The Trails of the Conquistadores

WITH good reason is the four hundredth anniversary of the great march of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado now celebrated in the American West. For nearly three centuries, 1536-1821, almost the only Europeans who knew or controlled the Great Southwest were subjects of Spain in her day of empire. Therefore a large part of Southwestern history has to concern itself with Spanish exploration, settlement and defense, from the Gulf of Mexico to the northern coast of California. Anglo-Americans have too often tended to misjudge this Spanish conquest of the Southwest, and have been prone to look at Spanish settlement and government from the patronizing viewpoint of American civilization and folkways of today. The Spaniards have been called mere gold seekers and conquerors; but they were more than that, and we should try to see them through the eyes of people of their own times rather than solely through our own. The Spanish settlements were neither so thin nor so transitory as has been supposed; they were planted by hard-hitting, hard-living, far-visioned pioneers; and they left an indelible imprint of Spanish culture and civilization upon our colorful Southwest.

First of all, in order to get a proper basis for understanding Spanish conquest and settlement in the American West, we have to reverse our usual point of view, and try to look at our Southwest from the South, that is, from Mexico, or New Spain, which was the source of most of the Spanish explorations and colonists. To Europeans in the sixteenth century, New Spain was just as rich as it was in Spanish eyes, the treasure-house of North America and of the Spanish Empire. If the Spaniards in our Southwest often seem to have been merely gold-seekers, it was for the very excellent reason that they had found gold and silver in Mexico, and not unnaturally expected to find them again farther north and west, in some other Mexico or some land that might be as wealthy as Peru. In the same way, after the discovery of gold in California by Americans in 1848, much of the exploration of the mountain west was thereafter carried on by prospectors of the same race. In the same way, too, in the sixteenth century, early French, English and Dutch pioneers in North America were seeking precious metals, either to forestall the Spanish goldhunters or to rob them, if they could, of what they had already collected. The Spaniards looked north from New Spain, then, and with plenty of justification, in quest of such mineral wealth as would properly reward them for their long journeys from Europe.

The beginnings of Spanish penetration into what we call the Southwest (but what they might have called simply the North) started immediately after Hernán Cortés had captured the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), in August of 1521, end ing one of the most romantic and melodramatic adventures in human history, the conquest of Mexico. Within a year after that, energetic Spanish soldiers had found the South Sea coast of Mexico, and had founded a town and shipyards at Zacatula on the Pacific at the mouth of the Balsas River. Here was the base from which in the next few years started a series of coastal voyages of exploration. From these voyages the admiring sailors brought back pearls and stories of an island inhabited by warriorwomen or Amazons, far to the northwest. Meanwhile, northward along the east coast of Mexico, explorers and settlers made their way as far as the region of what is now Mexico's great oil-port of Tampico; and still farther east, Spanish pioneers were seeking to know more of Florida.

It was in 1528 that Cortés was recalled to Spain, to answer charges preferred against him by jealous enemies who had friends at the court of the Emperor Charles V. While Cortés was in Spain, the chief authority left in Mexico or New Spain (in the days before there were any duly appointed imperial viceroys), was Nuño de Guzmán, president of the newly created audiencia or high court of Mexico. Guzmán, one of Cortés' rivals, seems to have been apprehensive of the revenge of his opponent, or else he felt the need of distinguishing himself during Cortés' absence and so recommending himself to the Emperor's favor. He therefore assumed the role of a conquistador in his own right. With ten thousand Indians and several hundred Spanish adventurers, he left Mexico City in December of 1529 and marched westward to the Pacific, provoking the Indian tribes into rebellion as he went, and then slaughtering or enslaving them, in such an atrocious manner that he earned the curses of that region for generations to come. During the next year, without much regard for the desires of the natives, Guzmán explored and partly subdued what is Now the narrow coastal state of Sinaloa, to which a little later the provincial name of Nueva Galicia was given. Its capital was the freshly-founded city of Compostela, at the western end of the great Ixtlán Pass; and Guzmán assumed the governorship of the province. In 1531, at the northern end of Sinaloa, Guzmán also founded the frontier outpost of San Miguel de Culiacán, long to be the northernmost outpost of Spanish authority in western New Spain. Guzmán's misconduct as governor of New Galicia led to his recall in 1536 by the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, shrewd and statesmanlike patron of Coronado. But on both the east and west coasts of Mexico, the Spanish authority had made notable advances in conquest and colonization by 1536, when the viceroyalty or virreino of New Spain officially began its existence.

