Welcome to Cabeza de Baca.

Episode 16, Signs and Wonders.

I'm Brandon Seale.

By the end of 1534, Cabeza de Baca, Castillo, Dorrantes, and Esteban had made their way as far south as the Rio Grande, somewhere perhaps near modern-day Lake Falcon.

And they were no longer mere slaves to the hunter-gatherer tribes of South Texas. They had become medicine men, faith healers, and honored guests of the new

tribes they met, a market change from the treatment that they had received for most of their

six years on the continent up to this point. Of course, the flip side to being medicine men

is that they were called upon to perform increasingly challenging cures.

First, it had just been some Indians with headaches.

Now, it was five crippled Indians with some kind of apparently permanent disability.

As an upfront payment for their healing, these five disabled Indians had brought their bows and arrows,

items of true inestimable worth to these resource poor Indians, and they laid them at the feet of Alonso Castillo in particular.

To date, it had only been Alonso Castillo who had been asked to heal, and yet he was never quite

comfortable with it. In Castillo's case in particular, he was always fearful, quote,

that his sins might interfere with his cures, and they would not all work out well, end quote.

Of course, maybe it was Castillo's piety and humility that made him such a good instrument

for divine healing in the first place.

Even so, the four expeditionaries agreed that only God could heal the five Indians now before them.

No carnival trick, nothing even that Castillo might have picked up from his doctor father back in Salamanca was going to save them now.

And so as Castillo began his rituals, the other three gathered around him

and began to pray as hard as they could. Eliseo Torres, a professor at the University of New Mexico,

has actually written a paper comparing the healing techniques of the Narvaise Expeditionaries

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