Estevan-Early American Negro

...Finally persuading the terrified Indians to accompany him a little further, to a point where he could overlook the city where Estevan had been taken, Friar Marcos erected there a little pile of stones...

...According to De Vaca's Relacion, the Spaniards started this practice against their will, protesting that they had no power to heal...

...Of the others, one was Estevan's master, Andr6s Dorantes, and the other two were Alvar Nufiez Cabeza de Vaca and Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado...

...When he set out again into the wilderness north of New Spain, on the trail that ended for him so abruptly at Hawaikfih, Estevan was still in slavery, not to Dorantes, but to the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza...

...The general consensus of opinion seems to be that he sent ahead by messenger his magic gourd, which is described as being decorated with two bells and feathers, one white and one red...

...It was the expedition of Friar Marcos de Niza, sponsored by the viceroy of New Spain and guided by Estevan, which resulted in the later and betterknown expedition of Coronado...

...He set up a cross and appropriated the country for God and Spain, christening it the Kingdom of Saint Francis as a compliment to his religious order...

...In Castefieda's account of the preliminary expedition of Friar Marcos, this early historian intimates that Estevan's presence as guide proved embarrassing on more scores than one...

...Ahead of him the black man was flying from village to village and leaving each village with a few less turquoises and a few less Indians than it had had theretofore...

...ARTHUR WALLACE PEACH...

...It was at a town probably slightly south of the Sonora valley that Friar Marcos stopped and sent Estevan ahead...

...That the party was in what is now Texas is certain at least, and some historians believe that De Vaca, Estevan and their companions were in New Mexico...

...It was not long until eighty Spaniards were reduced by privation and illness to fifteen...

...The vastness of the southwestern United States makes one readily forgive De Vaca for his ambiguity, makes one marvel that he ever found his way to New Spain...

...The Negro must have had a flair for organization and a persuasive tongue, for on one occasion he took the whole village out to meet his companions and the gifts included such substantial presents as blankets of cowhide as well as the beans and pumpkins on which the villagers subsisted...

...If only as a proud example of race vitality, Estevan should interest the modern Negro...

...Estevan sent back a cross as tall as the Indian who staggered under its burden...

...The ancients did away with Estevan and through the centuries his story has lived in the traditions of the Zufiis as well as in the narratives of the early Spanish explorers...

...Estevan was to send back by messenger a cross, the size of which would indicate the importance of the territory he was exploring...

...Before Estevan left Friar Marcos, the monk instructed him in the code in which he was to send back estimates of the importance of the country through which he passed...

...It was their hope to sail along the gulf and reach the Spanish settlements in Mexico, but all five of the rude boats they made were shipwrecked far from their goal...

...And so they trekked for long years...

...The chief sent back messengers to demand of Estevan that he return at once, for if he continued his party would have no further chance to return alive...

...The next morning some of the Zufii ancients took Estevan and his Indians out of their lodging and, their attempt to flee being defeated, they were killed...

...Perhaps if Estevan, the pathfinder, had written the Relacion instead of De Vaca, we might be more certain...

...The chief of Cibola lodged Estevan outside the pueblo's limits and took away all his belongings, all his turquoises and feathers and bells, and refused him and his party food or water...

...It has been given to few Negroes to serve in fellowslavery with their erstwhile masters, but that was the situation in which Estevan found himself for many years...

...The refugees had scanty protection from the elements and a storm-tossed, thirsty voyage had left them in no condition to withstand further hardship...

...He never overtook Estevan...

...Castefieda, who visited Cibola the next year, says that the Negro was kept prisoner three days under a severe strain of questioning before he was killed...

...However, in 1534 Estevan and Dorantes finally escaped from the Indians to whom they were slaves and with De Vaca and Castillo started westward toward the Spanish settlements...

...After De Vaca's party reached the Rio Grande, Estevan seems to have acted as both organizer and advance agent, helping arrange for the group to be guided from one settlement to the next and sometimes going on ahead with one of the Spaniards to pave the way for the arrival of the remainder of the party...

...a Flower Garden Lord, Who loved the fields and growing things, Who from the flowers drew Lessons that all the centuries Have learned were true, Give to this little garden plot The blessings of the sun, Sweet dews and gentle winds and peace When day is done...

...Estevan was successful on this, his first diplomatic mission, and the Indians, the Avavares, made the wanderers welcome...

...It must have been disconcerting to a man who had taken holy orders to have his slave guide hailed as the miracle man of the party...

...The other white man, also a churchman, who started out with the friar became ill and was left at a settlement...