At this point it becomes necessary to retrace the story for a moment, to recount one of the strangest adventures in the annals of North America, the journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. The story involves a Spanish approach to the Southwest from the eastward. In Florida, since 1513, Spaniards had been intrigued by the mystery of that wooded peninsula, where Juan Ponce de León vainly sought the Fountain of Youth, only to find his own death. It was in 1528 that another tragic attempt to penetrate the mystery of Florida was made, by Spaniards under the leadership of Panfilo de Narváez, another of Cortés' unlucky rivals in Mexico. Two years before, he had secured the royal consent to conquer Florida, taking over the lapsed contracts of previous conquistadores who had failed in the attempt. Narváez landed at Tampa Bay with high hopes and six hundred followers; and thence his army toiled north along the coast, missing contact with his ships and becoming daily more tangled and discouraged in the Florida wilderness as they sought what the Indians called the rich land of Apalachen or Apalache. When the goal was reached, near modern Tallahassee, there was only disappointment to be found in a miserable Indian village. Desperate and hungry, among hostile Seminole Indians, Narváez's men killed their horses and at St. Mark's Bay constructed five clumsy scows, bound together with horsehide, and with sails and rigging composed of their clothing and horsehair ropes. On September 22, 1528, some two hundred and forty half-starved, undisciplined survivors of the expedition set out in these crazy craft to coast the Gulf shores to the by RUFUS WYLLYS, Ph. D., Litt. D. Professor of History Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe. Author of “The French in Sonora,” “Pioneer Padre,” and other studies of Southwestern history.

Spanish settlements on the Panuco River, near modern Tampico. It was a wild, desperate journey, and it ended in final disaster in a storm on the coast of Texas, when the boats became separated and that containing Narváez drifted out to sea and obscurity, leaving the others to disappear or be wrecked on the coastal islands.

One of the boats contained an intelligent young man from Jeres in southern Spain, named Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had been secretary and treasurer for Narváez. This shipwreck of November, 1528, cast some eighty men ashore on San Luis Island, just south of Galveston, and at that point begins the story of Cabeza de Vaca's almost incredible wanderings. Most of the shipwrecked survivors died within a few weeks, and those who remained alive became slaves of the Indians. Here Alvar Nuñez spent a year in captivity, but he gradually exercised his talents in becoming something of a seer and a merchant among the simple coast Indians. Escaping only to become a slave farther south, he found other survivors, Andres Dorantes and Alonso de Castillo Maldonado, with Dorantes' African or Moorish slave, Estéban, among them. In company with these three, Cabeza de Vaca vainly attempted to move on southward; and then being turned back by hostile Indians, they turned inland, ascended the Rio Grande valley, and after crossing that river a number of times threaded their way somehow through the Sierra Madre mountain ranges. Just where they left the Rio Grande is uncertain, as is the route they took through the mountains-perhaps through Pulpito Pass in Chihuahua, perhaps through the region of Guadalupe Pass and the San Simón valley of Arizona. But they do not seem to have actually visited any of the Indian pueblos of the upper Rio Grande, although they heard about such communities. Their method of travel was such as to recommend itself to wayfarers in a strange land, for they set themselves up as medicine men, bearers of "strong medicine," and created no small impression among the Indians they met, who conducted them in state from village to village. It was somewhere in central Sonora that in the winter of 1536 the four adventurers seem to have picked up rumors of other white men farther to the south; and in the manner of travel which they had adoptedof being passed on from tribe to tribe, with appropriate feasts each time they changed their triumphal escorts they turned southward. Early in March of 1536, a party of Spaniards out slave-hunting north of Culiacán were amazed at the appearance of four wild-looking, half-clad men escorted by Indians. They turned out to be Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, the last survivors, so far as is known, of Narváez's ill-fated expedition. They had crossed the continent on foot, and practically weaponless, living literally by their wits. Moreover, they brought with them strange stories (which grew with retelling), of rich Indian com-munities or cities said to lie far to the northward, and because of these tales they were taken to Mexico City and treated with great honor by Viceroy Mendoza and his court. Thence Cabeza de Vaca traveled to Spain to seek the renewal of Narváez's royal contract, only to find that he had been forestalled by the rich and daring Hernando de Soto, whose unhappy fate in the Mississippi Valley five years later would mark the failure of the fourth Spanish effort to conquer and rule Florida and its hinterland.

