The Mississippi River has one of the least dramatic sources of any great river in the world. The Ganges and the Mekong thunder down from the Himalayas, the Amazon begins at a glacier high in the Andes, the Nile starts in the headwaters of Lake Victoria and in the highlands of Ethiopia, over a mile above sea level, and the Rhine begins in the snowy Swiss Alps. Even the Missouri River splashes to life among the dramatic peaks of the Rockies, and the Ohio begins in the rolling mountains of Appalachia. The Mississippi River gently gurgles out of Lake Itasca in north central Minnesota. At a mere 1,475 feet above sea level, even its birth occurs as a gentle, seemingly insignificant event.

By comparison to the headwaters of other rivers, the terrain at the source of the Mississippi lies relatively flat, but compared to the prairie of Minnesota, it might be called a zone of rolling hills. It is the sprawling domain of Christmas-tree farms and medium-sized forests where the three-hundred-year-old white pines and red Norway pines barely attain a hundred feet in height.

The stream that begins the Mississippi seems hardly different from thousands of other gentle streams passing around rocks and under fallen trees in North America. The point where the Mississippi leaves Lake Itasca stretches no more than twenty feet wide and less than a foot deep. In the summer, children eagerly wade across the mouth, while proud parents snap pictures and make videos of the momentous event. In the dead winter, cross-country skiers pass by, and if there were there no signs posted to announce the importance of the spot, they might easily miss it in the heavy snow and ice that coat the region. Local people visit the spot frequently and vacation around Lake Itasca, but the area lies too far from a major airport or an interstate highway to draw a big international, or even national, crowd of visitors.

Almost the only time that the local people do not use the park around Lake Itasca for something is during a blizzard. Particularly during a wet spring snowstorm that drops snow too slushy for skiers, the source of the Mississippi stands alone and deserted. The large, greasy snowflakes fall into the barely moving water and slowly dissolve. Other snowflakes congregate on a twig, a leaf, or any buoyant matter to make a small floating island of ice and snow.

As soon as the snows and pounding northern wind subside, the forest comes alive with the animals that seem to know that despite four inches of snow, winter has been once again defeated by the lingering sun of spring. A large red-headed woodpecker drums away at a dead tree, sending bark flying into the air in its search for bugs and other tasty insects. The ducks patrol across the lake. White-tailed deer bravely wander into new areas in search of ever-scarcer food before the spring snows yield to new growth. A still-healthy and well-fed beaver inspects the long shoreline of the lake after its deep winter’s rest in its lodge.

The snows of spring hang heavy on the trees, bending them toward the ground like overladen Christmas trees. The sudden snap of a breaking branch on an old tree rips through the air like the report of a rifle and reverberates through the woods, leaving a strange, ringing aftertone that transfixes every animal, including a human.

Flowing at the leisurely rate of only a mile and a half an hour, it will take the snowflakes that fall around Lake Itasca an average of ninety days to make the journey to the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico, 2,552 miles to the south. A May snowflake falling in Minnesota arrives in New Orleans as a drop of water on a humid and hot August day.

Around Lake Itasca, one can still see two native burial mounds from the Woodlands Indians about five hundred years ago. Nearby, on the other side of the lake, archaeologists found an even older site where some ancient Americans butchered a giant Bison occidentalis eight thousand years ago.

Today, Ojibwa people still live all around the source of the Mississippi. The White Earth Reservation flanks it on the west, and the Leach Lake Reservation on the east. Despite all the Indian ruins and the abiding native communities, plaques around Lake Itasca proclaim that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft discovered the source of the Mississippi River in July 1832. For the Indian people who have lived here so many thousands of years, Lake Itasca was obviously not “lost” or “undiscovered” before 1832. They knew it well, albeit under another name. Schoolcraft “discovered” the source of the Mississippi only because an Ojibwa chief guided him and his small expedition to the site.

Oddly, this was not the first time Schoolcraft “discovered” the source of the Mississippi. In 1820 he claimed to have discovered the source in another lake, and as evidence to support that claim, he published a book in 1821 with the ungainly title Narrative Journal of Travels from Detroit Northwest Through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River in the Year 1820.

