Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/342

 two handsome Indians to be brought and sacrificed, according to their custom on the death of a chief, in order that they might wait upon him hereafter. Mososco still insisted, that de Soto was not dead, but gone to heaven, and that of his own soldiers, he had taken such as were necessary to serve him, and desiring the Indians to be loosed, advised the chief hereafter to desist from such an inhuman practice. Upon this, the intended victims being set at liberty, one of them refused to return with his chief because of his inhumanity, and attached himself to Mososco.

After some deliberation concerning their intended route, they came, at length, to the conclusion of attempting a passage to New Spain over land, as more practicable than the way by sea. After passing through several Indian towns whose names are now unintelligible, we find him, at length, among the Naguatex (or Natchitoches).

{265} After proceeding in a western direction, about 300 miles from the Mississippi, they came to a river called Daycao, which Purchas conjectures to be the Rio del Oro of Cabeza de Vaca. From hence, after encountering the inclemencies and hardships of the commencing winter, they found it necessary to return to the confluence of Red river and the Mississippi, as it was impossible for them to subsist among the wandering natives of the sterile wilderness they were approaching, and over which, the natives themselves merely migrated and hunted, being destitute of any supply of maize, and spending a wandering life, like that of the Arabs, subsisting upon the Tunas (prickly pears), and roots of the plains.

Having returned to Minoya, considerably reduced by a sickness, which bordered on the typhus fever, they commenced building boats for the purpose of descending the