extremely difficult to say of any one man, "He was the greatest" this or
that; and even in the matter of journeys there have been bewilderingly
many great ones, of the most wonderful of which we have heard least. As
explorers we cannot give Vaca and Docampo great rank; though the
latter's explorations were not contemptible, and Vaca's were of great
importance. But as physical achievements the journeys of these neglected
heroes can safely be said to be without parallel. They were the most
wonderful walks ever made by man. Both men made their records in
America, and each made most of his journey in what is now the United
States.
Cabeza de Vaca was the first European really to penetrate the then "Dark
Continent" of North America, as he was by centuries the first to _cross_
the continent. His nine years of wandering on foot, unarmed, naked,
starving, among wild beasts and wilder men, with no other attendants
than three as ill-fated comrades, gave the world its first glimpse of
the United States inland, and led to some of the most stirring and
important achievements connected with its early history. Nearly a
century before the Pilgrim Fathers planted their noble commonwealth on
the edge of Massachusetts, seventy-five years before the first English
settlement was made in the New World, and more than a generation before
there was a single Caucasian settler of _any_ blood within the area of
the present United States, Vaca and his gaunt followers had trudged
across this unknown land.
It is a long way back to those days. Henry VIII. was then king of
England, and sixteen rulers have since occupied that throne. Elizabeth,
the Virgin Queen, was not born when Vaca started on his appalling
journey, and did not begin to reign until twenty years after he had
ended it. It was fifty years before the birth of Captain John Smith, the
founder of Virginia; a generation before the birth of Shakspere, and two
and a half generations before Milton. Henry Hudson, the famous explorer
for whom one of our chief rivers is named, was not yet born. Columbus
himself had been dead less than twenty-five years, and the conqueror of
Mexico had seventeen yet to live. It was sixty years before the world
had heard of such a thing as a newspaper, and the best geographers still
thought it possible to sail through America to Asia. There was not a
white man in North America above the middle of Mexico; nor had one gone
two hundred miles inland in this continental wilderness, of which the
world knew almost less than we know now of the moon.
The name of Cabeza de Vaca may seem to us a curious one. It means "Head
of a Cow." But this quaint family name was an honorable one in Spain,
and had a brave winning: it was earned at the battle of Naves de Tolosa
in the thirteenth century, one of the decisive engagements of all those
centuries of war with the Moors. Alvar's grandfather was also a man of
some note, being the conqueror of the Canary Islands.
Alvar was born in Xeres[9] de la Frontera, Spain, toward the last of the
fifteenth century. Of his early life we know little, except that he had
already won some consideration when in 1527, a mature man, he came to
the New World. In that year we find him sailing from Spain as treasurer
and sheriff of the expedition of six hundred men with which Panfilo de
Narvaez intended to conquer and colonize the Flowery Land, discovered a
decade before by Ponce de Leon.
They reached Santo Domingo, and thence sailed to Cuba. On Good Friday,
1528, ten months after leaving Spain, they reached Florida, and landed
at what is now named Tampa Bay. Taking formal possession of the country
for Spain, they set out to explore and conquer the wilderness. At Santo
Domingo shipwreck and desertion had already cost them heavily, and of
the original six hundred men there were but three hundred and forty-five
left. No sooner had they reached Florida than the most fearful
misfortunes began, and with every day grew worse. Food there was almost
none; hostile Indians beset them on every hand; and the countless
rivers, lakes, and swamps made progress difficult and dangerous. The
little army was fast thinning out under war and starvation, and plots
were rife among the survivors. They were so enfeebled that they could
not even get back to their vessels. Struggling through at last to the
nearest point on the coast, far west of Tampa Bay, they decided that
their only hope was to build boats and try to coast to the Spanish
settlements in Mexico. Five rude boats were made with great toil; and
the poor wretches turned westward along the coast of the Gulf. Storms
scattered the boats, and wrecked one after the other. Scores of the
haggard adventurers were drowned, Narvaez among them; and scores dashed
upon an inhospitable shore perished by exposure and starvation. The
living were forced to subsist upon the dead. Of the five boats, three
had gone down with all on board; of the eighty men who escaped the wreck
but fifteen were still alive. All their arms and clothing were at the
bottom of the Gulf.
