Estevanico, aka Mustapha al-Azemmour

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Since we are going to Morocco in November, I decided to pick an episode about Morocco. I only kind of got there. I chose somebody who's been on my list for a while who probably was born in Morocco, but this story mainly takes place other places in the West. He's usually called Estevanico, also spelled Estebonico because V and B have very similar pronunciations in Castilian Spanish. That though, is a diminutive form of estevon which English speakers usually say more like. People have used that diminutive for him, which they also would have used for children, because he was enslaved. I put the name Estevanico in the title of the episode because that's what he is usually called in the United States and other predominantly English speaking countries, and I wanted people to be able to find the episode if they were looking for it. But we are not going to call him that. We don't know exactly when or where estevan was born or what his name was from birth. Estevan is probably the name that he took or was given when he converted from Islam to Christianity. In Morocco, he is more often known as Mustafa Asimore or Mustafa al Asimore. Mustapha is an Arabic name. It means chosen, and it's one of the names of the prophet Mohammed. Mustafa also has some phonetic similarities to the way that Estevan is usually pronounced among Arabic speakers, and Asimore is the name in Morocco, where he's believed to have been from, so that is where the name that he's usually called in Morocco comes from. Estevon became a translator and a guide and was probably the first person of any race from outside of the Americas to enter what is now Arizona and New Mexico. That happened in fifteen thirty nine, so earlier than a lot of people imagine Europeans or Africans being in the United States what is now today at all. Like Tracy just said, we don't know exactly when or where Estevon was born. Really, we know almost nothing about his early life, but there are some pieces that we can put together based on where he lived and what other people wrote about him later. A major source of information is the relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeza Devaca, which chronicled a Spanish expedition to Florida that we will be getting to in a bit, and based on the Relacion and the timeline of that expedition, Estevon was probably born in the very early fifteen hundreds. Cabeza Devaca, which is a title that he inherited meaning cow's head, describes Estevan as a native of Asimore, but it is possible that he was born somewhere else and then brought to Asimore later on. Asimour is on the coast of Morocco, southwest of Casablanca. Its population in the sixteenth century was predominantly a Mezik also known as Berber, and also predominantly Muslim. Some translations of the Relacion and some books about Estevon describe him as a Moore, which was a general term for Muslims in Spain and northern Africa, including Arabs and converts from the Iberian Peninsula. But the word Moro was used in Spanish during Esevon's lifetime, and that's not what Kabeza Devaca called him Cabza. Devaca used the Spanish word for black, along with the word ala rabe, which in this context probably meant that he spoke Arabic. Morocco was a multi lingual society, and in addition to Arabic, Estevan likely would have spoken in Amazik language as well as some Portuguese or Spanish or even both. Yeah. The fact that some accounts describe him as a more means sometimes he's also depicted as having kind of an Arab appearance, but he's pretty consistently described in accounts from the time as black uh If he was from asimor that gives us some other clues, but also some questions about his early life. There was a lot of turmoil and instability in Morocco in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including multiple changes in ruling dynasties, a plague, and a series of severe droughts. Multiple kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula had also started to coalesce into modern Spain, and the Reconquista, or the Spanish reconquest of that peninsula from Muslim kingdoms, had ended in fourteen ninety two. Spain and Portugal both expelled their Jewish and Muslim populations, and that led to large numbers of refugees arriving in Morocco and other parts of Northern Africa. Spain and Portugal also tried to establish or take control of ports and trading routes in Northern Africa, including Asimar, which had become a tributary of Portuguese King Juu the Second in fourteen eighty six. That's a lot going on, and on top of all of it, Northern Africa was also facing ongoing threats and trade disruptions from the Ottoman Empire to the east. In this environment, slave traffickers captured people from Morocco and from farther south in Africa and sold them for profit, and according to sixteenth century chronicles and eyewitness accounts, the situation was so dire that people in Northern Africa surrendered themselves to Spanish and Portuguese slavers or to merchants who were willing to take them across the Strait of Gibraltar, Knowing that the law in Spain and Portugal required slaves to be fed, clothed, and housed, and that the likely alternative in Northern Africa was starvation and death. We really don't know whether