by Tony Horwitz
God knows that I wish I had better news to write Your Lordship, but I must give you the truth.
—Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, to the
viceroy of New Spain, 1540
IN 1893, DURING the Columbian quadricentennial, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that America’s steady push west had forged the country’s character. “Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization,” he declared of the pioneer pass through the Appalachians. “Winning a wilderness,” over and over again, tore settlers from their European roots and created “a new product that is American.”
Turner’s frontier thesis isn’t as popular today as it was in the heyday of American expansion. But his geographic framing of the national story endures. The narrative of America flows east to west: Atlantic, Appalachians, Plains, Rockies, Pacific. Pilgrims, Pathfinders, Pioneers. Go West, Young Man. Get Your Kicks on Route 66. Which I’d done, as a Kerouac-addled teenager, hitchhiking from Maryland to California. To make the same trip in reverse would have been unthinkable, like watching a film from finish to start.
So it felt strange, three decades later, to find myself tracing a very different path, one that was truer to the story of the continent’s opening. Turner’s gateway to the “Great West” was the Cumberland Gap; mine would be the arid, dust-blown borderland between present-day Arizona and Mexico.
In 1540, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado journeyed this way at the head of the only European army ever to invade the U.S. continent by land. The stock image of Spanish conquest is a glittering pageant of armored knights, and Coronado and his officers fit this stereotype. Each set off from Mexico with multiple horses, breastplates, chain mail, swords, crossbows, and harquebuses. Coronado wore a plumed helmet and gilded armor.
But the mass of his army was less resplendent. Fray Marcos de Niza’s report on Cibola had sparked a frenzy in Mexico, arousing fears that the colony would lose precious manpower in the rush to Tierra Nueva. To allay these concerns, the viceroy held a hearing at which prominent citizens testified about the character of those joining Coronado. Witness after witness declared the expedition a blessing to Mexico, because most of the emigrants were “single and licentious” men without employment or prospects at home.
This rough legion was also raggedly equipped. According to the expedition’s muster roll, the great majority of Spanish soldiers brought only a single mount and “native arms and armor,” such as quilted cotton tunics, clubs, and bows and arrows. Nor were these Spaniards the true body of the army. Accompanying them were thirteen hundred indios amigos, Indians in Mexico who had submitted to Spanish rule and now served as allied warriors. They outnumbered the European soldiers by almost four to one.
Coronado, then, led a force that was more New World than Old: mostly Indians or Indian-equipped Spaniards, commanded by a small corps of metal-clad caballeros. This ersatz army also included civilians—black slaves and native servants, soldiers’ wives, five friars (Marcos among them), even two painters—as well as 550 horses and innumerable livestock. In all, some two thousand people and approximately as many animals trod north across the arid frontier. Their passage must have created a mushroom cloud of dust.
The man chosen by the viceroy to lead this entrada, or journey to the interior, was only twenty-eight. Four years before, Coronado had wed the twelve-year-old daughter of a former royal treasurer of Mexico; her considerable dowry helped finance the expedition. Coronado’s other qualifications for the job weren’t as obvious. He had little experience in the field, apart from suppressing a miners’ rebellion in Mexico by drawing and quartering the alleged ringleaders. For the most part, he’d served as a colonial administrator, a functionary who faithfully performed his superiors’ bidding and signed his letters to the viceroy “Your Majesty’s humble vassal and servant, who kisses your royal feet and hands.”
Even as the expedition set off from the northernmost Spanish settlement in Mexico, banners flying, some of Coronado’s men wondered if this callow crony of the viceroy’s possessed the fire of a true conquistador. Coronado, one horseman later wrote, was leaving behind “estates and a pretty wife, a noble and excellent lady.” These circumstances, he added, “were not the least causes of what was to happen.”
I CAUGHT UP with Coronado several hundred miles into his march, in the Mexican state of Sonora. Compared to Santo Domingo, Sonora’s capital city, Hermosillo, seemed orderly and tame: a bland commercial and administrative center for the surrounding ranchland. At a concrete tower called the Edificio Sonora, I found the state tourism office and asked a receptionist whether anyone could advise me on tracking Coronado.
