Welcome to Cabeza of Baca.

Episode 23, Four Horsemen.

I'm Brandon Seal.

For the first three months of 1536,

Alvar Nunez Cabeza of Baca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorrantez, Esteban, and 600 or so of their Native American followers traveled down the Pacific coast of Mexico.

They were backtracking along the trail of an Indian that they had met up in Sonora,

who had sported a Castilian belt buckle and a horseshoe nail on a necklace.

The Indian had confirmed for them that the artifacts had come from men, quote, with beards like ours, end quote.

But the Indian had also told them that these bearded men had come with horses and armor and weapons and had actually run through two of his friends with a lance.

Quote, he told us how other times Christians had entered their lands and destroyed and burned their villages

and carried off half of their men and all of their women and children, end quote.

And the four expeditionaries now are able to see this with their own eyes.

In normal times, the Sonoran coast is a lush, well-watered plain

that according to Cabesa de Vaca was, quote,

without a doubt the best in all of the Indies, and more fertile, end quote.

In 1536, however, it looked more like a scene from the apocalypse.

Quote, we went through much of the land and found it all abandoned

because the inhabitants there had fled to the sierras,

leaving behind their houses and fields out of fear of the Christians, end quote.

From the expeditionary's position of shared nakedness with the natives, they physically felt the

effects of this devastation, of the food shortages it caused, and the psychological trauma it was

inflicting. They met some natives who were so shaken up by everything they were experiencing that they just stopped eating.

...