A Land So Strange

The four survivors never mention in their accounts that they had chanced upon an indigenous thoroughfare, yet their observations leave few doubts. Immediately after shifting course to the west, away from Pánuco, the trekkers came across two Indian women bearing loads. “Upon seeing us”—Cabeza de Vaca recalls—“[they] stopped and put down their loads and brought us some of what they were carrying, which was maize flour, and they told us that farther ahead on that river we would find houses and many prickly pears and more of that flour.” The sight of maize must have been immensely encouraging. The four men had not seen the New World staple during the entire time they had lived in captivity in Texas, nor had they found any sign of it south of the Rio Grande prior to this encounter. The corn flour must have come from far away, but it was still possible to carry it into northern Tamaulipas. Maize presaged the existence of a sedentary, agricultural people, the kind of society that had sustained the Spanish presence in the Caribbean and Mexico. The castaways were uncertain of what they would find, but at least they seemed to be headed in the direction of advanced cultural centers.²

The copper bell with a face mentioned by Cabeza de Vaca matches only one type of bell found by modern archaeologists. This one was found in Paquimé, not far from where the castaways passed, and overlaps chronologically with the Florida expedition. The face etched on it represents the Mesoamerican divinity Tlaloc. Courtesy of the Amerind Foundation, Inc., Dragoon, Arizona.

As they moved through the sierra foothills farther west, the three Spaniards and the African found more objects that they had not encountered before. One day they met a troupe “from another nation and language who said that they had come from farther inland.” It was a trading party of respectable size, whose camp consisted of about forty huts able to shelter up to 100 people or more. These merchants gave the castaways a large and thick copper bell with a face etched on it and some cotton blankets. The gift-givers said that these objects had come “from the North and across the land toward the South Sea [the Pacific Ocean].” The healers must have been stunned at the sight of these items. The Narváez expedition had not found copper anywhere throughout Florida, the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico coast, Texas, or Tamaulipas. The implication of wealthy Indian settlements was inescapable. As the survivors put it, “From this fact one can deduce that in the area where these objects had come from, even if there was no gold, there were settlements and smelting.”³

The four wanderers were no longer mere castaways; they had become explorers once again, heading west to find the settled peoples who knew how to cast metals. But theirs was a most peculiar expedition. Four naked and unarmed outsiders were led by hundreds, even thousands, of Indians. They were fed and protected and passed off from one indigenous group to the next, as if they were prized possessions moving along an ancient trading route across the continent.

THE EXPLORERS’ PROGRESS inland was rapid. The two sources refer to the landscape along the way only sporadically, providing just enough clues to keep generations of road-interpreters arguing over the party’s precise route. Cabeza de Vaca reports, for instance, that he and his companions passed through “a sierra of seven leagues and the rocks in it were of iron slag” before reaching an Indian village set on the bank of a very beautiful river. All around the area there were small pine trees with cones “like small eggs,” and pine nuts that were better than those of Castile “because they have very thin shells.” Remarkably, in this instance the shards of available evidence do point to a specific location. In the present-day state of Coahuila there is a sierra about 21 miles long, containing rocks made of iron. It is known as the Sierra de la Gloria. At about a day’s walk from the Sierra de la Gloria, there is indeed a delightful river flanked by groves of cypress and pecans called the Rio Nadadores. Most persuasively, botanists have recently identified a pine-nut species with extraordinarily thin seed shells. This small pine tree, Pinus remota, is appropriately called “paper-shell piñón,” and is especially common at low elevations in central and northern Coahuila. It is quite likely that Cabeza de Vaca passed through the Sierra de la Gloria. In many other cases, however, the clues scattered in the sources do not lead to definite conclusions.⁴

The four healers moved rapidly. West of the Sierra de la Gloria, they began to make out the imposing Sierra Madre Oriental. It must have appeared to them like a huge crumpled wall, bisecting the continent from the southeast to the northwest. The Spaniards and the African wished to go west toward the setting sun and the copper-smelting settlements that lay in that direction. However, the mountain range forced them to bear north toward the Rio Grande yet again. They walked through so many Indian communities and heard so many different languages that their memories failed to recall them all.⁵

