Coronado's Expedition to the American Southwest

The Ancestral Wichita people lived in the eastern Great Plains from the Red River in Arkansas north to Nebraska for at least two thousand years.

Early Wichita people were hunters and gatherers who gradually adopted agriculture.

Farming villages are developed about 900 CE on terraces above the Washita and South Canadian Rivers in present-day Oklahoma.

The women of these tenth-century communities cultivate varieties of maize, beans, and squash (known as the Three Sisters), marsh elder (Iva annua), and tobacco, which is important for religious purposes.

The men hunt deer, rabbits, turkey, and, primarily, bison, and catch fish and harvest mussels from the rivers.

These villagers live in rectangular, thatched-roof houses.

Archaeologists describe the Washita River Phase of Wichita occupation from 1250 to 1450, when local populations grewand villages of up to twenty houses were spaced every two or so miles along the rivers. These farmers may have had contact with the Panhandle culture villages in the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, farming villages along the Canadian River. The Panhandle villagers showed signs of adopting cultural characteristics of the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande Valley, with whom they interacted. In the late fifteenth century, most of these Washita River villages were abandoned for reasons that are not known today.

Numerous archaeological sites in central Kansas near the Great Bend of the Arkansas River share common traits and are collectively known as the "Great Bend aspect."

Radiocarbon dates from these sites range from CE 1450 to 1700.

Great Bend aspect sites are generally accepted as ancestral to the Wichita peoples described by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and other early European explorers.

The discovery of limited quantities of European artifacts, such as chain mail and iron axe heads at several Great Bend sites, suggests contact of these people with early Spanish explorers.

Great Bend aspect peoples' subsistence economy includes agriculture, hunting, gathering, and fishing.

Villages are located on the upper terraces of rivers, and crops appear to have been grown on the fertile floodplains below.

Primary crops are maize, beans, squash, and sunflowers, cultivated for their seeds.

Gathered foods included walnut and hickory nuts, and the fruits of plum, hackberry, and grape.

Remains of animal bones in Great Aspect sites include bison, elk, deer, pronghorn, and dog, one of the few domesticated animals in the pre-Contact Plains.

Several village sites contain the remains of unusual structures called "council circles," located at the center of settlements.

Archaeological excavations suggest they consist of a central patio surrounded by four semi-subterranean structures.

The function of the council circles is unclear.

Archaeologist Waldo Wedel suggested in 1967 that they may be ceremonial structures, possibly associated with solstice observations.

Recent analysis suggests that many non-local artifacts occur exclusively or primarily within council circles, implying the structures were occupied by political and/or ritual leaders of the Great Bend aspect peoples.

Other archaeologists will leave open the possibility that the council circle earthworks served a defensive role.

One of these sites is the city Etzanoa, located in present-day Arkansas City, Kansas, near the Arkansas River, that flourishes between 1450 and 1700.

Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan friar who, after serving his order zealously in Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, had been chosen to explore the country north of Sonora, its wealth pictured in the hearsay stories of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, an early Spanish explorer of the New World.

Preceded by Estevanico, the Moorish companion of Cabeza de Vaca in his wanderings and the Black Mexican of Zuni traditions, Fray Marcos had left Culiacán in March 1539, crossed southeastern Arizona, penetrated to the Zuni or the Seven Cities of Cibola, and in September returned to Culiacán.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado is the conqueror and Governor of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia (New Galicia, a province of New Spain located northwest of Mexico and comprising the contemporary Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Nayarit).

His planned expedition in search of the legendary Seven Golden Cities of Cibola and the fabled riches of Gran Quivira is better organized than that led previously by de Niza.

Coronado sets out from Compostela in February 23, 1540 at the head of a large expedition composed of 335 Spaniards, 1300 natives, four Franciscan monks (the most notable of whom are Juan de Padilla and de Niza, newly appointed as provincial superior of the Franciscan order in the New World), and several enslaved people, both natives and Africans.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expeditionary force, accompanied by Franciscan friars Marcos de Niza and Juan de Padilla, had followed the Sinaloan coast northward, keeping the Sea of Cortez to their left until they reached the northernmost Spanish settlement, San Miguel de Culiacán, about March 28, 1540.

After resting the expedition, Coronado follows the inland trail on April 22, 1540.

After crossing and passing the mountains in order to get into the level country, Coronado finds that Cíbola, as one of the legendary "Seven Cities of Gold,” is not the great golden city that Marcos had described, but merely a complex of simple pueblos constructed by the Zuni.

The soldiers consider killing Marcos for his mendacity, but Coronado intervenes and sends him back to Mexico in disgrace.

Traversing Arizona's Mogollón Rim, he continues from the headwaters of the Little Colorado until he comes to the Zuni River, following it until he finds the Zuni habitations.