The stories brought back by Cabeza de Vaca and his comrades had a tremendous effect upon New Spain. Mendoza had arrived in Mexico late in 1535, and now Cortés was back from Spain, exonerated and ready to undertake new enterprises of conquest in spite of a viceroy who was already jealous of the great conquistador's exploits. Particularly did Mendoza resent Cortés' explorations in the Pacific Ocean and along the west coast of New Spain. As early as 1527, in ships built in Cortés' shipyard at Zacatula, his navigators had sailed across the Pacific in search of the Spice Islands; and in 1535 they had discovered the tip of the long peninsula of Baja California. Two years later Cortés himself had led another voyage to this peninsula, there to found a short-lived colony for the hunting of pearls; an occasion on which the name of California was first applied, it seems, to the remote peninsula which many thought, then and later, was an island. In 1539 Cortés dispatched another navigator, Francisco de Ulloa, to explore the Gulf of California, stimulated, apparently, by Cabeza de Vaca's reports of the northern land of mystery. Ulloa's three ships rounded the head of the Gulf, and demonstrated what few were then willing to believe, that Baja California was a peninsula. Meanwhile, Cortés had gone to Spain again, to push his claim to an ex-clusive right of conquest in the northland. In 1547, Cortés died in Spain, and Mendoza arbitrarily took possession of his remaining ships. Thus a number of claimants were seeking to solve the Northern Mystery: Cortés, Mendoza, Guzmán (who still claimed prior discovery in that direction); Hernando de Soto, who was already pushing westward from Florida; and Pedro de Alvarado, old lieutenant of Cortés and also possessor of a fleet of ships.

It was with Alvarado that the crafty Mendoza was soon to complete a bargain, for the outwitting of rival claimants. Alvarado in return for a share in the profits of conquest would lend the use of his ships, while Mendoza, acting for the king's council, was to raise the expeditionary force. All these arrangements were being made in 1539, although Mendoza and Alvarado did not sign their final agreement until No-vember 29, 1540.

Mendoza had already, in his thrifty way, sent out a preliminary investigating party, composed of the slave Estéban (often called "Estebanico" or "Little Steve"), and two Franciscan friars, Marcos de Niza and Honorato, with some Indian guides, to re-connoiter the supposed cities in the north, cities which were soon to be known, by a queer mixture of legend and fact, as the Seven Cities of Cibola. The term Seven Cities was apparently derived in part from an old legend of seven lost bishoprics sup-posed to have been located on lost islands in the Atlantic, according to medieval travel tales; and the story heard by Guzmán from an Indian slave, of seven Indian communi-ties (the Zuñi pueblos) in the far north. The name of Cibola seems to have come from these Zuñis' own name for them-selves, of Ashiwi or Shiwona.

Fray Marcos' journey has been much discussed and disputed, both as to how far he went northward and what route he fol-lowed. But it appears that leaving Culia-cán on March 7, 1539, and leaving his companion friar ill at an Indian village somewhere in Sonora, he eventually attained the general vicinity of southeastern Arizona, perhaps even, as he somewhat equivocally asserts, coming within view of one of the Zuñi towns, Hawikuh. He had sent Esté-ban ahead of him from some town in Sonora, with instructions to send back reports of what the slave found, in the shape of cross-es; the importance of the discoveries to be indicated by the size of the crosses. Esté-ban, for the first time in his life, no doubt, in a position of authority and importance, pushed rapidly ahead with his Indian fol-lowers, and picked up a greater following as he went, seemingly favoring the collec-tion of Indian women and probably trying to imitate the triumphal progress of Cabeza de Vaca, since he posed as a magician of some power. It appears that he actually reached Hawikuh, then the largest of the Zuñi towns, but that the natives of that place were not duly impressed by his claims to importance. Probably incited by the Zuñi medicine men, the warriors of Hawikuh not only robbed and imprisoned Estéban in a house outside the town walls, but presently killed him, together with several of his fol-lowers. The survivors of Estéban's escort came to Fray Marcos with the sad news of what had happened, and the good friar was sorely troubled. "I thought it not good wil-fully to lose my life as Estéban did," he later recorded in his relation of events. But he did apparently make some kind of effort to visit the fateful town of Cibola, and persuaded some of the Indians to conduct him to what they asserted was Cíbola, which he viewed from a safe distance. Thence he hastened back to Culiacán, "with more fear than food," he says, and from there to Compostela, to report to the young governor of New Galicia, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. Fray Marcos' somewhat vague and garbled story seems to indicate that he had seen what he considered a city larger and finer than Mexico City, a city full of wealth and precious stones. Uncertain and This monument at Lochiel, Arizona, on the Arizona-Sonora border was dedicated last year to the memory of Fray Marcos de Niza, the first man to enter Arizona, and who pointed the way for Coronado.

