The Coronado Expedition

From the Distance of 460 Years

Richard Flint, Shirley Cushing Flint, Richard Flint, Shirley Cushing Flint

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780826329769
• eBook ISBN: 9780826329776
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the governor of Nueva Galicia in western Mexico, led an expedition of reconnaissance and expansion to a place called Cíbola, far to the north in what is now New Mexico. The essays collected in this book bring multidisciplinary expertise to the study of that expedition. Although scholars have been examining the Coronado expedition for over 460 years, it left a rich documentary record that still offers myriad research opportunities from a variety of approaches.

Volume contributors are from a range of disciplines including history, archaeology, Latin American studies, anthropology, astronomy, and geology. Each addresses as aspect of the Coronado Expedition from the perspectives of his/her field, examining topics that include analyses of Spanish material culture in the New World; historical documentation of finances, provisioning, and muster rolls; Spanish exploration in the Borderlands; Native American contact with Spanish explorers; and determining the geographic routes of the Expedition.

ONE

To See Such Marvels with My Own Eyes: Spanish Exploration in the Western Borderlands

JOHN L. KESSELL

TO THE ITALIAN ANTONIO PIGAFETTA, gentleman chronicler of Magellan’s fatal voyage, the wonders he first heard about the Ocean Sea were enchanting. “And then and there,” he confessed, “I resolved to see such marvels with my own eyes.”¹

Even after a century of revelation, as new-found islands, continents, and oceans crowded the Padrón Real (the official map) at the Casa de Contratación in Sevilla, the climate of wonder persisted. Errant Spaniards had seen countless marvels, invented new ones, and grasped repeatedly for those that receded before them like mirages, all the while seeking to reconcile fable, Christian scripture, and geography.

Father Francisco Escobar, chaplain on Juan de Oñate’s trek to the Gulf of California in 1604–5, was no exception. According to contemporaries, he possessed the gift of languages. Just as well, for not far from the Colorado River, an Indian whom Escobar called Otata put him to the test, describing people so strange that the Franciscan was at pains to record them. One tribe had gigantic ears that dragged the ground. Another slept underwater. And a third existed solely on the smell of food, its members born without anuses. Otata must have excelled at pantomime. The men of yet another native nation boasted, in the friar’s words, “virile members so long that they wound them four times around the waist, and in the act of copulation the man and woman were far apart.”

A circle of Indians nodded assent. Besides, Escobar assured skeptics, there were books that told of equally amazing things. And there was God. “Whosoever reflects on the marvels that God continuously performs in this world will not find it hard to believe that since He is able to create them, He may have done so.”² In his journal, the Franciscan chose not to speculate that these oddities might have been creatures of Satan, the Dark Side of the Force. Nor did he witness personally to believing them without seeing.

To explorers, seeing such marvels was rarely enough. To experience them personally, to possess them, materially and spiritually, and to enjoy a discoverer’s fame—such motives seemed always, in varying proportions, to underlie their travels and inure them to the excruciating hardships they were apt to suffer.

Three great swells of Spanish exploration and discovery rolled north from Mexico across the coasts and high deserts of the western borderlands. The first, set in motion by Columbus, lasted from the medieval (yet visibly Mesoamerican) quest of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to the failed business ventures of Juan de Oñate and Sebastián Vizcaíno, or from about 1540 to 1610. During the second, in the 1680s and 1690s, questing gave way to imperial defense as Frenchmen challenged Spain’s exclusivity west of the Mississippi. By the third, from the 1770s through the 1790s, Spanish explorers who shared the enlightened world of Thomas Jefferson reasserted Spain’s quixotic claims, erecting on promontories cairns and crosses before Russians, Englishmen, or Anglo-Americans did.

Not that these three swells rose on a calm sea. Always there was movement; hunters, prospectors, slavers, traders, white Indians—they were always out there even when the authorities, in the interest of consolidation, decreed otherwise. Exploration progressed, sometimes steadily, sometimes fitfully, as Spaniards compiled practical geographical observations, established new bases, and pushed back frontiers and myths.

