Spaniard found favor as healer with natives

The Journal is publishing a series of history articles to commemorate the settlement of New Mexico by Juan de Oñate in 1598. This one tells of the wanderings through the 1530s in the Southwest United States of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and other Spaniards who survived the Narvaez expedition.

By Miguel Encinias
For the Journal
The expedition to settle Florida led by Panfilo de Narvaez in 1527 and 1528 had been a disaster. Almost all of the more than 400 people who landed in Florida had died in storms, shipwrecks or at the hands of natives.
Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and a handful of men had made it to Galveston Island by late fall of 1528, where friendly natives helped them make it through a harsh winter.
During the Spaniards' stay on the island, the natives insisted that the travelers practice medicine on them.
Cabeza de Vaca and Captain Castillo, another survivor, would bless them and recite the Lord's Prayer and an Ave Maria. And they found success.
Cabeza de Vaca reported that many of their patients recovered and that the natives were grateful to the extent of depriving themselves of food to give to their benefactors.
Castillo and Andres Dorantes, a survivor who had been living in another part of the island, gathered all the Spanish survivors they could find who were ready to move on, crossed the channel and headed south on the mainland, somewhere in Texas.
Cabeza de Vaca was unable to join the group because he was sick, and two Spaniards named Oviedo and Alanis chose to stay.
About then Cabeza de Vaca's ability to heal seemed to fade, and the natives began to treat him as a slave.
More than a year later, around February of 1530, Cabeza de Vaca escaped and became a trader, taking conchs, sea beads and mesquite beans inland and bringing back skins, canes for arrows and flint for arrowheads.
He reported that he enjoyed the freedom the activity gave him for about the next 22 months.
During that time Alanis died, and Oviedo refused Cabeza de Vaca's pleas to leave with him. So Cabeza de Vaca stayed on the island until 1532, when Oviedo agreed to leave. But Oviedo turned back as soon as they were threatened on the mainland.
Cabeza de Vaca never returned to the island. Instead, with the help of some Indians, he located Castillo, Dorantes and an African slave named Estevan, and all four were enslaved again.
When their captors migrated to the area of Matagorda Bay in quest of prickly pears, they met up with a Spaniard named Figueroa, who knew what had happened to Narvaez after he abandoned the men of his expedition at sea. Upon arrival at Matagorda Bay, Narvaez had stayed on his barge with two other men while the rest debarked. During the night a strong wind blew the barge out to sea, never to be seen again.
When the tribe Cabeza de Vaca and the others were with moved to the area around what is now San Antonio while foraging for food around September of 1534, the four made their escape.
Making their way slowly to the west, they spent nights in the wilderness or in friendly camps. Once again Castillo and Cabeza de Vaca began to "practice" medicine.
They again found favor when Cabeza de Vaca was asked to minister to a native who showed signs of being dead. He did so, and the man revived.
After that, their reputation as healers spread like wild fire. The further west they went, the better they were received.
Soon hordes of Indians started following them. After crossing a river, presumed to be the Pecos, the four came to a wider river with people along its banks who were clad in cotton clothing and living in semipermanent houses. These people were well supplied with corn, but showed no signs of farming.
The natives told them they got their corn from the north, where there was an abundance of it, as well as of cows. The Spaniards were tempted to go north, but decided to continue heading northwestward along the river still hoping to find New Spain.
It is by no means certain where they crossed the river to head due west, but it would appear by the description in Cabeza de Vaca's account of the rest of the trek that they crossed the Rio Grande somewhat south of present-day Juarez, Mexico.
NEXT: Reunited with Spaniards

Miguel Encinias is an Albuquerque historian. His novel "Two Lives for Oñate" is being published by the University of New Mexico.