After conquering the Aztecs of Moctezuma in 1521, Hernán Cortés' lieutenants fanned out in all directions, like Pizarro's in Peru two decades later. In fact, the Peru story mirrored that of Mexico. In the quest for more wealth and more rich and prosperous civilisations to conquer, cities were founded, settlements made, encomienda grants of land and Indians distributed to the deserving, and order under Royal authority established. Those who felt short-changed following their efforts and sacrifices, ventured further, beyond the fringes of Spanish civilisation, in search of their own conquest and wealth.

Nor was it just the rank and file who succumbed to the urge of el relámpago. Men of standing left otherwise promising careers in high office in pursuit of gold and fame. Men such as the newly-appointed presidente of the Nueva España Audiencia, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, by accounts a scripture-quoting, sadistic, twisted personality, driven by his hatred and jealousy of Hernan Cortés' success. So vehement was his desire to prove himself a greater conquístador than Cortés, that he deserted his position and embarked on an unauthorised and destructive conquest in the north-west. Following the slaughter and conquest of the Totorame Indians and the capture of Mazatlán in 1531, the remote province of Nueva Galicia turned out to yield not gold but silver – in considerable quantities.

Rumours of a therapeutic 'fountain of eternal youth' brought the Spaniards in search of the island of 'Bimini' or 'Bermendi.' The first such expedition, led by former gobernadór of Puerto Rico, Juan Ponce de León, floundered miserably in western Florida in 1513. A large and unwieldy expedition led by another of Cortés' rivals, Pánfilo de Narváez, departed Cuba and founded the settlement of Espíritu Santo [18] in 1528 as a base from which to start the conquest of Florida - assumed to be rich in wealthy civilizations. But de Narváez was both arrogant and incompetent. His hatred of Cortés drove his 300-strong band of conquístadores, without adequate logistics, into the insalubrious swamps of north-western Florida and into the skilful ambushes of the Seminole Indians. Internal dissension soon reduced Spanish numbers and the expedition fell apart. With food supplies exhausted, de Narváez was pursuaded to abandon the expedition of conquest and to return to the coast (south-west of present-day Tallahassee) ... where the expected Spanish ships, having given up waiting, had already left the area. Rafts and barges were built and the survivors boarded them, following the coastline westwards towards Vera Cruz - assumed to be only a few days away, but in fact over 1,000 miles ... Storms swept the barely-seaworthy vessels further out to sea, never to be seen again, or drove them ashore. De Narváez and most of his followers fell into the hands of the Indians, no doubt meeting unpleasant deaths. But a few survivors, amongst whom a young Spanish hidalgo, Alvár Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, washed up on the shore of present-day Galveston Island ... where they unexpectedly received both succour and compassion from the local Karankawa Indians. Crossing with them to the mainland of Téjas, de Vaca and his companions, having no valuable 'local skills,' the Spaniards were reduced to 'servants' or dependents of the Karankawa. Unfortunately – and unknowingly – the Spaniards had brought with them European diseases which very soon began to kill-off their hosts ... until by 1531only Cabeza de Vaca was left. But de Vaca heard of three other European survivors at a neighbouring Indian tribe. Together with Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Andres Dorantes and Estebánico, the 'Black Moor,' Cabeza de Vaca escaped his hosts, the small party heading southwards along the Gulf of Mexico toward the known areas of Spanish presence. It was the start of an extraordinary trek, and is the subject of considerable debate regarding the actual route followed [19]. The conventional view holds that the four Spaniards headed westward, across Téjas, into present-day New Mexico and Arizona, and then turned south towards the Pacific, coming down northen Mexico along the western side of the Sierra Madre. A recent re-interpretation of Cabeza de Vaca's account of the epic journey, La Relación, suggests that the more likely route followed was that across the Río Grande del Norte [20], through present-day Coahuila, turning west toward Chihuahua, turning southwards in Sonora, arriving in Sinaloa on the Pacific in northern Nueva España in 1536. By a combination of intense spirituality and remarkable 'therapeutic skills,' Cabeza de Vaca had established a reputation as something of a 'holy man' among the Indians – some 600 followed him to Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca's Indians also brought with them tales of 'large towns to the north' of their homelands, where precious metals were traded. The buildings there were said to be made of turquoise and gold .... Perhaps these were the 'Seven Cities of Antilia?' [21]

