Footnote ¹⁴ Tracing the arc of white settlement in the Muslim South through its many adaptations, I heed recent calls to de-exceptionalize U.S. history by holding a mirror up to its agglomerated national and imperial impulses.Footnote ¹⁵ While the continental frontier remained a primary translational paradigm in Mindanao-Sulu, Americans sought inspiration and guidance from other coercive zones, ranging from the Jim Crow South to neighboring European colonies. Recent studies have demonstrated that permeability and exchange were built into the late-colonial world, and U.S. overseas possessions were not exempt from this phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁶ The nascent state in the Southern Philippines had a bifurcated identity, acting as both a national frontier continuum and a colony among colonies. Regional boosters used the New West narrative to sell the Muslim South as a “white man's country,” but Americans also looked elsewhere when expedient.Footnote ¹⁷ What follows explores how these settler spaces were conceived, implemented, and contested.

Surveying the Moro Province, Leonard Wood saw “a new West in Mindanao.” The territory he governed resembled the “trackless” American frontier of fifty years prior, and was ready for “the pioneer … [to clear] the way to civilization.” The Mindanao Herald agreed. “The Philippines are no different from all other frontiers of the United States,” its editorial page argued in 1906, pushing for land subsidies, increased investment in road and rail infrastructure, and the deregulation of Mindanao's forests.Footnote ¹⁸ The Herald's articles from the period reliably echoed the major talking points of colonial boosters in the Muslim South, which included the desirability of extensive settlement by pioneering American men; the use of the American West and Native American populations as analogues and guideposts for interpreting Mindanao-Sulu; and the rejection of skepticism about the nation's overseas agendas. These assessments underpinned the colonial project in the Southern Philippines, and the programs enacted there cannot be fully understood without reference to them.

American accounts of Mindanao from the early twentieth century invariably described it in terms of potential and transformation. The island was edenic, offering the prospective settler a wealth of opportunities. Dismissive of native settlement and agriculture, Americans presented the region as a terra nullius, deploying the colonial trope of the “empty” space to marginalize or erase precolonial societies.Footnote ¹⁹ Mindanao was “unmapped and unexplored,” claimed the anthropologist and colonial official David Prescott Barrows, and had “hardly been penetrated by white men.”Footnote ²⁰ In order for colonization to proceed, Americans had to “scientifically secularize the various mythological aspects of the south's geography.”Footnote ²¹ They accomplished this through a host of initiatives. Military intelligence-gathering expeditions trekked into the hinterlands, collecting demographic, agricultural, and epidemiological information; scientific data flowed in from Spanish sources; and government bodies like the Bureau of Lands made the region knowable through assiduous mapping.Footnote ²² Authorities encouraged enterprising individuals to explore mining, forestry, and plantation agriculture, with the hope that these activities would make the Muslim South “one of the wealthiest areas in the world.”Footnote ²³ Government-produced pamphlets pressed “immigrants and capitalists” to settle on Mindanao, and officials declared the “uninhabited” region held the Philippines' “great undeveloped natural resources.”Footnote ²⁴

Part of what made Mindanao so attractive as a white settler space was its relatively low population density. In Cotabato, for instance, this translated to around eighteen inhabitants per square mile. Booster literature portrayed the Christian north as overcrowded and poverty ridden. Worse still, it was plagued by the feudal misrule of rural landholders, Spanish leftovers who terrorized the peasantry and obstructed the colonial state.Footnote ²⁵ In comparison, the Mindanao interior, with its jungles and highlands punctuated only by the occasional Moro or Lumad village, presented a different sort of opportunity. Unburdened by Spain's cultural detritus, the state could bring natives into the colonial fold through a combination of incentive and coercion. Cheap labor, abundant land, and progressive military rule meant that in theory the prospective settler had all he needed to thrive. A 1905 editorial forcefully summarized this position:

The paper further claimed that “millions of acres” of hardwood, “productive” soil, “inexhaustible” rivers, ready access to the China market, and pliable native laborers made the Muslim South irresistible. With a modest amount of start-up capital, enterprising settlers could “get in on the ground floor” of what promised to be Asia's most bountiful colony.Footnote ²⁷

