Coronado Crestfallen

The American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited by whites for another three hundred years. 

In 1539, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a nobleman who had married rich and been appointed governor of Guadalajara by the Spanish king, set out on horseback from Mexico with a couple of hundred men, driving into the uncharted north. Coronado was a far kinder conquistador than his ruthless contemporaries Cortes and Pizarro and De Soto, but he was equally obsessed with gold. His objective was a place called Cibola, seven cities, where, legend had it, houses and streets were veneered with gold and silver. All he found, somewhere in northwestern Arizona, were some savage people living in earthen hovels, perhaps descendants of the great Hohokam culture, which had thrived in central Arizona until about 1400, when it mysteriously disappeared. 

Crestfallen, but afraid of disgracing the Spanish crown, Coronado pushed on. Tusayan, Cicuye, Tiguex, Quivira—no gold. His fruitless expedition took him from the baking desert canyons of south-central Arizona up to the cool ponderosa highlands of the Mogollon Rim, then down again into the vast, flat, treeless plains of West Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas. He returned, miraculously, a couple of years later, having lost half his men and some of his sanity when his horse stepped on his skull as he was exercising it. 

Since the climate of the American West is often compared, by those who don’t know better, with that of Spain, it is instructive to quote part of the letter Coronado wrote to Viceroy Mendoza as he was recovering along the Rio Grande:

“After traveling 77 days from Tiguex over these barren lands, our Lord willed that I should arrive in the province called Quivira [Kansas], to which the guides El Turco and the other savage were taking me. They had pictured it as having stone houses many stories high; not only are there none of stone, but, on the contrary, they are of grass, and the people are savage like all I have seen and passed up to that place. They have no woven fabrics, nor cotton with which to make them. All they have is tanned skins of the cattle they kill, for the herds are near the place where they live, a fair-sized river. [The Indian guides’ reward for their misleading travelogue was to be garroted to death.]…

“The natives gave me a piece of copper which an Indian chief wore suspended from his neck. I am sending it to the viceroy of New Spain, for I have not seen any other metal… I have done everything within my power to serve you, as your faithful sergeant and vassal, and to discover some country where God our Lord might be served by extending your royal patrimony… The best country I have discovered is this Tiguex River [the Rio Grande] and the settlement where I am now camping. But they are not suitable for colonizing, for, besides being 400 leagues from the North Sea and more than 200 from the South Sea, thus prohibiting all intercourse, the land is so cold, as I have informed Your Majesty, that it seems impossible for anyone to spend the winter here, since there is no firewood, nor any clothing with which the men may keep themselves warm, except the skins which the natives wear…”

The greatest irony of Coronado’s adventure was that he must have passed within a few miles of the gold and silver lodes at Tombstone and Tubac, Arizona. A few of his party, on a side excursion, discovered the Grand Canyon, but they were unimpressed by its beauty, and guessed the width of the Colorado River far below them at eight feet or so. The Rio Grande, which would later sustain the only appreciable Spanish settlements outside of California, didn’t impress them, either. When he returned to Guadalajara, Coronado was put on trial for inept leadership, which, though an utterly unfounded charge, was enough to discourage would-be successors who might have discovered the precious metals that would have induced Spain to lay a far stronger claim on the New World. 

His expedition also lost a few horses, which found their way into the hands of the native Americans. The two dominant tribes of the Southwest, the Apache and Comanche, soon evolved into the best horsemen who ever lived, and their ferocity toward incursionists made them formidable adversaries of the Spaniards who tried to settle the region later.

The Spanish did make a more than desultory try at establishing a civilization in California, which was more to their liking than the remainder of the West. (And, in fact, the huge California land grants doled out by the king established a pattern of giant fiefdoms that persists there to this day.) But they never found gold in California, so the territory didn’t seem worth a fight. Challenged by the first American expeditionary force in 1842, the Spanish ceded the entire territory six years later—just a few months before a man named James Marshall was to discover a malleable yellow rock in the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill on the American River above Sacramento.