Lost in the Wilderness—Cabeza de Vaca, Great Medicine Man—The Wilderness Traversed—Spanish Slave Hunters—The Northern Mystery—The Monk and the Negro—The Great Coronado Expedition—The Settlement of New Mexico and the Pueblo Rebellion—California Missions—Escalante to Salt Lake Valley.
As the harmless little snow-birds flit before the advance of winter's desolation, so a few hapless Spaniards cast up by the sea were forerunners in the Wilderness of the pressing swarms of Europe. These men were a small remnant of the expedition which Panfilo de Narvaez in 1527 led with rosy banners for the conquest of Florida, where a few years before Ponce de Leon, instead of his sought-for waters of perpetual youth, had found a shroud. Three years had barely passed when the same grave-garment was enwrapping Narvaez and his band, twining through one disaster after another, till the lonely, shimmering sea offered the only pathway from under the dark presence. Then it was a kingdom for a boat! Yet the staggering band had no tools, nails, cordage, skill; nothing in fact wherewith to prepare for the combat with Neptune. But the resolution of despair is great. They gathered spurs, bridle bits, all the iron they had, and made tools and nails. Spanish accoutrements were ever elaborate, so they were able to put their boats firmly together, and with shirts sewed one to another for sails, and their muscles fortified by the meat of the horses which they had eaten, whose manes and tails furnished ropes, at last in five large boats they coasted westward hoping valiantly to sight some camp, or settlement, of their fellow countrymen who, from the capital of the Aztecs, had been striving to penetrate the Northern Mystery.[32]
Seven or eight years only, it is true, had passed since this same luckless leader so ignominiously had failed in his errand from Cuba to arrest Cortez, but the Spaniards, besides annihilating the Mexican Confederacy, had founded some settlements towards the north, and it was these, their knowledge of distance being necessarily hazy, that the unfortunates expected to reach. After many days of weary toil and suffering, they passed the mouth of the Mississippi which Pineda, about twenty years earlier, had discovered and named the Rio de Espiritu Santo. No Holy Spirit was it to these baffled wayfarers, for its strong current brought confusion and separation. The boat of Narvaez reached land, the fate of two is not mentioned, while the remaining two, one of which was commanded by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had filled the once important office of treasurer to the expedition, drifted away together. After several days a storm threw these apart also and each was driven along haphazard, yet always keeping towards the land. Cabeza's craft finally beached itself on the wide sandy shores of an island, called by those who eluded the breakers the island of ill-luck, Malhado.
Here were natives who treated the castaways in a friendly way, and their fortunes seemed to slightly brighten; it was but a rift in the cloud. Attempting to proceed, their boat was capsized in the surf, and disappeared on the wide bosom of the Gulf. After a few days some men from one of the other boats, which had been thrown on another part of the island, joined Cabeza's party, raising the total number to forty. It was now November of 1530, and here begins the remarkable experience which Cabeza de Vaca afterwards wrote down as well as he could remember it. The account is vague in its details, giving rise among eminent students to a number of different opinions, as to Cabeza's exact route.[33] The island Malhado was either Galveston or some other along the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico between this and the mouth of the Mississippi. Bandelier places it at the mouth of the Sabine.
Alarçon's Ships in the Tidal Bore, Mouth of the Colorado, 1540.
Drawing by F. S. Dellenbaugh.
It was decided to send out a search party, and four men were therefore dispatched on the hunt for the settlements. Soon after some disease broke out in the camp which reduced the thirty-six to fifteen. Then the natives, who were not otherwise unkind, separated these and they never again all met. When spring once more turned the country green, all the Spaniards but Cabeza de Vaca and one Lope de Oviedo, who were too sick to travel, again started westward. Cabeza and Oviedo necessarily remained with the natives, and in spite of Cabeza's tale of cruelty we can see that he was not very badly treated, for after awhile he was allowed to make trading tours into the interior. On these journeys he saw the "hunchback cows" and learned much about the country, the first white man to tread that northern soil. In the course of time he and Oviedo turned their faces westward also and presently learned from other natives of three men like themselves farther on. Oviedo lacked the courage to proceed, and he went back to the first natives they had been with while Cabeza kept on alone and came to the other Spaniards, the fag-end of the company that had previously started. They were Andreas Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Estevan, an Arab negro.
The Amerinds they were now among did not seem to like the idea of their departing, but after one or two attempts, the four succeeded in taking up the broken march for the West. The tribes they met treated them kindly. In one place a man came with a headache which Castillo cured by making the sign of the cross and "commending him to God." Many more came to be healed, each bringing venison in payment, and the Spaniards found thereby the road to safety and comfort as well as to their desired goal. Cabeza even claims to have revived the dead; at least he became so proficient as a "medicine man" that everywhere the natives came to him in large numbers to be healed. Cabeza was successful, hence his progress was uninterrupted, but the role of medicine man is sometimes dangerous to assume. They think that if one is able to cure a single case, that he can cure all, and if the patient dies his "medicine" is bad. The reputation of Cabeza grew, till the progress of the four wanderers was little short of triumphal.