Schoolcraft sent the book to John C. Calhoun, the Secretary of War, who had sponsored the expedition. The book contains a rather dull accumulation of random observations and tidbits crammed into journal form. The only thing that saved it from total obscurity was the claim loudly stated in the title of having discovered the sources of the Mississippi River, which the explorers located in what is now northern Minnesota, in Lake Cass (or “Cassina” as they called it), named for the expedition’s leader.

Newspapers such as the American in New York, and the Detroit Journal and Michigan Advertiser, eagerly published accounts of Schoolcraft’s expedition, including excerpts from his journals. The great search for the source of the Mississippi rivaled in intensity and color the search for the source of the Nile, which gained international attention later in the nineteenth century, after the development of an increasingly important press tool, the telegraph. As soon as Schoolcraft’s first book appeared to claim the honor of discovering the Mississippi’s source, the Italian explorer Giacomo Constantino Beltrami put forth a rival claim by locating the river’s source in 1823 in another lake, which he named Julia.

Despite publication of his first book, Schoolcraft apparently recognized that that the Cass expedition had not found the true source of the Mississippi River, since a small stream fed into Cass Lake. In 1832, with the help and guidance of his wife’s Ojibwa relatives, Schoolcraft set out on his second expedition to find the true source of the Mississippi.

Schoolcraft had married Jane Johnston, an Ojibwa woman with a white trader father. Jane Johnston’s twenty-six-year-old brother, George, served as interpreter for Schoolcraft’s expedition. Ozawindib, or Yellow Head, an Ojibwa chief, guided the group into Minnesota, where they soon found the true source of the Mississippi River in Omushkos, an Ojibwa name meaning Lake of the Elk; it was known by fur traders as Lac La Biche, which also meant Elk Lake. With his penchant for making new names and claiming credit, Schoolcraft renamed the lake Itasca, which he derived from the final letters of the Latin words veritas (true) and caput (head). This expedition became the subject for Schoolcraft’s next book, Narrative of an Expedition Through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake (Savage).

Schoolcraft brought to a close a three-hundred-year chapter of American history obsessed with the search for the source of the Mississippi, a search that began with Hernando De Soto’s claim of having discovered the lower reaches of the Mississippi in 1541.

In the annals of American exploration, the name of Schoolcraft comes late and is relatively minor compared to Coronado, De Soto, Joliet, and Lewis and Clark. The names of the Indians who already lived in these areas and guided the explorers appear far less commonly. Aside from a few highly romanticized guides, such as Sacajawea, the names of Indian guides like Ozawindib rarely occur, and many of the names seem now lost for eternity.

As soon as the European explorers arrived in the Caribbean, they needed the guidance of Indians to get them from island to island and to the mainland. This need intensified when the European explorers came to the mainland, because most of the explorers had only maritime backgrounds, and thus found themselves poorly prepared for exploring the land.

Indians made some of the earliest maps for the explorers. Their personal knowledge of the land allowed them to draw maps with precise and accurate detail at the request of the whites. The use of forced Indian guides and Indian mapmakers by whites began with Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage along the coast of Mayan country on the Yucatàn Peninsula, in 1502. He encountered a trading party in a canoe propelled by twenty-five paddlers. Among the crew was an old man who knew how to make maps and diagrams. After dismissing the other men, Columbus kept the old man and had him make coastal charts (Winsor).

After landing in Mexico in 1519, Hernando Cortez depended on the Aztec woman Malinche (also called Marina or Malintzin) to interpret and to guide him from the coast to Tenochtitlàn, capital of the Aztec empire. Because of her knowledge of the various Mexican cultures as well as the languages, her role surpassed that of mere interpreter or guide; she gained Cortez’s confidence to become his chief negotiator and strategist. She hammered and welded together the native coalition of dissatisfied Indian nations that finally battered down the Emperor Montezuma and destroyed the Aztec Empire. As Mexican writers frequently note, Malinche deserves as much of the credit or blame for Spanish success as do Cortez and all his horses and artillery. Malinche would never have brought down the empire without Cortez, but Cortez may never have brought it down without her.

