The Coronado Expedition — A two-year march for gold that found mud-brick villages

Summary

The Coronado expedition marched out of Compostela in New Spain on 23 February 1540 under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, governor of Nueva Galicia, to seize the "Seven Cities of Cíbola" — wealthy cities reported by the friar Marcos de Niza to lie north of Mexico. It was a large armed enterprise: roughly 400 European men-at-arms, mostly Spaniards, together with an estimated 1,300 to 2,000 Indigenous Mexican allies, four Franciscan friars, enslaved people, servants, and great herds of horses and livestock. Over more than two years it crossed what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. It found no gold. It returned in 1542 a financial and strategic ruin, and most — though far from all — of those who set out came back alive.

What the expedition found instead of cities of gold was, at Cíbola, the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh: a rock-and-adobe town that the Spaniards stormed and took on 7 July 1540, wounding Coronado in the assault. The "seven cities" were farming villages of earth and stone. Pressed for the wealth they had been promised, the Spaniards quartered themselves on the Tiwa pueblos of the Rio Grande for the winter of 1540–41, demanding food, clothing and shelter, and the abuses — including the sexual assault of a Puebloan woman — provoked a revolt. The Spanish response was the Tiguex War: under García López de Cárdenas they besieged and destroyed pueblos, and at Arenal burned to death an estimated thirty captives who had tried to surrender. Hundreds of Tiwa people died and a dozen or more pueblos were ruined or abandoned, in what is reckoned the first named war between Europeans and Native Americans in the present-day United States.

Lured on by an enslaved Plains captive the Spaniards called "the Turk," who described a rich kingdom called Quivira on the eastern plains, Coronado marched out across the Llano Estacado in 1541 and reached Quivira — grass-house villages of the Wichita people near present-day Kansas — late that July. There was no gold there either. Concluding he had been deliberately misled, Coronado had the Turk garroted. A fall from his horse left him injured, and in spring 1542 the broken expedition turned back for Mexico, arriving that autumn. Coronado was later tried over the conduct of the expedition and acquitted; he died in 1554. The march mapped a vast stretch of the continent's interior, but it did so at the cost of Puebloan lives and towns, and it is honestly read not as an epic of discovery but as a failed conquest.

Timeline

The cities that were not there

The Coronado expedition was built on intelligence that proved false at every step. Cabeza de Vaca's survivors of the Narváez disaster had carried back to Mexico in the 1530s rumours of populous lands to the north, and in 1539 the friar Marcos de Niza returned from a reconnaissance claiming to have glimpsed Cíbola, a city he described as large and wealthy. On that report, the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and Coronado raised one of the largest entradas yet mounted in the Americas — roughly 400 European men-at-arms and, crucially, between 1,300 and 2,000 Indigenous Mexican allies who did much of the marching and fighting, alongside friars, enslaved people, servants, horses and herds of livestock to feed the column. The whole enterprise was a speculation: investors and soldiers had pledged their fortunes against the expectation of cities of gold.

The expedition reached "Cíbola" in July 1540 to find it was the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh, a town of stone and adobe with no treasure in it. The Spaniards stormed and took it on 7 July, and Coronado, conspicuous in gilded armour, was knocked down and wounded by stones in the assault. From this foothold he sent detachments out across the country: one party reached the Hopi mesas and became the first Europeans to look into the Grand Canyon; another rode east to the pueblos of the Rio Grande. Everywhere the pattern held — substantial farming towns of earthen and stone construction, and no gold. The "Seven Cities" had been a mirage, and an army outfitted to plunder cities of treasure now had to feed itself through a desert winter among people it had come to despoil.

The winter on the Rio Grande and the Tiguex War

The army wintered among the Tiwa, or Tiguex, pueblos along the Rio Grande near present-day Bernalillo, New Mexico — twelve or thirteen towns whose stores of food, clothing and shelter the Spaniards now appropriated to survive. The relationship was extractive from the start: Coronado's men demanded blankets, provisions and lodging, displacing inhabitants from their own homes in the cold. The abuses were not only material. When a Puebloan man sought redress after a Spanish officer sexually assaulted his wife, the Spanish command declined to investigate. Through December 1540 the Tiwa retaliated by killing dozens of the Spaniards' horses and mules — the animals on which the column's mobility and survival depended — and Coronado declared war.

What followed was a campaign of destruction. Coronado sent García López de Cárdenas against the pueblo of Arenal; the defenders, overwhelmed, attempted to surrender, and roughly thirty of them were burned alive at the stake — an atrocity carried out in part to terrorise the other towns. Survivors and other Tiwa concentrated at the pueblo of Moho, which the Spaniards besieged for some eighty days across the winter of 1541. The Moho leader Xauían was killed, reportedly while shielding women and children during an attempt to escape the dying town. By the end, hundreds of Tiwa people were dead, multiple pueblos lay destroyed or abandoned, and the Spaniards themselves had taken over a hundred wounded. The Tiguex War is reckoned the first named war between Europeans and Native Americans in what is now the United States, and it set a pattern: the violence was not incidental to the search for gold but the direct consequence of an armed column that could find no plunder and so took what it needed by force.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

In its own terms the expedition was a ruin. It found no gold, beggared its backers, and returned Coronado to Mexico under a cloud; he was relieved of his governorship and tried over the expedition's conduct, including the violence inflicted on the Native peoples, before being acquitted, and he died in relative obscurity in 1554. Yet the entrada had ranged across an enormous swath of the continent — from the Gulf of California to the Grand Canyon to the central plains of Kansas — and the accounts kept by its chroniclers, above all Pedro de Castañeda, became the first detailed European record of the Southwest, its pueblos, and the Plains peoples and the bison herds. That geographical knowledge fed the later Spanish colonisation of New Mexico.

The deeper reckoning belongs to the peoples in the expedition's path. The Tiguex War destroyed or emptied a dozen or more Tiwa pueblos and killed hundreds, and the Spaniards did not return in force for nearly four decades — but when they did, the memory of Coronado's violence shaped the colonisation that followed. For the Zuni, the Hopi, the Tiwa and the Wichita, the expedition was not a feat of discovery but an early, violent intrusion that the surviving communities long remembered. Honest histories now place the Tiguex War, the burning of captives at Arenal, and the garroting of the Turk at the centre of the story, rather than the romance of the Seven Cities — a march that failed at what it set out to do and inflicted lasting harm in the failing.

Lessons

References

• Francisco Vázquez de Coronado WIKIPEDIA
• The Expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado: A Journey to Quivira TEXAS STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
• Tiguex War WIKIPEDIA
• Coronado's Seven Cities NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
• Coronado Expedition OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY