Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca
De Vaca traveled to the Americas under the command of a man that he did not always see eye to eye with. His name is Panfilo De Narvaez. Their ship hit a hurricane off the coast of Cuba. After repairs and re-supplying they set sail for Florida. They landed around present day Tampa Bay in
March of 1528. Here is where disaster began. Narvaez ordered troops to head inland, while some of the men waited for them in boats off the coast, hoping to meet them later in the trip. The land-based soldiers wore out their welcome in the Indian villages quickly and were chased into the swamp land of Florida where they had to live off the land, the oysters in the ocean, their horses and in some cases each other. “Their food was austere in the extreme-some of the nomadic peoples in this wild region ate insects when there was nothing else”. The men waiting on the boats became tired of waiting and sailed back to Cuba. Narvaez and his men then had to battle their way across Florida, through marshy land, diseases and frequent Indian attacks. Once they made their way to the shore, the group had been reduced to about 80 men. The remaining men then made boats out of trees and horse hide hoping to sail their way back to Cuba. Once in the ocean, a hurricane developed and blew the rafts back into the shore destroying the, and reducing the numbers further. Initially the natives welcomed the Spaniards into their community, but this welcome was also worn out quickly when, as de
Vaca recalled, “half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us"... For over four years the number of men slowly dwindled as they tried to live in the complex world of the natives in
Eastern Texas. The number of men now was down to four, including de
Vaca. The names of the other three men were Alonso Del Castillo, Andres

Dorantes de Carranca and Estevan (who was an African slave that they brought with them). From here the three men began to head west and south attempting to reach the Spanish empire in Mexico. In doing so, these men of the old world to entered into the New World’s West (west of the Mississippi) and became the first Europeans to do so. The precise route that they traveled on is not clear, but it is thought that they traveled through southern Texas and then into Arizona and then into either Southern New Mexico or the
Northern provinces of Mexico, where they were discovered by a group of fellow Spaniards in July of 1536, over nine years after they left Spain in
Search of land to claim as a possession of Spain. When the troops found de
Vaca and his men he recalled his men as being “dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in company with Indians. They just stood staring for a long time". De Vaca returned to Spain, where he wrote his account of what occurred of the previous 9 years of the exploration.
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Conquistadors
Hernando De Soto
Hernando De Soto was born into a rich family, but from a young age he knew that he wanted to go and sail, and become wealthy on riches that have been taken from the New World. De Soto would come across these riches with his first encounter with the Incas. De Soto was on an expedition that was headed by Pizarro. They went to Peru in search of gold. When coming

across the Incas, the Spanish realized that to get the gold, they would have to totally conquer the Incan people. After being promoted to captain of the cavalry, De Soto was ordered to capture Cajamarca, where the Incan emperor lived. De Soto, upon his horse, with his men mounted behind him, approached Cajamarca. The Incan people, never having seen horses before, never fought back thinking “the Spaniards were gods because they had animals with silver feet”. The silver feet that they were referring to were nothing more then the horseshoes. The Spanish then took all of the gold out of the city, killed almost all of the Incans, and left the rest to die from disease brought over by the Europeans.
De Soto also had planned to make a port that would enable Spain to trade with the flourishing market of China. De Vaca had talked about a Northern
Sea in his accounts. Upon reading this De Soto set out to build his port here. De Soto searched for three years, and never found the Northern Sea, or enough gold to influence other Spaniards to come to the New World. De
Soto did however come across a river the he names the "Rio Grande", but it would later be renamed the Mississippi River.
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Conquistadors
Spanish Conquistadors

The sixteenth century brought about a plethora of changes for the Spanish empire and its conquistadors. They began their conquest of North America as well as their conquest of Central America (mainly Mexico) when
Hernando Cortes traveled to
Cuba in 1508. He then sailed to the east coast of a new land, now called
Mexico, to conquer the native Aztec’s and their immense wealth. Alvar
Cabeza de Vaca was the first conquistador, Spanish sailors who were searching for land that could be brought into the Spanish empire, to travel across the southern tip of North
America, into the Gulf of Mexico and upon his return to Spain, he published a book or an account with full details as to the climate, topography, and native life (including plants, animals and humans). De Vaca’s transcript brought immense attention to both New Spain (Mexico) and the
New World (North America). Two conquistadors that followed de Vaca some years later were Hernando De
Soto , who traveled through Florida and became the first European to travel to and discover the Mississippi, which he had aptly named Rio Grande
(the great river). Coincidently De Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi with fever and malaria (caught from mosquitoes) in the year 1542.
Francisco Vasquez De Coronado , who traveled to New Spain with Antonio
De Mendoza and then set out in search of the seven great cities of gold
(which he never found), was one of the first Europeans to discover the
Grand Canyon, which they thought was at least one mile deep. Although this was not his original goal, it was quite impressive. The Spanish, mainly
Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando De Soto, and Francisco Vasquez De
Coronado were the first and most significant North American.

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Corn
Francisco Vasquez De Coronado was born in Spain in the year 1510, with little known about his youth besides being good friends with Antonio De
Mendoza, who became viceroy of New Spain, which is now known as
Mexico. De Coronado was brought with De Mendoza as an assistant, and was promoted to governor of this area in 1538. De Mendoza had also heard about a place where there were seven cities of gold. A friar, named Marcos
De Niza was then sent to look for the place where the cities were supposed to be located. Upon the friar’s return, he said that he found these wonderful cities and that he would lead the way to the cities. De Coronado even wore a suit of gold and headed his men, who were well outfitted with swords, crossbows and even guns. Many other people joined them in their exploration, which made De Coronado even more proud to lead his men.
“Coronado was so confident he would succeed that he spent some 50,000 ducats of his own money on the expedition-an incredible sum in the 16 th century. Today, that money would be worth well over one million dollars”.
Coronado and his men reached the place that the friar was speaking of only to find 6 Pueblo Settlements. Coronado and his men then set off in search of another city that was filled with gold. They were lead here by a Native
American who told them that there were trees there that bared fruit of gold, and all the people, servants included, drank and ate off of plates and cups of gold and silver. They searched and searched for this village, but never found it; the guide lied to the men (no one knows why exactly he did it, perhaps hoping to lose the Spaniards in the parries where they would die with out food or water) 1 and upon admitting so was executed. On their exploration in Arizona, they came across what is now known as the Grand
Canyon in 1540. Coronado and his men headed back to Mexico where he was tried for his exploration, and found to have done nothing wrong, but was then tried again for his work as governor, where he was asked to step down in 1544.
1 Hurwicz, Claude. p. 18