Estevan was captured, or if he was in such a desperate situation that enslavement seemed like his only alternative for survival, or possibly if he entered into something that he thought was going to be more like a temporary indenture rather than permanent enslavement. Regardless, though, by around fifteen twenty two, he was being enslaved by minor Spanish noble Andreas Dorantes de Carranza. While Dorantes was technically part of the nobility, his family was poor, and in fifteen twenty seven he joined Panfilo de Narveez's expedition to the Americas with the hopes of gaining fortune and status for himself. King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth, known as King Carlos the First in Spain had appointed Narvaez governor of Florida, which at the time covered all of what is now the Southern Us, stretching west to what's now Texas. Narvaez was going there to conquer and colonize it, and he chose Dorantes as captain of his infantry, and when Dorantes joined the expedition, he took Estevon with him. Estevan at this point was probably in his mid twenties. If Estevan was Muslim, which does seem likely given what we know about him, he would have had to convert to Catholicism in order to accompany Drantes on this expedition. At this time, under Spanish law, only Africans who had converted to Christianity and assimilated to Spanish culture, who were known as Latinos, were allowed to be taken to the Americas and the Caribbean. That policy actually changed right around this time, as Spanish authorities came to believe that Ladinos were too independent and too hard to control, so instead they allowed only bosales, or Africans who did not speak Spanish and had not converted. The term bosales also included people who were trafficked directly from Africa to the Caribbean or the Americas without being brought through Spain first. So much about Estevan's life up to this point is completely unclear or the source of speculation, including when he got to Spain, how long he was there before Derontes joined this expedition, when and under what circumstances he converted to Christianity, and whether he can continued to think of himself as Muslim afterward, and we don't really know the details of his experience at the beginning of the expedition. At that point, Panfilo de Narveez, Andreas Dorantes de Serranza and other Spanish men on board didn't have much reason to take notice of Estevon or any other enslaved person who was with them, so for a while after the convoy set sail on June seventeen, fifteen twenty seven, we know that Estevon was part of the expedition and generally where the convoy was going, but we know almost nothing else. Pamfilo de Narveez already had some experience on these kinds of expeditions. He had been one of the first Spanish people to arrive in Jamaica, and then he was part of Spain's efforts to conquer the island of Cuba. In fifteen twenty he had been dispatched to Mexico to capture her Non Cortes, who had been charged with treason. Narvaez was supposed to replace Cortes as governor of Mexico, but this campaign was unsuccessful. Cortes defeated Narvaez in battle and imprisoned him for two years, and Narvaez lost an eye. It was only after Narvaez was released after all of this that he was appointed governor of Florida and tasked with this second expedition, a decision that, with the benefit of historical hindsight, I find questionable. This expedition did not go any better than Narvaez's first one had, As was the case for Spain's other expeditions to the Americas around this time, conquistadors had to fund everything themselves, and they had to recruit their own men. Narvaez was able to raise a fleet of five ships and recruit about six hundred men. They set sail on June seventeenth, fifteen twenty seven, with the wives of some of the married men and some enslaved people also on board. But their Atlantic crossing was difficult, as atlantic cross things generally were in the sixteenth century. People died along the way, and about one hundred and forty men deserted as soon as they arrived at Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola in August. From there, the fleet continued on to Cuba. The Spanish did not have a word for hurricane. It comes from the carib language and it had not made its way into the Romance languages yet. But after they arrived in Cuba, they endured a series of powerful storms. At one point, when the weather seemed clear, Narvayas sent two of his ships to another port to pick up supplies that were waiting for them there, and then another storm blew in, wrecking both of those ships and scattering all the supplies that they had loaded and destroying them. Crews on the remaining ships threatened to mutiny if the fleet tried to leave the waters around Cuba, so they did not depart for the Gulf coast until February twenty five of fifteen twenty eight, at which point they were hit by still more storms along the way. Things did not improve once they started trying to voyage over land, and we will talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break. On April fifteenth, fifteen twenty eight, Pamfilo de Narvaez and his expedition arrived on the Gulf coast of Florida, just north of what is now known as Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay is almost directly north of Havana, Cuba, and