“…the expedition to
Cibola, or the New Land, which the good viceroy – may he be with God in His
glory–Don Antonio de Mendoza, ordered and arranged, and on which he sent
Francisco Vazquez de Coronado as captain-general.” - Pedro de Castañeda, 16th c
account
I became interested in the Spanish Explorer,
Coronado, for two reasons. First, I saw
a Frederic Remington painting.
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| Frederic Remington, The Expedition of Francisco Coronado |
Second, I heard that my parents, during
their beatnik days before I was born, participated in a strange ritual in
Wichita, Kansas called “Raising Coronado.”
When I asked the late, great Kay Grove for her memories of the ceremony,
which was intended to invoke the spirit of the Spanish explorer, she said, “I
don’t know; there was a lot of beer involved.”
I heard there were robes, and candles, and chanting Coronado’s
name. Like Coronado’s expedition to find
the seven cities of gold, their attempts to commune with Coronado’s spirit was
unsuccessful, but the journey itself was the destination.
I resolved that as I traveled across the country on
my Visions of America trip, I, too, would invoke the spirit of Coronado. Why? I
suppose I wanted to follow in my parents footsteps, to reclaim the trail of one of the
earliest visionaries of America, who believed he would find seven magical
golden cities, gleaming in the sunshine, in which inhabitants drank from golden
goblets and ate off silver plates. I was on a journey across the United States,
and one of my main pilgrimage sites was Kansas, birthplace of Paul Raymond, my
greatest mentor. I wanted to find the
grassy mound west of Wichita, the city where I was born, the site of my parents’
strange poetic candlelight ritual. Perhaps I want
to invoke the spirits of my parents, the way they were in the 1950s and early
60s, my dad with a goatee, smoking a pipe, remnants of his recent brief Bahai
phase scattered about the apartment, my mom wearing a Swedish wool sweater and long
braids, writing poetry, organizing fair housing protests. Their friends, Dick
and Kay Grove, collectors and curators of Mexican art, who perhaps knew Diego Rivera and
Frida Kahlo (or at least people who knew them), Wayne Sauerbeer, alcoholic
poet/photographer and free spirit who helped preserve the Garden of Eden in
Lucas, Kansas, wearing a black turtleneck and always asking deep questions like
“What is Art?”
We started off on our quest in Arizona. Coronado is
everywhere in the southwest: shopping malls, boulevards, car washes. I first encountered him at the south rim of
the Grand Canyon, where his expedition tried for three days to find a way down,
and had to turn back. I invoked his
spirit as I called his name across the great divide.
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| "Coronado! Coronado!" |
I imagined the Spaniards’ frustration as they were
forced to turn eastward. From the firsthand account of their journey:
“It
was impossible to descend, for after these three days Captain Melgosa & one
Juan Galeras and another companion, who were the three lightest and most agile
men, made an attempt to go down at the least difficult place, and went down
until those who were above were unable to keep sight of them. They returned
about four o'clock in the afternoon, not having succeeded in reaching the
bottom on account of the great difficulties which they found, because what
seemed to be easy from above was not so, but instead very hard and difficult.
They said that they had been down about a third of the way and that the river
seemed very large from the place which they reached, and that from what they
saw they thought the Indians had given the width correctly. Those who stayed
above had estimated that some huge rocks on the sides of the cliffs seemed to
be about as tall as a man, but those who went down swore that when they reached
these rocks they were bigger than the great tower of Seville. They did not go
farther up the river, because they could not get water.”
I saw Coronado again on a carved doorway in the
Wigwam Motel, where we stayed for the night. In this depiction, he was with a man who
appeared to be dressed in some kind of Aztec garb. Of course, none of the Spanish accounts of
Coronado’s entrada mention the thousands
of Mexican Indian allies that he took with him, without whom his expedition
would have failed even more miserably than it did. I was glad to see that in that iconic Route
66 locale, the Aztecs who were with Coronado were remembered. Of course, it could have been a
representation of Hernan Cortes, I guess, but I choose to believe it was
Coronado, and the lady at the front desk said nothing to dissuade me.
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| Carved doors in the Wigwam Motel office |
Highway 40 through Albuquerque is named the Coronado
Highway, and we visited the Coronado shopping mall on our way to the Coronado
state monument.
