Most of the men, women, and children of the Cocos Indian village on Galveston Island were away from their homes, setting traps for fish and gathering roots, one early November day in 1528, and so they did not see the pale, half-naked man with hair on his face slip in among their huts.

Preface: In a conversation with us several years ago, the Kowa poet N. Scott Momaday remarked that the American West is "a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed...It is a landscape that has to be seen to be believed, and may have to be believed in order to be seen."