As they traveled, the castaways continued to burnish their reputation as healers. Cabeza de Vaca in particular became more confident in his skills. He became bolder in his interventions; he was no longer content merely to pray and blow. The medical procedures he employed may go some way toward explaining his success. Not far from the Rio Nadadores, he treated a man who had been struck by an arrow below the shoulder. “I touched him and felt the point of the arrow, and I saw that it had passed through the cartilage,” Cabeza de Vaca writes with the precision of a surgeon, “and with a knife that I had, I opened his chest to that place. And I saw that the point had passed through and was very difficult to remove. I again cut deeper, and I inserted the knife point, and with great difficulty, at last I pulled it out. It was very long. And with a deer bone, plying my trade as a physician, I gave him two stitches, and after that he bled a great deal and with scraps of hide I stopped the bleeding.” After the surgery, the patient claimed that he no longer felt pain. The arrowhead was passed around throughout the land, and everyone was amazed by the miraculous cure that Cabeza de Vaca had bestowed. The travelers’ authority over the peoples of central Coahuila became great indeed.⁶

They never traveled alone. Since crossing into northern Tamaulipas, they, and their string of indigenous hosts, had worked out a system that was part processional, part doctor’s visit, and part plunder. It must have been a marvel to behold. When the strangers arrived in each new Indian community, it set an elaborate series of rituals in motion. The natives would offer shelter, food, and gifts to the four men in exchange for access to their healing powers. Festivities would follow, sometimes for days. Then, reluctant to see the medicine men go, the Indian hosts would insist on traveling with them to the next settlement.

The four survivors had set ideas about where they wanted to go: first due south toward Pánuco, and then due west toward the metal-working peoples. They could not, however, simply dictate their route. Their Indian sponsors had their own notions and constantly tried to steer the drifters toward their friends and away from their enemies. The route actually taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions was often the result of complicated negotiations, and occasionally of deception. A native group by the Sierra de Pamoranes, for instance, tried to dissuade the four men from going inland by falsely claiming that there was neither food nor people in the direction the healers wished to travel. In that case the wanderers paid little attention and pursued their inland course. Yet in general they were not immune to such subtle manipulation, as they depended entirely upon their indigenous followers for information and knowledge about the terrain and geography of the region.⁷

Each time the explorers approached the next indigenous settlement on their journey, a curious exchange would ensue. Those who had accompanied the medicine men would pillage the new hosts, entering their huts and plundering whatever possessions or food they could carry back to their own encampment. In return, they left the medicine men. A certain sense of reciprocity undergirded the entire transaction, yet the details were unsettling for the explorers. They were initially taken aback by this custom when they first witnessed it in northern Tamaulipas. They were distressed by how badly the new hosts were treated and feared that the widespread sacking would lead to serious altercations. Yet their fears turned out to be unfounded as the plundered Indians offered reassurance. “On seeing our sadness,” Cabeza de Vaca writes, “[they] consoled us by saying that we should not be grieved by that because they were so content to have seen us that they considered that their possessions had been well employed, and that farther ahead they would be compensated by others who were very rich.” And indeed, a few days later the erstwhile victims would plunder the villagers that followed, “and the ones always sacked the others, and thus those who lost, like those who gained, were very content.”⁸

Precise instructions about how to deal with the healers were also passed down from group to group. The hosts were told to lead the foreigners onward, always treating them “with great respect and being careful not to anger us in anything,” Cabeza de Vaca writes, “and to give us everything they had, and to take us where there were many people, and that wherever we arrived to steal and loot what the others had because such was the custom.” Soon the “new custom” became so entrenched and so well known that native villages on the way began to take precautions like hiding their most valuable possessions in advance of the procession’s arrival. Reverence and intimidation were closely intertwined. An approaching band bent on plunder could easily cower villagers into surrendering their possessions and venerating the four outsiders.⁹

