Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South Book

The epic tale of African slave Esteban Dorantes tells of his travails in the North American wilderness with three conquistadors lost in the disastrous 1527 expedition of Panfilo Narvaez.
Narvaez led an army of 300 men into the swamps of Florida and it was all downhill from there as they wandered through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Searching for treasure, the conquistadors found mostly death from hostile Indians, disease, starvation and exposure.
A handful of survivors constructed rafts and set sail across the Gulf of Mexico, landing at present-day Galveston Island where they lived as slaves among the Karankawa Indians. By 1533 only four men were left alive, and as author Goodwin tells it, the slave Esteban took a leadership role, affording an escape from the increasingly hostile Karankawas.
Thereafter, they drifted west from tribe to tribe, throwing themselves on the mercy of Indians who were often on the brink of starvation themselves. Goodwin tells of tribes forced to rely on the most dismal of diets, including prickly pears and mesquite pods, living in abject poverty. On one occasion they encountered a tribe where the men wore no clothes and the women barely covered themselves with deerskins.
Traveling up the Rio Grande through northeast Mexico, they foursome eventually met up with Indian communities which were well established and prosperous, with fields of corn, squash, beans and a relative abundance of food. Eventually, they managed a few miraculous cures and were hailed as shamans. Esteban took to wearing shamanic feathers, bells and beads, carrying a large calabash rattle that bespoke his status as a witch doctor. By the time they eventually ran into a party of Spanish slavers, the foursome were at the head of an army of hundreds of worshipping Indians who followed them from village to village, heralding their approach.
Esteban and his companions had spent eight years wandering across what is now the southern United States. Once reunited with the Spanish in Mexico, he faced the grim situation of renewed enslavement. However, his knowledge of the Indians to the north led to an assignment to track down the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola under Coronado. In 1539, Esteban made contact with the Zuni Indians and what was perhaps considered to be the city of Cibola (actually, a humble pueblo) and was either killed, or fled his Spanish captors for a life among the Indians with four wives, depending.
It's a riveting story and Goodwin's writing is rich with imagery. At times the narrative gets bogged down as he compares three different 16th century accounts of the journey and the reading gets to be a bit of a chore; but you can't fault him for trying to get it right.
What I enjoyed most about this book was the descriptions of life among the Indians by the first Europeans (and an African) who'd ever made contact. Through sources that are 350 years old, Goodwin gives us an unvarnished vision of Indian life hundreds of years before they were overwhelmed by white settlers.