Viceroy António de Mendoza was intrigued by these tales. As a preliminary to a greater entrada, Frey Marcos de Niza [22] was charged to probe the unknown trails to the north into the lands of the 'Moqui,' as the peoples of the far north were collectively known by the Spaniards for the next two hundred years. Setting out on March 7, 1539, Frey Marcos took Estebánico with him as guide, followed the Indian trade routes up the western flanks of the Sierra Madre, and passed the now-vanished Indian town of Chichilticale. Details of Frey Marcos' wanderings remain sketchy, but the following is known for certain. When the expedition approached what are now the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, Estebánico and several companions went ahead to scout the country. A somewhat over-elaborate messaging system was agreed upon: the level of prosperity of the Seven Cities encountered was to be transmitted back to Frey Marcos' main party by the size of a cross - the richer the city, the bigger the cross. Whilst slowly following Estebánico's trail, Frey Marcos questioned the Indians of the humble villages, asking what they knew of the 'prosperous cities' to the north. The Indians told of large towns with market places, of broad streets lined with houses several storeys high. And, true enough, Estebánico had placed crosses along the trail, each one progressively larger. Eventually a scout returned carrying a 'man-sized' cross – clearly a truly fabulous city had been encountered! Another scout returned and reported that Estebánico had learned of a place called 'Cíbola,' and had been told this Cíbola was but "one of seven magnificent cities." Frey Marcos hurried forward and soon encountered several of Estebánico's companions .... who reported that their colourful guide had been killed. Frey Marcos cautiously continued northward until he came within sight of – but did not enter – a settlement which he described as being "larger than the city of Mexico," and beyond it, he added, lay the kindom of Acus. Historians disagree as to his motives, but it is clear Frey Marcos' report was vastly exaggerated. The 'Cíbola' where Estebánico was killed was in reality the ancestral Zuñi pueblo of Hawikah and the 'kingdom' of Acus beyond it was Áco (later: Ácoma), but the Franciscan's report seemed to confirm the stories which Cabeza de Vaca had heard during his travels. Could it be that these seven cities of this 'Cíbola' were the mythical Seven Cities of Antilia, the golden 'Quivira' men had been seeking since Medieval times - whose wealth even surpassed that of Mexico's? Could it be ...?