Too often, perhaps, we have oversimplified explorers’ motives, especially those during the first wave. Some of us have embraced or damned Columbus as a brave and practical mariner while, with a postmodern sneer, shunning him in his self-proclaimed role as Christopher, the Christ-bearer, mystical visionary who convinced himself that “he had discovered the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ prophesied in the Apocalypse.”³

If only we knew more about the explorers’ psyches, we might better understand how and why they saw, or did not see, certain features of the strange new worlds they entered. And we should not forget that most of the exotic scenes they beheld were already peopled by fellow human beings, non-Christian men, women, and children whom the Europeans understood very well, even while arrogantly professing not to. Almost to a man, secular explorers rejected the intimate, all-embracing vision of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Yet more often than not, Europeans, whatever their motives, were led along beaten trails by natives who influenced what they saw.

Contact and Early Initiatives

During the cluster of adventures that clung to Coronado between 1539 and 1542, material and spiritual motives diverged neatly in two men: the youthful leader himself and the obsessed fray Juan de Padilla. Coronado, in keeping with the private enterprise favored by the kings of Spain, had invested heavily of his wife’s fortune in the hope of discovering somewhere to the far north of Mexico City peoples and resources richer still than those subdued by Hernán Cortés and his hordes of native allies.

For the cranky Father Padilla, a former soldier, glory lay in revealing and reuniting with Christendom the Seven Cities of Antillia, allegedly founded centuries before on some distant shore by seven bishops fleeing the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and since grown fabulously wealthy. Instead, he found death in 1542 at the hands of Plains Indians somewhere in today’s Kansas. Coronado, alive but unfulfilled, went home, where his patron, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, decreed perpetual silence about the hapless venture.

By their brief passing, however, these steel-age Europeans had broken into the interlocking memory of native peoples from the Colorado River in the west to the plains of central Kansas. Yet nothing the invaders saw, when compared with the Valley of Mexico, was worth the cost of occupation. They imagined no profit in scenic wonders. How, for that matter, could they even relate to someone back in Sevilla the awesome dimensions of the Grand Canyon? The cathedral tower made a poor measuring stick.

Still, this first herculean wave of exploration, which included the contemporaneous failures of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo up the California coast, Hernando de Soto from Florida to Arkansas, and Ruy López de Villalobos in the Philippines (each fatal to its leader), served to define a reality for the future. From the 1540s onward, Spaniards had a surprisingly accurate idea of the width of North America and the vastness of the Pacific Rim. Colonies would follow for a variety of purposes.

To guard the return route of the silver fleets through the Straits of Florida and expel French Huguenots, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established a conspicuous Spanish presence at St. Augustine in 1565. That same year, the first galleon from the Philippines caught the Japan Current back across the north Pacific and sailed down the California coast to Acapulco, verifying the theory of an astute Augustinian friar and navigator, the Basque Andrés de Urdaneta. In 1571, Manila took life as a Spanish entrepôt. Thence, for two and a half centuries, on a voyage considered “the longest from land to land on our globe,” luxury goods from the Orient flowed to New Spain for transshipment to Europe while Mexican and Peruvian silver ebbed back to transform the economies of the Far East.⁴

The inveterate risk-taker Sebastián Vizcaíno, a merchant and mariner engaged in the Philippine trade whose surname suggests Basque blood, contracted in 1595 to pacify the Californias and develop pearl fisheries, but his beachhead at La Paz quickly foundered. Later, in 1602 and 1603, casting saints’ names along the outer coast, he dropped anchor in what he claimed was a superb harbor for the returning China ships. Not for 167 years, however, until Russians and Englishmen threatened on sea and land, did Spain move to occupy Monterey Bay and, soon afterward, San Francisco Bay, which Vizcaíno and the galleons had overshot because of rocky, storm-lashed offshore islands and fog.

Another son of a Basque, the mine owner Juan de Oñate, who disregarded Coronado’s fiasco, negotiated a deal the same year as Vizcaíno and founded New Mexico as a corporate venture in 1598. Viceroy Luis de Velasco hoped the dual enterprises would divulge a Strait of Anián. But although Oñate’s San Gabriel proved slightly more liveable than La Paz, neither looked out upon a northwest passage between the so-called South and North Seas, the Pacific and Atlantic, respectively.