In his work on French imperialism, Robert Aldrich identifies the “colonial man” as a glimmering composite of “brave soldier … wise administrator …[and] hard-working colonist” standing in civilizational juxtaposition to the irrational, anti-modern native.Footnote ²⁸ American writers described the ideal Mindanao colonist in similar terms, connecting him through a metaphorical genealogy to “his father who builded the vast empire known as the West.” Heirs to the plainsmen, this new generation of “hardy Americans,” were “braving the jungle and the hardships of pioneer life to delve out the agricultural and forest riches.” Alongside commercial motives, they also carried “civilization” to the peoples of Mindanao-Sulu by encouraging sedentism and industry. Possessing national traits of fearlessness and independence, these vanguard capitalists would bolster state authority where it was flagging and “constitute some of their own” where it was absent.Footnote ²⁹ As in the era of continental conquest, the peoples of the Southern Philippines would either profit under settler tutelage or be cowed into submission by the colonial pioneer's intellectual and material superiority. Boosters hoped to attract settlers with this masculinist vision of the imperial fringe, which fetishized initiative, strenuous living, and wealth generation while also indulging in the self-righteous language of the civilizing mission.

The colonial pioneer's foil was the Moro “Indian.”Footnote ³⁰ Institutional and individual memories of warfare against Native Americans influenced understandings of Muslim and Lumad groups in the Philippines. Central figures in the colonization of Mindanao-Sulu spent their early careers on the American frontier, as did an untold number of enlisted men stationed in the Muslim South. Governors Leonard Wood and John Pershing fought in campaigns against the Apache and Sioux, respectively. Hugh Lenox Scott, the influential district governor of Sulu, participated in expeditions against the Sioux, Nez Percé, and Cheyenne, while civilian governor Frank Carpenter served on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.Footnote ³¹ Soldiers, settlers, and officials mined these experiences to create typologies for their new colonial wards. Army officer Hugh Drum compared the Maranao Moros of the Lanao district to the Navajo and Apache. Like the latter, Maranao warriors were “fleet, courageous with a fatalistic spirit, [and] physically strong.”Footnote ³² The long-time district governor of Zamboanga John Finley obliterated all contextual separation in his calls for the moral and material “development of our Indian wards in the Philippines.”Footnote ³³

Proponents of this narrative believed Spain's empire, with its antique emphasis on religious conversion, was always doomed to failure in the Muslim South. Americans identified the Christian Filipino as an effeminate, duplicitous, and servile by-product of the Spanish—an exemplar of colonial tutelage gone wrong. The “brave, proud, warlike, independent, non-submissive” peoples of the south presented their own distinct challenges, but were more pliable than the half-civilized northerners.Footnote ³⁴ Debates over reform inevitably circled back to the U.S. frontier. Writing for Collier's, Frederick Palmer argued that Mindanao could be a site of economic wonders, but feared the unmotivated native. “The Moro we can never educate to work, any more than we did the American Indian,” he wrote.Footnote ³⁵ Others took contrasting positions, including provincial treasurer Fred Thompson, who believed the agricultural skills of the Moros were “far superior to the American Indian.” John Finley agreed, studying settler successes and failures among Native Americans to develop a system whereby Moros and Lumad became “self supportive agents rather than [continuing] as vagrant parasitic nomads.”Footnote ³⁶ The Moro-as-Indian functioned as convenient shorthand, rationalizing civilizational tasks and minimizing disorientation by relocating a new frontier alongside an old one. It also provided comfort: Native Americans were fierce enemies, but ones who ultimately submitted before the colossus that was the white settler state. Perhaps the same could be expected in Mindanao-Sulu.

By inserting the colonization of the Southern Philippines into national histories of continental expansion, U.S. colonials provided themselves with powerful rationales for spatial and ethnocultural dominion. With support from Manila and Washington, boosters argued, the “right class” of settlers would arrive, transforming the nomadic native and the nonproductive soil alike. Reduced government tariffs and expansive new road and rail systems would incentivize development. Cosmopolitan hubs like Zamboanga, Davao, and Cotabato would provide a local market for goods and connect settlers to supraregional commercial flows throughout colonized Southeast Asia and beyond. In some visions, the Southern Philippines would even be partitioned from the remainder of the archipelago and designated a permanent territorial possession of the United States.Footnote ³⁷ “What is needed here is an influx of such people as built up the West,” a 1904 report read. “The natives would be stimulated by their example and educated by their work, and the possibilities of these islands would soon be apparent.”Footnote ³⁸