Of course this raised Viceroy de Mendoza's interest, but even more so that of gobernadór of Nueva Galicia, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. His extremely well-funded, privately-financed expedition (said to be more than 110,000 ducats) set out from Culiacán in 1540 with 340 Spanish soldados and cavalry, 300 Indian allies – and 1,000 slaves, both native Americans and Africans. He followed the coast of the Gulf of California northward to the Sonora desert, and crossed the Río Gila north-eastwards to 'Cíbola.' There he was met by disappointment. 'Cíbola' was nothing like the great golden city Frey Marcos had described – Hawikah was just a simple pueblo, an earthen village of the Ashiwi (Zuñi) Indians [23]. The expedition's supply train now running dangerously low, Coronado 'conquered' this 'Cíbola' and availed himself of its foodstuffs. The other 'six' Zuñi pueblos were explored with the same result: no gold, no silver, no metals of any kind, and no precious stones save a few turquoises - pretty but neither valuable nor plentiful enough to be deserving of the appelation 'an advanced prosperous culture.' Frey Marcos was sent back to Mexico in disgrace. The single 'impressive' discovery was the Ashiwi women's efficient method of milling corn by grinding it with a small stone, a mano, against a shaped sandstone slab to which the Spaniards gave the Aztec name metate. De Coronado also sent out various smaller reconnaissance parties. Melchior Díaz was despatched south-westwards to the mouth of the Río Colorado, to meet Hernán de Alarcón who would be bringing up desperately-needed supplies for de Coronado by ship. Following up Ashiwi statements of a 'province' called Tusayan to the north-west, Pedro de Továr was sent thither accompanied by Ashiwi guides. Situated atop a series of mesas, de Továr encountered the grouping of Hopi pueblos; they, too, were 'conquered' but yielded none of the wealth so desired by the Spaniards. De Továr returned to Hawikah to report. Hearing tell of a 'great river' further west, de Coronado sent out another small party led by García López de Cárdenas, who found himself being the first European to see the magnificent gorge of the Grand Cañon. When a group of Indians from somewhere further east arrived in Hawikah and invited the Spaniards to visit their village of Cicuye (Pecos), Hernán de Alvarado was sent east. Along the way he received a friendly welcome at a pueblo atop a three-hundred foot high mesa, the Ácoma people's Áco, 'city in the sky,' and also enjoyed similar welcomes from the dozen or so pueblo villages around the Río Grande. These latter villages boasted somewhat larger adobes with more storeys, benefiting from a sturdier build. Here was a better place to spend the winter and de Coranado's main force moved to Tiguëz where the Spaniards were very heartily welcomed. At Cicuye, de Alvarado met a Moqui Indian (not a Pueblo - possibly a Pawnee), whom he called 'Turco,' who told him about 'Quivira,' a rich country in the northeast where herds of enormous cows covered the land and the nobles used numerous "pitchers, dishes and bowls made of gold." The Cicuye leaders warned de Alvarado that this Turco was lying about the gold .... and they were punished with torture for the impudence of suggesting there was no gold to be found in these lands.

Meanwhile, friction developed as the Spaniards had begun to behave in a swaggering, overbearing manner which soon aroused the ire of the Puaray Indians of Tiguëz. Hostilities broke out and the Spaniards spent several months investing the town until its surrender under 'peacable terms:' de Alvarado immediately executed over one hundred by burning at the stake to discourage similar acts against the Spaniards – the first 'bad blood' had now been spilled between the Pueblo Indians of the Río Grande and the Spaniards. Despite continuing claims by the Cicuye Indians that he was lying, Turco continued to regale de Coronado with his tales of the 'golden Quivira' out on the plains to the far north-east. Although becoming increasingly sceptical, de Coronado set off for this 'Quivira' in early-May, 1541, taking the insistent Turco as his guide. He traversed the Texan panhandle, and marched on further north. The 'enormous cows' – buffalo – were encountered in their thousands. However, Turco was found to have lied about the route – or at least Coronado thought he did - and was subsequently slapped in irons and later executed. Other guides led de Coronado further to 'Quivira,' until he reached a village [24]. But his disappointment was repeated: the 'Quivira' Indians were no rich people at all, the village consisted mostly of thatched huts, the primitive indigenous people living off the herds of beasts 'like Arabs,' and not even small amounts of gold could be found. Now thoroughly disgusted, de Coronado returned to Tiguëz where he spent another winter. In 1542 the would-be conquístador returned to Mexico along roughly the same route he had come – only 100 of his men came back with him [25]. Two Franciscan friars remained to convert the natives to Christianity; Frey Luis went to Cicuye whilst Frey Juan de Padilla (a soldier-turned-priest) decided to find Quivira for himself – both met swift martyrdom in their Christianising attempts once the Spaniards' main force had departed. Broken both in health and in spirit, in Mexico Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado faced an enquiry by the Audiencia as to the dismal failure of the entrada. But he was exonerated: de Coronado, and just about everybody else, had merely been following up on Frey Marcos de Niza's and Cabeza de Vaca's earlier misinformations.