“Sí,” she replied. “El Nazi.”
This turned out to be a 350-pound man whose German godfather had christened him Adolfo; hence his nickname. Educated at a Catholic school in Vermont, Adolfo spoke fluent English and knew all about Coronado. Unfortunately, he said few other Mexicans cared about the conquistador. “We have Cortés to hate—he did much more damage in Mexico. Coronado is your sad story, not ours.”
In Adolfo’s view, Coronado performed a small service to Mexico by conquering lands north of today’s border that would eventually earn the country a few pesos. As part of the 1848 treaty ending the Mexican-American War, the United States paid $15 million for the vast territory it annexed, and later added $10 million for another strip of borderland. “If we hadn’t sold it, the Americans would have taken that, too,” Adolfo said.
El Nazi sent me off with a satchel of tourist literature and a road map to guide me north with Coronado. As soon as I passed the rodeo at the edge of the city, the landscape turned arid and empty. Hermosillo lies near the southern fringe of the Sonoran Desert, which stretches hundreds of miles across northern Mexico and southern Arizona. Apart from bunches of brilliant chiles colorados draped on roadside stalls, the color scheme was a wash of khaki and olive. Low, gnarly creosote shrubs and spiny mesquite trees dotted the parched landscape, interspersed with organ pipe cactus and the towering saguaro, its branches upraised as if in prayer. Saguaros that hadn’t sprouted limbs stood like giant cucumbers on the dry brown plain.
By the time Coronado’s expedition had reached this point, having marched for two months and several hundred miles, the army was already struggling. Overburdened and inexperienced men quickly shed their gear. The army’s camp master died after being shot in the eye by an arrow; several Indians were hanged in reprisal. Horses collapsed from exhaustion and sheep lost their hooves on the rough terrain. Hungry, overworked slaves ran away at the earliest chance.
Worst of all, scouts reported that the territory ahead remained rugged and barren, despite Fray Marcos’s promise of a gentle and fertile land. “Everything the friar had said was found to be the opposite,” Coronado sourly wrote the viceroy. Fears spread through the dispirited army that other promises the friar had made would turn out to be empty as well.
Fifty or so miles northeast of today’s Hermosillo, Coronado entered the valley of Los Corazones, the Hearts, so named because Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow wanderers were given six hundred deer hearts there by Indians. Corazones is believed to correspond to modern-day Ures, a sun-struck town centered on a white plaster church and shady plaza. I parked beside a horse hitched to a post; a vaquero in jeans and boots snoozed on a bench nearby. Inside the church I met a priest named Father Coronado, and asked what he knew about the conquistador who shared his name. He looked at me blankly and said, “Nada. He is not a relative of mine.”
The only echo of the sixteenth-century Spanish passage was a market selling tuna, the fruit of the prickly pear, which Cabeza de Vaca virtually lived on and Coronado’s hungry men often ate as well. Yellow-green on the outside, the fruit had a seedy, whitish, and faintly sweet pulp, a bit like honeydew melon. However, as its name suggests, the prickly pear has tiny thorns. My fingers stung for an hour after handling it, as did my throat from a lunch of well-spiced chili con carne.
&nb
sp; For miles, the road north was almost empty, except for policemen made of plywood, standing guard before somnolent towns. By the time I reached Sonora’s northern edge, a long day’s drive from Hermosillo, the only thing keeping me awake was chili reflux and a fiery radio show from north of the border: Gun Talk, which peppered its chat about high-powered weapons with this bracing refrain: “The only person who can protect you is you.”
Self-defense of a different sort was on vivid display at the border town of Naco. On the Mexican side, the main street ran past a car graveyard selling “Yunque Americano” and pharmacies peddling cut-price drugs before reaching the U.S. line. No stream or ridge or other natural feature divided Mexico from the United States, only a striking man-made boundary: a fifteen-foot-high wall of corrugated metal topped with surveillance cameras and stadium lights. The road doglegged through a U.S. border post and then returned me to the wide main street I’d left in Mexico, twenty yards behind. Except that a battered sign now told me I was in Naco, Arizona, elevation 4,615 feet. The sign didn’t mention population and none was in evidence, apart from a dog sleeping in front of a row of abandoned storefronts.