in good weather these ships should have been able to make that crossing in about four days, but it had taken them almost two months due to a series of storms that sort of blew them all over the Gulf of Mexico, and they had to also sail around and try to evade them. Also, at one point most of the ships got stuck on a sandbar. A lot about this is unclear, but it doesn't seem like the area north of Tampa Bay is where they wanted to be or where they thought they were. Based on what happened after this, it seems like Narvaez might have been aiming for the River of Palms in Mexico known as the Soda la Marina River today that marked the western boundary of Florida, and it was roughly two hundred and fifty kilometers or one hundred and fifty five miles north of an established Spanish settlement that was Panuco, established by Hernan Cortes in fifteen twenty two. It would have made sense for Narvaez to want to start off within the territory that he'd been appointed to govern, but also relatively close to an existing Spanish outpost. While this obviously wasn't the first Spanish expedition to arrive in this part of North America, Spanish knowledge of its geography was still really limited. Unlike some other expeditions. They also had no local people with them to help them out. Earlier in the sixteenth century, her Non Cortes and cartographer Alonso Alvarez de Pineda had each made maps of the Gulf coast, which obviously would have been kind of limited, but we don't know whether Narvaez had access to either of them at all, or whether he had any other charts or maps of the area. Even with all of that in mind, though Narvaez was nowhere near the River of Palms or Panuco, he was on the opposite side of the Gulf of Mexico, more than a thousand miles away from that. He was also very wary of the indigenous peoples living there. His purpose was to explore and colonize, which would mean at some point he would have to conquer or ally with the region's indigenous peoples. But he also knew that one Ponza de Leon had been attacked on his expeditions to Florida and had died after Kaluza defender shot him with an arrow in fifteen twenty one, so, especially since many of Narvaez's men were exhausted and sick, he wanted to be cautious. They spotted a village near the coast, which probably belonged to the Tocobaga, and sent a small party to try to negotiate with them. Narvaez's men were given some fish, which seemed like a gesture of goodwill, but the Tocbaga seemed to have seen them as a threat. They fled during the night and apparently spread the word about the new arrivals, and so for a few days it didn't seem like there were many indigenous people around. This probably gave Narvaez the impression that the indigenous peoples in the area would not be particularly dangerous. And then not long after that, somebody pulled up a gold object in a fishing net. So Narvaez thought that he was facing an indigenous population that would be easy to pacify, and now an abandoned village that his expedition could occupy and a nearby source of gold. Gold was one of the reasons for Spain's efforts to colonize the Americas, so Narvaez thought he had gotten things off to a very good start. Now none of that lasted. Narvaez already had a reputation for cruelty and brutality against indigenous peoples. Friar Bartolome de la Casas, who is sometimes described as one of the first European advocates for the rights and protections of indigenous peoples, had previously denounced Narvaez's treatment toward the indigenous peoples of Cuba, including a massacre carried out by Narvaaz's men during the conquest of the island. When the Tocobaga resumed contact with the Spanish and objected to their insistence that the land belonged to Spain, Narvaez had their leader's nose cut off and had the party's war dogs attack his mother. And it turned out there also wasn't any gold nearby the peace that they found in a fish may have even been something that washed up from a Spanish shipwreck, which was also probably true of other pieces of gold that they came across from time to time. The Tocobaga eventually convinced Narvaez that they did not have any gold, but they told him that another tribe, the Appalachi did Appalachi territory was north of where the Tocobaga lived, Narvaez decided that he should split up his company to investigate. He would send to the boats ahead while he and about three hundred men continued on foot through Appalachi territory. He thought that the River of Palms was not too far away and that they could all rendezvous there. As they journeyed north, Narvaez and his party on land faced difficult inhospitable swampy terrain. Many of them got malaria, something that may have been introduced to the Americas by Europeans and the enslaved Africans that they brought with them, and it turned out that Tocobaga had been strategic in sending narvaas to the Appalachi. The Appalachi were armed with longbows that were capable of piercing the leather cloth and chain mail armor that most of his men wore. The Appalachi developed tactics that were particularly effective against Narvaez's force, including ambushes and removing their arrowheads when shooting at soldiers wearing chain mail, so the arrow shafts would break against the rings and drive long splinters of wood into the soldier's bodies. I think