Welcome to Cabeza de Baca.

Episode 25, The Gospel According to Cabeza de Baca.

I'm Brandon Seal.

The memory of Alvar Noyes Cabeza de Baca,

Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Esteban endured for a couple of generations in Native North America.

Expeditions into northern Mexico in 1542, 1565, and 1582, and perhaps others,

found stories still circulating about the three white and one black

medicine man who had passed through their years earlier.

In 1629, Cabes de Vaca's people of the cows came seeking out nearby Franciscan missionaries

after reportedly receiving visions of a so-called Lady in Blue, a Spanish nun who had mentally projected herself through space and time

to prepare them for Christian conversion.

Was it a coincidence that these people of the cows,

the most advanced of all the tribes that Cabes de Vaca and his companions encountered,

should have then become some of the earliest and most eager recruits

to the Franciscan missions of the area?

It's fun to imagine that maybe the four old expeditionaries had laid a foundation for Christianity

amongst the tribe, but I admit that it's a reach.

As late as 1643, one of the early settlers of Monterey, Alonso de Leon, whose son, actually, by the same name, would lead some of the first organized Spanish entradas into Texas, recorded Indians in Nuevo Leone who told stories of a white man who had passed through the area 100 years before performing great cures.

De Leon believed that they were referring to Cabeza de Baca.

And again, interestingly, these so-called Kuwait Tekin tribes of northern Mexico were among the

first to embrace mission life.

Had they retained enough memory of the four expeditionaries' gospel to identify it with the words of the later Franciscan missionaries?

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