Great River. Paul Horgan

Only at sundown could they get their bearings.

      But no word came from the General, and at last the army turned to the west. Plains Indians served as guides. Each sunrise a guide watched where the sun rose, and then facing westward sprang an arrow whose course they followed. Before they overtook it, they let go another, and so each day they drew the line of their course through the air until they came once again to the river, on the ninth of July.

      Captain de Arellano was in command of the army. He lost little time in sending out detachments to forage for the winter supplies, one to the north, one to the south, both to follow the river.

      Captain Francisco de Barrionuevo led his men to the province of Jemez, containing seven pueblos, where the people were generous and gave supplies. This lay on a stream that entered the Tiguex River from the west. On the main stream, at a powerful tributary with red water which they called the Chama, the soldiers came to two cities called Yuque-Yunque whose people fled to the mountains at the approach of the mounted strangers. These towns were on opposite banks of the river and in Indian tales were once connected by a bridge of parrot feathers, that had been upset by witches so that many people fell into the river and were drowned and became fish. Here the soldiers made an abundant haul of food and pottery with a high glaze over many curious designs. Some of the pots held a shiny metal—they thought it might be silver, and their hearts leaped—used for the glaze. Following the main river again, Barrionuevo came to Taos, where Alvarado had been before him a year ago.

      To the south another officer led a party to the towns previously seen by Ovando. Going farther than his lost fellow officer, he followed the river until, as he reported later, it disappeared in the ground. He stated that it made him think of the Guadiana River in Estremadura, in Spain, and that it made him quite homesick. The people down the river told him that much farther down, it reappeared with much water. It was the country of drought where Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had seen the low or dry river, like travellers in certain years long later. Where the river reappeared, it was brought back to life by the never-failing, full and clear green water of the Rio Conchos out of Mexico.

      The garrison at Alcanfor gathered their stores and explored the silent towns of Tiguex, and saw the kivas underground, some round, some square, with their walls painted in sorcerers’ markings, and some large enough in which to have a game of ball. They saw how the floors were paved with smooth stones, which reminded them of the sunken baths of Europe. They foraged in the fields where the Indians sowed their seed corn without plowing, but only waiting for the snows that would cover the earth in winter, and fatten the seed out of which would break the sprouts in summer. The snow clouds came off the mountains by the river and nourished the valley floors. Great flocks of cranes, wild geese, crows and thrushes came to eat the seed, and even so, the crop of one year was enough to last for seven, with a litter of ungathered corn left in the fields. Corn was the staff of life for the river people. They did not eat human flesh, or sacrifice it, like the Mexicans of twenty years before, who took youths to the tops of their temples and under the open sun tore their living hearts out with obsidian knives, in such quantity that at a certain temple the conquerors had seen one hundred thousand skulls near the walls. As well as they could tell, the army at Tiguex accounted for the existence of sixty-six towns in the new land, with Tiguex in the center of them all. They believed the Indian population to number twenty thousand.

      The pueblo people and their ways were so different from all others so far met with in the Indies of the Ocean Sea, remarked the soldiers, that surely they must have come from the coast of Greater India, that lay to the west of this land. The soldiers declared that the river rose in the mountains to the northeast, and that the towns were settled all along it until it disappeared underground. There was speculation. Might it not have been better to go north, rather than follow the Turk eastward? To be sure, the land between Norway and China, they realized, was very far up. But as something was known of Greater India, its treasure should perhaps have been attempted instead of that lying across the barren cattle plains.…

      In Tiguex. as they stated, there was not even anything to steal, though the jars and pots made by the women of the pueblos were fanciful and curious, but otherwise the rooms in the towns were bare and clean. They could only hope that when the General returned to the river he would bring the news all had sought so hard.

      Toward the end of summer Captain de Arellano decided to go to look for the General. Picking forty men, and giving the command of the army on the river to Captain de Barrionuevo, he started east. At Pecos he found the people unfriendly. There was a skirmish near the town and two Indians were shot. The misfortunes of Bigotes and Cacique were not forgotten. Pecos stood near the pass through which the General’s return must come. Why did he not come? It was late in August, and the rains were falling everywhere, the rivers would rise, the homeward travellers would have trouble crossing them if they waited much longer. But at last word came by Indian traveller that the General was actually on his way. Arellano decided to wait for him at Pecos, to protect the pass if need be, and by his presence keep the people of Pecos subdued.

      During the second week of September the General’s cavalcade came into view. Arellano and his men welcomed it with great joy. The General paid a visit to Pecos, and was politely received by the people, for he knew what he knew, now, and they realized it. He then pushed on rapidly to the river, and the soldiers of his party mingled with Arellano’s, and the General talked with his officers, and on reaching Alcanfor everybody had something to ask and to answer. Those starved for news were fed by those who had meagre news to share, and most of that outrageous.

      What was King Tattarax like: Montezuma?

      They saw a chief, an old naked wretch with white hair and a copper bangle around his neck, that was his whole wealth, and they were not even sure he was King Tattarax.

      And the canoes with golden eagles? The gold bells in the trees? The wagons full of gold?

      No gold anywhere.

      But the Turk said?

      The Turk was dead, garrotted one night in silence in the tent of Captains López and Zaldívar, and buried in a hole already dug for him, before anybody woke with the morning watch.

      But why?

      Treachery. He lied and lied. He plotted the destruction of the whole army from the first. Going east through Pecos, he arranged with the people to lead the army astray and exhaust them and remove them from food supply, so their horses would die, and if they straggled back from the plains, the Pecos warriors could easily dispose of them in their weakness.

      But Pecos? Why would they agree to this?

      Bigotes. The iron collar and chain, the dogs that bit him when ordered to. Cacique’s captivity.

      But the country? The wealth?

      Immense plains, people with grass-roofed huts, people who ate meat raw and carried a freshly butchered cow-gut around their necks from which they drank blood and stomach juice when thirsty, people who did everything with little flint knives set in wooden handles, who sharpened the blades rapidly against their own teeth, like monkeys that put everything to the mouth.

      And the Turk knew all the time there was nothing else?

      He must have known, though he kept saying to the end that just a way farther there really was the other great river, with all its gold and silver and jewels and royal splendor. But then, he had said that about every place at which they had stopped, and where they had found nothing.

      Why was he not killed much sooner then?

      The General was partial to him. Everybody knew it and resented it. Finally, of course, the General ordered the execution himself.

      How miserable. And there was nothing else in the country of Quivira?

      Big wolves, and white-pied deer, and rabbits that a man on foot could never catch but that never moved from the path of a horse, so that you could lance them from your saddle with no trouble. And grapes grew there, nuts, mulberries, and plums like those in Castile. As for riches and comforts and fine living—when you got off your horse at the end of a hard day and had to get some supper to satisfy your hunger, you cooked whatever you had, and you cooked it on a fire made of the only thing to be found,