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| "Coronado! Coronado!" |
Every place we went, we called his name. "Coronado! Cor-o-naaaah-do!" At the Shopping Mall, at the State Monument,
at his former winter camp.
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| "Coronado!" |
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| "Coronado!" |
At the Coronado State Monument, I met the woman who
manages the gift shop. She told me all about the Spanish encampment
just down the road from the old pueblo.
It was located right at the front of a giant housing development called
“Santiago.” This was a particularly
ironic name (or maybe an appropriate one) for a sprawling southwestern suburban housing development
with McMansions shaped like faux Indian pueblos, since “Santiago” was the
battle cry of Spaniards during the Reconquista
of 1492, when all Muslims and Jews were forced out of the Iberian
peninsula. It was also the battle cry,
apparently, of the Spaniards under Coronado as they brought out the “Santiago”
cannon to blast through their foes who, armed only with clubs and stone spears,
fought valiantly to defend their homes and families from the brutal invaders.
Undaunted, we drove down there and I climbed over
the fence, past the No Trespassing sign, to search the site. Apparently, some crossbow bolts and other
artifacts were found there by archaeologists in the 1930s and 1950s, and
recently the volunteer historians who staff the Coronado site prevented the
development from building houses by the roadside, where the Spanish encampment
was located during the winter of 1540-41.
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| "Coronado?" |
Carolyn, whom I spoke with, said she was pretty sure that Coronado himself
threw an Indian family out of their house so he could be warm there, while his
men stayed in the field. I bought a
brand new historical novel, Winter of the
Metal People by Dennis Herrick, which purports to be the first account of
Coronado’s “entrada” from the Native American perspective.
It isn’t clear exactly what Coronado’s route was
after the winter and before he got to Wichita, but we did try to visit “his”
bridge on the way to Amarillo. It is a
legend that the town of Puerto de Luna got its name from Coronado, as he went
through, but others dispute this. Unfortunately,
we missed the turn off to the bridge at Puerto de Luna, because I told Matt to
turn around too quickly. The bridge was
in his sight, but Matt didn’t know that was what we were looking for, so he
didn’t say anything and DARN IT! We
didn’t get to invoke his name there. However, later Dennis Herrick sent me a
consoling email in which he wrote, “Puerto de Luna is
one of several communities to claim Coronado's chimerical bridge. Frankly, that
probably wasn't the site.”
Driving across the Texas panhandle, I read out loud
to Matt from the firsthand account by Pedro de Castenada, who had been with
Coronado. It was shocking how many times
he “made peace” with the Indians and then went back on his word. One of his officers burned 200 people at the
stake at one point, after they had surrendered under the promise that they
would not be harmed. Is it any wonder
that the folks at the pueblo settlement by the monument refused to let them in
and Coronado had to lay siege to their town and basically starve them into
submission?
Coronado’s biggest problem was stated by Hernan
Cortes decades earlier: “We Spanish have an illness, which can only be cured by
gold.” He first heard from an idiotic
priest, Father Marcos (who later became the director general for the
Franciscans because of his bogus tip) that there were seven cities of gold,
where the windows shone with silver, etc.
Marcos accompanied Coronado’s expedition to Cibola, where the army did
NOT find anything. The soldiers began to
cuss out Father Marcos, even threatening him physically, and at that point
Father Marcos decided to hightail it back to Mexico City. At this point, Coronado might have given up
but for one Indian, whom the army called “El Turco” because he supposedly
looked like a Turk, or what they thought a Turk would look like since he had a
pony tail, told him that he came from a city called Quivera. In this city was a TON of gold and silver and
probably other jewels as well. He said their
chief took naps under a tree that was hung with little gold bells that would
ring and lull him to sleep. Despite the fact that every single other Native
American that they met (including Pueblo people, another guy who came from
Quivera named Ysopete, bands of roving Apaches, Comanches, Kiowa and many others) told him that it was
just an ordinary little village, Coronado and his men insisted on believing
this Turco guy, who was either insane (one of the men reported he was talking
to the Devil in a water pitcher) or malicious, or both. (More on Turco later.) Why? Because they
WANTED to believe him. They WANTED there
to be gold, so Coronado could get the kind of wealth and fame that Pizarro and
Cortes had won. Delusion! Caused by
avarice!