there's kind of an imagined image of the Counkistador wearing full plate armor, and that is not what overwhelmingly these guys were in. And what they were in was easily pierceable by these longbows. Since Narvaas had sent his ships on ahead, the company had no easy way to escape from the Appalachi, and they also had no way to send for any kind of supply reinforcements. Meanwhile, they were all so off course that they never made that rendezvous. The ships looked for Narvaas and his party for about a year before they started running low on food and supplies, and they ultimately left. After a summer that was full of extreme heat, illnesses, deaths, and very effective attacks by the Appalachi, narva Has decided their best means of escape would be to build boats and go westward along the coast. Over the span of about six weeks, they killed their horses, eating their meat and using their hides to make things like water skins and their manes and tails to make rope. The men melted down their armor to make nails, and they made sails from their clothing. The resulting boats were more like rafts with slightly built up sides and a tiller. They were powered by sails and oars. They were also barely big enough to hold all of the men that needed to get onto each one of them, so once somebody got aboard, there was nowhere to move. Once they had taken a place, they still were not sure how far they needed to go to get to territory that Spain was actually occupying, but they thought that they had traveled roughly seven hundred miles or eleven hundred and twenty five kilometers over land since they had arrived in Florida. There have been innumerable attempts to trace the journey of all of this over the centuries, and there's a lot of disagreement in all of the various maps, but they had probably gone closer to two hundred and fifty miles or four hundred kilometers. It is hard to know the distances for sure. They were measuring things in leagues, and they were also estimating a distance that had involved a lot of backtracking and detours because of the terrain. They set sail aboard these rafts on September twenty second, fifteen twenty eight. They were mostly able to stay out of range of the Appalachi's bows, but now they were facing sea sickness, dehydration, starvation, and the unrelenting sun. They did manage to go in the right direction, skirting along the coast, but when they reached the outflow of the Mississippi River, the force of the currents scattered the rafts and pushed them out to sea. They regrouped, but as they approached what is now known as Galveston Island, a storm swamped or capsized most of the rafts. At some point during all of this, Narvaez's raft was blown out to sea, and he almost certainly drowned or died of exposure or dehydration. These presumed to have died at that point by some means, only about eighty sailors finally made landfall on an island near modern Galveston. It might have been Galveston Island, it might have been a neighboring island. They nicknamed this Ela de Malajado, or the Island of Misfortune. At first, the survivors got some assistance from the Karankawa people, but the Spanish survivors apparently lost the Karankawa's sympathies after some of them turned to cannibalism over the winter. That winter was obviously difficult By April of fifteen twenty nine, there were only fifteen survivors left from the three hundred or so men who had started the trek to the River of Palms over land. One of those men was Estevan, and another was his enslaver Andres Dorantes de Sarranza. These survivors made various attempts to continue on to Spanish controlled territory, but none of them got very far. Then in the summer of fifteen twenty nine, they and other survivors started to be captured and enslaved, some by the Karankawa and some by other indigenous tribes in the areas. Over the next few years, some of the expeditions survivors died, others essentially assimilated into the tribes that had captured them. There were various escape attempts, and at first none of them was successful. The Spanish captives and Estevan rarely saw each other, and for a while they did not really have any way to communicate. According to Cabesa Devaca's account, he eventually convinced his captors to let him work as a trader, and that allowed him to travel to some extent and gave him away to relay messages to the others. The only time they were all in the same place at the same time was when multiple tribes came together for the Prickly pear harvest. Esvon Andres Dourrantes de Sarranza, Alonzo de Castillo Maldonado and Alvar Nunez Cabesa Devaca had various contact with one another in fifteen thirty two, and they planned to meet during the Prickly pair harvest in fifteen thirty three. That meeting did happen, but they were not able to escape. They tried again in fifteen thirty four, and this time they were successful, and that was largely thanks to Estevan. We said earlier he was already multi lingual before being enslaved in Morocco. He had learned more languages during his time in North America, including learning shared trading languages and a trading sign language. He was able to negotiate safe passage and shelter with a trader that Kabza Devaka's Relacion describes as being from the Avavare tribe. That is not a tribe that is mentioned outside of this document, so