Bolstered by triumphal histories of national frontier conquest, Americans set about creating their New West in the Islamic Philippines. Those advocating a permanent American presence did so by tying the economic opening of the Muslim South to the racial-civilizational mandates of colonial culture in the early twentieth century. The Philippine Commission formalized these mandates in June 1903 in its creation of the Moro Province, a partitioned sub-state run almost exclusively by military or ex-military officials. Operating out of the multiethnic port city of Zamboanga in Western Mindanao, Governor Leonard Wood and his legislative council delegated authority to district governors in Sulu, Cotabato, Lanao, Davao, and Zamboanga itself. From the outset, leading American figures in the south saw white settlement and native progress as inextricably bound. Annual provincial reports urged the Philippine Commission to open up greater and greater swathes of territory for potential settlers. Only through “liberal inducements” of land, Wood argued, could the region “be developed to the best interests of the inhabitants and of the United States.”Footnote ³⁹

Zamboanga was the political, economic, and cultural nucleus of the Southern Philippines under American rule. Inherited from the Spanish, the city became what Joshua Gedacht has called an “urban showcase” for a “prosperous, cosmopolitan, and modern Moroland future.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Zamboanga dwarfed the other communities that dotted the Mindanao and Sulu littorals, and was home to the governing bodies and businesses fueling colonial development. Befitting its centrality, the city received numerous infrastructural upgrades and was advertised in promotional literature as “the Key to the Orient”: a modern, hygienic colonial community linked commercially to Australia, China, the East Indies, and Singapore.Footnote ⁴¹ At any given time, about half of the Euro-American residents of the Muslim South lived there. As such, Zamboanga provides a clear portrait of how white society was structured. Between 1903 and 1914, military administrators occupied the upper strata in Moroland. These men and their families filtered in and out of the region, with some staying on as private citizens after their service ended. They shared the same social space as the permanent white merchant and professional classes.Footnote ⁴² Elite Americans mimicked their European colonial counterparts by living in tropical-style homes staffed by Filipino or Moro domestic servants. They relaxed in racially-demarcated leisure spaces like the Zamboanga Golf and Country Club and the Overseas Club, both of which remained “whites only” well into the 1930s. This dynamic also existed in other major communities like Cotabato, Jolo, and Dansalan, albeit in more limited ways.Footnote ⁴³

In the early 1900s, the population of the Moro Province numbered around 500,000 and was comprised primarily of Muslim, Lumad, and, to a lesser extent, Christian Filipino groups. The 1903 census of the Philippine Islands listed 638 “civilized” white inhabitants and 1,273 “mixed” residents, a category into which some of the Spanish settlers inevitably fell. There was also one African American resident on the island, an ex-soldier identified in the census as a “foreign-born black.”Footnote ⁴⁴ A decade later, figures for the city of Zamboanga included 387 white residents, many of whom were government employees or in “commerce or professional activities.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Patricio Abinales estimates that at the height of settlement the white population numbered around 5,000.Footnote ⁴⁶ Short-term residencies were common and not included on census documents. Curious scholars, representatives of foreign business interests, missionaries, and a range of colonial wanderers made the Muslim South their temporary home.Footnote ⁴⁷

Outside of the administrative and commercial elites in Zamboanga, the province and local press encouraged “immigration of the right type”: industrious white men who were able to secure capital and manage native labor. In 1911, near the height of white settlement, there were eighty-nine plantations in the Moro Province owned by Americans or Europeans. Fifty-four were in Davao, thirteen in Zamboanga, eleven in Lanao, six in the Sulu Archipelago, and five in Cotabato.Footnote ⁴⁸ Philippine Constabulary files provide an eclectic group portrait of men pushing forward the settlement project in isolated spaces. The planters, many of whom were ex-soldiers, juggled multiple occupations, feuded with one another, and married local women.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their interracial intimacies conjured the specter of civilizational transgression and often alienated them from elite society in the larger communities. Cognizant of this “town and country” separation, planters built their own clubhouses and formed mutual aid societies like the Zamboanga Planters Association.Footnote ⁵⁰

