Horses and Chains

A Changed World

Last time, we followed Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, and Estebanico as their reputation spread through the Native world. The four survivors had once been broken castaways. Dependent on people whose languages were almost completely incomprehensible to them. But after years of suffering, something strange had happened.

Native communities began to receive them as healers. People brought them the sick. They brought them children to bless. They carried them from place to place, fed them, and guided them. And soon, the story grew larger than the four men themselves. Some said they came from heaven. Some said they were children of the sun. Some said they could heal.

And some said they could kill. Wherever the four survivors went, crowds followed. Villages were robbed. Food was demanded. People trembled before them. And the four men found themselves trapped inside a legend they could not fully control. Now, as they moved farther west, the land began changing again. More corn and fixed settlements appeared.

Objects from faraway places appeared. And then, at last, the survivors began hearing news of men like themselves. Men with beards, horses, and lances. For years, Cabeza de Vaca had dreamed of finding Christians again. But when he finally did, the meeting would not be simple. Because the Spaniards waiting beyond the next horizon were not wandering healers, naked castaways, or men who had survived by depending on Native generosity.

They were armed riders and slavers. And for Cabeza de Vaca, the return to the Spanish world would feel less like rescue than he might have imagined.

Across the Hard Country

As the four survivors continued west, the way people received them began to change. Before, the pattern had been ugly but simple. One group would escort the four men to another group. Then the escorts would rob the people who received them for whatever could be taken. The four survivors disliked this. Cabeza de Vaca says they were grieved by it.

But they did not yet have the power to stop it. Now, as they moved into new country, the custom shifted. The people who came out to meet them on the road were not robbed immediately. Instead, once the four entered their houses, the people offered what they had. The survivors then gave these offerings to the leaders of the people traveling with them, who divided the goods among the group.

Those who lost their possessions often followed the four men onward, hoping to recover their losses when the next village gave in turn. This created a moving chain of giving, fear, hunger, and expectation. No one wanted to be left behind. No one wanted to lose everything without a chance to regain something later. And everyone had heard the same warning:

Do not hide anything. The strangers will know. The sun will tell them. And if you deceive them, they can kill you. That is what the legend had become. The people guided the survivors across more than fifty leagues of desert and rugged mountains, roughly 175 miles or 282 kilometers, though these old measurements were far from exact.

The country was dry. Game was scarce. Hunger returned. This matters because the last episode ended with abundance. Thousands of people traveling with them. Hunters bringing deer, hares, quail, parrots, and other game. Food piled before them. But the land did not stay generous. Again, the journey entered hard country. The mountains were rough.

The desert was dry. And the people traveling with the survivors suffered badly from hunger and exhaustion. Eventually, they crossed a great river. Then they came out onto plains beyond the mountains. People arrived from far away to receive them. They gave so much property to those traveling with the four survivors that much of it had to be left behind.

The Spaniards told the people to take it back so it would not be wasted. But they refused. Once something had been offered, they said, it was not their custom to take it back. The four men still wanted to go west toward the sunset. Toward what they hoped would eventually be New Spain. But the people with them resisted. They said the people in that direction were far away, and that they were enemies.

They did not want the four survivors to go to them. This had happened before. Groups wanted the power of the four men for themselves. They wanted their relatives, allies, and friends to receive them. They did not want their enemies to enjoy that same blessing. But the four survivors insisted. So the people sent two women ahead as messengers.

One was from their own group. The other was a captive woman from the enemy people. Cabeza de Vaca explains why women were sent. Even in war, women could negotiate. That detail matters. Women could cross lines that men might not be able to cross safely. They could carry messages. They could create a path where armed men might create bloodshed.

So the women went ahead. The survivors waited. Five days passed. No one returned. The people claimed the women must not have found anyone. Then the four men said they wanted to go north. Again, the people resisted. They said there were no people there. Or if there were, they were very far away. They said there was no food. No water.

