Coronado National Memorial

A History of Montezuma Canyon and the Southern Huachucas

Joseph P. Sánchez

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780874174731
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Coronado National Memorial explores forgotten pathways through Montezuma Canyon in southeastern Arizona, and provides an essential history of the southern Huachuca Mountains. This is a magical place that shaped the region and two countries, the United States and Mexico. Its history dates back to the expedition led by Conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540, a mere forty-eight years after Columbus' first voyage. Before that time Native Americans occupied the land, later to be joined by Spanish and Mexican period miners and ranchers, prospecting entrepreneurs, missionaries, and homesteaders.Sánchez is the foremost historian of the area, and he shifts through and decodes a number of key Spanish and English language documents from different archives that tell the story of an historical drama of epic proportions. He combines the regional and the global, starting with the prehistory of the area. He covers Spanish colonial contact, settlement missions, the Mexican Territorial period, land grants, and the ultimate formation of the international border that set the stage for the creation of the Coronado National Memorial in 1952.Much has been written about southwestern Arizona and northeastern Sonora, and in many ways this book complements those efforts and deliversdetails about the region's colorful past.

CHAPTER 1

Montezuma Canyon, the Coronado Expedition, and Historians

A Historiographical Conundrum

We know, of course, that Coronado climbed the highest peak in order to survey the vast territory to the north and to the south, in his search for the ‘Seven Cities of Cibola’. Nothing lower than the highest vantage point would have satisfied him, and when honoring him we should build at the point that is actually hallowed by his footsteps.

— MRS. J. M. KEITH, 1940¹

Centuries after Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and a large expeditionary force trekked through a large area stretching northwest from Compostela, Nayarit, to places that today are clearly known as Sonora, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, his exact pathway is still a mystery. In 1940 Congress sought to commemorate the epic expedition by creating the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission. The commission had hoped to establish an international memorial to commemorate the first European explorers into the greater Southwest and the north Mexican states. In so doing, they wished to affirm historical ties that bind the United States and Mexico. Seeking to pinpoint the spot where the Coronado Expedition crossed the present international boundary from Mexico into the United States, the commission contracted historians to find the route or, at least, a corridor. The search for the route resulted in a flurry of academic publications that brought the state of knowledge about the expedition to its high point. Their conclusions tied the Coronado Expedition to Montezuma Canyon. In the same way, the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission inadvertently abetted the creation of a historiographical tradition tied to the Coronado Expedition of 1540.

In 1990, when the 450th anniversary of the Coronado Entrada (entry) once again came into view, a renewed interest in that expedition among scholars unfurled. Symposia, publications, reenactments, and other commemorative activities abounded. Since 1992 there has been interest in regard to the expedition of 1540, and a few archaeological publications have expressed new finds. Published in 1997, one book, however, brought the state of knowledge about the expedition to a reasonable level: The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1540–1542 Route across the Southwest, edited by Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint. The book contained a series of essays, penned by well-known historians and archaeologists, that summarized the state of knowledge dealing with archaeology and history about the Coronado Expedition. The publication included a historiography of the Coronado Expedition written by Joseph P. Sánchez. He identified at least thirteen general geographical issues that historians and archaeologists have explored and pondered. They included segments between points, such as,

Compostela to the Abra [The Valley of Sonora]

Suya and the Sonora–Arizona connection

The location of Chichilticale

From the Despoblado to Cíbola: The Arizona–New Mexico riddle

Vázquez de Coronado’s tiguex: The Albuquerque/Bernalillo campsite

From Tiguex to pecos and beyond: Spring 1541

The search for Coronado’s bridge

with the main army from the bridge on the Rio Cicuye to the Llano

Estacado and back

Mysterious Cona: place or event?

The main army returns to the Rio Grande

north by the needle through Texas and Oklahoma

Quivira—at last

The expedition heads home²

To a degree, the historiography of the expedition represented a starting point for those who would dare tread across Coronado’s path.

Some of the contributing authors of the Flints’ book did not stop their research into Coronado’s entrada. The Flints, for example, continued their tireless search for new information regarding the expedition and have published several new books and articles on the subject. Archaeologist Donald Blakeslee, meanwhile, made a new discovery at Blanco Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, of material cultural items associated with the Coronado Expedition. Over the years, crossbow points related to the expedition have been found at Hawikuh (Zuni), Santiago and Piedras Marcadas Pueblo (Albuquerque), and Yellow Lake Canyon (Lubbock), among other places.

