Great River. Paul Horgan
no tribes, only a few roving Indians who said yes, there were people, but they had scattered themselves away from the river, far away from what they knew about. To the south, Indian men and women of tribes persecuted in the slave trade had vowed to have no children rather than let them grow up to be captives for sale. Such news travelled. Caniedo returned from the empty lowlands of River of Palms to Guzmán at the Pánuco with neither slaves, gold, nor establishment of a city. Guzmán was later transferred to a command in the western coastal region of Mexico, where after a successful campaign he became the cruel governor of Nueva Galicia.
On September 3, 1526, from Tenochtitlan his capital, where he returned after months of arduous pacification of Yucatan and Guatemala, Cortés wrote to the King, “… I have a goodly number of people ready to go to settle at the Rio de las Palmas… because I have been informed that it is good land and that there is a port. I do not think God and Your Majesty will be served less there than in all the other regions because I have much good news concerning that land.… “That announcement had the air of forestalling in the King’s mind any rival’s similar plans for the River of Palms. On the great map of New Spain Cortés laid a paw here, a dagger point there, a knee elsewhere, a scowl yonder; while he pursued whatever local battle required his presence. When deep in the tropics, away from communication for two years, he finally heard from a loyal friend in Mexico the capital that his government had proved treacherous; that his death and his army’s had been proclaimed and all their possessions confiscated; and that Narváez, his miserable, once-disposed-of rival, had been granted the River of Palms, then a whole day the great commander kept to himself. His soldiers outside his tent could hear that “he was suffering under the greatest agitation.” After Mass the following morning he told them the terrible news, and in the midst of their dejection made plans for a secret return to Mexico, to confound his traitors, regain his empire, and once more beguile the Emperor with triumphs. But in his large affairs, as in his small, a spell seemed to have been broken. The genius for success had abandoned him. Soon he was in Spain arguing for more power; the Emperor deliberated, complimented him, relieved him of his major command, and created him Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca. He returned to Mexico, a lion still hungry but with claws drawn. He never saw the Rio de las Palmas; for, a decade later when he asked for another part of the same long river, far to the north, he was denied in favor of a young officer, a late-comer to Mexico, of whom nobody among the veterans of the Conquest had ever heard.
Meanwhile, Pánfilo de Narváez with his royal charter, four hundred men, eighty-two horses, four ships and a brigantine rode out of the harbor of Xagua in Cuba. His course was charted for the mouth of the Rio de las Palmas. His pilot had been there before, with Garay, and was believed to know the whole crescent of the great Gulf, from Pánuco to Florida. But it was a year of storms, and in early April of 1528 Narváez and his company were driven from their course by a wild south wind that blew them into the west coast of Florida, where they landed on the fifteenth. They were far—how far they could not know—from the River of Palms; but amidst hostile demonstrations by Indians, who yet wore a few golden trinkets, and discoveries of the wrecked ship and the deerskin-wrapped corpses of earlier Spaniards, Narváez concocted high plans. The fleet was to proceed along the Gulf Coast to the Rio de las Palmas, while he and the cavalry and the bulk of the footmen marched to the same future capital by land. There they would meet, and the city would rise, and it would not be Cortés who built it, or poor Garay, but the Adelantado Pánfilo de Narváez, with his failures in Mexico wiped out, his one eye flashing enough for the other one which Cortés had cost him, his marvelous deep commanding voice proper to a wise governor of fabulous lands united to Spain and ennobled by his own courage and zeal. The fleet caught the wind to sea, and in due course, Narváez moved overland into the wilderness, according to plan. He never reached the river that was the western boundary of his vast province. The ships of his original fleet looked for the River of Palms, there to meet him, but either did not sail far enough or passed the lazy waters of its bar-hidden estuary at night, for they never found it. They returned to their starting point on the Florida coast, but there was no sign of their captain-general. They sailed back and forth for nearly a year searching for him and the three hundred men who had disembarked with him; but to no avail; and in the end they gave up and sailed for Veracruz, in New Spain.
For seven years nothing was known of the fate that befell the remainder of the Narváez command. But when the news finally came, those who heard it were lost in marvelling at how it arrived.
3.
Upland River
A thousand miles upland from the mouth of the Rio de las Palmas, dug-out villages roofed with straw, twig and mud sat by the banks of the river. It was the same river, though nobody then knew this. The river-banks were low, here and there shaded by willows and cottonwoods. A little distance back on either side, the ground was hard with gravel. Narrow deserts reached to mountains that lay parallel to the river. The leaves were turning yellow, for the first frost had come, and the hunting parties from the villages had already left for the buffalo plains to the northeast, leaving only a few people at home to care for old persons and to guard the stored harvest of beans, squashes and corn. In mid-November, if the wind was from the north, hard dust was blown up to sting the face, and the sky was wan with long white streaks. If the breeze was southerly, midday was warm and blazed with empowering light out of the blue, and sharp, dry scents came off the scaly desert and somehow told of well-being.
To the most northerly of these river villages, near the site of modern El Paso, now came walking in mid-November, 1535, two Indian women, one of whom was the returning daughter of a man who lived there. With them were two extraordinary persons, a man whose skin was light, though burned by sun and wind, and a man whose skin was black. These men showed signs of having suffered from near-starvation over a long period. They were sparsely clothed in animal skins. The women said that three days away were two other white men, escorted by a large throng of Indians of the prairies who dared not approach closer because of long-standing enmities with the village people. There was much to tell the villagers about the strangers, who were great doctors able to cure the sick and raise the dead. If the two already there in the town by the river were made welcome, the other two who waited three days away would come also. Yes, let them come, said the town people. With that, accompanied by many of the river people, the strangers set out to join their companions. Toward the end of the three days’ journey, the white man, with five or six of the villagers, went ahead to prepare the meeting, and a few miles later met the other two white men who waited in the desert with their crowd of roving prairie people. The white strangers greeted one another with joy, sharing the news of settled towns where food was to be had. They then proceeded to meet the gift-laden procession that was approaching, and with which walked the black man.
The meeting in the desert was ceremonious. The river dwellers brought gifts of beans, squashes, gourds, robes of buffalo fur, and other things. These were bestowed upon the strange doctors in friendship. Now the plains people and the river people confronted one another. They did not speak one another’s tongues, and were enemies. The doctors gathered up the gifts they had just received and gave them to the roaming people who had come there as escorts, and asked them to go back to their own people and away from their enemies, which they did.
With the others, the doctors then marched to the river dwellings, and as night came with the November chill they reached the houses. Great celebrations were held for the visitors, who gave thanks in prayer for having found those people, with whom they stayed all night and a day. On the second morning they began to travel again, accompanied by the people, going up the river which ran brown and shallow between earthen banks below two mountains that made a pass. Messengers went ahead. On the streambanks beyond the mountains the doctors found other towns where they were received with different signs of friendship. When the strangers came into houses they found the people seated facing the wall, with lowered heads, and their hair hiding their faces. In tribute to the visitors the householders had heaped all their possessions in the middle of the room from which, when greetings had been exchanged, they gave presents of robes and animal skin. The people were strong and energetic, with beautiful bodies and lively intelligence. The young and able men went wholly naked, the women and old feeble men clothed in deerskin. They freely and aptly answered questions put to them by the strangers.
Why did they