After such a débacle, for nearly forty years the Zuñi, Hopi and the other Pueblo Indians along the upper Río Grande del Norte were more or less forgotten, as in 1548 large silver deposits were found around Zacatecas and Guanajuato north of Mexico city - both Spanish attention and greed were focussed there. However, once this had consolidated into an annual 'routine,' and the first revolt of the Chichimecas (1575) was dealt with, Christianising zeal returned. In 1581 Frey Agustín Rodríquez received permission to enter the Río Grande del Norte region as a missionary. Two other friars, Frey Francisco López and Frey Juan de Santa Maria, along with nine soldados and sixteen Mexican Indian followers accompanied him upriver to Tiguëz, but although the Indians of Puaray were cordial enough, they showed little interest in the strange religion that was supposed to be 'The Truth.' Disgruntled, Frey Juan decided to return downriver to Mexico – on his own – much against the advice of the others, who visited Cicuye pueblo to the east and Áco and Hawikah to the west. No converts were made at all, and the soldados returned to Mexico, leaving behind the two Franciscans to their seemingly-hopeless evangelizing mission. The Indians soon put them to death – either weary of the friars' religious zeal or simply to obtain the horses, goats and trade goods the missionaries had brought with them.

So if the Zuñi and Río Grande del Norte pueblos were not the 'Seven Cities of Cíbola' .... then where were they? The next Spanish venture into the Moqui lands, this time following the Río Grande del Norte northwards rather than the previous more westerly Sierra Madre and Sonora desert route, left Mexico late the following year, 1582, led by Frey Bernardino Beltrán and António de Espejo, with fourteen soldados, and was ostensibly to find out what had happened to the three friars. At a group of pueblos near the bend where the Río Grande del Norte turns from its southward to a more south-easterly course, a small settlement was established (it would later become El Paseo del Norte, and the El Paso), and here de Espejo began the first serious study of the Indians of these northern lands. De Espejo was a private citizen and so neither a military man seeking glory or wealth, nor a clergyman seeking converts for the Church (although he was a fugitive from justice in Mexico, having stood accused of murdering one of his ranch hands), and made some informed observations regarding the Indians' customs, diet and agricultural system. He also noted the kivas of each town, mistaking these religious centres for places of refuge from the winter cold and calling them estufas (ovens). The small entrada headed north upriver, along what would become the tortuous Jornada del Muerto, to the larger grouping of pueblos. Here he noted that each pueblo and its people was more or less a small 'independent' community; the concept of 'unity' or 'commonwealth' seemed quite alien to the Indians here – an important fact that would be of considerable use to the Spaniards later on. Heading west first to the Áco and Ashiwi pueblos, then following de Továr's earlier route on to the Hopi mesas, he allowed himself to be pursuaded of 'fabulous golden cities' to the west. But after a futile search in what is now central Arizona, de Espejo and his companions returned to the Río Grande. His report to the Audiencia was detailed and concise, noting the possibilities for building towns, soil tillage and trade, as well as the different cultural and language groups of the not-so-united Pueblo Indians' towns and regions. Such possibilities for 'conquest by settlement' rather than outright military activity greatly determined the Consejo de Indias' and the Audiencia's next effort to expand the Spanish empire in the New World. However, de Espejo perpetuated the popular myth of the 'prosperous cities' with his reports of a still undiscovered 'golden lake,' thereby adding the last touch of legend to the cartography of terra incognita in this part of Spain's empire in the New World – Richard Hakluyt's Novus Orbis chart of 1587 depicts both the 'golden' lake and Quivira. And this temptation of wealth brought about another, somewhat farcical, entrada.

