Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/223

the plains, those of the east likewise resorted to them, from Kansas, Arkansas, and the present Indian Territory, in similar expeditions, and they met. Trade or war was the result; often both; and thus these deserts were the market in which the novelties of either half of the North American continent were exchanged. "The Turk" there fell into the hands of the Pecos Indians, and they did not kill him. He tried now to make the Spaniards understand whence he had come, and what was the character of the country there, and as his language was not sufficient for the purpose, he was obliged to employ gestures. Conversation in this way was very inconvenient, and mistakes were inevitable. He is said to have told the Spaniards of houses like those of the pueblos, but larger. If he did this, he intentionally falsified, as the result showed. But while the Spaniards were thinking of houses, he may have had something quite different in his mind, and may have mentioned the pueblos only for comparison. He spoke, they said, of gold. Did he know what gold was? I am satisfied that he did not know the difference between gold, yellow mica, bright pyrites, and copper pyrites, of which there is much in the Mississippi Valley. That he should prefer his native land, where vegetation was apparently more luxuriant than in New Mexico, and where animal life was consequently more abundant, to the more barren southwest was natural, and so it was, too, that he should extol it to the Spaniards, for he had reason to suppose that he might possibly, with the aid of these strangers, be restored to his people. It is also probable that "the Turk" eventually led the Spaniards wofully astray, but this, too,