The survivors were now on Mal Hado, "the Isle of Misfortune." We know no
more of its location than that it was west of the mouth of the
Mississippi. Their boats had crossed that mighty current where it
plunges out into the Gulf, and theirs were the first European eyes to
see even this much of the Father of Waters. The Indians of the island,
who had no better larder than roots, berries, and fish, treated their
unfortunate guests as generously as was in their power; and Vaca has
written gratefully of them.
In the spring his thirteen surviving companions determined to escape.
Vaca was too sick to walk, and they abandoned him to his fate. Two other
sick men, Oviedo and Alaniz, were also left behind; and the latter soon
perished. It was a pitiable plight in which Vaca now found himself. A
naked skeleton, scarce able to move, deserted by his friends and at the
mercy of savages, it is small wonder that, as he tells us, his heart
sank within him. But he was one of the men who never "let go." A
constant soul held up the poor, worn body; and as the weather grew less
rigorous, Vaca slowly recovered from his sickness.
For nearly six years he lived an incomparably lonely life, bandied about
from tribe to tribe of Indians, sometimes as a slave, and sometimes only
a despised outcast. Oviedo fled from some danger, and he was never heard
of afterward; Vaca faced it, and lived. That his sufferings were almost
beyond endurance cannot be doubted. Even when he was not the victim of
brutal treatment, he was the worthless encumbrance, the useless
interloper, among poor savages who lived the most miserable and
precarious lives. That they did not kill him speaks well for their
humane kindness.
The thirteen who escaped had fared even worse. They had fallen into
cruel hands, and all had been slain except three, who were reserved for
the harder fate of slaves. These three were Andres Dorantes, a native of
Bejar; Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado, a native of Salamanca; and the
negro Estevanico, who was born in Azamor, Africa. These three and Vaca
were all that were now left of the gallant four hundred and fifty men
(among whom we do not count the deserters at Santo Domingo) who had
sailed with such high hopes from Spain, in 1527, to conquer a corner of
the New World,--four naked, tortured, shivering shadows; and even they
were separated, though they occasionally heard vaguely of one another,
and made vain attempts to come together. It was not until September,
1534 (nearly seven years later), that Dorantes, Castillo, Estevanico,
and Vaca were reunited; and the spot where they found this happiness was
somewhere in eastern Texas, west of the Sabine River.
But Vaca's six years of loneliness and suffering unspeakable had not
been in vain,--for he had acquired, unknowingly, the key to safety; and
amid all those horrors, and without dreaming of its significance, he had
stumbled upon the very strange and interesting clew which was to save
them all. Without it, all four would have perished in the wilderness,
and the world would never have known their end.
While they were still on the Isle of Misfortune, a proposition had been
made which seemed the height of the ridiculous. "In that isle," says
Vaca, "they wished to make us doctors, without examining us or asking
our titles; for they themselves cure sickness by blowing upon the sick
one. With that blowing, and with their hands, they remove from him the
disease; and they bade us do the same, so as to be of some use to them.
We laughed at this, saying that they were making fun, and that we knew
not how to heal; and for that they took away our food, till we should do
that which they said. And seeing our stubbornness, an Indian said to me
that I did not understand; for that it did no good for one to know how,
because the very stones and other things of the field have power to
heal,... and that we, who were men, must certainly have greater power."
This was a characteristic thing which the old Indian said, and a key to
the remarkable superstitions of his race. But the Spaniards, of course,
could not yet understand.
Presently the savages removed to the mainland. They were always in
abject poverty, and many of them perished from starvation and from the
exposures incident to their wretched existence. For three months in the
year they had "nothing but shell-fish and very bad water;" and at other
times only poor berries and the like; and their year was a series of
wanderings hither and thither in quest of these scant and unsatisfactory
foods.
It was an important fact that Vaca was utterly useless to the Indians.