we do not know exactly how to identify these people today, but it is possible that this is something that Estevan and the other survivors had started planning during that Prickly Pair harvest in fifteen thirty three and had been working on for a year until they did it. There are a lot more references to Esseevon in the relacion after this point, and we will get into that after we pause for a sponsor break. Estevan Andreas Toronto State Toronto, Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado, and Alvar Nuniez Cabza Devaca are sometimes described as the four Ragged Castaways. When they had first set sail from Spain in fifteen twenty seven, they had been on radically different social strata. Esdevin was black and enslaved, while Cabza Devaca was the second in command of Penfeo di Narvaz's expedition. Cabeza Devaca's Relacion makes it clear that at the start of the voyage he was a typical conquistor. He was going to the Americas hoping for fortune and glory, and he was also viewing the Spanish as superior to Africans and indigenous peace peoples. But by the time they escaped from their indigenous captors. In fifteen thirty four, things were much different. Cabes and Nevaca had been through the experience of being enslaved himself. He had also been given shelter and care by people of multiple indigenous nations while also being enslaved and forced to work for some of those same peoples. He had started to realize that the indigenous peoples they were encountering were not one monolithic group of from the Spanish Catholic mindset pagans and barbarians. He had contact with at least twenty different indigenous tribes and nations during his journey around the Gulf and into Mexico, and each one was its own people. He also developed a deeper religious faith during his time in captivity and the journey that followed. His relation followed that progression and became a document not just of their journey, but also of the land they traveled through and the peoples they encountered, with far more empathy toward indigenous people at the end of the account then at the beginning. Yeah, I'm not suggesting that he suddenly became a perfect person, but he definitely started seeing other non Spanish Catholic people as more human than before. It would be a stretch to say that the three Spanish men ever saw Estevan as their equal, but when they escaped from their captors, it was immediately obvious that his knowledge and skills were going to be critical to their survival. They still had hundreds of miles they needed to travel through unfamiliar territory. His facility with languages meant that he could negotiate passage through these territories of multiple different tribes and trade on the group's behalf. In general, Estevan also seemed to be just more at home with the indigenous peoples than the Spanish men were. For example, on their first night with the Avavari tribe, he joined in their dancing while the others just watched. The people that they encountered often seemed more willing to negotiate with him than with the others. Various articles about the four ragged castaways described them as smoothing their passage through native territories by pretending to be faith healers or medicine men, but pretending is kind of an oversimplification. Details on this are very fuzzy, and the primary sources recounting this voyage are contradictory, but at some point an indigenous person was sick or injured, Kabeza Devaka or one of the other men prayed over them, using Christian prayers and making the sign of the Cross. At some points, they may have also used some kind of other treatments, either something that would have been used among Spanish conquistadors or something that they had seen indigenous people do. Over time, seems like Cabeza Devaca thought they really were healing these people, or really that God was healing them through them. This was something he had to be really careful in how he described, given that they were not priests, and this was the kind of thing that the Spanish Inquisition would not look favorably on at all if they ever managed to make it back home. Eventually, somebody, either one of this foursome or someone indigenous started calling them the children of the Sun or the sons of the Sun. The four ragged castaways continued west and south for months, and over time they built up an indigenous following. It's not always clear how much of this alleged faith healing Estevan did, because contemporary accounts sometimes call him Durrantes, being the name of his enslaver, but over time, as they acquired a large group of indigenous followers, it seems like the three Spanish men used Estevan as an intermediate between themselves and that group. This was both because he was the one who best knew their languages and because doing so gave them an air of mystery that helped maintain this idea that they were healers with divine powers. In the spring of fifteen thirty six, more than eight years after Narvaez's expedition first arrived on the Gulf coast of Florida, the four ragged castaways ran into a group of Spanish slavers in Nueva Galacia, confirming that they were finally back in territory that was actively being occupied by Spain. They made their way from there to Mexico City. While in Mexico City, Estevan met Juan Garrido, known as the Black