A 400-year-old secret lies undisturbed beneath the waters of the Yadkin. It is a secret about Rowan’s earliest recorded history, about events that predate the county’s founding by nearly two centuries. It is a secret about the first documented Christian missionary success in the Southeastern interior, indeed, in all of North America.

It is a secret about Indians — the Guatari, who lived in an influential settlement near Trading Ford and were led by a female chief.

It is a secret about Europeans — Spanish explorers led by Captain Juan Pardo who came through the North Carolina Piedmont with grand hopes of creating a powerful empire.

The Guatari welcomed the Spanish to their village in early February 1567. On that chilly winter day, the New World and the Old World came face to face on the banks of the Yardkin, and Rowan’s documented history officially began.

The Spanish arrival in Rowan preceded that of the “Lost Colony” settlers on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island by 20 years.

Go to the state archives in Raleigh, and a copy of a Spanish document from 1569 offers this description of the Rowan County area and the Yadkin River at the point of first European contact in 1567:

It is a rich land. ... a land of mountain ridges and flat tracks of arable land, good for all the crops of the world. ... Next to this place passes a very full river ... They say that any sort of ship could sail more than 20 leagues up this river.

Such descriptions impressed Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, governor of La Florida, the sprawling Spanish colonial territory that, according to Spain, included the entire Southeast and all of the Atlantic coast. Menéndez was so taken by descriptions of Guatari that he intended it to be the site of his personal agricultural estate — a 5,500-square-mile domain promised him by the Crown.

But the Spaniards’ ambitious dreams quickly withered in Southern soil. And the native tribes, beset by European-borne epidemics of smallpox and other diseases, faced sweeping disruptions in their way of life. The Guatari would eventually leave the Yadkin area and ultimately take on a new identity.

Similarly, the colonial records noting the Spanish presence at Guatari became quietly submerged beneath the waters of history. Unknown in the United States for centuries, the documents would eventually be discovered — though detective work by American archaeologists would not work out an accurate route for Pardo’s Southeastern expedition until the 1980s.

Four centuries after Pardo’s men braved heat and cold on a 900-mile route through the Carolinas and Tennessee, the one-time village of Guatari is itself submerged — literally — beneath the waters of High Rock Lake. Archaeologists have never excavated the Guatari site — its exact location hasn’t been pinpointed — though digs at Trading Ford in the 1940s did turn up intriguing hints about Indian life in precolonial times. So, while much of the Guatari story is known, much remains hidden.

The secret still lies beneath the Yadkin.

Beginnings of empire

The story of the Pardo expedition begins in a most peculiar place and with a most peculiar question:

That question can be answered by going to Parris Island, S.C. There, the Marine Corps operates not only its well-known basic training center but also its own golf course. Just past the rough at the eighth hole lies a series of trenches.

Those trenches aren’t part of Marine war games, however. They’re archaeological excavations, and they contain the ruins of Santa Elena, the capital city of Menéndez’ La Florida.

Digging at the site began two decades ago, and over the years archaeologists have found the remnants of forts, a plaza and a vineyard. In the 1570s, 400 people — craftsmen, bureaucrats, soldiers, slaves — lived there, struggling to re-create a self-sufficient European-style community under painfully daunting conditions.

It was from Santa Elena that Pardo and his company of 125 soldiers headed out on Dec. 1, 1566, to explore the Southeastern interior.

A ‘primary concern’

Menéndez had specifically charged Pardo to head west and build a road to Zacatecas, Mexico, site of a major silver mine for the Spanish empire. The Spanish incorrectly thought they could arrive at Zacatecas after several days’ travel over the Appalachians. But Pardo found it necessary to head north first, toward Indian settlements, because the expedition had to rely on the Indians for food. And Pardo and his men needed plenty of energy, since they would walk the entire way without using pack animals.

“Food was a primary concern of the conquistadors,” says Tim Burke, who studies Spanish colonial expeditions as part of a 16th century re-enactment group in Bradenton, Fla. “Like their counterparts in European armies, in the New World the conquistadors lived off the land, or more particularly off those who worked the land. ... An army on the march could rarely afford to stop and hunt, even with the plentiful wildlife available in 16th century North America.”