...There is one story which says that his body was cut into pieces and given the chiefs to satisfy them that the Negro really was dead, but I hope that story is not true...

...The fare of the Indians on this island, roots for the most part, unless fish or oysters were to be had, did not sit well on the Spanish stomachs...

...It was on the first lap of the westward journey that the party saw distant smoke and caught a glimpse of a fleeing redskin...

...There are minor differences...

...The gourd was presented to the chief of Cibola in the manner which had been the custom of the De Vaca party...

...So may it be through summer days And golden hours thereof A symbol by the roads of men Of joy and love...

...but the Indians withheld food from them and forced them to agree to try...

...Very probably it was because Estevan became so impressed with the prestige of the gourd rattle at this time that he carried one of them with him to the Cibola city...

...The Negro Estevan, who had been the companion of Cabeza de Vaca on his eight years' trek through the Southwest, and who was now pathfinder for Coronado, appeared before the ancestors of the Zufii Indians...

...But though still a slave, Estevan had the advantage over the friars he accompanied in that he was no stranger to the country into which they traveled and he had a prestige that the holy men lacked among the Indians who knew him as a medicine man...

...Why, they reasoned, should a black man be sent to tell of a white man and a white man's God...

...but he was not very welcome at Hawaikfih...

...Only the Indians who brought the word back to Friar Marcos escaped...

...Friar Marcos's report gives no such intimation, but one can readily see why he might have preferred to have the matter die into historical silence...

...For of the 3oo men of the Narv~iez expedition who started inland from Tampa Bay in I528, four were in the party which reached Mexico eight years later...

...But, imperturbable, Estevan went on...

...After his party had marched inland from Tampa Bay to Apalachee Bay, Don P~infilo de Narv~iez, who had authorization from his king to conquer the country from the Rio de las Palmas to the Cape of Florida, became hopeless of rejoining the ships of his expedition and he set his crew to building crafts for their escape...

...The boat in which Estevan was, with his master Dorantes, was capsized near an island, probably along the coast of either Louisiana or Texas...

...With the return of De Vaca to New Spain, one phase of Estevan's career as explorer was definitely over...

...The method of healing, as De Vaca relates it, was "to make over them the sign of the cross while breathing on them, recite a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and pray to God Our Lord, as best we could, to give them good health and inspire them to do us some good favors...

...The ancients did not think that his logic was very good...

...This bearded black man who had been slave and explorer, barbarian and god, was tricked out in all the gaudy furbelows of the southwestern medicine man...

...They dispatched Estevan to overtake the Indian, the reception seeming uncertain, and instructed him to ask the Indian to conduct the party to the people who were making the smoke...

...Estevan told the Zufii ancients of a white man who followed him and of a Lord Who knew about things in the sky...

...I much prefer the end ascribed to him by an old Zufii tradition which has it that the chiefs took Estevan out into the starlit blackness of a New Mexican night and "gave him a powerful kick that sped him through the air back to the south whence he had come...

...Just where they went no one seems quite sure, for De Vaca's ori384 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, 1929 entations were of the vaguest...

...Somewhere along the route they followed, Indian medicine men presented the group with two of the gourd rattles which the Indians set great store by and which their native medicine men often used...

...It was a code in the tradition of the Church...

...The crew escaped to the island--they christened it Malhado, the Island of Misfortune--where they soon encountered the party, of which De Vaca was the leader, from a second shipwrecked vessel...

...Such is the general substance of the historians' conclusions about the end of Estevan...

...When Friar Marcos reached the continental divide he was met by an Indian bearing the news of Estevan's imprisonment at Hawaikfih...

...A maze of stories exists about the end which Estevan found awaiting him at Cibila...

...August 14, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 383 ESTEVAN--EARLY AMERICAN NEGRO By ELIZABETH DICKENS N A spring evening in ~539 the sunset at Hawaik6h, one of the Seven Cities of Cibola, was darkened by a black shadow...

...It was on Malhado that the shipwrecked wanderers got their start as medicine men...

...Plumes and bells flapped and jangled about his feet and arms and he brandished a gourd rattle, an article to which the pueblo Indians attached a mysterious significance...

...Even under the urgency of this message, the friar did not immediately set out to join him, but awaited the return of messengers he had dispatched to the coast...

...Then, as the Friar so naively put it, with "more fright than food" he hurried back to Nueva Espafia where his tales were to inspire the expedition of Coronado...

...A gift which may have had much to do with Estevan's death at Hawaikfih was the result of the medicine man practice which the De Vaca party undertook...

...One of these four was Estevan, or Est6vanico, a blackamoor of Azamor, Morocco...