There followed several years of considerable enthusiastic lobbying and legalistic wrangling by hopeful applicants – including de Espejo – eager to be granted the King's capitulación or contractual charter, to settle the Pueblo region. In July 1590 Gaspar Castañon de Sosa organised a group of 170 men and women and led them on an unauthorised journey of colonisation into Pueblo country, believing that he, as lieutenant-gouvernor of Nueva León, could exploit a loophole to settle lands that had previously been discovered. Their journey lasted several long months, eastward across the Río Grande del Norte, then northwards through present-day west-Texas, and not arriving at Cicuye pueblo (Pecos) until December – and having exhausted their supplies. The Pecos Indians refused to allow the sullen Spaniards into their town, whereupon the latter realised they would have to fight their way into the pueblo. After a few shots from the Spaniards' two brass cannon, the Indians yielded and allowed the Spaniards in. Despite Castañon de Sosa's assurances of honourable intentions, the sullen and timid Pecos Indians departed quietly during the second night while the Spaniards slept. Castañon de Sosa continued westward toward the Río Grande in January 1591, announcing at each of the twenty-one pueblos that henceforth he would govern the region on behalf of His Most Catholic Majesty, King Felipe II of Spain. At every pueblo the Spaniards erected large crosses with great solemnity and ceremony, and bestowed the name of a saint upon each community: San Cristobál, San Marcos, San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, etc. Proudly sending messages of his success to the Audiencia in Mexico City, Castañon de Sosa requested more settlers and soldados. Upon hearing that a party of Spaniards had advanced upriver and believing these to be his reinforcements, Castañon de Sosa hastened to Tiguëz to meet them .... only to find that the group of soldados had come to arrest him for entering the Pueblo country without official approval. He was taken back to Mexico for trial and his colony was disbanded.

Don Juan de Oñate was of fine pedigree. His father was gobernadór of Nueva Galicia, and his wife both a grand-daughter of Cortés and great grand-daughter of Moctezuma, the last Aztec emperor. The third richest man in Nueva España, he was well able to finance his extensive entrada of 130 families of settlers, several thousand farm animals and eighty-three heavy wagons to firmly establish Spanish presence along the upper Río Grande del Norte among the pueblos of the Pueblo Indians, in the region henceforth known as Nuevo México. After founding a new capital on the Río Grande called San Gabriel, de Oñate regarded his main task as 'done' .... and set off west to look for de Espejo's 'golden lake' or, failing that, gold mines of which the Indians spoke, and pearls on the Pacific coast even further west. He had barely started west when word reached him of a revolt by the unyielding Indians of Áco, the mesa-top pueblo; Juan de Zaldívar, nephew of de Oñate and second-in-command of the entrada-cum-conquísta, and a dozen of his men were killed when they attempted to take food from the unwilling Ácoma. This demanded revenge, of course – in a "war by blood and fire." De Oñate ordered his other nephew - Vicente, younger brother of Juan and no doubt only too willing to exact terrible retribution for the 'murder' of his brother – west to the treasonous pueblo ... where the Ácoma indeed paid dearly for their resistance. The Spaniards dragged a small cannon up the less-steep southern approach to Áco and let rip into the village. Nearly a thousand Ácoma were massacred and the remainding five hundred were herded across the desert to the pueblo of San Gabriel to stand 'trial' for insurrection and treason against His Most Catholic Majesty, King Felipe II of Spain (it was not yet known that Felipe II had in fact died and was succeeded by his son Felipe III). Punishment was brutal, even by the then standards of the Spaniards in the New World: all men over the age of twenty-five had their right foot cut off and were made slaves for twenty years, whilst women, girls and boys above the age of twelve were likewise condemned to two decades of servitude. Two Hopi who happened to be present during the uprising had their hands cut off, and were sent back to their villages as living warnings of what might happen to any who defy the authority and might of Spain.The mesa-top village of the Ácoma lay in smouldering ruins. The survivors were allowed to rebuild their village, but on the plain below the mesa; it would take a while for mesa-top Áco to be rebuilt and repopulauted. And to the Pueblo Indians of Nuova México the Spanish measures of bloodshed and destruction had set an unpalatable precedent for the century to come ...