The Mexican writer Octavio Paz wrote at length in The Labyrinth of Solitude about the psychological and cultural role that La Malinche played in shaping the cultural psyche of the Mexican people. She spanned the transition from the ancient Indian society to the modern Indian-Spanish mestizo nation of Mexico. Unlike the Aztec emperors and nobles who sank beneath the surface and disappeared from history, Malinche survived. The Mexicans of today continue to call themselves “the children of La Malinche.”

Soon after Cortez conquered Mexico, the French explorer Jacques Cartier cautiously sailed his ships up America’s North Atlantic coast. In 1534 his expedition explored the coast of Canada, and like Cortez, he also wanted to venture inland in search of treasures and new cities. To prepare for the excursion into the interior, he kidnapped Taignoagny and Agaya, two coastal natives whom he took back to France with him to teach them to speak French. Cartier returned in the spring of the following year with the interpreters, whom he used to guide his ships up the St. Lawrence River to the Huron territory of Chief Donnaconna and on to the Huron village of Hochelaga, which became Montreal.

One of the guides, Agaya, acquired a special role in medicinal history because he was the one whom Cartier beseeched for a treatment for scurvy when the ailment began to decimate his crew. Agaya turned to the Huron women, who prepared a medicine from one of the evergreen trees. This medicine of the unknown Huron women reversed scurvy in every one of Cartier’s men and prevented any more deaths that winter.

Rather than releasing the interpreters in appreciation for their services, Cartier kept them with him for his return voyage to France. Cartier also kidnapped Chief Donnaconna, who, along with both interpreters, died in France without seeing his homeland and family again.

The English explorer Martin Frobisher developed a novel technique for using the services of the Inuit as pilots for his ship during his first Arctic exploration, in 1576. When he sailed around Baffin Island, searching for a northwest passage to the Pacific, Frobisher watched for Inuit men out in their kayaks. When he saw one, he leaned over the bow of his ship and rang a bell, which he held out as though offering a gift to the passing native. When the friendly Inuit came closer and reached up for the bell, Frobisher grabbed him and forced him to pilot the large ship through the Arctic bays and inlets.

Kidnapping Indians and forcing them to become interpreters, guides, or slaves grew into a well-established cultural pattern among explorers. Such practices became a standard part of the business. By the time Samuel de Champlain made his first voyage up the St. Lawrence, in 1603, he did not need to do the kidnapping himself. He saved a whole trip to America by first securing in France the services of two Indians as guides. The men had probably been kidnapped by some other explorer or fishing expedition and abandoned or sold in France.

Champlain continued to rely on native help, and in 1610 he took an Indian boy with him from America to France for the purpose of teaching him the French language so that he could serve as a guide. Champlain also added a new dimension to this during the same year by persuading a French boy to live among the Indians and learn their language and culture while Champlain was away in France. Thus, when Champlain returned to Canada in 1611, he had a Huron-speaking French boy who could interpret, and a French-speaking Huron who could guide him.

The Spaniards lacked the well-established French custom of kidnapping Americans and taking them back to Europe for training guides. Like Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, most of the Spaniards seized translators and guides as they needed them. This lack of training by their guides may account for some of the more fantastical stories brought back by Spaniards about men of gold and cities of gold; maybe the Spaniards simply heard what they wanted to hear.

After joining forces with Pizarro in Peru, Hernando De Soto received a thousand pounds of gold as his share of the ransom of the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1533. He then sailed back to Spain to petition the king for permission to invade the final unknown continent of North America, then called Florida. In granting De Sota his request, the king appointed him governor of Cuba and adelantado of all of America north of Mexico. The concession signed by the king charged De Soto “to conquer, pacify, and populate the lands there are from the Province of Rio de las Palmas [Texas] to Florida” (Buckingham Smith).

With the king’s political endorsement, but with his own money, De Soto assembled the largest armada of ships and men yet to sail against the Indian nations of North America. De Soto intended to conquer and rule Florida. He sailed to America determined not to suffer the same fate as Pànfilo de Narvàez, whose Florida expedition disintegrated, wandering aimlessly until some of his men reached Texas. De Soto had an advantage over Narvàez in that he knew the value of local guides, and he knew ways to force them to cooperate.

