by Tony Horwitz
AFTER LEAVING HIS army behind in Texas, Coronado and his horsemen rode through the summer of 1541, across hundreds of miles of desolate plain. They lived like Indians, subsisting solely on buffalo they killed and cooked on fires of buffalo dung. On many days, the Spanish went without water. Then, in what is now central Kansas, the horsemen halted. “It pleased Our Lord,” Coronado wrote the viceroy, “that at the end of having traveled seventy-seven days through those empty lands, I reached the province they call Quivira.”
This relief, however, instantly gave way to disenchantment. In the next line of his letter, Coronado began listing “the things of great magnificence” he’d been told of by El Turco and contrasted this to what he actually found. Rather than tall stone buildings, even grander than the pueblos, Coronado saw only round thatch huts. The inhabitants wore buffalo hides and ate raw meat; no sign of cotton or golden platters. The only metal they possessed was a single piece of copper hanging from a chief’s neck.
“The people are as uncivilized as all those I have seen and passed until now,” Coronado wrote. In short, the golden land of Quivira was even more of a mirage than the seven glittering cities the Spanish had expected to find at Cibola the summer before.
Coronado stayed in Quivira for almost a month, while combing the countryside for evidence of the rich and populous society he’d been promised. He found “nothing but villages” and homes of “skins and sticks.” Nor did his scouts hear news of settled communities anywhere in the region, except those in Quivira, “which are a very insignificant thing.”
Insignificant, perhaps, in terms of mineral wealth or prosperous natives from whom to extract tribute. But Quivira was rich in other ways. “The land itself,” Coronado observed, was “fat and black and well-watered” by streams and springs. The natives raised corn; walnuts, plums, grapes, and mulberries grew wild. “This country presents a very fine appearance,” wrote one horseman. “I have not seen better in all our Spain nor Italy nor a part of France.” He thought the region very well suited to both crops and livestock.
But Coronado hadn’t come this far to till the soil or husband cows. While others praised Quivira, his own dispatch to the viceroy was sour and self-pitying throughout. “I have suffered. . . . The report given me was false. . . . I have done everything I possibly could.”
The conquistador had gambled his fortune, and that of his patron, on hopes of finding fame and riches in Tierra Nueva. Instead, after almost two years of hard travel since leaving his wife and home in Mexico, he found himself in the middle of a vast continent, cut off from his army, with winter approaching. And for the second time on his journey, he’d been duped; first by the fanciful Fray Marcos and now by a crafty Indian guide.
One night, Coronado ordered El Turco taken from the tent where the Spanish held him prisoner. Under interrogation, the Indian finally confessed to having deceived the Spanish. He’d spun golden lies about Quivira in hopes of going home and rejoining his wife. Also, his pueblo masters had told him to misdirect the Spanish through the Plains, so the army would perish from hunger or thirst, or return so weakened that Indians could easily “take revenge for what had been done to them.”
Instead, it was the Spanish who took revenge—on El Turco. “Without waiting for further talk, or counter-arguments,” a soldier “put a cord around the Indian’s neck from behind and tightened it with a stick. That strangled him, and then they buried him next to the tent.”
Coronado raised a cross to mark the farthest spot that his expedition had reached in Tierra Nueva. Then, provisioned with dried corn, and led by fresh Indian guides, the conquistador and his thirty horsemen turned and rode west along buffalo paths, back to the land of the “flat-roofed houses.”
BLOATED WITH BUFFALO meat, and bleary from too much driving, I barely registered the scenery as I drove east from Elkhart, piloting from silo to silo, the great pueblos of grain marking every town. The farther I went into Kansas, the more incredible it seemed that Coronado had kept going—seventy-seven days on the Plains!—through a landscape that offered so little relief, not only to Spanish stomachs but also to their spirits.
At earlier points in my trip, crossing the Sonoran Desert and mesa land and the Llano Estacado, I’d often felt awed by the Spaniards’ resilience. Hunger, heat, harsh winters, a steady diet of buffalo meat—none of this deterred them from their mission. But as my odometer ticked over the three-thousand-mile mark since Hermosillo, I started to wonder if the Spaniards weren’t so much dogged as possessed. Greed and desperation I could grasp, up to a point. But to plunge this deep into a sea of grass, on a quest so doubtful, seemed evidence of a tenacity that bordered on derangement.
From almost the start of Coronado’s long journey to Quivira, he had ample reason to doubt El Turco, just as he’d had cause to doubt Fray Marcos. El Turco’s pueblo masters, a second Quiviran guide on the expedition, the nomads Coronado met in the Plains—all of them contradicted El Turco’s tales of great riches far in the interior. Yet still the Spanish rode on, and on, and on.