In short supply

After they depleted their initial stocks, Spanish explorers in the 16th century routinely demanded food from the Indians. The main items taken were corn, beans and squash.

“Meat of any kind seems to have always been in short supply,” Burke says. “When they could get meat, these extremely Catholic Spaniards seem to have ignored the prohibition of eating meat on Friday.”

After leaving Santa Elena, Pardo and his men first marched northward through a string of Indian settlements in South Carolina along the Catawba-Wateree River. The most influential settlement was Cofitachequi, near present-day Camden.

When the Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto had passed through South Carolina 26 years earlier, he and his men regarded Cofitachequi as one of the most memorable tribes they encountered. Blessed with stores of freshwater pearls and a city that included an impressive ceremonial mound, the settlement of Cofitachequi was then ruled by a female chief. De Soto tried unsuccessfully to take her hostage, though he did capture the chief’s niece.

When Pardo’s company marched through the same area in the 1560s, Cofitachequi’s power was substantial but diminished from De Soto’s time.

At all the Indian settlements, Pardo, following standard Spanish practice, gave a prepared speech to the Indians, explaining that the Spanish emperor claimed the territories and that Christian belief would now take root in the land. Over the course of the 1500s, the stylized ceremony in which Spanish leaders presented this requerimiento, or notification, became a standard scene throughout the New World, from Piedmont woodland to Peruvian mountains, from Nicaraguan jungles to Arizona desert.

Pardo also instructed the Indians to build houses for later use by the Spanish and to lay up stores of corn exclusively for Spanish use.

Hostilities

Few Indian groups in the Carolinas acted in a threatening way toward Pardo’s party. Existing documents do describe several exceptions, however.

In one instance, a group of Indians in southern South Carolina rebelled against Spanish demands for food and canoes. While Pardo was to the north, soldiers from Santa Elena attacked the Indians and gave them no quarter. In another case, a contingent of Spaniards Pardo stationed near present-day Morganton sided with one group of Indians against their rivals and engaged in a battle. Pardo himself later withdrew from Satapo, a village in eastern Tennessee, after receiving warnings of a planned massed Indian attack.

De Soto’s expedition of 1539-43 had used calvary effectively against Indian warriors on a series of occasions. Pardo’s expedition had no mounted fighters, though the soldiers were armed with crossbows and a primitive firearm called an arquebus. Pardo encouraged a positive reception from the Indians by offering their village leaders gifts of metal tools such as axes, chisels and knives.

“Pardo was just lightly equipped and was part of a colonizing effort,’’ says Charles Hudson, a University of Georgia archeologist who has written books on both the Pardo and De Soto expeditions.

Spanish explorers from earlier times, such as De Soto and the conquistadors Francisco Pizarro in Peru and Hernán Cortés in Mexico, had been aggressive and often ruthless. Those explorers had been “the first guys on the land,’’ Hudson says. “They were using every sort of force they felt was legitimate, whereas Pardo was really more conciliatory. He was giving out gifts and trying to build positive relationships. It was more of a diplomatic effort.”

“I have no reason to think that Pardo was a nicer guy than De Soto and the others,” Hudson says. “It was just that the times and the nature of what was going on were different.”

Maneuvering

Records do indicate that Pardo’s men took a small number of Indians captive. So, while Pardo pursued a diplomatic approach with the natives, Hudson says, Indian leaders probably understood that behind the Spaniard’s conciliatory words lay the clear possibility of coercion.

Throughout Pardo’s expedition, in fact, the Spanish and the Indians constantly maneuvered to maximize their influence with each other. To what extent each side shrouded its true agenda with deception is impossible to determine at a distance of four centuries.

The first Indian settlement Pardo visited in present-day North Carolina was Otari, at present-day Charlotte. The Spanish then headed north along the Catawba River and stopped at the Indian village at Yssa, near Denver, in Lincoln County. “There I found many chiefs,” Pardo later wrote, “and a great number of Indians to whom I made the customary speech and they remained under the dominion of His Holiness and of His Majesty.”

