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By Root 454 0

and a healer. More important, he was a man of exceptional cultural fluidity; it seemed he was able to understand the ways of the Native peoples and adjust to them with more alacrity than his Spanish fellow travelers. As the years progressed, he came to be regarded as a shaman by the Native peoples. In his narrative La Relación, first published in 1542 as a report to the Spanish king, Cabeza de Vaca speaks of Estebán as being “constantly in conversation, finding out about routes, towns, and other matters we wished to know.”

The group finally arrived in Mexico City and was taken to the astonished Governor Antonio de Mendoza, the first Spanish viceroy of Mexico, who listened to their tale with amazement. The Europeans were rewarded with riches and became heroes. Estebán, however, despite his aid to the expedition, was not freed. Instead, he was purchased by the viceroy and given to a friar, Marcos de Niza, who led a second expedition back into the little-known territory. The new group embarked with Estebán in the lead as translator and expediter. This voyage was not successful. Although the welcome was warm at times, many of the Indians were wary of Europeans and animosities among tribes created contention. Estebán, caught in the tribal conflicts, was killed by Indians in Hawikuh, a settlement just over ten miles southwest of Zuni Pueblo. Estebán’s remarkable journey among America’s first peoples encapsulates the relationship between black man and red man in early America. It is a saga of admiration and friendship turning to mistrust and hostility that would be repeated over and over again in the country’s early years.

The Roman Catholic Spanish were the first European settlers on the American mainland. The other Roman Catholics to establish a foothold on the continent, the French, were last to arrive in what would become the United States, having spent their time battling the British and establishing colonies in the Caribbean and Canada. The French arrived with different attitudes toward race and slavery from the Spanish and often brought the children of their liaisons with Africans enslaved in the Caribbean with them to the mainland. The French were trappers and traders more than settlers, and their society was initially one with few women, therefore liaisons with Native American women were common. Because of their Indian wives, they lived in closer proximity to the Native peoples and learned much about their ways. They were also inveterate chroniclers of things culinary and left some of the best observations of Native American life. They had a rich field for observation, as witnessed by explorer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who recorded the annual calendar of the Natchez people of the Lower Mississippi in 1758:

This nation begins its year in the month of March, as was the practice for a long time in Europe, and divides it into 13 months … At every new moon they celebrate a feast, which takes its name from the principal fruits gathered in the preceding moon, or from the animals usually hunted then …

The first moon is that of the Deer. The renewal of the year spreads universal joy … The second moon, which corresponds to our month of April, is that of strawberries.

The third moon was little corn; the fourth, watermelons; the fifth, peaches; the sixth, mulberries; the seventh, great corn; the eighth, turkeys; the ninth, bison; the tenth, bears; the eleventh, cold meal; and the twelfth, chestnuts. The thirteenth month was also nuts, which were broken then mixed with cornmeal to make bread in winter, when famine was always a possibility. As reported by the French explorers, the year unfolded in an ever-changing celebration of foodstuffs.

The months were shifted somewhat by other travelers to the Lower Mississippi region, but available food and game were the organizing principles behind the monthly divisions of most tribes. Each month began with a feast. In times of plenty, they were lavish; in times of want, there was less, but there was always an acknowledgment of the changing foodstuff. The feasts were celebrations