Conquistasor, who had been born in the Kingdom of Congo and had been part of multiple Spanish expeditions in the Caribbean and the Americas. At this point, once all four men had recovered from having made this incredibly arduous journey, the three Spanish men but not Estevan were questioned about what they had been through. They made the territory they had traveled through sound wealthier than it actually was, fueling rumors of the Seven Cities of Cibola much later also called the Seven Cities of Gold. So Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, wanted them to travel north again, back in the direction they had just come from, to look for this wealth and to claim it for Spain. He also wanted them to gather information for Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who was planning an expedition as well. Understandably, Andreas Durrantes, Alonso de Castillo Maldonado, and alvar Nuniez Cabza Devaca all said no, thank you. Dorantes did discuss doing this with the viceroy, but ultimately declined that offer. Castillo got married to a rich widow, and Caveza Devaca went to Spain. He was hoping that he would be named governor of Florida and then he could come back and he could succeed where Pomfio de Narvaez had failed. That did not work out for him, though, because by the time he got back to Spain, Hernando de Soto had been authorized to conquer Florida, Cameza Devaca became governor of some of Spain's territory in South America instead. He obviously has a whole story beyond this that we are not getting into. Estevon, though may not have had a choice. He had not exactly been treated as a freeman during that journey across what's now Texas in northern Mexico, but over time he had been treated less and less like a slave. It is not fully clear whether he was considered to be enslaved or free after their arrival in Mexico City, but from this point documents were more likely to reference him as Estevon than Estevanico. And when he was tasked with accompanying Franciscan Friar Marcos Deniza on an expedition north, he was given explicit instructions to follow Marcos's orders. Those kinds of instructions would not have seemed necessary if he was enslaved. At the same time, it seems as though Derante's approval was needed for Estevon to go on this expedition, something that would not have been necessary if he was free. So there's some conflict here. Apparently, Derantes originally refused, and then he agreed to letting Estevont go on this travel only after having irritated the Viceroy by refusing to go on this expedition himself. It seems like he was kind of trying to smooth things over fire. Marcos's expedition departed on March seventh, fifteen thirty nine. It consisted of Marcos, another Franciscan friar, Estevan, and about one hundred enslaved indigenous people who had been promised their freedom in exchange for their participation. A Stevan's role was similar to what he had done before. He was working as a scout, a guide, and a translator and negotiator with all the indigenous tribes they would encounter. A couple of weeks after they left Mexico City, Marcos sent Estevan to scout ahead. Estevan was to update Marcos on his progress by sending a runner back with a cross, with the size of the cross corresponding to the value of what he had found. This sounds like a wild way to communicate, but it is what it is. Some sources conclude that this was because Estevan and the others with him could not read or write. But as we talked about in our recent episode on Ballpoint Pens, writing on this kind of expedition would have actually been incredibly cumbersome. Okay, we need you to keep up with an ink well quills, your paper might get wet or following apart. Although Estevon was supposed to wait after sending word back to Marcos, he kept on pushing ahead. First, though, he would make arrangements for Marcos and the rest of the party to be fed and provisioned and care for at each of the sou he came to. Marcos kept struggling to catch up as Estevan kept sending back a series of crosses, each one bigger than the last. Finally, in May of fifteen thirty nine, a runner reached Marcos and told him that Esseevon was dead. According to Friar Marcos, Estevon and many of his party were killed by the Zuni outside the city of Cibola, which Estevon had managed to reach. It's believed that Estevon was somewhere in what is now Arizona, but there is debate over exactly where. Marcos never made it to that location. Himself. Yeah, there's a lot of discussion of exactly which pueblo might have been being described as the city of Cibola. There are no eyewitness accounts of Estevan's death, and accounts from later on in the sixteenth century are wildly contradictory, including contradicting what Marcos wrote down, which was pretty straightforward. