Lasseter’s Reef was a fabulously rich gold reef that Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, an Australian prospector born in Victoria in 1880, claimed to have discovered in the central Australian desert decades earlier and could lead an expedition back to. In 1930 the newly formed Central Australian Gold Exploration Company (CAGE) bankrolled a well-equipped search on the strength of his story. The reef was never found, and Lasseter died alone in the desert in late January 1931, of starvation, thirst and exhaustion, after months in which Pitjantjatjara people sheltered and fed him. The reef has never been located by anyone, before or since, and most geologists regard it as a fiction.
The CAGE expedition left Alice Springs on 21 July 1930, far better outfitted than Lasseter’s tale warranted: a heavy Thornycroft truck, a six-wheeled support vehicle, an aircraft, an established base at Ilbilba, and a party that included the leader Fred Blakeley, the prospector George Sutherland, the engineer-driver Phil Taylor, the driver Fred Colson and the pilot Errol Coote, with Lasseter as guide. Lasseter could not find his reef. He shifted his story, claimed the party was scores of miles off course, and at the Kintore–Mount Leisler country Blakeley concluded the reef was imaginary and broke off the search. The main expedition withdrew in September 1930.
Lasseter refused to give up. He pressed on into the desert with a dingo-shooter named Paul Johns and a string of camels; the two men quarrelled and parted, and then Lasseter’s two camels bolted, stranding him on foot in the Petermann Ranges with almost no food or water. He survived as long as he did only because Pitjantjatjara people of that Country took him in — they recaptured his camels for a time, gave him food including nardoo he could not digest, and built him shelter. He went blind with “sandy blight” and grew steadily weaker, recording in his diary the despair of a man who had chased millions and would have traded them all for a loaf of bread. He died near Irving Creek around 30 January 1931. The Pitjantjatjara buried him; the bushman Bob Buck found and reburied the body, and recovered the diary from a cave, in March 1931.
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.