Transforming the southern frontier required sustained governmental and military intervention. Governor Leonard Wood, his legislative council, and the Mindanao Herald spent the early years of the Moro Province advocating for the extension of public land laws to the region. Provincial boosters chafed at the planters' designation as squatters and the refusal of the Philippine Commission to dictate land allocations.Footnote ⁵¹ Calling the situation a “parallel case to the western part of the United States,” provincial treasurer Fred Thompson argued that a proper land law would “bring an influx of settlers and capital, and the future possibilities, financial and otherwise, [are] beyond estimate.”Footnote ⁵² The Mindanao Herald spent much of 1904 and 1905 openly blaming the powers-that-be in Manila for settler insecurity, fuming that proposed forty-acre homestead legislation was discouraging to the American “accustomed to the generous provisions of the laws applicable to the public domain of the United States.”Footnote ⁵³ Manila extended the Land Act to the Moro Province in late 1905, recognizing previously established American and European plantations and creating a process by which individuals and corporations could apply for property titles. Even so, complaints remained that the small clause grants left “millions of acres of virgin soil absolutely idle.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Expecting accelerated settlement, authorities in Zamboanga built new wharves, opened dockside warehouses, and briefly subsidized a government steamship to transport people and product between the ports of the south. Short on support from Manila, they also forged relationships with European banking concerns and shipping companies operating out of Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies.Footnote ⁵⁵ Beyond the capital, military and civilian expeditions undertook a range of measures aimed at demystifying the southern frontier, stitching together the piecemeal information they gathered into a series of knowable colonial terrains. Surveying parties conducted census reports, compiled topographical surveys, and engaged in geologic reconnaissance.Footnote ⁵⁶ The cumulative effect of this work was evident in Moro Province reports, which each year became more precise in their discussions of climate, growing conditions, and areas of mineralogical value.Footnote ⁵⁷ The penal colony at San Ramon, fifteen miles north of Zamboanga, became a government-run farm meant to showcase Mindanao's biodiversity. San Ramon's mandate grew rapidly between 1905 and 1908, with crops expanding to include coconuts, hemp, coffee, rubber trees, and a variety of vegetables. The mountains behind the estate provided data on the effects of elevation on different crops and the farm furnished seeds and cuttings to planters to encourage diversification. George Langhorne, aide to Governor Wood, declared the farm to be a “model institution” for teaching colonists and natives how to “cultivate the soil in a scientific manner.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The Moro Province's endeavors were not entirely unique, of course. Mapping, census-taking, land legislation, whites-only spaces, and the promotion of market capitalism all functioned as state-building tools in other regions of the colony.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, many prominent Americans viewed the Southern Philippines' trajectory as more akin to Hawai'i than Luzon. In this reading, the transformational projects reshaping Mindanao-Sulu paved the way for assertive settler colonization and eventual incorporation into the United States.Footnote ⁶⁰ Campaigns that moved from frontier boosterism to outright separatism occurred in 1905–6 and again in 1909–10, at one point even gaining the support of staunch anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan. Visiting Mindanao in 1906, the Nebraskan presidential candidate argued the south should be set aside for long-term American settlement.Footnote ⁶¹ The Mindanao Herald published Bryan's findings, expanding upon them with its own prescriptions: “Divested of all sickly sentimentality, we are here for the same reason that we are in Louisiana, Texas, California, and Oregon—for national aggrandizement.”Footnote ⁶² Further north, Manila elites jostled over Mindanao's place in the Philippine polity, an issue that remained contentious through independence and beyond.Footnote ⁶³

Authorities promoted most sections of the province as suitable settler spaces. By American standards, each district was underdeveloped and presented unique opportunities: the Zamboanga Peninsula was situated near the capital; Cotabato had rich river valleys; the “hill people” of Davao were a ready source of labor; the islands of the Sulu Archipelago were integrated into maritime trade; even Lanao, a hotbed of anti-colonial resistance, was marketed as a region of great risk and great reward. After the extension of the Land Act, aspiring pioneers acquired their acreage through a leasing clause, which required them to complete an official application and have a topographical sketch made of their property.Footnote ⁶⁴ Willing to protect squatters rights and eager for Euro-American migration, Moro Province representatives boasted of how they “anticipated” settler needs.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The Mindanao Herald provided reliably positive coverage, promoting each new plantation, timber company, or mining concern as evidence of the viability of long-term colonization. On the island of Cagayan de Sulu, for instance, planter William Stratton was “laying the foundation for a great white man's country in Moroland.” With eight thousand coconut trees and several hundred head of cattle, Stratton planned to cultivate the entire island, all while acting as “little white father” to its Muslim inhabitants.Footnote ⁶⁶ National and provincial officials often blurred the line between government, business, and settlement. Superintendent of schools Charles R. Cameron helped found the Moro Plantation Co. near Zamboanga, while Constabulary officer Frank S. Dewitt established the Sulu Development Company on Siasi, and the former treasurer of Cagayan de Misamis opened a commercial farm near Lake Lanao. Further north, long-time interior minister and architect of colonial rule in the Philippines Dean Worcester established his own coconut plantation.Footnote ⁶⁷

The district of Davao became home to the most vigorous Euro-American community outside of Zamboanga. Established by Spanish explorers in 1858 as Nueva Guipuzcoa and settled by mestizo planters, Davao held considerable appeal for those wishing to grow hemp, coconuts, and other agricultural products.Footnote ⁶⁸ Authorities actively promoted settlement efforts in the district, going so far as to give potential planters guidelines for what to expect if they took up residency there. A planter with a “good constitution” and $100 per month to live on could expect returns on his hemp plants within two years, boosters declared.Footnote ⁶⁹ Focused on permanency, Davao plantation owners induced Lumad communities from the interior to move to the coast “where their labor [would] be of equal value to them and to the planters.” Reports spoke of these efforts in missionary tones, with the “kindly” planters teaching the hill tribes the “desirability of labor and guiding them along the first stretches of the road leading to a settled life and its resulting advantage.” Not coincidentally, the push for native sedentism coincided with the Davao planters' need for an inexpensive, proximate labor pool. By 1907, the “sane, sensible, peaceful, and progressive work of the plantations in Davao” had attracted four thousand Moro and Lumad laborers and their families.Footnote ⁷⁰ To this end, Americans established a “handsome and up-to-date” marketplace and workers were encouraged to send their children to plantation schools, where they were inculcated into the gospel of work.Footnote ⁷¹

The plan to build up Mindanao-Sulu on the back of a globally-connected plantation economy did not go unchallenged. Despite loud support from the Mindanao Herald and a cross-section of the colonial elite in Zamboanga, the settler approach and its streamlined vision of economic and moral progress met with doubt in some corners. Governor Tasker Bliss believed that resettling and training Moro and Lumad farmers would better accomplish the rapid transformation of the region. Although Bliss saw white leadership as integral to the native “advance in civilization,” he pessimistically declared in 1907 that “the white man will never come here in such numbers as to make even a beginning of ousting the native from his occupation of the soil.”Footnote ⁷² Rather, uplifting the indigenous population through improved infrastructure and industrial education would be the catalyst for transforming Mindanao-Sulu. The settlers also faced powerful opposition from Filipino politicos in Manila and their American allies, who viewed the south as an integral part of any future Philippine nation-state.Footnote ⁷³ On-the-ground factors ultimately proved the biggest challenge to the success of white settlement, however.

Achieving sufficient levels of white migration created issues from the outset. Permanent Anglo-Saxon settlement remained the gold standard, but the allure of frontier wealth was tempered for many by fears of an environment unsuited to the white body. Overwhelmed by parasitic tropical surroundings and isolated from civilization, the Euro-American pioneer exposed himself to a host of potential threats: physical collapse; sexual congress with natives; substance use disorders; madness.Footnote ⁷⁴ Newspapers gave apocalyptic descriptions of Mindanao's climactic and epidemiological conditions, while the complaint of “Philippinitis”—a blanket term for all tropical maladies, real or imagined—was commonplace among soldiers and settlers.Footnote ⁷⁵ One of the final white planters in Mindanao, Vic Hurley, wrote in his memoirs of deteriorating physical health and equilibrium while living alone in the wilds of the Zamboanga Peninsula. Suffering from malarial fever, he fantasized about “three thousand billion little parasites” running through his veins and slept with a revolver by his bedside, convinced he would be attacked and killed by local Moros. “This is my reward for going to impossible places where no white man should be,” he concluded grimly.Footnote ⁷⁶ An account of Hurley's book in the Saturday Review of Literature was titled, fittingly, “No Place for a White Man.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The potentially deracinating effects of the environment complicated the booster narrative and stoked fears about the viability of the settler project. Although the conquest of the western frontier remained a dominant leitmotif, officials broadened their spatial imaginaries to include other models of colonial settlement and labor. In 1902, Senator John Tyler Morgan pitched Mindanao as future home for the African American population of the Jim Crow South. Built upon white supremacist fantasies of removing “surplus” blacks from the southern states, Morgan's plan tapped into the broader push to transplant racialized labor regimes abroad. As Jason Colby and others have shown, during this same period, U.S. corporate interests in the Caribbean Basin actively adapted Jim Crow practices in their operations.Footnote ⁷⁸