With 'peace' re-established, de Oñate set out again on his quest for treasure, eastwards this time, in search of Quivira. Like de Coronado before him, he roamed the rain-swept prairies for several months, reaching as far as Kansas and found .... nothing of note. He returned to the Río Grande in 1601 to find his capital at San Gabriel deserted and his 'colony' crumbling. Enraged but unbowed, he set about re-establishing this remote outpost of Spain's empire. With that painfully achieved, his thoughts returned to the 'golden lake' and gold mines to the west. With a skeleton force of thirty soldados he set out west in October 1604, roamed the wilds of present-day Arizona, reached the Río Colorado, and followed it to its embouchure in the Gulf of California by January 1605. De Oñate's party then returned the way it had come, reaching San Gabriel three months later. Nothing of value was found - no gold, no lake, no pearls, not even turquoises. And unbeknownst to Juan de Oñate, decisions about his colony were being made elsewhere, thousands of miles away in Mexico City and El Escorial in Castile. The colony of New Mexico had yielded neither gold nor silver, that was clear, and its soil was not really fertile enough for extensive farming. De Oñate's enemies had managed to inveigle charges of "excesses" and "inhumane severity" toward the Ácoma against him. It was recommended that the colony be disbanded. But some religious enthusiasts pursuaded the King to allow continued Christianisation of the Pueblo Indians: de Oñate was to be recalled to Mexico - without arousing his suspicion - and replaced by another man. In 1609 Don Juan de Oñate left San Gabriel for Mexico. On the way his only son was killed in an Indian ambush. Trial and disgrace awaited this would-be conquístador, and a hefty fine as the price of failure. Like de Coronado, it would be many, many years – until 1624 – before a pardon was finally gained from the King, by which time he was more than seventy-five years old. His colony on the Río Grande endured, slowly and ailing, among a dejected and unconvinced Pueblo people [26].

But there was one more flutter of el estase de oro, although it was some 250 years before it came to pass.

By the 1820s the Spaniards had departed, their former lands of New Spain becoming the Republic of Mexico. And by 2 February, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo finalized the cessation of the Mexican War of 1846-47, with most of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and California being ceded by Mexico to the United States. Many American soldiers and militiamen settled in California. And here the 'golden kingdom' was finally found. James Marshall was building a sawmill for Captain John A. Sutter on the south fork of the American river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at Coloma when, on 24 January, 1848, he found some gold nuggets. Gold was then also found at Feather River by General John Bidwell, and more again at the Trinity River by Major Pearson B. Reading. Times had changed: as news of this gold strike got out, official newspaper print, such as those of the The Californian (15 March, 1848), the New Orleans Daily Picayune and the New York Herald, added an 'official' stamp of authenticity by predicting "... a Peruvian harvest of precious metals ...". Added to this were the reports by men who had seen with their own eyes that gold was to be found in the rivers - and not in some mysterious 'lost' kingdom. The stream of goldseekers came from far and wide, but getting to California was - like the Spanish arrival in the New World - not without difficulties.

For starters, the land between the Mississippi, the young state of Texas and the newly discovered goldfields in California were peopled by proud and independent Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, Shoshoni, Ute and Paiute Indians who did not take kindly to these streams of white men in their strange Conestoga wagons crossing their lands. Nor was it just the Indians' hostilities, for the harsh land itself proved difficult to overcome. The ill-fated 'Donner Party' was tempted to California not by the lure of gold and riches, but by the promise of lands where a peaceful and harmonious religious community could be established. Thanks to the misinforming Emigrants' Guide to California and Oregon guidebook, the subsequent slow progress forced them to an unplanned wintering in the Sierra Nevada uplands. They became a cropper when famine ensued, and eventually several of the survivors were forced to resort to the dehumanising nightmare of cannibalism. For the most adventurous, there was the genuinely arduous trek across the barrancos of Mexico's wild Sierra Madre Occidentale, through the lands of the hostile Yaqui, Nednhi-Apache and Yuma as well as the ever-present ladrones, and then through the searing heat of the Sonora, Gila and Mojave deserts. And finally there was the long maritime haul around Cape Horn in the extreme south of the South American continent. But still the 'Argonauts' [27] came in their thousands, peaking in 1850 when news of the hardships reached the East Coast, dwindling the stream to only the hardiest of goldseekers heading West 'seeking for El Dorado.'

