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 ha ...