So the army schlepped all the way across New Mexico,
demanding that the Indians give them food, water, shelter, blankets, their
wives, etc. During the winter of 1541 they would just go up to Indians and “swap”
their crummy clothes for the nice warm blankets the Indians had. One entire village was “required” to move in
with their neighbors so that the Spanish could stay in their houses. They still didn’t find anything. They did see buffalos, didn’t know what they
were, called them “hairy cows” and weren’t that interested. Finally, they got to the Palo Duro Canyon
just south of Amarillo. Coronado decided
he would continue on to Quivera with just 30 mounted soldiers and half a dozen
foot retainers, some of whom were now guarding el Turco because the finally
started to suspect his story was crap.
He was chained up and they were basically dragging him along. The rest of the army allegedly begged
Coronado to take them, but he said he would let them know if he found anything
good in Quivera and they could join him.
We, too spent the night in Palo Duro Canyon, albeit
in “Starlight Canyon Guest House” complete with outdoor hot tub. The next morning, we set off in his footsteps
again. As we turned northeast, leaving
Amarillo, we realized that we were once again on the old Route 66. Coronado took Route 66 most of the way! On our Albuquerque balloon ride, I told the
couple we met (who were from Dodge City) that I was searching for
Coronado. They said, “Oh, yes, he came
right through. Look for Coronado’s
cross.” Amarillo to Dodge City, Dodge
City to Great Bend.
In Dodge City, home of Wyatt Earp, we found the
cross.
The ladies at the visitor center
were most hospitable; they gave us directions to the cross, little gold marshal
badges to wear, and a leaflet about a Quivira Coronado museum in Lyon, just
east of Great Bend. Our quest continued.
The next morning was misty and foggy, and it was
hard to see the grassy rolling hills around us.
On the side of the road, we found a marker in memory of Father Juan
Padilla, a Franciscan priest who had not only accompanied Coronado, but who had
returned to Kansas after Coronado left, taking with him only a handful of
companions. Whether he still thought
there was some gold there, or whether he genuinely wanted to “save the souls”
of the Wichita people, we don’t know. He
lived with them for a while and then was killed, again for an unknown
reason.
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| Of course it was erected by the Knights of Columbus |
Some Catholic encyclopedias call
him the first “Christian Martyr” of the New World. These accounts of Padilla’s mission and death
are even more bizarre and fanciful than those about Coronado. I found an article by George P. Morehouse in Kansas Historical Collections that is
really fun to read out loud in a strange British accent. Here, he quotes another account by Moto
Padilla (no relation to the priest, presumably):
“He reached Quivira and prostrated himself at the foot of
the cross, which he found in the same place where he had set it up; and all
around it clean, as he had charged them to keep it, which rejoiced him, and
then he began the duties of a teacher and apostle of that people; and finding
them teachable and well disposed, his heart burned within him, and it seemed to
him that the number of souls of that village was but a small offering to him
that the number of souls of that village was but a small offering to God, and
he sought to enlarge the bosom of our mother, the Holy Church, that she might
receive all those he was told were to be found at greater distances. He left
Quivira, attended by a small company, against the will of the village Indians,
who loved him as their father.”
Morehouse speculates that Padilla was
killed by the Quivirans because he was attempting to leave them, to go preach
the Gospel to their traditional enemies.
However, he speculates that after Padilla’s death the Quivirans were
sorry.
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| Oops, sorry, Father Juan. |
“One account says that the Quivirans even permitted his companions
to bury his body in a decent manner. What an impressive scene it must have been
to these savages of the plains, when the two oblates, Lucas and Sebastian, his
faithful pupils, clad as they were "in friar's gowns," tenderly laid
away their devoted teacher in that lonely martyr's grave midway between the
great oceans! What a subject for the brush of an artist, as they perform a
brief service according to the rites of their church and place the first
courses in that crude monument which has lasted to this day! Sorrowfully these
religious youths hasten from the scene, overtake the Portuguese, and together
they commence that remarkable period of several years' wandering. Part of the
time they are thought to have been in captivity, but finally they reach the
Gulf of Mexico. It is said that during all of this journey they were followed
by a faithful dog, and the rabbits and game he caught often saved their lives.”