After finding little of political or mercantile interest on the Florida peninsula, De Soto marched his army northward across what was to become Georgia and into South Carolina, searching for a civilized kingdom to conquer. He came closest to his goal when he met the exotic Lady of Cutifachiqui, the woman who ruled over a large portion of what is now South Carolina. Scholars argue over the precise location of her capital, but it probably lay in the middle of South Carolina’s piedmont, quite possibly near the ancient ruins around modern Camden.

According to the memoirs of one of De Soto’s men, the land of Cutifachiqui “was delightful and fertile,” and “the forest was open, with abundance of walnut and mulberry trees.” De Soto’s private secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, describes the country as possessing “many very fine fields and a pretty stream and a hill covered with walnuts, oak trees, pines, live oaks, and groves of liquidambar, and many cedars” (Bourne). Since De Soto stayed in South Carolina in May, it is hardly surprising that all of the memoirs of the survivors of the trip speak of the beauty of the land and its fertility, for May is the most beautiful and pleasant month of the year in that region, and the land abounds with the bright green color of lush new growth and with the fragrant blossoms of a thousand flowering plants.

The Gentleman of Elvas, another of De Soto’s companions, proclaimed the people as “more civilized than any people seen in all the territories of Florida.” Rodrigo Ranjel portrayed them as “very clean and polite and naturally well conditioned” (Bourne). Because the people of Cutifachiqui had no prior experience with Spaniards, they received De Soto with courteous interest and with minimal fear.

Even if the natives had wanted to resist the Spaniards, they had recently been weakened by strange, ravaging epidemics. European diseases had already traveled up from the coasts and had decimated the population. Many of their villages were now deserted, and grass and vines had taken over the central plazas. The mortuary temples overflowed with bodies and the goods buried with them.

The Cutifachiqui were ruled by a woman who sent her daughter, sister, or niece (the accounts vary) to meet De Soto. In a scene reminiscent of his encounter with the Inca emperor Atahualpa, De Soto received her with Spanish pomp and formality, but the Lady of Cutifachiqui matched him in dramatic pageantry. She approached De Soto’s encampment slowly, traveling in a large canoe, where she sat in the stern, proudly posed on large cushions and protected from the harsh sun rays by a billowing awning. Her warrior escorts surrounded her in adjacent canoes.

After she disembarked, her men carried her seated on a chair atop a litter that they bore on their shoulders. According to Rodrigo Ranjel, her litter was draped with a delicate white cloth that looked like linen (Bourne), but was probably a finely spun cotton. Unlike the nearly naked people to the south in the Florida peninsula, her people were dressed in clothes and shoes, and she wore three strands of shining pearls that luxuriously draped her body down to her thighs.

The Lady presented a stunning parade of gifts to De Soto. She gave him furs, shawls, dressed skins, and blankets. In a gesture of great drama, which the writer Garcilaso de la Vega compares to Cleopatra’s reception of Marc Antony when trying to save her dynasty, the Lady of Cutifachiqui slowly and dramatically unwound the strands of pearls from around her neck and held them out to one of De Soto’s men to give to him. De Soto asked her to bring them to him herself, whereupon he removed from his finger a gold ring set with a ruby and presented it to the Lady.

After the genteel exchange of luxury gifts, the Lady of Cutifachiqui supplied the expedition with goods of more immediate need. A generous and regal hostess, she gave the Spaniards plentiful supplies of food, including bushels of corn, strips of dried venison, dry wafers, and the much-desired luxury of salt, for which the men lusted in the subtropical Carolina heat.

In addition to food and gems, De Soto wanted information. He grilled the Lady of Cutifachiqui to gain intelligence regarding the surrounding provinces—their produce, rulers, cities, and any other pertinent information—for his conquering caravan. The Spanish observers of this meeting marveled at how well informed the Lady seemed, and how eloquently she spoke. But we must wonder how much accurate information she gave De Soto regarding neighboring lands, and how much she embellished her descriptions to discourage De Soto and his men from lingering in her own lands.

Despite this great show of courtesy, cooperation, and hospitality from the Lady of Cutifachiqui, De Soto finally seized her and her court, just as he had seen Pizarro do so successfully in his capture of the Inca emperor in Peru. De Soto then looted her country. When he demanded gold, the Indians brought him copper, and when he demanded silver, they brought him silvery mica, which they mined in the North Carolina mountains, in sheets up to three feet wide and three feet long.