He could not serve them as a warrior; for in his wasted condition the
bow was more than he could master. As a hunter he was equally
unavailable; for, as he himself says, "it was impossible for him to
trail animals." Assistance in carrying water or fuel or anything of the
sort was impossible; for he was a man, and his Indian masters could not
let a man do woman's work. So, among these starveling nomads, this man
who could not help but must be fed was a real burden; and the only
wonder is that they did not kill him.
Under these circumstances, Vaca began to wander about. His indifferent
captors paid little attention to his movements, and by degrees he got to
making long trips north, and up and down the coast. In time he began to
see a chance for trading, in which the Indians encouraged him, glad to
find their "white elephant" of some use at last. From the northern
tribes he brought down skins and _almagre_ (the red clay so
indispensable to the savages for face-paint), flakes of flint to make
arrow-heads, hard reeds for the shafts, and tassels of deer-hair dyed
red. These things he readily exchanged among the coast tribes for
shells and shell-beads, and the like,--which, in turn, were in demand
among his northern customers.
On account of their constant wars, the Indians could net venture outside
their own range; so this safe go-between trader was a convenience which
they encouraged. So far as he was concerned, though the life was still
one of great suffering, he was constantly gaining knowledge which would
be useful to him in his never-forgotten plan of getting back to the
world. These lonely trading expeditions of his covered thousands of
miles on foot through the trackless wildernesses; and through them his
aggregate wanderings were much greater than those of either of his
fellow-prisoners.
It was during these long and awful tramps that Cabeza de Vaca had one
particularly interesting experience. He was the first European who saw
the great American bison, the buffalo, which has become practically
extinct in the last decade, but once roamed the plains in vast
hordes,--and first by many years. He saw them and ate their meat in the
Red River country of Texas, and has left us a description of the
"hunchback cows." None of his companions ever saw one, for in their
subsequent journey together the four Spaniards passed south of the
buffalo-country.
Meanwhile, as I have noted, the forlorn and naked trader had had the
duties of a doctor forced upon him. He did not understand what this
involuntary profession might do for him,--he was simply pushed into it
at first, and followed it not from choice, but to keep from having
trouble. He was "good for nothing but to be a medicine-man." He had
learned the peculiar treatment of the aboriginal wizards, though not
their fundamental ideas. The Indians still look upon sickness as a
"being possessed;" and their idea of doctoring is not so much to cure
disease, as to exorcise the bad spirits which cause it.
This is done by a sleight-of-hand rigmarole, even to this day. The
medicine-man would suck the sore spot, and pretend thus to extract a
stone or thorn which was supposed to have been the cause of trouble; and
the patient was "cured." Cabeza de Vaca began to "practise medicine"
after the Indian fashion. He says himself, "I have tried these things,
and they were very successful."
When the four wanderers at last came together after their long
separation,--in which all had suffered untold horrors,--Vaca had then,
though still indefinitely, the key of hope. Their first plan was to
escape from their present captors. It took ten months to effect it, and
meantime their distress was great, as it had been constantly for so many
years. At times they lived on a daily ration of two handfuls of wild
peas and a little water. Vaca relates what a godsend it seemed when he
was allowed to scrape hides for the Indians; he carefully saved the
scrapings, which served him as food for days. They had no clothing, and
there was no shelter; and constant exposure to heat and cold and the
myriad thorns of that country caused them to "shed their skin like
snakes."
At last, in August, 1535, the four sufferers escaped to a tribe called
the Avavares. But now a new career began to open to them. That his
companions might not be as useless as he had been, Cabeza de Vaca had
instructed them in the "arts" of Indian medicine-men; and all four began
to put their new and strange profession into practice. To the ordinary
Indian charms and incantations these humble Christians added fervent
prayers to the true God. It was a sort of sixteenth-century
"faith-cure;" and naturally enough, among such superstitious patients it
was very effective. Their multitudinous cures the amateur but sincere
doctors, with touching humility, attributed entirely to God; but what
great results these might have upon their own fortunes now began to dawn
upon them. From wandering, naked, starving, despised beggars, and slaves
to brutal savages, they suddenly became personages of note,--still
paupers and sufferers, as were all their patients, but paupers of mighty
power. There is no fairy tale more romantic than the career thenceforth
of these poor, brave men walking painfully across a continent as masters
and benefactors of all that host of wild people.
