Our Catliolic Heritage in Texas
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the sun came from, and that one could go along this river through an inhabited region for ninety days without a break from settlement to settlement." They said the first of these was called "Haxa." Perhaps they meant Harale or Harahey, a corrupted form of the name given to the Wichita Indian settlements on Red River and the upper Brazos. They added that the river was more than a league wide and that there were many canoes on it. Due allowance should be made for Indian exaggeration as to the size of the river, but it is important to remember that they clearly indicated it was to the east and not north or northeast. 48 The Querechos impressed Coronado as intelligent, strong and brave. They lived and moved with the buffalo on which they depended for all their wants. Shelter and clothes were furnished by the hides of these beasts, their meat was their food, and from their horns they made spoons and other implements. The following day the Indians struck camp, folding their hide tents and packing them and the tent poles with all their belongings on packsaddles strapped to the backs of their dogs. 49 Moving on, very likely in an easterly direction as indicated by the Querechos, Coronado and his men continued along the trackless plains and came upon another roving band of these same Indians two days later. Again the Spaniards questioned them and were told there were many settlements "all toward the east from where we were," declares Castaneda. On they went over the plains "without a sign, as if we were engulfed in the sea," says Coronado, "there being not a stone, nor a hill, nor a tree, nor a bush, nor a thing resembling it ." The buffaloes were so numerous that the herds impeded their progress and frightened the horses. Under such conditions they could travel but slowly. The long caravan with a thousand horses, five thousand sheep and fifteen hundred Indian allies must have stretched out indefinitely over the boundless prairie. One day a party of hunters scared a herd of buffaloes, which stampeded down a ravine, into which they fell in such numbers that they filled it up and the rest thundered over the bodies of the fallen beasts. ••Castaneda, "Narrative," in Winship, op. cit. , 504; Coronado to the King, Octo- ber 20, 1541, in Documentos /neditos, III, 364. 49Castafieda, op. cit., 446; Jaramillo, "Relacion," in Coleccion Documentos de Florida, 1 58. Mooney declares that Querecho is an old Comanche name of the Ton- kawa, who ranged the buffalo plains of Western Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Mooney, James, "The Caddo and Associated Tribes," U. S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Fourleeenlh Annual Report. 1892-93.
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