De Soto found little precious metal, but an abundance of pearls, especially in the mortuary temples. In one town alone his expedition found 25,000 pounds of pearls. The mortuary temples of the people of Cutifachiqui astounded the Spaniards, who had already seen the cathedrals of Spain, the mosques and fountains of the Arabs, the palace of Montezuma in Mexico, and the gold ransom of Atahualpa in Peru.

Outside the massive doors into the temple that housed the pearls, twelve wooden giants stood guard. The huge figures held over their heads massive clubs covered with strips of copper and studded with what appeared to the Spaniards to be diamonds, but may have been mica chips.

The Indians had decorated the roof of one temple with pearls and feathers so that it looked to the Spaniards like a building from a fairy tale. Along the sides of the roof, pearls had been suspended from threads so thin that the pearls seemed to be floating in the air around the temple. Inside the temples the Spaniards saw rows of chests, each filled with pearls of uniform size. The Spaniards could not carry all the pearls, but they selected out the best ones for themselves. Ironically, even though De Soto’s expedition was the first into the area, his men also found in the temple some European trade goods—glass, cheap beads, and a rosary—indicating just how fast and efficiently the native trade systems operated.

After ravaging Cutifachiqui, De Soto marched away with the nation’s wealth and a new supply of Indian slaves, including the Lady of Cutifachiqui herself. De Soto wanted her as his guide and as insurance against Indian attack. The troop set off toward the mountains, probably near the present border of North and South Carolina, to one of the Lady’s provincial towns, called Xuala. When they neared the end of her territory and were about to cross over into the territory of Guaxule, the Lady and some of her servants escaped, taking the best of their pearls with them.

De Soto wanted to recapture the Lady, but his lust for treasure pulled him forward toward the next town, where, she had promised him, was much gold. He wandered on in his expedition of greed across the southern United States with a series of kidnapped and impressed guides. In May 1541, De Soto’s guides took him to the Mississippi River, which he promptly “discovered.”

De Soto’s health began to fail after months of unrewarding pillage and conquest across America. Tortured by repeated disappointment in his search for riches, and racked by persistent fevers, he grew weaker and more depressed as his invasion lingered into its third unproductive year. On May 21, 1542, almost a year to the day after he first claimed to have discovered the Mississippi River, Hernando De Soto died, probably near the site of Ferriday, Louisiana. His men buried him, but fearing that the Indians would dig up his body and desecrate it, some of his followers secretly took the body to the middle of the Mississippi River and consigned it to the deepest part of the water. His followers auctioned off his possessions, which included two male slaves, three female slaves, seven hundred pigs, and three horses with saddles. His conquest and enslavement of the people of the Lady of Cutifachiqui, and his pillaging of their lands as well as the lands of Mauvila and so many other of the Southern nations, had produced nothing but suffering for the Indians and for his own men.

During the summer of 1541, while De Soto tramped around the southern Mississippi River, another Spanish explorer and would-be conqueror roamed only a few hundred miles northwest of him, also searching for the fabled rich cities. Francisco Coronado wandered lost somewhere in Kansas after trekking thousands of miles up from Mexico and across Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.

Even though both De Soto and Coronado served under the banner of the same Spanish king, they competed with each other to see who could discover and conquer the most valuable Indian kingdoms. Coronado sought to find, claim, and conquer anything of value in North America in the name of Mexico before De Soto could claim it for Florida. Neither one of them knew what riches North America might hold, but whatever these riches might be, each explorer wanted them for himself.

After a bloody conquest of the pueblos of New Mexico, Coronado wanted to conquer kingdoms of greater value. He wanted a new Mexico equal in value and glory to the old Mexico. His lust made him particularly susceptible to the tales offered by an Indian known to us simply as El Turco or “the Turk,” so named because his appearance reminded the Spaniards of the Turks they had seen in the Mediterranean.

Coronado’s men encountered the Turk at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico, but he apparently came originally from somewhere out on the Great Plains to the east. He claimed that many days’ journey to the east the Spaniards could find a great river six miles wide and filled with fish as large as horses. According to the Turk, the boats on this river required forty men to row them, and had canopies under which their lords reclined. On land the subjects carried their lords in litters. The ruler supposedly read from a sacred book and worshipped the Queen of Heaven.