Life on the move was exhilarating but tiring for the survivors. They found themselves at the head of moving crowds that could reach as many as 3,000 or 4,000 people. They were veritable armies, capable of foraging along the way. In one instance, when the group went through a dry area, the women actually carried water, and the authority of the foursome was so great that no one dared to drink without their permission. Other followers gathered prickly pears and spiders and worms on the march. Many of the natives carried wooden clubs, and when a hare came out of its nest, they immediately surrounded it and threw themselves on it, swinging their clubs in a rain of blows. And these hunts were a wonder to see because the hare jumped from one place to another and sometimes, not knowing what else to do, came to rest in the hands of one of the hunters. The deer hunters went away to the sierras during the day and came back at night, carrying five or six animals for each of the four healers and also bringing quail and other game. “And everything, finally, that the people killed, they put before us without daring to take one single thing without our first making the sign of the cross over it, even though they might be dying of hunger.” Every day the four medicine men spent hours blessing and blowing on every scrap of food and drink. And after the blessings were concluded, the healers ordered the Indians to roast the hares and the deer and the quail and the other animals in ovens that they made for this purpose. Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and Estebanico took whatever food they wanted and left the rest for their followers.¹⁰

Although the outsiders appeared to lead the procession, real power remained in the hands of Indian lords who chose to stay in the background. The healers themselves would have been unable to coordinate the imposing machine of exchange and pillage with which they were traveling. After all, much of the work of organization had to be conducted in languages that they could scarcely understand, and deciding on the procession’s precise route required an understanding of the geography and human landscape of North America that the four men did not possess. Indigenous leaders were the only ones capable of organizing and directing the movements of the group. Cabeza de Vaca reveals only in passing that one indigenous man—“the principal man of these people who had come with us”—was the one who distributed the food after the healers had eaten. It is almost certain that this mysterious figure oversaw other aspects of the venture, including the division of goods after each looting spree. Cabeza de Vaca also mentions that either this lord or others cultivated the healers’ reputation, shrewdly claiming that the four men were the “children of the sun” and spreading the word that they could either heal or kill, and “said even greater lies since these Indians know well how to do it when it suits them.” Unfortunately, the sources do not give us more information about this principal man or the others. But clearly the four men had become complicit in a system of pillage that they did not control, a system that nonetheless permitted their safe passage across the continent.¹¹

From the Rio Nadadores in central Coahuila, the trekkers followed a northwesterly course, traversing some 90 miles of prairies and more than 150 miles of desert and rugged terrain that caused them great hardship. The group must have been moving parallel to the Sierra Madre Oriental, skirting the narrow ranges of northwest Coahuila and ascending into plateaus at ever-higher elevations. The landscape grew more and more barren as they approached eastern Chihuahua. The land was uninhabited and so devoid of game that the hunters and foragers could not get enough food for everyone. The travelers suffered greatly from hunger, and some fell ill. At last, they crossed “a very great river in which the water came up to our chests,” probably a reference to the Rio Grande. After this crossing, they walked onto a plain where the traveling procession encountered a new group of Indians. These new hosts had come from very far away and carried many things with them. The usual plundering exchange took place. But this time the loot was so great that the departing Indians could only take half of it, leaving the rest lying on the ground. The four wanderers told their new hosts to take the remaining objects with them, but they refused, saying that once they had made an offering, it was not their custom to take it back. And thus, Cabeza de Vaca says, “holding it in low estimation, they let all of it be lost.”¹²

To their new hosts, the explorers expressed their intention to go west. But the Indians demurred. They said that in that direction the people were very distant and unfriendly to them. Their refusal angered the castaways. One night Cabeza de Vaca separated himself from camp, intending to spend the night alone to show his displeasure. But the Indians went looking after him and remained awake the whole night trying to please the healers and telling them how terrified they were. The four men pretended to be angry while they continued to haggle over which route to take. And during this time, the Royal Treasurer reports a strange occurrence: some of the Indians fell suddenly ill, and the next day eight of them died. The fear among the natives became overpowering. The castaways too were taken aback by these deaths. They must have felt responsible for bringing about this tragic event and also feared that, if the Indians continued to die, all the others would abandon the healers. The four men prayed to God fervently and begged him to restore the health of the Indians. Cabeza de Vaca and the others believed that they could summon God’s power and were now beginning to learn the alarming consequences of their extraordinary gift.¹³