Marcos de Niza, the first man to enter Arizona, and who pointed the way for Coronado.

Hesitant though his report appears today, it was enough to arouse the cupidity of Mendoza, and hence the viceroy's elaborate preparations, his instructions to Governor Coronado, his bargain with Alvarado, in order to obey promptly (and perhaps even to forestall) the commands of the royal council. All these intrigues and investigations form the background for the great Coronado expedition.

The story of the journey of Coronado forms a striking and significant episode, therefore, in the history of our Southwest. It should be noted here, however, that its objectives were not merely conquest or gold-seeking. It had a definite strategic and even a vaguely scientific purpose as well, which was to discover and seize possession of the rumored Strait of Anián, which was presumed to lie around the northern end of North America and to furnish a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. In short, Coronado was expected to find, some thousands of miles south of its actual location, the renowned Northwest Passage, which, in the imperfect geographical knowledge of those days, men believed was as easily attainable as Ferdinand Magellan had found the Southwest Passage (the Straits of Magellan), to be, and which would give its discoverers a short route to the rich markets of golden Cathay or China. Already Englishmen and Frenchmen had sought it, and within seventy years of Coronado's time, Dutchmen would also be hunting for it; but it would not be found until less than forty years ago, and even then would have little value. In the middle sixteenth century, however, the canny Spanish rulers, knowing full well the importance of keeping their grasping European rivals out of the South Seas, also wished to find the Northwest Passage by traveling overland, and to fortify it, as Coronado proposed to do, in order to prevent its use by subjects of other European monarchs.

Therefore, in the winter of 1539-1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, protégé of Viceroy Mendoza and recently the fortunate bridegroom of the wealthy and beautiful daughter of the royal treasurer of New Spain, was busily assembling an eager force of adventurous Spaniards at Compostela, mixed with political, mercenary, scientific and glory-seeking motives. To accompany him by sea up the west coast of New Spain, and to bring supplies, arms and baggage, the viceroy dispatched one Hernando de Alarcón in two of Alvarado's ships. Alarcón, through no fault of his own, apparently, never established contact with Coronado's men. But his voyage was not without interest. August of 1540, he found the mouth of the Colorado River, and in his ship's boats ascended that broad stream. Somewhere near the Gila-Colorado junction he landed (first of white men), on the California bank of the great river; and it is believed by some students that he may have gone up the Colorado as far as the southern end of the Grand Canyon. But then, disappointed in his search, he returned down the river to his ships, leaving a record of his visit for any of Coronado's party who might seek to make contact with his expedition; and his ships then returned to Acapulco on the south coast of New Spain. Incidentally, an interesting sidelight on the visit of Alarcón to the Colorado is to be found in his statement that certain Indians there told him of the murder of Estéban at Hawikuh.

In the mean time, the great expedition was gathering in New Galicia. In the American Historical Review for April, 1939, is published the muster roll of the Spanish members of Coronado's army, both cavalry and infantry, together with the weapons of each man. The document lists 225 horsemen and 62 footmen, exclusive of a small number, probably not more than twenty-five, who either had not arrived or were members ofan advance, scouting party. It does not include a number of friars or priests who accompanied the army, nor some eight hundred Mexican Indians; but it is careful to list 556 horses, two mares and one mule, most of these animals provided from the private estate of Viceroy Mendoza. According to this muster roll, very few of the members of the expedition were fully armed and very few had full suits of armor, although most of them had odd pieces of steel armor, such as breastplates and helmets, and a great number had buckskin armor, cueros de anta, which had been found more comfortable and suitable to the climate of New Spain. The document is dated February 27, 1540, as drawn up by the notaries after the army had departed.