Trudging on from tribe to tribe, painfully and slowly the white
medicine-men crossed Texas and came close to our present New Mexico. It
has long been reiterated by the closet historians that they entered New
Mexico, and got even as far north as where Santa Fe now is. But modern
scientific research has absolutely proved that they went on from Texas
through Chihuahua and Sonora, and never saw an inch of New Mexico.
With each new tribe the Spaniards paused awhile to heal the sick.
Everywhere they were treated with the greatest kindness their poor hosts
could give, and with religious awe. Their progress is a very valuable
object-lesson, showing just how some Indian myths are formed: first, the
successful medicine-man, who at his death or departure is remembered as
a hero, then as a demigod, then as divinity.
In the Mexican States they first found agricultural Indians, who dwelt
in houses of sod and boughs, and had beans and pumpkins. These were the
Jovas, a branch of the Pimas. Of the scores of tribes they had passed
through in our present Southern States not one has been fully
identified. They were poor, wandering creatures, and long ago
disappeared from the earth. But in the Sierra Madre of Mexico they found
superior Indians, whom we can recognize still. Here they found the men
unclad, but the women "very honest in their dress,"--with cotton tunics
of their own weaving, with half-sleeves, and a skirt to the knee; and
over it a skirt of dressed deerskin reaching to the ground, and fastened
in front with straps. They washed their clothing with a soapy root,--the
_amole_, now similarly used by Indians and Mexicans throughout the
Southwest. These people gave Cabeza de Vaca some turquoise, and five
arrow-heads each chipped from a single emerald.
In this village in southwestern Sonora the Spaniards stayed three days,
living on split deer-hearts; whence they named it the "Town of Hearts."
A day's march beyond they met an Indian wearing upon his necklace the
buckle of a sword-belt and a horseshoe nail; and their hearts beat high
at this first sign, in all their eight years' wandering, of the nearness
of Europeans. The Indian told them that men with beards like their own
had come from the sky and made war upon his people.
The Spaniards were now entering Sinaloa, and found themselves in a
fertile land of flowing streams. The Indians were in mortal fear; for
two brutes of a class who were very rare among the Spanish conquerors
(they were, I am glad to say, punished for their violation of the strict
laws of Spain) were then trying to catch slaves. The soldiers had just
left; but Cabeza de Vaca and Estevanico, with eleven Indians, hurried
forward on their trail, and next day overtook four Spaniards, who led
them to their rascally captain, Diego de Alcaraz. It was long before
that officer could believe the wondrous story told by the naked, torn,
shaggy, wild man; but at last his coldness was thawed, and he gave a
certificate of the date and of the condition in which Vaca had come to
him, and then sent back for Dorantes and Castillo. Five days later these
arrived, accompanied by several hundred Indians.
Alcaraz and his partner in crime, Cebreros, wished to enslave these
aborigines; but Cabeza de Vaca, regardless of his own danger in taking
such a stand, indignantly opposed the infamous plan, and finally forced
the villains to abandon it. The Indians were saved; and in all their joy
at getting back to the world, the Spanish wanderers parted with sincere
regret from these simple-hearted friends. After a few days' hard travel
they reached the post of Culiacan about the first of May, 1536, where
they were warmly welcomed by the ill-fated hero Melchior Diaz. He led
one of the earliest expeditions (in 1539) to the unknown north; and in
1540, on a second expedition across part of Arizona and into California,
was accidentally killed.
After a short rest the wanderers left for Compostela, then the chief
town of the province of New Galicia,--itself a small journey of three
hundred miles through a land swarming with hostile savages. At last they
reached the City of Mexico in safety, and were received with great
honor. But it was long before they could accustom themselves to eating
the food and wearing the clothing of civilized people.