Nothing but danger. The four survivors pushed harder. And finally, Cabeza de Vaca used the thing he had been trying to manage for so long. Fear. He became angry. One night, he left the group and slept apart from them in the field. The people came to him. They stayed awake around him all night. Terrified. Begging him not to be angry.

They said that even if they knew they would die on the trail, they would take the four men wherever they wished to go. The survivors continued to act angry so the fear would not fade.

Fear of the Healers

And then something happened that made everything worse. Many of the people became sick. The next day, eight men died. For Cabeza de Vaca, this was horrifying. To the people around him, it must have looked like proof. The strangers had become angry. Then sickness came. Then men died. The legend had warned that the four could kill.

Now the warning seemed true. Word spread through the land. People became so afraid that they seemed worried they might die simply by looking at the survivors. They begged the four men not to be angry. They begged them not to wish death on anyone else. They believed the survivors could kill simply by willing it. Cabeza de Vaca says the sorrow they felt could not have been greater.

That is important. He does not describe this moment as a triumph. He says they were grieved. Because people had died. And because the four survivors now faced a new danger. If everyone believed they carried death, people might flee from them. Their guides might abandon them. Future villages might refuse them. The road that had opened through belief could close through terror.

The same reputation that fed them could isolate them. So the survivors prayed to God for help. And thankfully according to Cabeza de Vaca, the sick began to recover. That recovery mattered as much as the sickness. If the deaths had confirmed fear, the recoveries helped restore the healing side of the legend. The four men were dangerous.

But maybe they could also protect. During this time, Cabeza de Vaca noticed another custom that struck him deeply. When the sick were still alive, their parents, siblings, and wives showed great pain. But after they died, the relatives showed almost no outward grief. They did not cry or speak to each other. They did not approach the bodies until the survivors ordered them to bury the dead.

For more than fifteen days, Cabeza de Vaca says he did not see these people speak to one another. He did not see them laugh. He did not even hear infants cry. Except once. One child cried. And because the child had cried in the presence of Cabeza de Vaca, the people carried the child away and cut the child from the shoulders almost to the legs with sharp mouse teeth.

Cabeza de Vaca was angry. He asked why they had done such a thing. They said it was to punish the child for crying before him. It is a disturbing scene. And like many disturbing scenes in La Relación, we have to read it carefully. We are reading through Cabeza de Vaca’s eyes as an outsider. Whether he understood every detail correctly or not, the larger point is clear.

The fear surrounding the four survivors had become intense. Too intense. It was reshaping behavior. Belief could feed, protect, and open roads. But belief could also become terror. And terror can make people do terrible things.

A World of Bison

After the sick recovered, the women who had been sent ahead returned. They had found few people. Most had gone after the cows. It was the season for them. The “cows” Cabeza de Vaca describes were not cattle in the Spanish sense. They were bison. Great shaggy animals of the North American plains. People followed them. Hunted them.

Made shoes, blankets, robes, and shields from them. For Texas history, this is a powerful moment. Long before cattle drives or ranches. Before the cowboy became one of the great symbols of Texas. The land already had its own great grazing animal. And Native peoples had built lifeways around them. The survivors decided that the sick should remain behind.

The healthier people would continue with them. After several days, Alonso del Castillo and Estebanico went ahead with the two women as guides. The captive woman led them to a river running through mountains. There was a town there. And for the first time, they saw houses that looked more fixed. After three days, Castillo returned.

He brought five or six people with him. And he brought news that changed everything. There were many fixed houses ahead. The people ate beans. They ate gourds. And he had seen corn. Corn. That one word lifted the spirits of the survivors more than almost anything else could have. Corn meant settled life. Stored food. Agriculture.

A different world from the hunger of the coast. For years, the four men had wandered through lands where survival often depended on roots, fish, prickly pears, mesquite, game, insects, and whatever people could gather or hunt. Now they were hearing of corn. To them, corn meant abundance. It meant villages. It meant the possibility that New Spain might not be impossibly far away.