It was on February 22, 1540, a Sunday, that Viceroy Mendoza in person held a grand review of the expedition, and next day the march northward began. So enthusiastic had been all New Spain over the gallant enterprise, that the fear was expressed that so great a number of armed men leaving the viceroyalty would encourage an Indian rebellion, and the fear was not without foundation. As Pedro de Castañeda, the more important of the two chief chroniclers of the expedition, expressed his opinion: "They had on this expedition the most brilliant company ever collected in the Indies to go in search of new lands. But they were unfortunate in having a captain who left in New Spain estates and a pretty wife, which were not the least causes for what was about to happen." As substitute governor for Coronado there was left Cristóbal de Oñate in charge of New Galicia. Mendoza accompanied Coronado's march for two days, and then returned to Mexico City. In advance had gone Captains Melchoir Díaz and Juan de Saldívar, with a small reconnoitering party, to verify Fray Marcos' reports; encumbered with a great drove of cattle, sheep and swine, the main army followed more slowly. After finding nothing of importance in a journey which took Díaz and Saldívar as far, says Castañeda, as "Chichilticalli, which is where the wilderness begins," they returned to meet and to report to Coronado at the Indian town of Chiametla on the Sinaloa coast. Their report was discouraging to many of their comrades, who began to murmur their discontent and to look upon Fray Marcos with doubt and dislike. Perhaps to rest and encourage his men, Coronado paused at Culiacán on March 28, where the frontier settlers welcomed them hospitably and where they spent nearly a month.

Díaz and Salvídar had reported a scarcity of food in the country ahead, and it was for that reason that on April 22, Coronado selected about seventy horsemen and about half as many foot soldiers, together with four friars and a large party of Indians to form the advance guard under his own leadership. The rest of the army was left to advance more slowly, under the command of Tristan de Arellano, and did not get under way until May 9. The main force reached the Corazones valley (near the modern Sonora town of Ures), and paused there again, to establish a frontier military post.

Coronado with the advance party went through the Corazones valley late in May. In June he had reached Chichilticalli (which most students locate in the vicinity of Solomonville, Arizona). It is now generally agreed that Coronado must have entered the present-day Arizona somewhere near Naco in the San Pedro valley. He was apparently discouraged with the appearance of Chichilticalli, "a tumbledown house, without any roof . . . made of red earth," although the Indians in that neighborhood are said to have remembered Fray Marcos and Estéban, and were friendly enough to the white men.

This monument to the pioneer mothers is situated at Springerville, in the heart of the White Mountains, and symbolizes the spirit of those who came west in the middle of the last century. They followed the Spanish Conquest. They built the Empire the Spaniards discovered.

As Tusayán (or Totonteac, as they had been named to Fray Marcos), which lay to the northwest of Cibola. In search for these villages, the modern Hopi towns, Don Pedro de Tovar departed from Hawikuh on July 15, with Fray Juan de la Padilla and twenty soldiers. The party took the Hopis by surprise, it appears, although the latter were said to have been alarmed by the Spanish conquest of Hawikuh. At Awatobi the natives drew lines in corn meal before their town and warned the white men not to cross them. For a moment the Spaniards hesitated, until Fray Juan, "who had been a fighting man in his youth," boldly led them in an attack upon the red men, and the latter quickly yielded before the horses and steel weapons of the conquistadores. Friendly relations followed, however, and the Hopis, in the course of conversation, revealed to Tovar that some twenty days' journey westward was a large river, whose lower valley contained "big-bodied" people and was very fertile. But Tovar had no orders to go beyond Tusayán in search of any such place, and so he returned to Hawikuh about the middle of August. His party had been the first white visitors to the ancient land of Tusayán, Arizona's oldest continuously inhabited group of towns.

To learn more about this mysterious river seemed important to Coronado, since it might have some connection with the fabled Strait of Anián, supposed to lie to the north of North America. Therefore, Captain García López de Cárdenas with a dozen men, including the chronicler of the journey, Pedro de Sotomayor, departed from Hawikuh about August 25, bound northwestward for an investigation. The party was welcomed by the now friendly Hopis and furnished with guides and provisions. After twenty days' travel beyond Hopiland, the white men"came to the banks of the river. It seemed to be more than three or four leagues in an air line across to the other bank of the stream which flowed between them. This country was elevated and full of low, twisted pines, very cold, and lying open toward the north, so that, this being the warm season, no one could live there on account of the cold. They spent three days on this bank looking for a passage down to the river, which looked from above as if the water was six feet across, although the Indians said it was a half a league wide.