Good old Fido.
After coffee with old friends in Great Bend, we
finally found the legendary village of Quivira!
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| Of course, when Coronado got here, he didn't find any gold. The chief had a copper breastplate, which he was proud of. The houses were made of grass. Coronado was pissed off. |
The Quivera museum was most bizarre. The
women who staffed it were mostly interested in the hundreds of aprons,
potholders and dish towels they had collected in the other rooms. They seemed
to have no understanding of historical facts, dates, or geography. I asked them questions like, “When did the
archaeological digs take place?” or “Where were these artifacts discovered?” They gave me answers like, “On private
property. I went there once. Or maybe that was somewhere else.” Their eyes were glassy and unfocused. There
was a replica of a grass hut, some very odd drawings, and a tiny piece of chain
mail that had been discovered in a field.
“You should go to the new museum in
Lindesborg,” one of them told me. “They
have a new museum. It isn’t open
yet. They have a drawing just like that in
there.” I asked where the petroglyphs were.
She said, “I went to see some hieroglyphics once.” The women tried to
direct us to a place called “Coronado Heights,” a mound with a stone cross or
marker (they could not say which) “on the left side of the road.” I asked her the name of the road. “I used to live near there,” she
replied. “And what road is it? How many miles is it?” I pressed. “It’s near the animal hospital. Before you
get to the main highway.” “Which main
highway?” She couldn’t think of the
name.
My favorite piece in the museum was a rock with a
so-called ancient inscription carved onto it, found by one Ralph Steele of
Effingham, Kansas. It says, in Spanish: “August
3, 1541 – I take (tomo) for Spain (por Espana) Quiver(a)…(F)ranciso…” This
was in 1937. Controversy raged over
whether the rock was a fake or not, with many “experts” on both sides. Finally, Ralph confessed that he had carved
the rock himself, but by that time nobody seemed to believe him. No wonder the ladies in the museum were
confused.
I tried on the replica of the Conquistador
helmet. I looked at the life sized
diorama with the pointing Indian.
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| "Yeah, you guys, the gold is just over that hill. Keep going. You can't miss it." |
Was it
El Turco, telling them the way to the city of gold and silver? I asked the docent. “Look!” she said, “He’s pointing!” In reality, El Turco did finally confess his
plans, under some sort of Spanish torture.
“They asked the Turk why
he had lied and had guided them so far out of their way. He said that his
country was in that direction and that, besides this, the people at Cicuye had
asked him to lead them off on to the plains and lose them, so that the horses
would die when their provisions gave out, and they would be so weak if they
ever returned that they would be killed without any trouble, and thus they
could take revenge for what had been done to them. This was the reason why he
had led them astray, supposing that they did not know how to hunt or to live
without corn, while as for the gold, he did not know where there was any of it.
He said this like one who had given up hope and who found that he was being
persecuted.”
In
fact, to this day, El Turco is revered as a hero by the pueblo people. Remember, this was 40 years after the
massacre, mutilation and enslavement of the people at the Acoma Pueblo, which
we visited outside Albuquerque. The
bodies of those who died from exhaustion and torture under forced labor were
interred within the walls of the Catholic church. 40 years after El Turco’s
bold plan to deceive the invaders, a man named Pope led the Pueblo Revolt freeing
the people of the pueblos from Spanish tyranny, exploitation, slavery and
cultural genocide for 12 years.
His
plan didn’t work, and of course Coronado garroted him, but it was a good
try. Coronado himself might have been
planning to try again, but he had an accident while racing around on his
horse. He fell, and the horse trampled
on his head. After that, he was never
the same; he returned to Mexico City the following year and never achieved
anything else in his life. Some call his
expedition a failure, others call it an inspiration. We couldn’t find Coronado heights, although
we did see a road going away towards the west. We had run out of time, as we needed to get
to the Eisenhower Presidential Museum in Abilene and eat some Kansas barbecue. We invoked Coronado’s name one last time;
perhaps I was invoking other spirits of the past, both real and imaginary, as
we drove away into the Kansas mist.