Soon they met Estebanico returning with people from the houses. They brought beans. Gourds for eating and carrying water. Cowhide robes. And other goods. But there was a problem. The people now receiving them were enemies of the people who had brought them there. They did not understand one another. So the four survivors did what they had done before.

They took leave of the first group. They gave them everything that had been offered. And then they moved on with the new people. The four men survived because they became transferable. One group could hand them to another. One set of guides could give way to the next. One relationship could become a bridge to another relationship.

That may sound simple. But in a world of enemies, different languages, and hard country, it was extraordinary. The four survivors had become something like a moving diplomatic object. A sacred burden. A dangerous blessing. No group wanted to offend them. Many wanted to claim them. And almost everyone seemed to understand that they had to be passed on properly.

That was how the road west continued. The four stayed briefly among these people, then moved to other fixed houses. But they faced a choice. They could follow the road of the cows. That road went north. Or they could follow the road of the corn. They chose corn. The northern road would have taken them too far out of their way. They believed their best hope was still to move toward the sunset.

West. So they turned from the road of the cows and followed the road of corn. It was not easy. For seventeen days they traveled up a river. The people gave them cowhides. But food was scarce. Cabeza de Vaca says their daily sustenance was little more than a handful of deer fat. Then they crossed the river. And traveled another seventeen days.

By then, they came among people who, for part of the year, ate powdered straw. And because the four survivors arrived during that season, they ate it too. Once again, abundance vanished. But at the end of that journey, they found fixed houses. And there, at last, was corn. Gourds. Beans. Cotton robes. The survivors loaded the people who had brought them there with these gifts, and those people returned home overjoyed.

Think about that. A group had guided the four men across hard country. They had endured hunger. They had carried them toward people who might have been enemies or strangers. And when they returned, they returned loaded with food and goods. The chain of giving continued. The legend still worked. From there, the country opened into another world.

Some of the houses were made of earth. Others of cane matting. For more than a hundred leagues (a league being around 3.5 miles or 5.5 kilometers), the survivors kept finding fixed houses. Corn. Beans. Deer. Cotton blankets that Cabeza de Vaca says were better than those of New Spain. And other goods carried across long distances.

This is one of the most important parts of the entire journey. Because what the survivors found was not wilderness in the sense Europeans often imagined. It was a connected world. Turquoise from the north. Coral from the Pacific coast. Parrot feathers. Bison hides. Copper bells. Antimony. The four survivors were not discovering empty land.

They were crossing networks of trade, communication, and culture. And every object told them that the world ahead was larger and more complex than they had understood. Then Cabeza de Vaca received five emerald arrowheads. The people used them in ceremonies and dances. He asked where they came from. The answer pointed north. They came from high mountains.

And beyond those mountains, the people said, were villages with many people and very large houses. To Spanish ears, that kind of news mattered. For men raised in an age of conquest, rumor could become fuel. The same kind of rumor that had lured Narváez into disaster was beginning to form again. Farther north. Richer lands. More wealth.

This is part of why Cabeza de Vaca’s journey mattered beyond his own survival. His account did not just preserve memory. It helped feed the Spanish imagination. It suggested that the lands north of Mexico were not empty. They were inhabited. Connected. And perhaps, in Spanish minds, worth pursuing. Cabeza de Vaca also pauses to describe the women among these people.

He says they were the most decently treated women he had seen in any part of the Indies. They wore cotton shirts reaching to the knees. Over them, they wore half-sleeves of deerskin strips that reached toward the ground. They washed the garments with roots that worked like soap. They wore shoes. To Cabeza de Vaca, this stood out.

He had spent years among peoples living in extreme scarcity. He had seen nakedness. Hunger. Hard labor. Constant movement. Now he saw cotton clothing. Clean garments. Shoes. Fixed houses. Corn. Beans. Turquoise. Ceremony. Trade. Again, the land was changing. And so was the Spanish understanding of it. The people still came to the four survivors to be touched and blessed.

The sick came. The healthy came. Women who had just given birth brought newborn babies to be touched. The four men were exhausted by it. They had to bless people constantly. But even here, in this more settled country, the reputation followed them. They were still healers. Still holy men. Still children of the sun to some.