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado claimed that este Von had a reputation for inappropriate relationships with indigenous women, and the Zuni had killed him after he had demanded women and turquoise from them. Coronado said this when he was about to face charges over his own behavior with indigenous people, so there's some speculation that he said this to try to distract from what he was being accused of. Hernando de Alarconde claimed that the Zunis killed Esteban because they did not want him to reveal their location to the Spanish. Zuni anthropologist Edmund J. Ladd, writing in the twentieth century, concluded that the Zuni had probably heard about the expedition through indigenous trade networks, and that they just did not trust the Spanish. According to Zuni tradition, Estevan had sent a gourd rattle decorated with red and white feathers to the Zuni leader to introduce himself. The Zuni leader recognized this rattle and became became angry, and he ordered Estevon not to enter the town. When Estevon approached anyway, they killed him. While all of the sixteenth century accounts and most modern historians agree that Estevon was killed by Pueblo in Peoples in the spring of fifteen thirty nine, there are a few modern historians that proposed something else entirely, which is that Estevon worked with one of the Pueblo in peoples to fake his own death and then he escaped from enslavement by the Spanish. There isn't really concrete support for this, but it is an interesting idea. Today, the Panfilo da Narvez expedition is known primarily for its spectacular failure and the long journey of its four survivors that then paved the way for Coronado's expeditions into what is now the American Southwest. There has been less focus on Estevon until much more recently. One possible connection to Stevon that continues in Pueblo culture today is a catsina or a spirit being who was depicted as having black skin. I don't want to get into a ton of detail about this because this is sacred Pueblo and cultural knowledge. Some sources have described this catsina straightforwardly as a representation of Stevon, although others note that there were catsinas depicted with black skin before he had contact with any pu blow In peoples. There is also a saying among some pueblo In peoples, as reported by doctor Joe S. Sando of Hamo's Pueblo, that quote, the first white man our people saw was a black man. Uh, and that is Estevon. Do you have listener mail? I have listener mail. It is from Heather. Heather wrote, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I started writing this email before I even finished listening to the behind the scenes episode on Beatrice Kenner and Mildred Smith's side note. Shout out to those ladies for all the great work they did to make that time of the month more bearable. I wanted to write to share that I had similar memories and feelings when I read are you there, God, It's me Margaret. I'm a few years younger than you, ladies, and I probably read the book around my late elementary years, maybe going into middle school, which would have been very late nineteen eighties early nineteen nineties. The copy I read also had references to the belted pads, and by that time I felt like the adhesive ones were pretty ubiquitous, and I also had my mother explain the belts to me. It made me feel like the book was out of date and silly, and I never really wanted to read Judy Bloom anymore as an adult. I feel bad about that, because obviously Judy Bloom is amazing. I also find it pretty funny that just the day before this episode came out, my son, who was sixteen, had his girlfriend over to our house. It's his first girlfriend, and she needed a tampon. I was outside and she made him text me that she needed one, which I found hilarious. Everybody just needs to get over any squeamishness about periods. They are everywhere. Ha ha ha As Pettax, I am attaching a picture of my dog's Nellie and Malcolm. Nellie is red and white and is an eleven year old Welsh Springer Spaniel. This is a different breed than the English Springer that most people know most people think she's a Brittany or a cocker, but to me, she's just a precious angel. Baby Malcolm is an eight year old black and white English Springer Spaniel, the Springer breed that most people know. He's not the smartest boy, but he would literally die for me, and that's all I could ever ask for. Thanks for reading this email. Have a wonderful day, Heather. Thank you so much for this email. Heather. Thank you for these very cute dog pictures. They look like they are sitting in a kitchen, very patiently but also eagerly awaiting a treat. I love this story about getting a text about needing a tampon, and it reminded me a story of a story that has been passed to me from my mother, which is that my mom was one of five four girls in a boy and their neighbors across the street also five children, four boys and a girl. So the joke was that each of the moms would just count every night. As long as they each had five children, everything was okay. So one day my mom was helping her mom unload the groceries that had just been brought in, and one of the boys from across the street was there helping. He was passing the things to my mom from inside the bag and then was like, that's it. I'm done by. And my mom was like, there's obviously something in that bag still, and he was like, nope, nothing left in this bag, nothing at all. Bye, and mom went. And being a household that contained, you know, a mother and four sisters, it was an industrial size box of paths and I don't know. That story makes me laugh every time I think of it. Thank you so much again, Heather for this email and the dog pictures. If you would like to send us a note where at history podcast dot iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.