The negro remained in Mexico. On the 10th of April, 1537, Cabeza de
Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes sailed for Spain, arriving in August. The
chief hero never came back to North America, but we hear of Dorantes as
being there in the following year. Their report of what they saw, and of
the stranger countries to the north of which they had heard, had already
set on foot the remarkable expeditions which resulted in the discovery
of Arizona, New Mexico, our Indian Territory, Kansas, and Colorado, and
brought about the building of the first European towns in the inland
area of the United States. Estevanico was engaged with Fray Marcos in
the discovery of New Mexico, and was slain by the Indians.
Cabeza de Vaca, as a reward for his then unparalleled walk of much more
than ten thousand miles in the unknown land, was made governor of
Paraguay in 1540. He was not qualified for the place, and returned to
Spain in disgrace. That he was not to blame, however, but was rather the
victim of circumstances, is indicated by the fact that he was restored
to favor and received a pension of two thousand ducats. He died in
Seville at a good old age.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Pronounced Hay-ress.
II.
THE GREATEST AMERICAN TRAVELLER.
The student most familiar with history finds himself constantly
astounded by the journeys of the Spanish Pioneers. If they had done
nothing else in the New World, their walks alone were enough to earn
them fame. Such a number of similar trips over such a wilderness were
never heard of elsewhere. To comprehend those rides or tramps of
thousands of miles, by tiny bands or single heroes, one must be familiar
with the country traversed, and know something of the times when these
exploits were performed. The Spanish chroniclers of the day do not
dilate upon the difficulties and dangers: it is almost a pity that they
had not been vain enough to "make more" of their obstacles. But however
curt the narrative may be on these points, the obstacles were there and
had to be overcome; and to this very day, after three centuries and a
half have mitigated that wilderness which covered half a world, have
tamed its savages, filled it with convenient stations, crossed it with
plain roads, and otherwise removed ninety per cent of its terrors, such
journeys as were looked upon as everyday matters by those hardy heroes
would find few bold enough to undertake them. The only record at all
comparable to that Spanish overrunning of the New World was the story of
the California Argonauts of '49, who flocked across the great plains in
the most remarkable shifting of population of which history knows; but
even that was petty, so far as area, hardship, danger, and endurance
went, beside the travels of the Pioneers. Thousand-mile marches through
the deserts, or the still more fatal tropic forests, were too many to be
even catalogued. It is one thing to follow a trail, and quite another to
penetrate an absolutely trackless wilderness. A big, well-armed
wagon-train is one thing, and a little squad on foot or on jaded horses
quite another. A journey from a known point to a known point--both in
civilization, though the wilderness lies between--is very different from
a journey from somewhere, through the unknown, to nowhere; whose
starting, course, and end are all untrodden and unguessed wilds. I have
no desire to disparage the heroism of our Argonauts,--they made a record
of which any nation should be proud; but they never had a chance to
match the deeds of their brother-heroes of another tongue and another
age.
* * * * *
The walk of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveller,
was surpassed by the achievement of the poor and forgotten soldier
Andres Docampo. Cabeza de Vaca tramped much more than ten thousand
miles, but Docampo much over _twenty_ thousand, and under as fearful
hardships. The explorations of Vaca were far more valuable to the world;
yet neither of them set out with the intention of exploring. But Docampo
did make a fearful walk voluntarily, and for a heroic purpose, which
resulted in his later enormous achievement; while Vaca's was merely the
heroism of a very uncommon man in escaping misfortune. Docampo's tramp
lasted nine years; and though he left behind no book to relate his
experiences, as did Vaca, the skeleton of his story as it remains to us
is extremely characteristic and suggestive of the times, and recounts
other heroism than that of the brave soldier.
When Coronado first came to New Mexico in 1540, he brought four
missionaries with his little army. Fray Marcos returned soon from Zuni
to Mexico, on account of his physical infirmities. Fray Juan de la Cruz
entered earnestly into mission-work among the Pueblos; and when Coronado
and his whole force abandoned the Territory, he insisted upon remaining
behind among his dusky wards at Tiguex (Bernalillo). He was a very old
man, and fully expected to give up his life as soon as his countrymen
should be gone; and so it was. He was murdered by the Indians about the
25th of November, 1542.