The Turk called this place the land of Quivira, and he claimed that beyond it lay even larger and richer lands. He called one of these “Harahey” or “Arahe,” now thought to be the Pawnee lands of Nebraska, and he referred to the other as “the Gaues,” now thought to be the Kaws or Kansas of the Missouri River (Bolton).

The reports left to us by the chroniclers depict a mythic and romantic image, in part because the descriptions have been filtered through the eyes of Spaniards and had to be translated from Indian languages to Spanish. With their poor ability to communicate even with their own guides, the Spaniards often translated their guides’ words to fulfill their own fantasies. Today we have very little way of knowing what the Indian guides actually said; we have only the Spanish descriptions.

These reports are often dismissed as the mere fantasies of a man who made them up and lied to the Spaniards for whatever reason he may have had. Yet the substance of these claims rings true, and certainly seems to point toward the civilizations of the Mississippi River, which was a large enough body of water to fit the Turk’s description. Even though it may not have fish the size of horses, it has giant catfish of over a hundred pounds swimming along its muddy bottom, and in its southern regions there were once alligators as long as horses.

Judging by the size of the war canoes encountered by De Soto along the Mississippi, the Turk’s reference to boats of forty oarsmen was an understatement. The Turk may not ever have seen the Mississippi or any of these marvels he described, but his information possibly derived from hearsay based more on fact than conjecture. The reports seem too close to what we know of the Mississippi civilizations to be coincidental with the fantasies of a pathological liar or a lunatic.

The Turk embroidered his descriptions with tales of gold and silver, since that was what the Spaniards seemed most interested in hearing. Almost everything that he says about the gold we can dismiss as either a lie (if he was trying to deceive the Spanish or enhance his own importance) or a mistake, if the Turk did not know the difference between gold and copper or between silver and mica.

In April 1541, Coronado set out across the Great Plains in search of Quivira and its six-mile-wide river. The departing company must have made one of the most unusual spectacles to head out onto the American plains. Coronado departed with 300 mounted soldiers in armor and a marching infantry, which, together with the slaves and servants, amounted to about 1,500 people accompanied by 1,000 horses, 500 cattle, and a massive flock of 5,000 sheep (Horgan). At the head of this caravan rode Coronado proudly atop his steed. In front of Coronado walked El Turco, leading the way but controlled by Coronado, who kept him on a long chain.

As Coronado traveled toward the east, it seemed that the plains would never end. All they saw were great stretches of sky and a land filled with “humpbacked cows,” as they called the bison. He encountered Plains Indians who painted their bodies and lived in pavilions (tepees) made of many skins. They also had dogs that carried their masters’ goods in packs like miniature saddles and dragged the tepee poles that served as a travois between encampments. This meeting marked the first European encounter reported with the Plains Indians, who would become internationally famous in the nineteenth century because of their prolonged struggle to defend their home from the increasing waves of white pioneers.

To hasten the discovery of Quivira, Coronado set out ahead of his main party with a smaller and faster party of thirty soldiers and a handful of Indian slaves and guides. The Turk obviously did not know how to get to the Mississippi, but he took them as far as Kansas, where they found twenty-five villages of tattooed Indians cultivating maize and living in straw houses. These people were possibly the Wichita or some related group, but precise identification today proves difficult. Whoever they were, the Spaniards obviously had not reached the land of the great river filled with giant fish and mighty boats.

The Indians encountered by Coronado told him of other white men like himself, wandering farther south. Assuming that this might be the rival De Soto expedition, Coronado tried to contact them by sending out couriers with letters, but nothing has ever been found of these communications. By a strange coincidence, however, one of the captive women in Coronado’s expedition did make contact with the De Soto expedition. She escaped from the Coronado expedition, probably somewhere in the Panhandle of Texas. She hid herself from her Spanish master, Juan de Zaldivar, by taking refuge in an isolated canyon. Since the Coronado group was moving northeast, the Indian woman fled to the south, into the heart of Texas.