As New Mexico’s poverty sank in and his colonists took flight, proprietor Oñate explored in desperation. His captain Marcos Farfán de los Godos, prospecting in present-day central Arizona, reported veins of rich, multicolored ores “so long and wide that one-half of the people in New Spain could stake out claims in this land.” On the Gulf of California, wrote Father Escobar, “according to experienced seamen, we saw the most famous bay or harbor . . . that any of them had ever seen.”⁵

Viceroy the Marqués de Montesclaros doubted it. In 1605, the same year Cervantes’s Don Quijote appeared in Madrid, Montesclaros despaired of the New Mexico project. “I cannot help but inform your majesty,” he wrote to Felipe III, “that this conquest is becoming a fairy tale. If those who write the reports imagine that they are believed by those who read them, they are greatly mistaken.”⁶ Still, disillusion fed illusion, and Frenchmen, a century later, felt the lure westward of bountiful fantasy mines in New Mexico.

Rivals

The middle, transitional wave of exploration broke all along the northern frontier in the 1680s and 1690s amid widespread warfare with native peoples and heightened French activity following the Sieur de LaSalle’s descent of the Mississippi in 1682. Once Oñate had withdrawn from New Mexico in 1610, the Spanish crown, at the friars’ urging, turned his proprietary colony into a government-subsidized Franciscan ministry to the Pueblo Indians. Abiding for three generations, the Pueblos in 1680 avenged themselves in fury, not only casting Spaniards out but also shutting down their medieval machine of questing knights, a feudal lord, and the friars’ expectant city of God on the Rio Grande.

Between first and second swells, trade kept drawing Spaniards from New Mexico out into the vastness of the Great Plains. The case of the rugged Diego Romero implies at least two generations of far-ranging commerce. Romero, who led a caravan hauling manufactured goods hundreds of miles east from New Mexico in the summer of 1660, had an ulterior motive. He wanted the Plains Apaches to honor him as their head war chief, a title he swore they had once bestowed on his father. At a distant rendezvous that he called the ranchería of don Pedro, Apaches feted Romero in an elaborate calumet ceremonial. Afterward, according to eyewitnesses, he entered a new teepee set up for the occasion and had sexual intercourse with an Apache woman. Romero wished, he admitted later, to leave, as his father had, a son among the Apaches. If only he had not stuck the symbolic white feather on his hat, the agent of the Inquisition might never have found out.

Another Spaniard accused and tried by the Holy Office was New Mexico’s resourceful, blaspheming governor Diego de Peñalosa. Banished from New Spain in the mid-1660s, don Diego had presented himself at the courts of Charles II in England and Louis XIV in France. As credentials, he carried the falsified diary of a grand exploration he claimed to have made across the plains and a map showing the settlements of New Mexico, one of which he had labeled Santa Fe de Peñalosa. The Spanish swashbuckler’s offer to lead an invasion force of pirates and capture for France the mines of northern New Spain, although courteously refused, evidently played into the hands of LaSalle.

As Spanish-French rivalry intensified in the 1680s, so did exploration. Lured eastward by reports of freshwater pearls, bison products, and Indians asking for baptism, civilians and friars from the New Mexico colony in exile around El Paso penetrated central Texas. Farther east, Spaniards mounted coordinated sea and land probes to locate and put to the torch what was left of LaSalle’s aborted colony on the Texas coast, a pleasure bestowed in April 1689 on Coahuila’s governor Alonso de León and the zealous fray Damián Massanet.

