Long before English colonists ever set foot in North America, an enslaved man born in Morocco had already walked thousands of miles across it, surviving shipwrecks, years of captivity and a journey that took him through present-day Florida, Texas and deep into the Southwest. His name was Estevanico, and his story is one of the earliest and least known chapters of American history. What makes his journey so remarkable is not just the distance he covered, but how he did it, going from an enslaved outsider to a man Native communities across the region came to see as a healer and guide, at a time when almost everyone else on his expedition had already died. What lingers most about Estevanico isn't his death at Hawikuh but everything before it, an enslaved man who somehow became indispensable, remembered only by those he outlived.
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