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Show 98 LEADING FACTS OF NEW MEXICAN HISTORY The next day they crossed a mountain range about seven leagues broad upon which they found indications of iron, and in the evening arrived at a village located upon the bank of a beautiful river. Here they were given many presents including mica, pulverized galena, and many beads and robes of cow-skins. ‘‘There are in that country,’’ says Cabeza de Vaca, ‘‘small pine trees and the cones of them are like small eggs; but the seeds are better than those of Castile, as the husks are very thin, and while green it is beat and made into balls and thus eaten. If dry it is pounded in its husk, and consumed in the form of flour.’’ The Spaniards were furnished with food, and after awhile the Indians brought to Cabeza de Vaca a man who had been wounded some time before with an arrow, the head remaining in the wound, and requested that he be cured. Here Cabeza de Vaca again demonstrated wonderful capabilities, this time as a surgeon. He extracted the arrow head, sewed up the wound, and the next day he eut the stitches he had made and the Indian was well. The wound made by Cabeza de Vaca ‘‘appeared only like a seam in the palm of the hand.’? They showed these Indians the copper bell that had been given them, and they were informed that in the place where the bell had come from ‘‘were buried many plates of the same material.’’ They shortly left this village and ‘‘travelled through so many sorts of people, of such diverse languages, the memory fails to recall them. They ever plundered each other, and those that lost, like presented Maldonado with a lot of tanned buffalo hides and other things and that the members of Maldonado’s command rushed upon the pile of buffalo robes and took possession of them. That thereupon the ‘‘women and some others were left crying, because they thought that the strangers were not going to take anything, but would bless them as Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes had done when they passed through here.’’ Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes did not take the many gifts of the kind here mentioned although they were offered to them, and because they did not take them, but gave them back, was one of the reasons why the Indians had so much confidence in them. It will also be re- membered that Castafieda relates the circumstance, hearsay to him, that while on this march Coronado whom was one who was met a wandering band of Querechos Indians, among blind who told them that ‘‘he had seen four others like us many days before, whom he had seen near there and rather more toward New Spain.’? We are as much justified in believing that these places men- tioned by these Indians were far north of the mouth of the Pecos river, and not upon the Colorado river, as are some historians in coming to the conclusion that the route of Cabeza de Vaca present confines of New Mexico. did not proce ee ton of: the Courtesy of Burcau Apache of American Ethnology Necklace of Human Fingers |