The members of the expedition are almost starving and demand entrance into the village of Hawikuh, one of the largest of the Zuni pueblos, constructed around 1400.

The natives refuse, denying the expedition entrance to the village or trade.

Coronado and his frustrated soldiers enter Hawikuh on Coronado's demands, when the Spanish request intelligence and resources.

The ensuing skirmish constitutes the extent of what can be called the Spanish "Conquest of Cíbola."

Coronado is injured during the battle and has to stay with the Zuni while healing.

From the knowledge gathered during this time he sends out several more scouting expeditions, but finds neither precious metals nor jewels in any of the Zuni villages.

The Pueblo peoples encountered in 1540 by Coronado’s expedition include, in addition to the Zuni of western New Mexico, ...

...the Hopi of northeastern Arizona.

The Hopi, according to their legends, are a gathering of many separate tribes from distant areas, now culturally one people.

Since the Athabascan migrations from Canada (forming the modern Navajo and Apache nations) that ended as late as the fifteenth century, the Hopi have been forced into defensible and dense villages on several mesas, in contrast to the Navajo who prefer to live small family groups in widely distributed farmsteads.

Thus, the Hopi have been town dwellers for many centuries.

The Hopi village of Old Oraibi, located on Third Mesa and founded about the year 1100, is today the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United States.

Spanish contacts with Oraibi, the largest, and most important village of the Hopi, begin in 1540, when Coronado’s expedition heads to the Hopi villages, with the expectation that this region might contain the wealthy Cíbola.

The Spanish, upon arrival, are denied entrance to the first village they encounter, and once again resort to using force to enter.

Afterwards the remaining villages do not dare fight the Spanish.

The Hopi region is just as poor materially as the Zuni, but the Spanish do discover that that a large river (the Colorado) lies to the west.

The Rio Grande Pueblos, Coronado’s next stop, are divided, linguistically, among four groups.

The Hopi and Tanoan Pueblos of the Rio Grande (three groups: Tewa, Tiwa, and Jemez) speak Aztecan-Tanoan languages; ...

...the languages of the Zuni and of the Keresan-speaking Pueblos of New Mexico, from Acoma eastward to the Rio Grande, have not been clearly related to any existing linguistic family. (U.S. linguist Joseph Greenberg, however, grouped the Keres group with the Siouan family to form a postulated Keresiouan macro-group).

The Pueblo people of 1540 inhabit perhaps ninety independent villages along the Rio Grande in the region of present northern New Mexico and northeast Arizona.

Village-dwelling cultivators, they construct multistory apartment houses focused around subterranean religious rooms (kivas).

Political power is vested in religious organizations, and each member of Pueblo society participates in the intense ceremonial cycle that fills each year.

Warrior societies exist in each village, but they are primarily oriented toward defensive actions.

Spaniards led by Coronado make contact with the Acoma people, a Pueblo people who speak a Western Keresan language.

Since at least 1100, they have lived atop their sandstone mesa in three-storied homes made of flat stones plastered with adobe and supported with wooden beams.

Their irrigated fields of maize, beans, and squash are located below the mesa approximately twelve miles (nineteen kilometers) away at Acomita.

Acoman tradition speaks of ancestors pushing their way up from the worlds below to the present world.

The Acoma credit their mother-creator, Latiku, with establishing their religious and social order, organized into matrilineal clans with animal and plant names.

The male head of the Antelope clan is traditionally regarded as the father of the kachinas (spirits who bring rain for the crops); he is also the village religious and political head.

Hernando de Alarcón had set sail on May 9, 1540, concurrent with Coronado’s expedition, with orders from the Spanish Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to wait at a certain point on the coast the arrival of an expedition by land under the command of Coronado.

The meeting with Coronado had not been effected, though Alarcón had reached the appointed place and left letters, which are soon afterwards found by Melchior Diaz, another explorer.

Alarcón sails to the head of the Gulf of California and completes the explorations begun by the Spanish explorer Francisco de Ulloa the preceding year.

During this voyage, Alarcón proves to his satisfaction that no open-water passage exists between the Gulf of California and the South Sea.

Subsequently, on September 26, he enters the Colorado River, which he names the Buena Guia.

He is the first European to ascend the river for a distance considerable enough to make important observations.

On a second voyage, he probably proceeds past the present site of Yuma, Arizona.

A map drawn by one of Alarcón's pilots is the earliest accurately detailed representation of the Gulf of California and the lower course of the Colorado River.

Alarcón is almost unique among the conquistadores in that he treats the natives he meets with humanely, as opposed to behavior that is otherwise the norm.

Bernard de Voto, in his 1953 Westward the Course of Empire, observes: "The Indians had an experience they were never to repeat: they were sorry to see these white men leave."

Alarcón writes of his contact with the Yuma-speaking natives along the Colorado.

The information he compiles consisted of their practices in warfare, religion, curing, and even sexual customs.