Welcome to Leapon Apocalypse.

Episode two, Alliance and Advantage. I'm Brandon Seal.

Plains Apaches of the Texas Panhandle wouldn't see the Spanish again for almost 40 years after their first meeting with Coronado in 1541.

Which didn't mean, however, that they didn't feel the Spanish presence in other ways.

All throughout the middle of the 16th century,

the Spanish pushed up through the central Mexican highlands,

fueled by the spectacular wealth of the mines that they found there.

The silver supply of Europe would septuple over the next hundred years,

fueled in large part by these Mexican mines.

And despite royal prohibitions to the contrary, almost every ounce of that silver was pulled out of the ground by Indian slaves, who died at horrific rates in the process.

Using a loophole in Spanish law, which technically forbade Indian slavery, as long as slaves could claim that they had captured the Indians warring unlawfully against the Spanish throne,

then they could keep them, which created a terrible but terribly profitable incentive for

maintaining a state of continuous war against the natives in northern Mexico.

Profitability of the Indian slave trade became perhaps the primary enticement

to Spanish-North American Frontier Service and settlement.

The Humano strongholds along the Rio Grande and the Southern Texas Plains

shielded the Plains Apaches somewhat from these earliest slaving expeditions.

But not entirely. When Spanish expeditionaries returned to the Texas Panhandle in 1581,

they were received much more coldly than Coronado had been in 1541.

400 Apache Bowman met this Spanish expedition and made it clear in no uncertain terms that

the Spanish were not welcome.

Something had changed, and most likely it had been rumors of or direct encounters with Spanish

...