It was the year 1539, and Juan Ortiz had just seen his first Spaniard in eleven years. Ortiz was with his friends when they came upon horsemen led by Baltazar de Gallegos, from Hernando de Soto’s expedition. Indians had recently attacked men from the expedition, and the horsemen charged the group. Ortiz, who looked like his friends, called out that he was a Christian from Seville. The Spaniards took him to their camp, and so ended his eleven years of slavery.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Juan Ortiz, or how he came to be a slave of the Indians. Although his story is quite fascinating and offers insights into the culture in that time and place, he is often little more than a footnote in detailed accounts of the Hernando de Soto expedition, and gets no mention in general US histories. Even the finest histories are like a “See Europe in a Week” tour,” and, at best, readers come away with a broad overview. A historian is like a tour guide taking visitors into the past, stopping at events he considers significant. In the broad scope of history, Señor Ortiz’s ordeal tends to be judged more of significance to him than to the grand scheme of things. It’s only when we look at the Hernando de Soto expedition itself are we apt to encounter the story of Juan Ortiz, and even then it’s not a given. Concentrating on a specific part of history is like touring France rather than all of Europe: you’ll see more of the event, but seeing the entire thing is still impossible. In the end, all histories are like the motion picture Rashomon, with what’s considered important, and even the account of the event itself, varying by who tells it. And, unfortunately, like Rashomon, the history we read may be shaped by what the teller wants the reader to believe.

Cynical? Hardly. Bias is well known in histories. One view (at least several decades ago) is that history should be as unbiased as possible. Another is that, like it or not, all histories contain some unconscious bias. Still another is that since bias is impossible to avoid, a historian shouldn’t worry about bias in his works. Being no more than a dabbler in histories, I don’t know which was the prevailing view when I was in college, much less the prevailing view now. I would hope that it’s the first, yet realize that in actual practice it’s probably closer to the second.

Consider the moment that de Gallegos encountered Ortiz. The Spaniards, who had previously suffered an Indian attack, came across a group of Indians and charged them. Ortiz let it be known he was a Spaniard and that saved him from being run through with a lance. Omit that Spaniards had recently suffered an Indian attack subtly changes the account. So does omitting both the previous attack and that the Spaniards charged Ortiz and his friends. Omitting that Ortiz was held a slave by the Indians changes the story even more. Say simply that the daughter of the chief who captured him saved his life, and the reader can’t help but think of the tale of Pocahontas and John Smith and be skeptical. Add that she took pity on Ortiz and saved his life with the argument that he was just one Christian, and what harm could one Christian do, and suddenly it seems more likely. Tell that she saved him as he was being burned alive, and it changes the account even more. And so forth and so on. Sometimes the smallest detail or omission can radically change how we view an event.

It doesn’t matter if it’s intentional or not. Regardless of a historian’s motivation, all history is edited. Unless we read the primary sources, what eyewitnesses wrote or records such as deeds and court transcripts, we have no way of knowing what was omitted.

Is that significant? It can be. It may not be important to know who Juan Ortiz was, but that Indians practiced slavery is, just as it’s important to know the Norse brought slaves when they settled Greenland and that the Spaniards had no qualms with slavery in the New World, and that other peoples, including Muslims, kept slaves at this time. Without that bit of information, we have a distorted view of how things were in the 15^th through 17^th Centuries. That the US had military involvement in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and Siberia during the Russian Revolution, is barely covered in US history classes, but I suspect the Chinese and Russians haven’t forgotten it. There are so many aspects of history that doesn’t get covered and yet affect how we see the world today.

Even the examples I’ve shown here are just stops on a short tour of what I happen to think are interesting sites. The important thing to remember is that no history tells everything. All histories have omissions. Some have mistakes, and a few outright falsehoods. The only way to sort through them all is to try to go to primary sources yourself. With so much information at our fingertips, it’s easier today than it was a few decades ago. The bibliographies of different histories can serve as leads to even more information. With primary sources like letters, essays, and autobiographies, you don’t have to take someone else’s word for what happened; you can read it from those who were there.

It’s when these primary sources don’t agree that things get interesting. Who’s telling the truth? What actually happened? That’s where the Rashomon problem really begins.