The Village of the Hearts

Then came the village the Spaniards named Corazones or the Village of the Hearts. There, the people gave Dorantes more than six hundred deer hearts. Opened and prepared. They had such abundance of them that the Spaniards named the place for what they received. The people told them this place was an entrance to many provinces toward the South Sea.

The South Sea meant the Pacific. To the Spanish mind, that mattered. They were no longer just lost men stumbling west. They were now near worlds connected to the Pacific coast. The people spoke of corn planted three times a year. Fixed houses called buhíos. Food in abundance. Poisonous trees whose sap could be used on arrows. And then, another sign appeared.

A Spanish Object

At one village, Castillo saw something around the neck of a Native man. A little buckle from a sword belt. With a horseshoe nail sewn into it. A Spanish object. The survivors asked what it was and who had brought it. The answer must have made their hearts pound. Men with beards like theirs had come from the sky. They had horses and lances.

They had lanced two people. Then, the people said, those men went to the sea, put their lances below the water, and went beneath it, later appearing on the waves, moving toward the sunset. The description was filtered through Native interpretation. To the survivors, the meaning was clear enough. Spaniards had been near here. For the first time in years, they had solid news of Spaniards.

But the news did not bring only joy. It brought confusion. And sadness. Because these Christians had not been described as rescuers. They had wounded people. The four survivors did not yet know who they were. Were they explorers? Slavers? Soldiers? The survivors did not know. But now they moved with urgency. They told the Native people that they were going to find these Christians.

They said they wanted to tell the Christians not to kill the Native people. Nor to enslave them or take their lands. That is one of the most striking turns in the entire account. For years, Cabeza de Vaca had dreamed of reaching Christians. But by the time he finally heard of them, he was warning Native people against them. And after years of surviving through Native generosity, he now found himself in a strange position:

A Spaniard trying to protect Native communities from other Spaniards. As they pushed on, they found land abandoned. People had fled into the mountains. They were afraid of Christians. The fear was not abstract. It was reshaping the land. People were hiding rather than planting and living openly. Hiding because men with horses and chains had entered their world.

Then the four survivors found many people gathered together out of fear. These people received them well and gave them what they had. They gave them more than two thousand loads of corn. The four survivors distributed that corn to the hungry people who had been traveling with them. Again, we see how their authority worked. They did not simply take.

They received. They redistributed. They fed the people with them. That difference mattered to the Native communities. And it would matter even more when the four finally met other Spaniards.

Horses and Chains

The next day, they sent messengers ahead, as they had often done. The messengers returned with disturbing news. They had not found people in the open. Everyone had fled to the woods. The messengers had watched the Christians from behind trees. And they had seen something terrible. The Christians were carrying many Indians in chains.

The Native people traveling with Cabeza de Vaca became upset. Some began turning back to warn the land that Christians were coming. More would have left if the four survivors had not told them not to fear. Cabeza de Vaca tried to calm them. He tried to keep them with him. He even slept there that night to reassure them. But the meaning was already clear.

The return to the Spanish world was going to be ugly. The four survivors had lived for years among Native peoples. They had been hungry among them. Protected by them. Guided by them. Fed by them. Celebrated by them. Feared by them. Now they were approaching Spanish Christians who hunted those same people in chains. The next day, the messengers guided the survivors to the place where they had seen the Christians.

At the hour of vespers, they saw the signs clearly. Stakes where horses had been tied. Horsemen had been there. The old Spanish world had left tracks in the dirt. But those tracks were not comforting. They meant armed men. Mobility. Power. And to the Native people nearby, terror.

Next time, Cabeza de Vaca follows those tracks.

After nearly eight years of shipwreck, hunger, captivity, healing, and wandering, he finally comes face to face with Christians again. But the reunion he had dreamed of will not end the confusion of this journey. It will deepen it. Because the men waiting ahead are not broken castaways. They are not wandering healers. They are mounted Spaniards.

And they have come looking for captives.