The myth of the Gilded King has faded, but El Dorados of a different sort have been found. For modern prospectors there were the discoveries of platinum, silver and coal deposits in Colombia; gold, bauxite and manganese in the Guianas; silver and copper in southern Arizona and New Mexico; and the 'black gold' of the 20th Century – oil – was found to be plentiful around Lake Maracaibo and in the eastern regions of Venezuela. For anthropologists there were the discoveries, between 1948 and 1950, of the Maquiritares and Guaharigos tribes of the Sierra Paríma – and several more scarcely-known 'lost' tribes have since been discovered throughout the Amazonian basin following mass-deforestation to pursue the latest – though environmentally unfriendly – 'treasure' of cattle husbandry. For film-makers especially, fuelled by the fantasy storylines beloved of Hollywood and lapped up by its worldwide audiences, 'lost civilisations' in the vast interiors of the great continents provide good material.

And for historians, two farm-workers found an interesting artifact in a cave near Bogotá in 1969: a solid gold model, in the unmistakable flat, two-dimensional style of the Muisca artisans, of a balsa raft upon which sits a gilded king and several priest-like rowers ....

The End

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Footnotes

17. The seamen and inhabitants of the port of Vlissingen (Flushing) in Zeeland became known to Spaniards and Portuguese in the New World as pichelingues, pitselingos, etc. - the best they could pronounce Vlissingen. [return to text]
18. Present-day Tampa Bay. [return to text]
19. Central Coahuila is rich in minerals, as Cabeza de Vaca discovered. His account mentions, amongst others, 'margaxita' - iron-pyrites, known also as "fool's gold" for its resemblance to gold. Not being a geologist, Cabeza de Vaca may have, wrongly, over-embellished his narrative of this 'mountain of gold.' [return to text]
20. In Spanish times, the great river was officially known as the Río Bravo del Norte, but to the Spaniards who ventured into and then settled in the region the Indian name for the 'Great River' became, more or less by default, the Río Grande. [return to text]
21. Although Cabeza de Vaca later went on to become gobernadór of Paraguay, both his account, La Relación, and his appeal for benevolent regard for the American Indians were not received well. He died a pauper in Spain. Erstwhile conquístador-turned-Dominican Frey Bartolomé de Las Casas argued both vociferously and vituperatively in favour of more humane treatment for the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and helped bring about the 'New Laws' of 1543. These reviewed the status of encomienda Indians and outlawed slave-raiding. It took a while for these 'New Laws' to be correctly interpreted by both the outraged Spanish settlers and the mendicant Orders in the New World, but they eventually, though reluctantly, accepted ... so that Black Africans replaced American Indians as the victims of 'the necessity of Empire.' [return to text]
22. 'of Nice' (now in southern France, but then still Italian-speaking). The Franciscan had earlier accompanied Francisco Pizarro in his conquest of Peru, and Sebastián de Benalcásar in his advance on Quito. [return to text]
23. Some have speculated that the straw that was mixed with mud in the manufacture of adobe walls was responsible for the 'cities of gold' legend. When viewed from a distance, it can glitter in the sunlight and appear like gold. Furthermore, the multi-storied buildings suggested an 'advanced culture' [advanced = prosperous]. Actually, there were only six Ashiwi villages (today, five lie in ruins, the sixth - Zuñi - is still inhabited). Perhaps 'six' was close enough to 'seven' for the gold-hungry Spaniards to warrant these villages being the legendary 'seven' cities of Cíbola. [return to text]
24. near present-day Lindsborg, Kansas. The 'Quivira' Indians were later known as Wichita. [return to text]
25. An account of Coronado's entrada is provided by Pedro de Castañeda, only published several decades later. [return to text]
26. In 1610 a new capital was founded called Santa Fé. In 1680 most of these Pueblo peoples would rise up against Spanish bureaucratic mismanagement and clerical misrule. They successfully drove out the Spaniards, who would not return until 1692 - the longest successful revolt against the Spaniards anywhere in Spain's vast overseas empire. [return to text]
27. The 1848 trickle of goldseekers became a wave the following year, earning those who arrived in California then the soubriquet 'the Forty-niners.' [return to text]

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Glossary & Bibliography