For fifteen days the Indians went completely quiet. No laughs or cries were heard, even from children or babies at breast. Some Indians were evidently grieving their spouses or children or other relatives who had succumbed to the mysterious illness, but they too remained silent and showed no emotion, as if nothing at all had happened. Whenever they stood in front of the four mighty men, they did not dare to speak or lift their stare from the ground. One little girl, who dared to cry before Cabeza de Vaca, was immediately taken far away, and with the sharp tooth of a rat, had her body slashed from the shoulders to the legs. “And seeing this cruelty and angered by it, I asked them why they did it. And they responded that it was to punish her because she had wept in front of me.”¹⁴

The natives understood that they had no choice but to take the travelers wherever they wished to go, even into enemy territory. Since Indian men could not venture west for fear of being killed, two women were sent as guides. Women were able to move about unencumbered, even in periods of internecine hostilities. Moreover, one of the two women guides was a captive who hailed from the place where the four men wanted to go; she would know the way and be able to communicate with her kin. Castillo, Estebanico, and the two indigenous guides went on ahead. The two hidalgos, Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes, followed behind with a modest entourage of twenty or thirty Indians. The captive woman led the party to a river that ran through the sierras, finally arriving at a village where her father lived. The travelers caught a glimpse of a sizable settlement and of the first dwellings that had the appearance of being permanent houses. It was the first real settlement the wanderers had encountered since leaving Florida.¹⁵

THE CASTAWAYS HAD reached an agricultural oasis in the midst of a sea of nomads. The captive’s village turned out to be part of a cluster of settlements located at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos, an area aptly known today as La Junta de los Rios (“The Juncture of the Rivers”), between Presidio, Texas, and Ojinaga, Chihuahua. Almost fifty years after Cabeza de Vaca’s visit, another Spanish expedition headed by a Mexico City merchant named Antonio de Espejo went through La Junta area and counted five pueblos and more than 10,000 inhabitants living in flat-roofed houses. Espejo learned another interesting fact. The residents told him that “three Christians and a negro had passed through there.” Espejo immediately concluded that such visitors could only have been “Alonso [sic] Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo Maldonado, and a negro, who had all escaped from the fleet with which Pánfilo Narváez entered Florida.”¹⁶

The Indians at La Junta de los Rios were farmers. The damp islands and bays formed by the rivers were propitious for the farming of corn, beans, and squash. Cabeza de Vaca and his companions quickly learned that these Indians possessed corn; “and this was the thing that gladdened us more than anything else in the world, and for this we gave infinite thanks to our Lord.”¹⁷

By the time of the castaways’ visit, these Indians had occupied the river juncture continuously for around three centuries. They would continue to cling tenaciously to the area until their final amalgamation into Spanish society in the eighteenth century. Their centuries-old history has been largely lost, but it is not too difficult to imagine the tribulations of an agricultural island and strategic crossroad of exchange, where hunter-gatherers of the southern Great Plains, merchants from the Southwest, and travelers from the Gulf of Mexico region converged. These people—known variously to the Spaniards as Jumanos, Patarabueyes, and rayados—had to adapt and shift to survive, at times aligning themselves closely with the centers of the Southwest and at other times strengthening their ties to the nomads of the Plains. Regardless of the dominant cultural elements, they always straddled the divide between the settled and the nomadic worlds.¹⁸

The material possessions of the Indians of La Junta revealed the extent to which they inhabited both worlds. On the one hand, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were impressed by the obvious signs of village life, such as the sturdy houses that overlooked their cornfields. Unlike the portable skin tents that the castaways themselves had been using for years, the people at La Junta de los Rios lived in spacious square structures anchored with pillars as thick as a man’s thigh and with walls plastered with mud. On the other hand, this same people seemed to lack such essentials as pots. To boil water, they resorted to filling gourds with water and throwing hot stones into them, “and then they would add the bean meal, and put more stones on top, until the pap or porridge was cooked, and then they would eat it.” They were also astonishingly mobile, and periodically embarked on lengthy expeditions to trade and hunt buffalo. “And we called them the people of the cows,” Cabeza de Vaca explains, “because the greatest number of those cows are killed near there. And upstream along that river for more than fifty leagues they go killing many of them.”¹⁹

Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and Estebanico stayed in these settlements for some weeks, surely contemplating their achievements and wondering how their journey would end. Their breathtaking gamble of forsaking Pánuco and venturing inland seemed to have paid off. By letting go and allowing themselves to be driven along by throngs of Indians, they had traveled halfway across the continent. They had seen many peoples and had covered much ground that no other outsider had seen before, getting closer to the Indians with metallurgical knowledge.