Military brass in the Philippines gave Morgan's ideas extensive consideration. General George W. Davis, commander of Mindanao-Sulu, argued that resettling African Americans in Mindanao would ease racial tensions in the United States and lessen domestic opposition to colonial empire. Expanding considerably on Morgan's plan, Davis advocated a system that looked not only to the U.S. south, but also British models in the West Indies and India. White sugarcane producers could relocate to the Southern Philippines and sign African American men to labor contracts. The latter would bring their families, remaining on Mindanao after their contracts expired and “bettering themselves by engaging in abaca, coffee, cacao and rice culture.” By importing “industrious immigrants from our southern states,” Davis argued, the United States could mimic colonial success stories in the Caribbean and South America.Footnote ⁷⁹ The idea of importing settler populations racially suited to the environment continued after the establishment of the Moro Province. Following the extension of the Land Act in 1905, Leonard Wood attempted to secure Italian farmers, citing the “little difference” between the climate of Mindanao and the Mezzogiorno. Authorities also tapped persecuted Armenians from the Ottoman Empire as potential agriculturalists. The Mindanao Herald labeled them the “advance guard of European labor.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The problem of labor and how to solve it vexed colonial officials. Anglo-Saxon settlement figures never reached the dizzying heights predicted by boosters, the global search for suitable agriculturalists faltered, and the logistics of recreating the plantation economies of the Jim Crow South and Caribbean Basin proved impracticable. The colonial project in the Muslim South increasingly relied upon “reclaiming” indigenous peoples from “their savage mode of living” through the “blessing of civilization as presented by the western pioneers.”Footnote ⁸¹ Stripped of bold language, this meant transforming indigenous groups into ground-level producers in a white-led market economy. To the elites of the Moro Province, the settler and native existed in a state of mutual interdependence, with the success of the former tied to the uplift of the latter. Every official in the Moro Province, it seemed, had an answer to the question of native labor.

In Zamboanga, John Finley founded the Moro Exchanges, a series of local markets doubling as experiments in the civilizing effects of commerce on the non-Christians of the Southern Philippines. Ideologically aligned with provincial settlement plans, the exchanges encouraged sedentism, industrial productivity, and a respect for property rights.Footnote ⁸² District governor of Lanao John McAuley Palmer directed construction of a new town called Dansalan, adjacent to the native settlement of Marawi, and urged white traders and planters to harness the “industrial capacity” of the Maranao Moros. He consciously looked to extractive zones in the European colonial sphere for guidance, adapting compulsory labor programs from the Dutch East Indies. “Anyone who has had occasion to study [the Moros] or similar peoples in Malaysia,” Palmer argued, would understand the “necessity” of enforced labor.Footnote ⁸³