It was impossible to descend, for after these three days Captain Melgosa and one Juan Galeras and another companion, who were the three lightest and most agile men, made an attempt to go down at the least difficult place, and went down until those who were above were unable to keep sight of them. They returned about four o'clock in the afternoon, not having succeeded in reaching the bottom on account of the great difficulties which they found, because what seemed to be easy from above was not so, but instead very hard and difficult. They said that they had been down about a third of the way and that the river seemed very large from the place which they had reached, and that from what they saw they thought the Indians had given the width correctly. Those who stayed above had estimated that some huge rocks on the sides of the cliffs seemed to be about as tall as a man, but those who went down swore that when they reached these rocks they were bigger than the great tower of Seville. They did not go farther up the river, because they could not get water." In these words was recorded the discovery of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, probably sometime late in September of 1540. Cárdenas and his men, lacking a supply of water, returned as hastily as they might to Hawikuh.

Eastward from Hawikuh, Coronado sent another of his officers, Hernando de Alvarado, who was supposed to be in charge of the expedition's artillery (although nowhere is there any description of anything like artillery in the chronicles of the journey). Leaving on August 29, Alvarado arrived at the Rio Grande valley pueblo of Tiguex, just above Isleta on the Rio Grande, and near the modern towns of Bernalillo and Albuquerque, on September 7, the same... gold and silver and rich cities, found only mud villages of Indians, and found a land that defeated them.

The great Blue Range and White Mountain regions of eastern Arizona offer spectacular mountain scenery, inviting fishing streams, and invigorating climate to the visitor. This area was traversed by Coronado on his march to the cities of Cibola.

day that Arellano was starting out with the main army from San Gerónimo in Sonora. From Tiguex, Alvarado pushed on eastward, to “see the cows” or bison on the plains of eastern New Mexico. Incidentally, on his march from Cibola to Tiguex, he had passed Acuco or Acoma, (in real Zuñi, Hakukwe), whose isolated mesa-dwelling people he described as “robbers, feared by the whole country round about.” From Tiguex he sent back word to Coronado that this country would be a good one in which to spend the winter, since it was better stocked with food than the Zuñi towns. He also visited the pueblo of Cicuye, or Pecos.

As soon, then, as the main army reached Cíbola, Coronado moved on to Tiguex with the rest of his advance party. By the end of the year, the army was arriving to take up winter quarters in Tiguex, or Tuthaco, as the region around Isleta was called. Here a new and interesting acquaintance was found. Alvarado had met at Pecos, the big village at the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and on the upper Pecos River, an engaging, talkative Indian who was said by the Pecos headman to have been a slave from Florida, and whom the Spaniards, from his appearance, dubbed El Turco. It was he who had guided Alvarado to see the bison herds, and he was full of accounts of the wealth of gold and silver in his native land. One suspects that his Pecos masters instigated him thus to lure the Spaniards away from the pueblo, as indeed he later confessed. Now Alvarado brought El Turco back to make the acquaintance of Coronado.

It appears that wintering an army of about one thousand Spaniards and Mexican Indians was something of a problem for the little New Mexican pueblos, and that at least one whole village had to be abandoned, merely to provide the white men with suitable lodgings. Moreover, it became necessary to imprison certain of the leading men of Tiguex, to convince them of the need of hospitality; and to requisition native-made cloth to make clothing for the white visitors; while the too obvious conduct of some Spaniards toward the Indian women made for more bitterness and hostility between the races.

Suddenly the Indians began to run off the Spanish horses, and to close their villages, as far as possible, to the white men; whereupon the whites attacked one of the most provocative of the communities, smoked the Indians out of their dwellings, and threatened to burn alive some two hundred of the captives. When the red men naturally fought for their lives, they were hunted down mercilessly and slaughtered. Then Tiguex, the main pueblo of the region, was besieged by the Spaniards. One instinctively sympathizes with the Indians; but we should remember that the Spaniards themselves were in dire need of food and shelter to carry them through the winter, and the law of self-preservation made it a case of conquer or die with them. So much extenuation can be urged for their ruthless conduct. It was late in March of 1541 when the tragic racial war reached a climax, as most of the people of Tiguex, in attempting to escape one night, were killed or driven into the icy Rio Grande, there to drown or perish of the cold.

the Spanish horses, and to close their villages, as far as possible, to the white men; whereupon the whites attacked one of the most provocative of the communities, smoked the Indians out of their dwellings, and threatened to burn alive some two hundred of the captives. When the red men naturally fought for their lives, they were hunted down mercilessly and slaughtered. Then Tiguex, the main pueblo of the region, was besieged by the Spaniards. One instinctively sympathizes with the Indians; but we should remember that the Spaniards themselves were in dire need of food and shelter to carry them through the winter, and the law of self-preservation made it a case of conquer or die with them. So much extenuation can be urged for their ruthless conduct. It was late in March of 1541 when the tragic racial war reached a climax, as most of the people of Tiguex, in attempting to escape one night, were killed or driven into the icy Rio Grande, there to drown or perish of the cold.