The Spanish next turned toward the mountains. At the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, they camped at Joara, an Indian settlement at an important crossroads north of present-day Morganton. Pardo could see that snow had fallen on the mountains, so he decided against trying to press westward. The Spanish built a small fort, which they christened Fort San Juan.

Pardo left a garrison of 30 men under the command of Sergeant Hernando Moyano de Morales.

‘A very full river’

Turning eastward amid the winter chill, Pardo and his entourage re-entered the Piedmont and stayed briefly at villages at Guaquiri (Hickory) and Quinahaqui (Catawba), where Pardo gave his usual presentation to the Indian chiefs.

To cross the Catawba River, the Spanish may have used Indian canoes instead of trying to ford it. In any case, the Spanish, numbering about 95 soldiers, entered what is now western Rowan County and proceeded toward the Yadkin.

In early February 1567, Pardo arrived at Guatari. For the first time, the waters of the Yadkin gleamed before him.

“It is a good land,” recorded Pardo’s notary for the second expedition, Juan de la Bandera. “Good houses and humble, round huts as well as very large and very good huts are to be found in all the settlements. ... Next to this place passes a very full river.”

A female chief known as Guatari Mico held power in the settlement — the first time Pardo had encountered a female leader among the Indians. Guatari Mico was said to have 39 chiefs subservient to her.

The Indians, including local leaders, turned out at Guatari in impressive numbers. More than 30 chiefs, headed by Guatari Mico, assembled at the river settlement to greet the Spanish travelers.

Pardo and his men stayed at Guatari for 15 or 16 days. The settlement was the easternmost point the expedition visited in North Carolina. Pardo ended his visit when a messenger from Santa Elena arrived and said Pardo needed to return to the capital. Menéndez feared the French would retaliate for the Spanish slaughter of French Protestant settlers on the Florida coast, and he wanted Pardo’s men to provide military reinforcements.

Before Pardo left, he directed that his chaplain, Father Sebastian Montero, a lay missionary, remain at Guatari to instruct the Indians in Christian teachings. Four soldiers also remained with Montero, who was later described as tireless in his religious duties among the Indians.

Visit by chiefs

Pardo arrived in Santa Elena in March 1567, about a month after leaving Guatari. Six months later, at Menéndez’ order, he led a second expedition into the interior. His train of about 120 soldiers followed the same basic route he’d used before.

While Pardo was in Otari on his second journey, Guatari Mico and Orata Chiquini, the two female chiefs he’d met earlier, visited him, accompanied by two of the soldiers he’d left in Guatari. As translated by Guillermo Rufín, a captured Frenchman who served as translator for Pardo, the two cacicas said that with the aid of the 39 subsidiary chiefs a wooden house had been built in Guatari for the Spanish, as Pardo had commanded the previous winter. The Guatari had also filled two storerooms with corn for the Spanish, they said.

The cacicas signaled their obedience to the Spanish Crown by saying an Indian word, “Yaa.” This was the common way Southeastern chiefs publicly expressed subservience to the Spanish emperor or to a superior chief. Pardo presented the two female leaders with an axe as a gift.

Building a fort

The Spanish commander “was well received by the cacicas of the place,” Bandera wrote. “As soon as he arrived, he treated with the cacicas through Guillermo Rufín, interpreter, that they should command to come to the village all the caciques, their vassals, so that they could help him build a fort ... The cacicas made the ‘Yaa,’ letting it be understood that they were very content to do it thus.”

On Dec. 16, several chiefs arrived, though they did not appear until late in the morning. Pardo gave many of them a variety of metal tools as well as necklaces, mirrors and red taffeta, all of which pleased them. Initial construction work on the fort lasted five days. Pardo had the work proceed quickly in case he was called back to Santa Elena.

Pardo named the structure Fort Santiago, after the patron saint of Spain. He designated a corporal, Lucas de Canizares, to command a group of 16 soldiers at the fort. Canizares took a formal oath to have the soldiers treat the Indians well, which Menéndez had made a particular priority for Pardo’s second expedition.