Native populations resisted the restructuring of their societies. The settler push occurred against a backdrop of anti-state conflagrations in every district of the Moro Province: Lanao in 1902–1913; Cotabato in 1904–1905; Zamboanga in 1909–1911; and repeatedly in Sulu from 1902–1913. These revolts arose from a variety of grievances, including unpopular taxation schemes, enforced disarmament, newly-established secular schools, and the erosion of customary leadership structures. U.S. colonial rule, with its far-reaching transformational agendas, challenged Moro and Lumad societies, most of whom were accustomed to either limited Spanish interference or, in certain parts of the Mindanaoan interior, complete self-governance.Footnote ⁸⁴ Natives responded to the rationalization and remapping of their lands with suspicion, and at times outright hostility. Moros and Lumad became figures of fear for Americans, who portrayed them as violent and unbeholden to the colonial order of things. The Mindanao Herald worried that the 1902 murder of two miners near Zamboanga spoke to the “unsettled conditions” of the province, warning that future claims could go unworked. The paper rendered the 1907 killings of American lumbermen George Case and J. H. Verment on the island of Basilan in lurid detail. Reduced to “ghastly heaps of livid flesh” by the Moro pirate Jikiri and his band, the two dead men provided the paper opportunities to indulge in now-familiar comparatives: “The murders have stirred this community to a sense of the dangers which attend to isolated Americans and Europeans who are facing the wilderness with the spirit of the Western pioneers in an effort to push a little farther the bounds of our civilization.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Disciplinary labor hierarchies strained relations between settlers and Lumad groups in Davao. In early 1906, district governor Edward Bolton assigned a white planter to be the headman of the newly-established Tagacaolo tribal ward. Beset by worker shortages, Americans believed that co-opting the leadership roles of local datus would allow them to draw more Lumad to their plantations. Bolton's plan reordered the social structures of local indigenous communities, giving rise to a series of religious movements advocating for Euro-American expulsion or elimination. Lumad and Moro prophets channeled the energies of new deities, promising protection through ritual dances and talismanic fetish objects.Footnote ⁸⁶ Steeped in national frontier histories, American officials contextualized the phenomenon through reference to the Ghost Dance movement of the Lakota and Paiute peoples.Footnote ⁸⁷ The comparisons were not entirely inaccurate. Experiencing the social upheavals of colonial incursion, Lumad societies sought mystical-millenarian solutions.Footnote ⁸⁸

Resistance mounted as planters deployed graft and violence to grow their operations, and in June 1906 a Tagacaolo leader named Mungalayon assassinated Governor Bolton near the village of Malalag. Although archival records frame the district governor as the unwitting victim of native savagery, his role in establishing a planter state at the expense of Lumad groups likely contributed to his demise. Bolstered by “charms” from the prophet Simbanan, Mungalayon and his followers led colonial forces on a two-month long chase that ended with the datu's death.Footnote ⁸⁹ Despite the government crackdown in the wake of the murder, native resistance persisted in Davao. In 1908, Bolton's successor Allen Walker ordered the arrests of scores of members of a heterodox religious dance movement who had vowed to assassinate planters and government officials.Footnote ⁹⁰

The coercive character of the settler-native encounter created an atmosphere of ambient violence. Americans lamented the lack of funds available to build up the region, difficulty securing new groups of settlers, lukewarm support from Washington and Manila, and native indifference or resistance to civilizing projects. Some officials worried over the capacity for settler violence. “We all know what men will do on a remote frontier,” Tasker Bliss wrote in the summer of 1906, “where they are removed from the immediate operation of law and from observation and criticism.”Footnote ⁹¹ Others approved of such excesses. Speaking to the Mindanao Herald, an officer from the 28th Infantry declared “extermination” as the only “cure for the present state in Mindanao.”Footnote ⁹² The editorial board of the Herald went further, staking out a grim social Darwinian position. If natives refused to get on board “they must starve”; if they fought the Americans, “they must die.” Endorsing a policy of “shoot first and explain afterwards,” the paper determined that colonial success “must be written in blood.”Footnote ⁹³ Visiting journalists framed military expeditions against Moro groups along a frontier continuum. The running battles with the Maguindanao leader Datu Ali in 1904–1905, for instance, “marked all but the last phase of that war of extermination which the American race has waged for nearly three centuries against first the red and then the brown race.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The need to harness native labor, however, undermined the desire to eliminate those who challenged the new status quo. This tension produced violent, contradictory rule. A proving ground for pioneer masculinity and commercial acumen, the settler zone also functioned as a blood-stained crucible replete with intractable racial conflict, questionable civilizational outcomes, and potential threats to the white body.