Since the late nineteenth century, a long list of historians and archaeologists have carried out their own search for the Seven Cities of Cíbola. With few exceptions, theories about the route have been presented as fact by several researchers, but proof for hypothetical conclusions concerning the actual line of march by the expedition will never be satisfactorily attained. In the first place, no maps of the expedition exist. Second, the documents are too vague with regard to distance between points, place names that no longer exist, and lack of detail to define exactly where the expedition camped or traveled. The historiography of the expedition demonstrates that only a handful of sites can be identified, but how the expedition got to them is fraught with hypothetical examples.

The expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado is significant because it was the first major European exploration to penetrate the interior of the continent to its heartland in present Kansas. Exploring from Compostela on the west coast of Mexico, northward through Sonora, eastern Arizona, and across central New Mexico to the Rio Grande, the expedition moved eastward across the Texas Panhandle, marched through Oklahoma, and reached the great bend of the Arkansas River in central Kansas.

Narrative accounts of the expedition, the first written by Europeans, describe its many encounters with the native inhabitants and contain a wealth of information about certain societies and their cultures while they were still pure of European influences. Likewise, Coronado and his men wrote descriptions of the flora and fauna and other natural resources they encountered. They were the first Europeans to describe the Grand Canyon of Arizona and the large herds of buffalo on the Great Plains, the name we give today to the vast treeless plains that stretch from the Arctic coast to South Texas and from eastern New Mexico almost to the Mississippi River. The expedition members noted mountains, valleys, rivers, salt beds, lakes, forests, and other topographical features, including the Continental Divide, the watershed that separates rivers flowing toward the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.

The traditional consensus regarding the route, however, is that it lies close to that proposed by A. Grove Day and Herbert Eugene Bolton.³ Both men popularized portions of the route through western Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and central Kansas. Although the route they proposed is not the object of this analysis, it plays an important role in the historiography of the expedition led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. The Bolton–Day route, particularly as it crossed through northern Sonora into present Arizona, became the accepted route on which Congress based the location of Coronado National Memorial in 1941–52.

In recent years, nonetheless, researchers have debated portions of the route proposed by Day and Bolton, and some have even gone as far as to propose new routes. There are reasons for the disparities between some of the hypotheses: Day and Bolton dealt with the larger picture of the route. They were able to connect known places visited by the expedition with theories explaining how it reached them. Later researchers, concerned only with portions of the route, began to discover other hypothetical alternatives by concentrating on specific topographical and cultural features in certain areas believed crossed by the expedition. It should be noted that Day and Bolton actually tested their hypothetical routes on the ground, as have other researchers. Unlike Day and Bolton, who visited the Spanish colonial archives in Spain and Mexico and who read the original manuscripts of the expedition, some of the early writers of the route lacked access to the documentation and used translations that precluded certain perspectives about what the expedition had seen. Other writers, it is apparent, lacked geographical knowledge about the areas traveled by the expedition or did not read carefully the sources available to them.

When the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission was formed in 1935, the members focused their attention on the United States–Mexican border where Coronado could have entered the United States. Throughout the fall of 1940 and into the summer of 1941, Congress entertained the possibility of creating the Coronado International Memorial on the Arizona–Sonora border. Answering a question regarding the proposed monument, in the Congressional Record for that day, Congressman John Robert Murdock of Arizona commented that the monument would be established “at the point on the international border where Coronado crossed into Arizona 400 years ago this spring.”⁴ Earlier, on March 26, Congressman John M. Houston addressed the House of Representatives in a Washington Post article entitled “Southwest to Celebrate Four Hundredth Anniversary of Coronado’s March” dated two days prior.⁵ Reading from that article, Houston told the House, “the exact spot where Coronado entered the territory of what is now the United States has long been a matter of controversy.” Supporters of the memorial argued for the Naco entry point with a focus on Montezuma Canyon and its high points.

