Welcome to Cabeza de Baca. Episode 1, The Sons of 1492. I'm Brandon Seal.

Four horsemen sat on their mounts surveying the Sinaloa River Valley in April of 1536.

The horsemen didn't call the land before them Sinaloa, of course.

It didn't even have a name in their language yet, because they were well beyond the borders of New Spain and the northernmost outposts of Castilian settlement.

And that was by design. Strictly speaking, these four horsemen

weren't supposed to be doing what they were doing. They were slavers, and by 1536, the enslavement

of Native Americans was technically forbidden by their king. That said, the economy of New Spain still depended heavily on it. Castilians who came to the

new world and dutifully served their superiors were granted incommendas, huge tracts of land to be

worked by the natives who were entrusted to their care. The natives working these incommiendas

died at horrific rates, however, and incommienda owners were always in need of replacements.

But by 1536, at least up here along the Pacific coast of Mexico, the slavers had run out of Indians to enslave.

The natives had withdrawn into the mountains, abandoning their homes and fields,

preferring starvation to capture. For the last three days, in fact, the four horsemen had roamed

all over this beautiful, fertile coast, and found nothing but abandoned cornfields. The natives

always seemingly just out of their reach. And yet on this morning, here in April of 1536, the slavers couldn't shake the sensation that they were the ones being followed.

So they broke camp that morning and decided to circle back the way they had come.

They rode along together, erect in their saddles,

and alert to any hint of movement behind a bush or up on a ridge, when suddenly, and all at once,

they spotted a mass moving toward them in the distance. It looked like a group of men. But they

were here well beyond the range of any others of their

countrymen, so they couldn't be Castilians, and they couldn't remember the last time that

natives had mustered up the courage to approach them. As the mass neared them across the valley,

...