Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/148

134 striking figure of the bison would not have been wanting in the "Naufragios" if Cabeza de Vaca had actually seen the "hump-backed cow," as the older Spanish writers called it. It is possible that he heard of the buffalo and perhaps saw some of the robes, but it is not certain; for, in the verbal explanations which he gave at Madrid in 1547 to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, he spoke only of "three kinds of deer, one of which was as large as an ox," but said nothing of "cows."

The fact that the Spaniards constantly wandered toward the "setting sun," and that from Texas, and that they did not cross the great waterless plains of that state, excludes the supposition that they entered New Mexico and that the "permanent dwellings" meant the pueblos of the Rio Grande. Further decisive is the declaration that the inhabitants of those permanent houses obtained green stones (turquoise or calcite) in exchange for parrot feathers. There are no species of parrots in New Mexico and Arizona, but the Sierra Madre is the habitat of the large green sittich, the feathers of which I have often seen in the possession of the Pueblo Indians, who had bought them in Sonora. The southern Pimas and the Opatas of Sonora used parrot feathers as decorations in their dances till the middle of the last century; and I have surveyed numerous ruins of the clay and stone houses of the Opatas in the Sierra Madre which, now a solemn, silent wilderness, is covered with lofty pine woods in which the loquacious green sittich flit in the early morning from limb to limb. The Indians of whom Cabeza de Vaca speaks bought the turquoises far in the north, and