The four men must have been humbled, however, by the enormous and eerie land ahead of them. They asked “the people of the cows” about the country to the west and were told that there was a great deal of corn there. In fact, for two years in a row the rains had not come to La Junta de los Rios. “The people of the cows” had lost their crops and had been forced to import corn from the land to the west. The wanderers must have been delighted to know that ahead of them lived peoples who were in possession of great stores of corn, but they also learned that this land of plenty was very distant and it would be difficult to get there. They would have to start by following the river (most likely the Rio Grande) upstream for seventeen days, where they would find nothing to eat except for a certain fruit that grew in trees that the Indians called masarrones and that had to be crushed with rocks. Even then, they were told, it was “very bad stuff, not even fit for animals.”²⁰

After pondering their options for two more days, the foursome decided to follow the trail of the maize, “and the fear they put into us about the great hunger that we were to endure, which, in truth, we suffered all the seventeen days’ journey about which they had told us, was not sufficient to stop us from doing this.” The trekkers ascended the river. They did not eat the unpalatable masarrones but subsisted instead on daily rations of deer fat. They needed the calories badly, and there was nothing else to be had. As they proceeded up river, the explorers found empty Indian camps; most of the regular occupants had gone north to hunt bison. But the few Indians who stayed behind were friendly, allowing the expeditioners to sleep in the empty huts and giving them bison robes and other things.²¹

On the seventeenth day, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions stopped following the river and veered west. They were traveling with some natives who told them where to go. The medicine men walked another seventeen or twenty days through a high plain. The vast landscape was broken only by stands of creosote, yucca, and mesquite. In the distance the majestic Sierra Madre Occidental loomed interminably from south to north, completely blocking their way. They reached the foothills of the massive range, and their Indian hosts steered them through passes that gave way to even higher and more desert-like tablelands. Somehow—the sources provide precious few clues—the group was able to negotiate the continental divide, eventually reaching the Pacific slopes of the mighty sierra. The entire area was fringed by mountains crowned with pine trees. The cold must have been unbearable at night as the dreaded winter approached once again.²²

The castaways must have passed very near the ancient city of Paquimé (Casas Grandes or “Big Houses”), once a cultural center of the first magnitude. Between 1250 and 1450, Paquimé had dominated a vast realm, controlling outposts stretching as far away as La Junta de los Rios to the east and the Pacific coast to the west. The people of Paquimé were consummate merchants. They had been the preeminent importers of live scarlet macaws, copper bells, and shells, and the greatest exporters of turquoise into central Mexico. The city itself—first described by a European party of exploration in the 1550s—appeared compact but extremely dense. It boasted structures that were as high as six or seven stories. According to an account of this expedition, Paquimé could well have been constructed by the ancient Romans. It possessed “towers and walls like fortresses” and “magnificent patios paved with enormous and beautiful stones resembling jasper.” Yet, Paquimé became depopulated and was finally destroyed and burned to the ground sometime around 1450 or 1500, only two or three generations before the passage of Cabeza de Vaca’s party. The great city and its surroundings were by then inhabited by recent arrivals, nomads who did not so much live in the ruined stone houses as camp in them. The erstwhile residents of Paquimé had scattered in all directions, moving into a constellation of modest villages that, in all likelihood, were some of the settlements that the castaways encountered “every two or three days,” and where they rested as they made their way to the Pacific coast.²³

After two or three months of arduous marches, the three Spaniards and the African at last arrived at the “land of maize,” sometime in late 1535 or early 1536. They ventured into a region of many villages boasting permanent houses and large stores of maize. The four healers were given corn flour and beans and squash, “and we loaded those who brought us there,” Cabeza de Vaca says, “and with this they went home the most contented people in the world.” The castaways walked for 300 miles or more without ever leaving the maize country.²⁴

