Did the Pawnee (if he was a Pawnee) really say that? Some anthropologists, Carroll Riley and Mildred Mott Wedell among them, have wondered. As a trader, the Turk knew a smattering of Nahuatl, as did the missionary friar, Juan de Padilla, one of his chief interrogators. To this stumbling _lingua franca_, El Turco added the fluent sign language of the Plains Indians, bits of which the Spaniards were beginning to pick up, though not as skillfully as they thought. Moreover, the talkers on both sides were discussing ideas and objects the others know nothing about. These opportunities for misunderstanding were immeasurably increased by the determination of Juan de Padilla to find the legendary Seven Cities of Antilia.
A word about Padilla. He had served as a soldier under Cortés in Mexico until deciding to enter the Franciscan order. He was hot-tempered, obstinate, and consumed with the hope of bringing the lost citizens—the wealthy, Christian citizens—of Antilia back into the mainstream of Catholicism. He believed implicitly that their gorgeous metropolises lay somewhere in the north. Meager Háwikuh and the Hopi villages had shocked him profoundly, but word of true urban centers farther east—Quivira!—reinvigorated his faith. He talked earnestly to the Turk about the kind of places he wanted to discover and listened with intense preconceptions to the trader’s answers.
Out yonder, the Turk told him, was a wide river full of fish as big as horses. The canoes on the river held 20 or more rowers to a side, and their lords sat in the sterns under brilliant awnings. This tale corresponds with what the Gentleman of Elvas said about the canoes De Soto saw on reaching the Mississippi half a year later. So maybe El Turco had witnessed, during his wanderings, the Indian flotillas of the lower Mississippi and the fish as well—gar can reach 10 feet in length. The chiefs of the canoe tribes, he went on, were lulled to sleep by little bells of gold (_acochis_) tinkling in the breeze. They ate (a standard fantasy) from dishes molded out of _acochis_. But _acochis_, it developed years later, was a Spanish rendering of _hawichis_, a generic Pawnee term for any metal. Copper, perhaps? It was rare on the Plains and in the Southwest, but there was some and it was displayed conspicuously by important men.