Cabeza de Vaca and his companions are thought to have been the first Spaniards to reach Big Bend. In 1535 they were astonished to find a farming people—probably the Jumanos at Presidio—living in actual houses at the junction of two rivers. Many years were to pass before the _conquistadores_ scouted this far country. Driven by their lust for gold and silver and zealous to Christianize the Indians, the Spaniards ignored Big Bend because they thought this unpeopled desert held no riches. The only Indians then living in the park were the Chisos, a tribe from north central Mexico that passed its summers in the mountains north of the Rio Grande. The Spaniards had the habit of enslaving Indians to work their mines, and the Chisos retaliated by coming down from Big Bend to raid the Spaniards. In 1644 the Chisos won a great victory, but in the end, they were driven out by a new group of Indians who filtered down the Rio Grande from New Mexico. These were the Mescalero Apaches, so-called because they ate the heart of the “mescal” or century plant. So fierce and skilled in battle were they that even the Spaniards fled before them. By 1720 they dominated Big Bend, becoming known as Chisos Apaches. Regarding themselves as mountain folk, the Apaches became the most successful desert dwellers and guerrilla fighters this country has ever known. What nature did not provide they took by raiding. Belatedly the Spaniards tried to stop the raids by building forts near major Rio Grande fords. One of these, a combination mission and presidio, was built about 1770 on the Mexican side at the park’s San Vicente crossing. But the Apaches kept up the pressure, the Spaniards fled, and the fort soon lay in decay. [Illustration: Strawberry pitaya cactus blossoms and articulated spines pose delicate counterpoints to sweeping desert, mountain, and canyon grandeur.] About this same time a new group of raiders, the Comanches, appeared in Big Bend. These nomadic buffalo hunters may have been the finest horsemen the world has ever seen. They ruled the south plains from Oklahoma to Texas and used Big Bend as a highroad to Mexico. For more than a hundred years, at the full of the September moon, the painted warriors crossed the Pecos and swept down past the flattopped hills and on up the long, empty, gently sloping desert floor toward the blue mountains, threading the Santiagos at Persimmon Gap where U.S. 385 now enters the park. They forded the Rio Grande at present-day Lajitas, picked Mexico clean as far south as Durango, and turned home at the end of the year. Driving captives and herds of horses and cattle northward, they probably recrossed the Rio at Paso de Chisos just to the west of Mariscal Canyon. We are told that for decades after the last Comanche left Big Bend, the great War Trail burned like a white scar across the landscape, scuffed bare by countless hooves.