The one open business was a mission-style bar. Inside, men chatted in Spanish while playing pool beneath a ceiling fan: a mirror image of a bar I’d just visited on the Mexican side. While sipping beer, I learned that the town’s name was a combination of the last two letters of “ArizoNA” and “MexiCO.” The Arizona side had eight hundred residents, compared with eight thousand on the Mexican side, many of them engaged in the business of illegal border crossing. Coyotes, or people smugglers, cut doors in the border wall, tunneled under it, or climbed through the barbed-wire fence that extended from either side of the metal barrier.
On the Arizona side, the wide, treeless plain hummed with motion sensors, drone aircraft, and cameras mounted on mobile cherry pickers. Each day after dark, U.S. Border Patrol agents wearing night vision goggles scooped up hundreds of illegal entrants and transported them back to the Mexican side. Most of those caught simply tried again the next day.
“It’s loco,” said the bar’s owner, Leonel Urcadez, a second-generation Mexican-American. He was the first person I’d met since El Nazi who had heard of Coronado. Leonel led me outside and pointed along the border wall to an old stone obelisk that marked the boundary established after the Mexican-American War. In a roundabout way, Coronado’s march had set in motion the long, cross-border drama that was still playing itself out around Naco.
“The Spanish are invading again, eh?” Leonel said. “Back in Coronado’s day, they came for gold. Now it’s jobs—same thing, really. Indians didn’t want the Spanish here. Most Americans today don’t want them, either. History, all over again.”
THE ATMOSPHERE HADN’T always been so tense. In 1941, during the four hundredth anniversary of Coronado’s expedition, Congress approved the creation of a park that would straddle the border and commemorate links between the two countries. But World War II and other obstacles intervened, including Mexico’s ambivalence about the park. The country had won its independence after a bloody struggle with Spain and come to embrace its Indian rather than its European heritage. So Congress went ahead without Mexico and located the Coronado National Memorial just on the U.S. side of the border.
The park site, on a mountainous slope west of Naco, overlooked the San Pedro River and the broad plain surrounding it. There were no cars but mine on the road winding up to the park, except for Border Patrol vehicles. A small visitors center was also vacant. “This is not a typical park,” explained Thane Weigand, the site’s lean, brush-cut chief ranger. On average, only about twenty tourists a day stopped at the visitors center. Each night, almost twenty times that number crept across the park’s three-mile border with Mexico, drawn by the cover of the park’s brushy slopes. “A lot are repeat visitors,” Thane said.
This annual influx of roughly 120,000 illegals had radically altered the park’s mission. In earlier decades, the park hosted a “Borderlands Festival” that brought together students and artists from the United States and Mexico. But as the border tightened in the late 1980s, the festival ended. Only two rangers still performed traditional park functions. The five others did law enforcement, not only rounding up migrants but also chasing drug smugglers, and sometimes exchanging gunfire with them. A park that began as a monument to cross-border amity had become its opposite: a symbol of tension between the two countries.
“I used to talk about the history and nature here,” Thane said. “Now all I know about is UDAs and OTMs.” “UDA” stood for “undocumented alien,” “OTM” for “other than Mexican.”
Thane gave me a park map and recommended I hike to a mountain lookout called Coronado Peak. Midway along the short, steep foot trail, I stopped to catch my breath: the altitude approached seven thousand feet. A tiny roadrunner skittered past me, mocking my pace. Thorny shrubs and stunted trees clung to the dry rocky soil. Finally reaching the top, I was rewarded with a panorama that stretched south for roughly a hundred miles, to the Sierra Madres in Mexico.
Three thousand feet below me, the San Pedro trickled along the valley floor, nourishing a thin green line of foliage across the brown expanse. According to my map, I was scanning thirty miles or so of the river’s course as it ribboned north from Mexico and disappeared behind mountains on the Arizona side. The Coronado expedition would have spent two days crawling across my sight line: a time and distance that represented less than one percent of its eventual journey.