A tireless Jesuit, meanwhile, had begun his notable career as a missionary explorer to the west in Baja California. Although Cortés and Coronado knew it was a peninsula, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino had been taught in Europe that California was an island. His first recorded crossing from the gulf to the Pacific failed to convince him otherwise. Later, however, Kino’s methodical explorations of the Gila and lower Colorado River drainages, and his crossing of the Colorado River delta in a big basket to observe the sun rising over the Gulf of California, led him to restore Baja California’s peninsularity. Kino’s map of 1710, despite the peninsula’s swollen girth, is a marvel of accuracy.⁷

Regardless of the almost immediate royal demand that New Mexico’s breakaway Pueblo Indians be restored to the empire, that feat had awaited Governor Diego de Vargas, the lisping but self-assured Spanish nobleman who took command at El Paso in 1691. Sending the viceroy a sack of salt from salines he discovered east of El Paso, Vargas lamented that the sample was not from the Sierra Azul, an elusive, silver- and mercury-laden range off beyond the Hopi pueblos to the west. Vargas never found it, but that hardly tarnished New Mexico’s imaginary luster.

Vargas’s grit, meanwhile, combined with Pueblo Indian disunion, resulted in a ceremonial repossession of the Pueblo world in 1692 and, late the following year, a bloody battle for Santa Fe. By the time Vargas died in 1704, the crusading intolerance of the seventeenth-century colony was giving way to a more practical, day-to-day accommodation as Hispanos and Pueblos stood shoulder to shoulder against common nomadic enemies, traded beans and chilies, and became compadres.

Vargas and Kino, two European imperialists who rode the turn-of-century swell and died on the northern frontier, both evoked an earlier age. Raised on Spain’s past glories and confident of knighthood in the military Order of Santiago, don Diego continued to beseech Our Lady of Remedies while coping with a monarchy in decline. The accomplished Father Kino, mathematician, astronomer, and contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, saw with medieval eye the comet of 1680 as a dire omen from God.

To Defend Such Vastness

As the third swell of exploration and defensive expansion gained momentum to peak in the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s, the imperial map of North America shifted constantly. Earlier, Frenchmen at midcontinent such as Louis Juchereau de Saint Denis had caused Spain mighty discomfort. The concurrent founding in 1718 of French New Orleans and Spanish San Antonio, along with José de Escandón’s massive project for Nuevo Santander in the 1740s, was symptomatic. French influence among Plains tribes in the meantime had drawn Pedro de Villasur hundreds of leagues northeast from Santa Fe in 1720 into an early preview of Custer’s last stand. Then suddenly, France, biggest loser in the great war for empire, gave over Louisiana and Illinois west of the Mississippi to a revitalized Spain in 1762, while most everything east of the river went to rival England.

Spain, by creating in 1776 almost but not quite a northern viceroyalty (the General Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: New Vantages on the Coronado Expedition
• 1. To See Such Marvels with My Own Eyes: Spanish Exploration in the Western Borderlands
• 2. Before the Coronado Expedition: Who Knew What and When Did They Know It?
• 3. The Financing and Provisioning of the Coronado Expedition
• 4. What’s Missing from This Picture? The Alarde, or Muster Roll, of the Coronado Expedition
• 5. Chichilticale: A Survey of Candidate Ruins in Southeastern Arizona
• 6. Spanish Artifacts, a Trail, and a Diary: An Eighteenth-Century Trail from Sonora to Zuni, New Mexico
• 7. Jars Full of Shiny Metal: Analyzing Barrionuevo’s Visit to Yuque Yunque
• 8. The Mystery of Coronado’s Route from the Pecos River to the Llano Estacado
• 9. Reconciling the Calendars of the Coronado Expedition: Tiguex to the Second Barranca, April and May 1541
• 10. Bison Hunters of the Llano in 1541: A Panel Discussion
• 11. The War for the South Plains, 1500–1700
• 12. The Jimmy Owens Site: New Perspectives on the Coronado Expedition
• 13. First Arrivals: Coronado, Hank Smith, and the Old Springs of the Llano Estacado
• 14. Spanish Crossbow Boltheads of Sixteenth-Century North America: A Comparative Analysis
• 15. Looking at a Mule Shoe: Sixteenth-Century Spanish Artifacts in Panama
• 16. Mapping, Measuring, and Naming Cultural Spaces in Castañeda’s Relación de la jornada de Cíbola
• 17. Two Colonies, Two Conquistadores: Francisco and Juan Vázquez de Coronado
• References Cited
• Contributors
• Index