By Richard Gorby
For anyone perusing maps of Yavapai County as early as 1865 to the present, the 12-mile square in the upper left corner is bound to be noticeable, perhaps puzzling: “Luis Marie Baca Grant, Float No. 5.”
Using an An American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster, 1878, one finds: “Grant: A transfer of property by deed or writing; especially an appropriation of property by the government, as a grant of land.”
Float is defined as “a government grant of a fixed amount of land not yet located by survey out of a larger specific tract.”
Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca was a lineal descendant of Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, to whom the King of Spain granted a large tract of land in what was then New Mexico, later adding land in Colorado and Arizona.
The spelling change is interesting, undoubtedly used because the descendants didn’t like to be called “Head of Cow.”
After this, grants were made by the Mexican Government in 1821 to heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca. They were authorized to selected land near Las Vegas, N.M., then called La Vegas Grandes.
They were unable to secure all the land owing to conflicting grants.
Congress passed an act on June 21, 1860, authorizing the heirs to select an equal acreage in squares not exceeding five in number. Luis Maria Baca Grant, Float Number 5, was one of these.
The origin of this rather strange name is interesting. The family of Cabeza de Vaca originally bore the name Alhaja.
They were simple peasants until after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, On July 11, 1212, which the kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarro won over the Moors.
To indicate it, he placed at the entrance of the defile the skull of a cow. In recompense for this service, Martin Alhaja, until then a humble shepherd, was ennobled, and he changed his name to Cabeza de Vaca (Head of a Cow) in memory of his good fortune.
Some 200 years later, a journey across the continent from near what is now Galveston, Texas, to Sinaloa, Mexico, was a remarkable experience.
The travelers were Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andres Dorantes, Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado, and Esteban, Dorantes’ black slave.
These men were the few survivors of the Narvaez expedition of 400 men who, in February 1518, sailed from the coast of Cuba to explore the peninsula of Florida.
Most of the rest lost their lives at the hands of hostile Indians, by disease, or by shipwreck.
De Vaca and six companions had escaped by barge to the coast, near the Sabine River, where the barge had sunk.
“We lifted the barge out of the sand into which it had sunk (for which we all had to take off our clothes) and had great work to set her afloat, as our condition was such that much lighter things would have given us trouble.”
“Then we embarked. Two crossbow shots from shore a wave swept over us, we all got wet, and being naked and the cold very great, the oars dropped out of our hands. The next wave overturned the barge. The inspector and two others clung to her to save themselves, but the contrary happened; they got underneath the barge and were drowned.
“The shore being very rough, the sea took the others and thrust them, half dead, on the beach of the same island again, less the three that had perished underneath the barge.
“The rest of us, as naked as we had been born, had lost everything. It was in November, bitterly cold, and we in such a state that every bone could easily be counted, and we looked like death itself.”
Rescued by Indians, who lit fires to warm them and took them to their homes, de Vaca and the others survived. For the next six years they lived in various tribes, sometimes as slaves and almost always ill-clothed and hungry, until reaching the central area of today’s Texas, where most of the Indians treated them as friends.
After eight years Cabeza de Vaca and friends finally reached Culiacan, in Sinaloa. On the minds of the Spanish occupants of that area, the impression of the feat performed by the travelers and tale of their sufferings produced a great effect.
De Vaca returned to Spain and was awarded the position of governor of the settlements on the La Plata River. Reaching his post in 1541, he soon was regarded with animosity by his subordinates, which broke out, in 1543, to open revolt.
He was sent to Spain as a prisoner and spent some time in “mild” captivity.
He lived in Seville “……to an advanced age,” and occupied an honorable and fairly lucrative position. It seems likely that Cabeza de Vaca was an honest and well-intentioned man who may have been unfit for superior command.
Although honored by being awarded the large area of land that later became the five “Luis Maria Baca Grants,” he somehow lost most of the honor by having his name spelled differently.
(Richard Gorby is a volunteer at the Sharlot Hall Museum.)