Ten days after leaving Guatari, Pardo had occasion to see the Yadkin-Pee Dee River a second time. Taking a detour from their basic route, he and his men visited Ylasi, an Indian settlement near present-day Cheraw, S.C., just south of the state line. The Yadkin-Pee Dee flows nearby. The documents give no indication that the Spanish realized it was the same river they’d known at Guatari.

Traces

“If the people of the Southeastern chiefdoms had built stone houses that could have survived the centuries,” archaeologist Charles Hudson writes, “their place in the history of the early South might not have evaded scholars for so long. But the building materials of the Southeastern chiefdoms were impermanent: earth, wood, cane, bark, thatch and clay.”

The jewelry that Guatari Mico and Orata Chiquini likely wore, the axes, chisels and mirrors that Pardo distributed to the chiefs at Guatari — all remain undiscovered.

Lost, too, is the sizeable inventory of ammunition left at Fort Santiago — some 51 pounds of lead balls for the soldiers’ guns.

Even the word “Guatari,” symbol of a once-proud people, has lost all meaning for residents of Rowan.

Miles to the west of Rowan, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, archaeologists are now exploring the former settlement of Joara — in 1567 the site of Fort San Juan, today a farm owned by Pat and James Berry. Over the past decade, digs at the Berry site have revealed the largest group of Spanish artifacts in the Southeastern interior. At the site of Guatari, however, the waters of High Rock Lake quietly blanket the area, barring scientists from entry.

Beneath the surface of the Yadkin, the “very full river” where Spanish explorers and the Guatari Indians first met four centuries ago, a mystery lingers.

The waters of the Yadkin continue to move forward, and they still hold onto their secret.

BY GEITNER SIMMONS

SALISBURY POST

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done ...

It was the spring of 1567, William Shakespeare was only 2 years old, and at the Indian settlement of Guatari, Sebastian Montero, chaplain of the Juan Pardo expedition, was preaching the Gospel.

Montero began his missionary effort at Guatari, an Indian settlement near Tradiing Ford, in February 1567. The next major step in Rowan’s religious history — the formation of Thyatira Presbyterian, the county’s first Christian congregation, in 1749 — would not come until 182 years later.

Christianity’s actual foundation in Rowan was thus laid far earlier than previously imagined — by Spanish explorers living in the age of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Rowan County, then, was where Christian mission work gained its first foothold on the North American continent.

When warm weather settled over Rowan in the spring of 1567, Montero likely took advantage of it to hold his first outdoor Mass at his new post. No record proves that an outdoor service at the Yadkin took place, but Spanish settlers are known to have held outdoor religious services elsewhere in the Southeast in the 1560s, and Montero held Masses routinely at Guatari, according to testimony from Spanish soldiers who served with the priest. That testimony confirms, in any case, that Montero pursued his mission to the Guatari with dedication and zeal.

The Guatari, Mendana testified, “kept the holy days, especially the Sundays, and did not eat meat on Friday.”

Men and women came forward for daily instruction in the Spanish language and Christian tenets, Pedro de la Sierra, another soldier, told the court.

The missionary also taught some of the Indians how to write in Roman script.

Gannon wrote a 1965 journal article that still stands as the most comprehensive study of the Montero mission. “Father Montero,” Gannon wrote, “was the last, as he had been the first, Spanish priest-missionary in the Carolina interior. ... With his successes, modest and ephemeral as they were, Sebastian Montero deserves to have his name engraved, belatedly, on the first page of the missionary history of La Florida and of the nation.”

Converting the Indians to Christianity had stood from the beginning as one of the central Spanish goals for the New World. The pope had given his blessing early on to Spanish exploration and conquest of the Americas, provided that the colonial authorities placed Catholic proselytizing at the forefront of priorities.

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, head of the Spanish government for the Southeast in the 1560s, explicitly designated missionary work as a central goal of the Juan Pardo expeditions.

Montero was one of several secular priests Menéndez brought to La Florida — the territory the Spanish claimed in the eastern United States — in the 1560s to proselytize among the Indians. Secular priests were empowered to conduct religious activities but were not members of an established religious order, such as the Jesuits or the Franciscans, who were regarded as “regular” priests.

