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three hundred years before John Brown pledged his family to warfare against slavery, a black man stood on the plains of the Southwest looking toward Kansas. It was the Negro Steven once slave of Dorantes, now leader and interpreter of the Fray Marcos explorers, and the first man of the Old World to look upon the great Southwest, if not upon Kansas itself.Whiter men have since ignored and ridiculed his work, sensualists have charged him with sensuality, lords of greed have called him greedy, and yet withal the plain truth remains: he led the expedition that foreran Coronado, reported back the truth of what he saw and then returned to lay down his life among the savages.

The land he looked upon in those young years of the sixteenth century was big with the tragic fate of his people. Planted far to the eastward a century later, their dark faces traveled fast westward until slavery was secure in the valley of the Mississippi