Mindanao never became the “only white man's country in the Far East.” The post-1914 Filipinization of government agencies also reoriented settlement plans, with nationalist politicians in Manila regarding the south as a “territorial asset” and pursuing legislation that would accelerate Christian Filipino migration there. The Muslim South was increasingly integrated into the Philippine geo-body, and experimental settlement projects such as the “rice colonies” in Cotabato and Lanao probed the limits of Moro and Lumad tolerance for Christian colonists.Footnote ⁹⁵ Frustrated by reduced government support and the growing improbability of partition, white settlers began to depart in greater numbers. This downturn coincided with the growth of Japanese plantations in Davao. These new planters cultivated important patronage relationships with northern politicians and tapped into Japanese trade networks to move their cash crops, in effect succeeding where white settlers had failed. On the eve of the Second World War, over seventeen thousand Japanese residents lived in Davao and dominated commerce there.Footnote ⁹⁶ Continued U.S. sovereignty over military affairs and foreign policy during the Commonwealth Era (1935–42; 1945–46) meant the Euro-American enclave in Zamboanga continued to thrive, so much so that Constabulary officer Charles Ivins called it a “white man's haven” during the 1930s.Footnote ⁹⁷ An aggressive embrace of frontier development also survived the white settler movement. Millions of Christian Filipinos journeyed to Mindanao in the pre- and postwar years seeking financial and social mobility unavailable to them in the north. Facing real population pressures, the government of the Philippines encouraged “internal” resettlement. By the 1960s, around one-third of the residents on Mindanao were migrants.Footnote ⁹⁸ These new arrivals inherited and built upon settler notions of the region's possibilities and dangers, with Mindanao remaining a “zone of darkness, savagery, and instability.” Thus an imperial frontier became a national one.Footnote ⁹⁹

Of course, cross-pollinating frontiers drove Euro-American settlement in the first place. White rule did not survive in the Southern Philippines and settlers did not arrive in predicted droves, but this was not for lack of effort. As shown, colonial boosters created a New West narrative grounded in antecedents from what Thomas McCormick calls the “first empire” in North America.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Virginal soil, cheap land, endless natural resources, and mutable indigenous populations all factored into the stories that settlers told about Mindanao-Sulu. Replicating the acquisitive and incorporative programs of the American West on the Southeast Asian imperial fringe took on familiar forms: environmental transformation through agriculture and industry; racial reformation through the incentivization of sedentist labor; and demographic restructuring through migratory schemes. Embedded in the Progressive Era psyche, these notions traveled across the Pacific with ambitious Euro-American pioneers. Myriad obstacles disrupted their application. Support from Manila was lukewarm; the fecund tropical environment presented unique challenges to settler bodies; and continued American rule in the archipelago remained an open question. Faced with the prospect of squandering the bounty of the land, boosters considered importing “surplus” African Americans from the Jim Crow South and farmers from Southern Italy and Armenia.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Colonial administrators and planters also adopted management schemes from European empires in their attempts to create pliable native laborers. For their part, Moro and Lumad populations contested this presumptive integration into the colonial status quo by retreating further into the Mindanaoan interior, participating in anti-colonial religious movements, and assassinating Euro-American colonists. Labor shortages and native resistance frustrated the settler movement, ultimately accelerating its downfall after the end of military rule in 1914. As independence approached, the so-called “Moro Problem” in Mindanao-Sulu progressively became a Filipino rather than American issue.Footnote ¹⁰²

Indeterminate national and imperial boundaries pervaded the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Patriots spun the conquest of the American West, an escalating series of imperialist expansions, into a chauvinist tale of predestined nationhood. The ultimate fate of the Philippines after the United States' entrance into the scramble for colonial empire hardly allowed for neat demarcations between “nation” and “empire” either. Political debates over permanent annexations occurred frequently in both colonial and metropolitan settings, with the Southern Philippines eventually joining Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and sections of Mexico in the category of could-have-beens.Footnote ¹⁰³ That these discussions now appear quaint or absurd speaks more to the nation-state's ability to naturalize and cast backward its contemporary condition than it does to “ambiguous and often-unstable” processes of frontier state formation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Colonial experiments elsewhere in U.S. realms led to different outcomes, from settler naturalization and incorporation in Hawai'i to exclusionist permanency in Puerto Rico, and we can place the foregoing narrative alongside them.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The desire to establish “an American colony in a tropical country” drew thousands of settlers to Mindanao-Sulu during the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing inspiration from other frontiers, these colonial pioneers attempted—and failed—to create their New West.Footnote ¹⁰⁶