By a cruel twist of fate, after escaping from Coronado’s group in the north of Texas, she then encountered the remnants of the De Soto expedition (by then under the leadership of Luis de Moscoso, following De Soto’s death) on the upper branches of the Brazos River, nine days’ journey south of where she had left Coronado’s men. To get information about the country to the north, the Spaniards tortured the woman and the Indians with whom she had sought refuge. The woman first told them the story of the Spaniards in the north, but under more torture she recanted and said that she had lied.

Only years later did the accuracy of her story emerge when the Gentleman of Elvas wrote his account of the De Soto expedition and Pedro Castañeda wrote his account of the Coronado expedition. The fact that she had given De Soto’s men correct details of the Coronado expedition, including the names of Coronado’s officers, proved that the woman was the same one.

Explorers quickly forgot the tragic story of the Indian guide called the Turk, but for generations they continued to search in vain for his fabled Quivira. For the next two hundred years after the Coronado and De Soto expeditions, mapmakers had trouble locating the mythical land of Quivira on their maps. It showed up on maps in places as widely apart as the Great Lakes, Texas, and the coast of what would now be British Columbia.

In disgust at not finding a rich kingdom to conquer, Coronado had the Turk executed. Coronado’s men garrotted him in much the same way that Pizarro had had the Inca emperor Atahualpa executed after he ceased to be of use to the Spaniards. Coronado and his convoy headed back to the pueblos of New Mexico, where they hardly found an enthusiastic welcome.

Coronado spent the winter in the pueblos, but in the spring of 1542, Coronado’s great steed stumbled and threw him to the ground, leaving him with lifelong injuries. Defeated and humiliated, he began the long retreat back to Mexico; news had reached him of Indian rebellions in northern Mexico, and he feared being trapped in New Mexico with hostile natives on every side.

Over the centuries after the Spanish entrada, native guides continued to lead explorers, settlers, and pioneers across North America. One of the last great Indian guides was the Shoshone woman Sacajawea, who had been captured by the Hidatsa and sold to the French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau. In 1804 she encountered the Lewis and Clark expedition at a Mandan village near modern Bismarck, North Dakota. Sacajawea led the expedition across North Dakota and through Montana to the tribe of her brother Cameahwait, and then she accompanied them to the Pacific Coast and back again. Along the way, she had a healthy baby in the middle of the winter of 1805.

The era of North American exploration effectively opened with Malinche leading Cortez across Mexico in 1519, and ended when Sacajawea led Lewis and Clark to the northern Pacific Coast in 1805. Throughout these three centuries of exploration, women played an exceptional role as guides and interpreters. Because they had often been captured in raids or sold into a distant area as slaves, women frequently spoke several languages and knew the routes from one area into another.

Women also had excellent foraging skills that allowed them to live off the land by finding food even when animals were not around. Like the Huron women who saved Carrier’s crew from scurvy, native women possessed the specialized knowledge of medicines derived from herbs, roots, and barks that proved so important for curing illness, treating cuts and wounds, binding sprains and splinting broken bones, and combating the effects of insect and snake bites. This knowledge often proved even more valuable to the explorers than did the women’s linguistic and travel experience.

Indian women possessed other vital skills for long-distance travel. They knew how to make and repair the birchback canoes the explorers used in northern America, and they also knew how to track. On one occasion, after the Lewis and Clark expedition had traveled nearly a thousand miles from Mandan territory without seeing another Indian, they came across an abandoned campsite. Sacajawea immediately identified the territory and the makers of the camp by examining the distinctive sewing pattern on a discarded moccasin that she found at the site.

Although we know the names and the stories of a few of these women, such as Malinche, the Lady of Cutifachiqui, and Sacajawea, many of the others, such as the woman who escaped from Coronado’s men only to be re-enslaved by De Soto’s men, remain nameless. Many men who became known to us as trappers, traders, or explorers depended heavily on their Indian wives for much the same services of translation, counsel, and guidance in their dealings with other Indians in crossing the American land.

Most of these explorers and trappers, usually known pejoratively as “squaw men,” left us few records to detail how their native wives helped them. They rarely shared credit with anyone else, much less with Indian women. Sometimes we know something about these women, such as Henry Schoolcraft’s Ojibwa wife, who arranged for his trip to “discover” the source of the Mississippi, but Schoolcraft himself, even in mentioning his Indian guides, oddly omits the information that his guides were his inlaws, related to him through his wife.