When Pardo arrived at Guatari for the first time in February 1567, two female chiefs at the settlement asked the Spanish captain to leave someone to instruct them in the religion of the explorers. Indians at Joara, near present-day Morganton, had earlier made the same request of Pardo. One of the Spanish soldiers is said to have provided religious instruction there for a time.

Montero, chaplain for the expedition, remained in Guatari in response to the chiefs’ request. Four soldiers were assigned to stay with Montero. Two boys from the expedition also stayed and helped teach the Guatari.

Montero would have sought to learn the Indians’ language, Gannon, the University of Florida historian, said in an interview with the Post. Most New World priests of the era attempted to learn the natives’ language.

Franciscan missionaries, for example, doggedly studied the numerous native languages of Indians in Florida during the late 1500s. Four centuries later, records from the priests provide the only information available about those now-extinct native languages.

Montero would have spoken only Latin during religious services at Guatari, according to Gannon. The Indians, he says, would have had no understanding of the actual words at all, the same as most European Catholics of the period.

So, not only was English not the first European language spoken in Rowan County; it wasn’t even the second. Spanish was the first European language to arrive in Rowan. The second, thanks to Montero, was Latin.

“I’m sure he didn’t have a very big operation,” says Charles Hudson, an archaeologist at the University of Georgia who has studied the Pardo expedition for the past two decades. “Four posts and a roof on top was probably all.”

The records are also silent about whether a cross was erected at Guatari.

He would have needed a cloth to place on top of the chalice and one under it. A missal, containing all the prayers and rites of the Mass, was essential. So were candles.

He would have needed a black cloak, which was the attire of secular priests. During confessions, he would have worn a purple stole around his neck.

In fact, Gannon says, Montero “would have performed all of the sacraments: baptism, marriage, confirmation, penance (confession), the last sacraments, which used to be extreme unction. The only thing he could not do was ordain someone to be a priest. That had to be done by a bishop.”

No follow-up

Montero had used his own funds to purchase all the religious articles and clothing he used on the Pardo expedition. Later, after ending his missionary work at Guatari, he would seek compensation for his investment from Spanish authorities.

Although Montero’s achievements were modest and short-lived, Gannon writes, “there is no record that anything like the same success was enjoyed by any of the earlier priests, secular or regular, who accompanied Spanish explorers to La Florida in the 16th century.”

Montero’s efforts have to be judged in long-range terms, cautions Paul Hoffman, a historian at Louisiana State University who has studied the Pardo documents in detail. The Montero mission may have begun the “first page” of Christian mission activity in America, Hoffman says, “but then the page was largely left where it fell. Nothing happened afterwards, and we have no evidence that any of the Indians to whom Montero preached ever converted or followed the Spaniards to the coast. ... So there was no follow-up.”

Montero evidently returned to Santa Elena in the spring of 1568, after spending about a year and a half at Guatari, according to Hudson, the University of Georgia archaeologist. That is admittedly a matter of speculation, since existing records do not say when Montero actually left Guatari. There is also a possibility that Montero visited Santa Elena, the capital of La Florida, during the summer of 1567 and then returned to Guatari, according to Hudson.

In ill health

A decree from Philip II, the Spanish emperor, on March 24, 1572 stated that Montero “has wished to return to his native land because he has been feeling ill in that land (Florida) and has been afflicted by certain maladies.” Upon his return to Spain in 1572, Montero quickly initiated a hearing in Seville, seeking repayment for his purchases for the Pardo expedition.

Called before a board overseeing matters in the Americas, five of the Pardo soldiers testified that Montero had spent significant sums to outfit his mission effort. Pedro de la Sierra, one of the soldiers, said that Montero had even “handed out shirts and jackets and trousers and other clothing to many soldiers, sold on credit until his Majesty paid them their salaries.”

There is no known record telling whether Montero received compensation.

One thing that has been documented, however, is that one of the prayers Montero taught the Guatari was the Nicene Creed. Which means that more than two centuries before the start of the American Revolution, Indians in Rowan County were repeating these words: