In 1536, a procession of thousands of indigenous people crossed the American Southwest led by a man wearing bells and feathers and shaking a decorated gourd rattle. He was Esteban de Dorantes, also recorded as Estebanico, an enslaved man from Azemmour, Morocco, and the first person of African descent to explore the American West. This episode follows him from his sale into slavery in 1522 to the disastrous Narvaez expedition of 1528.

We trace how 300 men marching through Florida swamps dwindled to four survivors enslaved on the Texas coast, and how those four, including Cabeza de Vaca, reinvented themselves as healers and walked some 2,000 miles to Mexico. Then we follow Esteban’s final mission as vanguard of the 1539 search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, his arrival at the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh, and the competing explanations for what happened next.

• Why Narvaez’s decision to separate his troops from his ships doomed the expedition
• How Esteban learned languages and sign language to become the party’s primary diplomat
• The wooden-cross messaging system he used to signal Fray Marcos de Niza
• Zuni perspectives on the owl feathers, the rattle, and possible kachina impersonation
• The theory that Esteban faked his death and lived on among the Zuni