The American natives proved to be such important guides not merely because they lived on the continent and thus knew where the next village or river was located, but also because they had specialized kinds of knowledge, much different from European knowledge. Nowhere did this prove more important than in the Arctic region of North America, where European knowledge and technology proved inadequate.

A compass is of little use in the North American Arctic. The North Magnetic Pole actually lies within the northern islands of North America, and not out in the center of the Arctic Ocean with the geographic North Pole. When used in such places, the compass needle twirls and points in virtually any direction, with little regard for true north. Even if the compass did point at the North Magnetic Pole, the explorer could easily be east or west or even farther north of the magnetic pole.

The sun in the Arctic offers little help. For several months, depending on how far north the traveler goes, the sun fails to appear. In the summer, the explorer certainly cannot depend on the sun rising in the east or setting in the west; it circles tirelessly in a clockwise path just above the horizon for weeks on end. At any season of the year, fog or snow can cut off any view of the sun, moon, or stars for several successive days.

In such a context the Inuit developed completely different ways of travel that relied less on astronomical calculations than on earthly ones. Like Polynesian sailors who learn to “read the waves,” the Inuit learn to read the waves on the ocean, rivers, and streams, but they must also learn to “read the snowdrifts” that occur much more frequently in their homelands. By studying the different kinds of winds and the patterns that they make, Inuit walk parallel or counter to the snow ridges to move in the desired direction, even when they have no dogs to help lead the way. Similarly, they know how to keep the wind hitting a particular quadrant of the body in order to steer them, even when a blinding snow destroys all visibility (Hall).

Explanations of Inuit, Aleut, and Dene navigation methods become difficult in English because we lack adequate words to explain what they see and how they interpret it. Where we see only undifferentiated snow, they may have a dozen or more different words to describe what lies before them. Similarly, they have many more words to describe different kinds of ice, various shades of white, and the different colors of water and movement of ripples or types of animal tracks. All of these words come into play in deciding which way one can move with safety.

The Slave tribe of Dene, who live on the Mackenzie River near the Arctic Circle north of the Great Slave Lake, have a general word te meaning “ice,” but they have thirteen categories of ice, which we could easily translate into English as “black ice” (tetsidenit’le), “white ice” (tega), “blue ice” (tedeit’le), “hollow ice” (tevu), “muddy ice” (tetagot’le), and so forth. English words, however, lack the full meaning conveyed in the Slave language. The Slave know which kind of ice can support the weight of a child, which can support the weight of a man on snowshoes, which can support a full dog team and sledge, and so forth. Such information frequently proves vital in the activities of daily life, when a Slave Indian must repeatedly make decisions on where and how to cross a river, lake, or stream (Basso).

The importance of American natives and their specialized knowledge about exploration continued right through the twentieth century. A Greenland native named Oodaq helped a series of international explorers of the Arctic in the early twentieth century, including Robert Peary, Knud Rasmussen, and Jean Malaurie. Even if one rejects the rigorously debated claim of Robert Peary to having reached the North Pole in 1909, all the polar explorers used Inuit assistance.

Even though Captain Cook sailed to Antarctica as early as November 1773, the continent resisted repeated attempts to be crossed. Because no people lived there, the area offered no ready-made technology or cultural patterns that the newcomers could appropriate for their explorations. The Europeans lacked the equipment and technology to travel across the land. Early explorers even tried using shaggy ponies to carry their supplies, but they failed.

In December 1911, the Norwegian explorer Ronald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole. He did so by relying almost exclusively on Inuit technology. He wore only Inuit clothing, made by Inuit women in the traditional way and thus weighing about half as much as the clothes worn by his competitors. He traveled with four sledges, each drawn by thirteen Inuit dogs. As a Norwegian, he preferred to travel on Scandinavian skis rather than on Native American snowshoes. All subsequent explorations of Antarctica, from 1911 through the 1990 crossing by Will Steger with his dog teams, have continued to rely heavily on the technology, knowledge, and culture of the Arctic Inuit.