To reach a solution, the matter was referred to the NPS; early in January 1940 a special party of historians, headed by Herbert E. Bolton, director of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, drove to Compostela, Nayarit, Mexico. They retraced, mile for mile, what they believed to be the original route of the Coronado Expedition of 1540. In the end, they determined that the explorers had entered the United States at Naco, Arizona, which is on the east slope of the San Pedro Valley, about ten miles south of Bisbee, Arizona.⁶ In his book Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains, Bolton reiterated his position that the entry point, in the vicinity of Naco, was somewhere south of Benson, Arizona.⁷

The acceptance of the vicinity of Naco as the point of entry by the Coronado Expedition gained popularity among the Arizona proponents of the Coronado International Memorial for a variety of reasons. Some of the conclusions regarding the Coronado entry point were speculative, and others went beyond reason. For example, in a letter dated May 9, 1940, from Mrs. J. M. Keith to Charles M. Morgan, executive secretary of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission, Mrs. Keith complained that the proposal for a memorial containing 2,900 acres “is too large a tract to be effective or practical.” Instead, she suggested a smaller tract, consisting of one section along the north and one section along the south side of the Arizona–Mexico international line, that would include a museum at the “very highest point” along the border. What would be the highest point, and why would it be important? Mrs. Keith explained, “We know, of course, that Coronado climbed the highest peak in order to survey the vast territory to the north and to the south, in his search for the ‘Seven Cities of Cibola’. Nothing lower than the highest vantage point would have satisfied him, and when honoring him we should build at the point that is actually hallowed by his footsteps.” Mrs. Keith, undoubtedly, referred to a high point at Montezuma Canyon called Lookout Peak, which was later renamed Coronado Peak. Still, it would be left to historians, archaeologists, and other researchers to validate the history of the Coronado Expedition’s entry into Arizona from Mexico.⁸

There was another alternative to the Naco area point of entry by Coronado. In his autobiographical notes, Morgan mentions that there was a push to have the Coronado International Monument located in Nogales, Arizona. “For many years,” he wrote, “there has been continuous controversy [about where the Coronado Entrada came out of Mexico into what is now Arizona]. As a casual student of southwestern history I was well aware that they went down the San Pedro River—but a lot of very influential people seriously contended that he came down the Santa Cruz, crossing the present line near Nogales.”⁹

To quell the Nogales proponents, Morgan claimed he influenced a study to be made. “We put a suitable resolution through the commission,” he wrote, “So an imposing historical commission, headed by the famous southwestern historian, Dr. Herbert Bolton, from the University of California at Berkeley, with members from the Universities of Arizona and New Mexico, representatives of the Park Service, photographers, etc. all equipped [sic] with special high-wheeled cars for rough country, carrying all the known data along; took off from Compostela and retraced the route of the Coronado Entrada to the border.” The Bolton group, wrote Morgan, “came out along the San Pedro, any other route would have been quite impossible.”¹⁰ Apparently, Bolton presented his preliminary findings to Congress in November 1939.¹¹

In his letter to Congressman John R. Murdock in 1939, Clinton P. Anderson, managing director of the New Mexico Coronado Commission, wrote that the people of Nogales raised the question regarding Coronado’s route. They did so because, wrote Anderson, they wanted “a monument in that City for Coronado as a step toward the realization of their dream of making Nogales the great International Gateway. I believe that Mr. Morgan feels that Coronado came into the State 160 miles East of Nogales, and that the Park Service will so decide.”¹²

Other historians such as R. K. Wyllys at Arizona State Teachers College in Tempe emphatically argued in favor of the San Pedro Valley point of entry and against the Santa Cruz Valley route.¹³ Renowned New Mexico historian J. Manuel Espinosa supported Coronado’s entrance along the San Pedro River into Arizona near the Palominas–Naco area as the corridor, which led to the Arizona entry point.¹⁴

On February 6, 1940, G. R. Michaels, secretary of the Bisbee Chamber of Commerce, announced to Dr. Vernon Aubrey Neasham, regional historian, NPS, and the NPS Santa Fe Regional Office, that the last hurdle toward gathering a consensus about the whereabouts of Coronado’s entry into the United States had been overcome. “Needless to say,” he wrote, “all of the people in this area were delighted with the announcement from Albuquerque, Sunday. Coronado entered what is now the United States via San Pedro Valley. We wish to assure you that we are ready and willing to do everything possible to assist your committee in getting this memorial project under way.”¹⁵

In an undated printed letter to the minister for foreign relations in Mexico, the United States Coronado Expo...