The four wanderers must have been traveling through the fertile valleys of northern Sonora, already on the Pacific slopes of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The Indians there lived in permanent houses and wore shoes, and the women wore cotton shirts all the way to their knees and long deerskin skirts that touched the ground. They appeared to the four men to be “the most decently clad women we had ever seen in any part of the Indies.” They continued to cure and in return received many rich presents, including cotton mantles “better than those of New Spain,” beads and corals from the Pacific Ocean, fine turquoises from the north, and what was described as “emeralds made into arrowheads.” But the most extravagant gift that they received was a bundle of more than 600 hearts of deer, split-open through the middle and dried. For that reason, the adventurers called that village Corazones, or “Hearts.”²⁵

Throughout the “land of maize,” the people had flocked to the strangers, asking to be touched and to have the sign of the cross made over them. The ill and the healthy alike approached the healers, and even the women who had just given birth took their babies to be blessed. The Indians following the four men numbered 1,500 and could reach up to 3,000 or more. The four medicine men sought to enhance their authority by speaking as little as possible, communicating mostly through the African Estebanico, an arrangement that must have seemed impressive to the Indians. While the three Spaniards remained aloof and forbidding, Estebanico was gregarious and easygoing. He was the one who informed himself about the roads and villages ahead. His gift for languages and communication through signs was tested to the limit. Even though the healers were now able to speak six indigenous languages between them, they were of little use in a land where so many tongues were heard. “And among all these peoples, it was taken for certain that we came from the sky,” Cabeza de Vaca writes, “because all the things that they do not have or do not know the origin of, they say come from the sky.” The Indians would come out at sunrise, raising their hands to the sky and then running them over the strangers’ bodies.²⁶

The four wanderers’ ascendancy over the natives was so great that they could not help but think about how to use it to advance Spain’s imperial aims. Instead of bringing the Indians into the Christian fold through violence, the healers dreamed of accomplishing this grandiose project peacefully and humanely. Since Narváez was dead, Cabeza de Vaca and the others may have considered the possibility of going back to Spain to obtain his adelantamiento. For the moment they did what they could, as Cabeza de Vaca says, “And we told them by signs, because they understood us, that in heaven there was a man whom we called God, who had created the heaven and the earth, and that we adored him and served him as Lord, and that we did whatever he commanded us, and that from his hand came all good things, and if thus they were to do it, it would go very well for them.”²⁷

The healers may have been humane, but they were also sixteenth-century Christians. They believed that the throngs of Indians that showed so much reverence and devotion toward them would be infinitely better off as Catholics under Spanish rule. The castaways thus intended to forge a Christian kingdom out of these untamed lands. Unfortunately, their dreams would soon collide with a different kind of kingdom—one of brutality and greed.

Around Christmas of 1535, Castillo spotted a Spanish buckle and a horseshoe nail tied around the neck of an Indian in the manner of jewels. It was a small detail that he could easily have overlooked, but once he spotted the necklace he must have been overcome with excitement. He took the buckle and the nail and asked the man where they had come from. The Indian responded that they had belonged to “some men who wore beards like us, who had come from the sky and arrived at that river, and who brought horses and lances and swords, and who had lanced two of them.” Trying not to appear too eager, the medicine men inquired further about the activities of these Europeans. They were told that the foreigners had been seen by the coast.²⁸

The survivors had decidedly mixed feelings upon hearing the news that there were conquistadors not far from where they were. On the one hand, they were grateful to God because they appeared at last to be at the very doorstep of deliverance. Almost a decade of hardship, privation, and uncertainty seemed to be coming to an end. But on the other, they felt greatly disturbed and saddened that other Christians had already reached these remote lands and were causing so much harm to the natives. These conquistadors had destroyed towns throughout the area and had captured men, women, and children. The medicine men promised their Indian hosts that they would look for these men and try to get them to stop killing and enslaving the natives. The Indians of the maize were greatly pleased at hearing this promise.²⁹