The previous day, while I was speeding across the Sonoran Desert, the landscape had struck me as stark but unthreatening, at least in autumn, when the temperature topped out at 90 degrees. Now, reading a park booklet, I grasped just how punishing the desert can be. In summer, when Coronado and his men crossed, the heat often exceeds 120 degrees. Rain is scarce: sometimes none falls for two years. The best-adapted Sonoran creature, the kangaroo rat, survives without drinking water at all. Its organs extract fluid from plants and seeds, even from the rat’s own feces.
Other desert fauna include tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, a poisonous giant centipede, and the Gila monster, which latches onto prey with small teeth and “grinds its jaws so that the venom, mixed with saliva, can enter the wound.” Even the picturesque flora was hazardous. The cute, furry-looking teddy-bear cholla, which I’d stopped several times to photograph, has spines that “easily impale clothing or flesh.”
I’d read little about these hazards in the Spanish accounts. Typical was Coronado’s terse observation about his passage across Sonora: “The route is rough and long.” But hunger was a constant theme. Fray Marcos had led the Spanish to believe that the route to Cibola ran close to the sea, meaning the army could be reprovisioned by ships from Mexico. Instead, on reaching today’s United States, Coronado realized he was heading deeper inland. Indians said the sea was several weeks’ march in the opposite direction.
On learning this, Coronado confided to the viceroy, “We all experienced great distress and confusion.” Yet the expedition pressed on, into a rugged despoblado, an uninhabited wilderness, devoid of food or fodder. Conquistadors, whatever their many faults, were a tough and daring bunch of hombres.
CORONADO’S ROUTE NORTH of today’s border crossed the arid valleys and rugged mountains of southeast Arizona. Fray Marcos had promised Coronado that he could feed his men and horses at an Indian stronghold called Chichilticale. But when the Spanish arrived, they found an abandoned clay fortress and a few scattered Indian camps. This desolate sight, wrote one of the Spaniards, “grieved everyone.”
Even traversed by car, almost five centuries later, southeast Arizona had a scale and vacancy that felt unsettling, at least to an easterner. I spent three days exploring small roads on Coronado’s trail through Arizona without leaving Cochise County, a jurisdiction larger than Connecticut. Heading off one morning at sunrise, I reckoned I could breakfast at a crossroads marked on my road map. Two hours later I came to my intended rest stop: a cattle guard, a
n abandoned shop named Frontier Relics, a fence with sun-blanched cow skulls stuck on each post, and a “Beware of Dog” sign. No dog, or other life of any kind, was in sight. After another hour without passing so much as a car, I started scanning the roadside scrub for a prickly pear to suck on.
The Spanish described Chichilticale as a once powerful bastion set in a mountain pass between hot desert and high alpine terrain. Though the army’s horses were “worn out,” Coronado wrote, he rested for only two days: food was too short for the Spanish to linger longer. So they plunged ahead, into the worst terrain they’d yet encountered, a mountainous despoblado where horses dropped dead from hunger and exhaustion, as did some of the indios amigos. A Spaniard and two Moors died after ravenously devouring a poisonous plant.
Then, after two weeks in this wilderness, the Spanish reached a gentler region of streams and trees. For the first time, they encountered Indians from the seven cities of Cibola, who had come “to tell us we were welcome.” Coronado gave them a cross and rosary beads, and told them they should not be afraid, “since I was coming in His Majesty’s name only to protect and help them.”
Neither side was sincere. The next night, Coronado’s advance guard found Indians waiting in ambush. Though the warriors quickly retreated, they appeared well-disciplined, sounding trumpets to assemble their force and sending up “smoke clouds, which were answered from a distance with as much coordination as we would have known how to do ourselves,” Coronado wrote.
His own men were anything but battle ready. During the foiled ambush, one Spaniard wrote, inexperienced soldiers “became so flustered that there were some who put their saddles on backwards.” But Coronado had no choice other than to advance quickly toward Cibola. “With such a shortage of food,” he wrote, “I was worried that if we had to delay one more day, we would all be dead of hunger.” After almost three months of hard travel from the last Spanish outpost in Mexico, Coronado’s force wasn’t so much a conquering army as a desperate mob of starving men and animals.