There were compensations for the white men in the shape of the weird tales told to Coronado by El Turco during that dreary winter. He was glib with accounts of a mythical kingdom of the Gran Quivira, located vaguely to the northeast. Quivira was described as a land of plenty, in which "there was a river in the level country which was two leagues wide, in which there were fishes as big as horses, and large numbers of very big canoes, with more than twenty rowers on a side, and that they carried sails, and that their lords sat on the poop under awnings, and on the prow they had a great golden eagle. He (El Turco) said also that the lord of that country took his afternoon nap under a great tree on which were hung a great number of little gold bells, which put him to sleep as they swung in the air. He said also that everyone had their ordinary dishes made of wrought plate, and the jugs and bowls were of gold . . ."

Do not accuse the Spaniards of being simply greedy when they heard of such marvels. Such a wondrous country could not fail to rouse hopes in a weary, hunger-pinched army lost in an unfriendly wilderness. Moreover, these tales of El Turco were of the stuff of which much of European literature was composed in the sixteenth century, and not far removed from the unrealities of Spanish and French romances of chivalry, or Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Even a hard-headed, sardonic Cervantes, had he been present in Tiguex in that gloomy winter, could scarcely have dissuaded his fellow Spaniards from a desire to believe in something better than their environment; and certainly any experienced Spanish officer would have hesitated to increase the disappointment of his men by scoffing at such hope-engendering stories of what lay "más allá." It was significant of the white men's readiness to believe, that they discounted the scoffing with which the crafty Pecos Indians treated El Turco's yarns. Indicative, too, of the moral value of these tales was the news that came that winter, of a mutiny among the garrison back at San Gerónimo. There was no El Turco regaling the men of San Gerónimo with wonders of the farther wilderness. Coronado sent Pedro de Tovar back to San Gerónimo to administer justice to the mutineers and to take letters which were to be sent on thence to Viceroy Mendoza and which contained El Turco's descriptions.

were of the stuff of which much of European literature was composed in the sixteenth century, and not far removed from the unrealities of Spanish and French romances of chivalry, or Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Even a hard-headed, sardonic Cervantes, had he been present in Tiguex in that gloomy winter, could scarcely have dissuaded his fellow Spaniards from a desire to believe in something better than their environment; and certainly any experienced Spanish officer would have hesitated to increase the disappointment of his men by scoffing at such hope-engendering stories of what lay "más allá." It was significant of the white men's readiness to believe, that they discounted the scoffing with which the crafty Pecos Indians treated El Turco's yarns. Indicative, too, of the moral value of these tales was the news that came that winter, of a mutiny among the garrison back at San Gerónimo. There was no El Turco regaling the men of San Gerónimo with wonders of the farther wilderness. Coronado sent Pedro de Tovar back to San Gerónimo to administer justice to the mutineers and to take letters which were to be sent on thence to Viceroy Mendoza and which contained El Turco's descriptions.

The quest for Quivira began on April 23, 1541, as the army set forth on its renewed march. It left desolation, we may infer, in the vicinity of Tiguex, for Castañeda says: "The twelve villages of Tiguex were not repopulated at all during the time the army was there, in spite of every promise of security that could possibly be given them." When the Rio Grande, "which for almost four months had been frozen over so that they crossed the ice on horseback," had been thawed out, the Spaniards were ready to move on, although as Castañeda remarks, some of the men already suspected El Turco of deceit and wizardry. Passing through the pueblo of Pecos, the chieftains of that community who had been held hostage during the winter to secure its good behavior, were liberated; and there the white men found an alleged native of Quivira to add to their group of guides, although he dis-

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This view was taken from a point in the Huachuca mountains, near the Arizona-Sonora border. Through this valley below crossed the Coronado expedition. Plans are now being formulated for an international museum at this point.