This willfulness spoke to a late-medieval imagination that I couldn’t wrap my modern mind around. Seven Cities of Gold, the Isle of the Amazons, El Dorado—these weren’t wild fantasies to the Spanish, they were vivid realities, just waiting to be found. Europeans often wrote disdainfully of Indian “superstition”—while marching through jungles and mountains in pursuit of their own potent myths. Natives clearly sensed the power that legend had over Spaniards. Despite the linguistic and cultural divide between them, El Turco immediately surmised that he could inflame these gullible strangers with visions of golden platters and trees hung with golden bells.
By the time I reached Lyons, Kansas (“Land of Quivira,” according to its welcome sign), my own dream was a tall cold beer. The town announced itself with a sixty-foot marble cross honoring Juan Padilla, a friar who accompanied Coronado to Quivira and returned there a year later to bring Christianity to the natives. He was promptly killed, apparently by Indians who coveted his vestments and other goods. This made Father Padilla, in the eyes of his admirers, the first Christian martyr in the future United States.
Lyons also had an excellent museum with displays on the Spanish and on the Indians of Quivira. They’re believed to have been ancestors of the Wichita, who lived in conical pole-and-grass homes like those described by Coronado. I lingered until closing and asked the museum’s director whether there was anything else to see around Lyons related to the conquistador.
“Not really,” she said, “unless you count Coronado Heights.” This was a hill in the next county, topped by a monument to the conquistador. “Folks there like to say that was Coronado’s last stop.” She obviously didn’t agree, though she confessed there was no hard evidence that Lyons had a better claim. “The best we can say is that Coronado’s journey ended ‘near here.’ ”
This was a bit disappointing, as was downtown Lyons, where I’d planned to celebrate the end of my own journey. The only nightlife in sight was a dingy tavern called Bill’s, filled with patrons who looked as if they’d been there since lunchtime. When I asked a man beside me at the bar what he thought of Coronado, he slurred, “Dunno. Buy me a beer and I might remember him.” Instead, I decided to ignore the museum director’s caveat and raced the fading light to try and reach Coronado Heights.
Earlier in the day, while driving from western to central Kansas, I’d watched the landscape gradually soften, from high dry plain to midwestern prairie. East of Lyons, it began to gently roll, with dark plowed earth and lush fields of sunflower and corn. Quivira might not have been the gilded paradise Coronado imagined, but it looked heavenly—golden, even, at sunset—after the hundreds of miles that had preceded it.
Zigzagging on rural roads, I made a wrong turn and didn’t find a sign for Coronado Heights until nightfall. Rather than scale the elevation in the dark, I headed for the lights of the nearest town, a few miles off, and trolled the main street until I came to a bar. The tavern was called Öl Stüga, with “Välko
mmen” written on the window.
Stepping inside, I ran straight into a bearish, bearded man who looked as though he’d just disembarked from a longship. Almost everyone in the pub seemed a clone of him: tall, fair, and broad-shouldered. A horned helmet perched over the tavern’s TV. I fought my way to a stool at the bar, next to a handsome man with blue eyes and long blond hair.
“This may sound stupid,” I said, “But is this a Viking convention or something?”
He smiled. “I take it you’ve never been to Lindsborg?” When I shook my head, he thrust out his hand. “Well, then, welcome to Little Sweden. I’m Nels Peterson. Can I buy you an aquavit?”
Lindsborg, Kansas, it turned out, was one of the largest Swedish communities in the nation. Most of its 3,300 residents descended from pietistic Lutherans who settled in the nineteenth century, and they still held Swedish festivals, decorated their homes with painted wood Dala horses, and called their sports teams Vikings and Terrible Swedes. I’d trailed the Spanish from Mexico to Kansas only to land in a nest of latter-day Norsemen.
“No one here cares much about Coronado,” Nels said. “Even if the Spanish did get here, so what? The Vikings beat them to America by five hundred years.”
Nels’s family had farmed the land around Coronado Heights for 132 years, and he offered to give me a guided tour. I bedded down at the Viking Motel, and then drove with Nels the next morning to the top of the three-hundred-foot bluff. “Kansas is hillier than people think,” he said.
The bluff was the tallest of a small chain of buttes called the Smoky Hills, overlooking a river and prairie. The setting corresponded with the description of one of Coronado’s horsemen, who wrote that Quivira was a land of “hills, plains, and beautiful-looking rivers and streams.” Another Spaniard went so far as to write, “At that place there begin to be some mountain ranges.”
Since there were no other rises nearby, the Spanish were probably referring to the Smoky Hills. It also seems likely that they would have scaled one of the hills to survey the surrounding landscape. In any event, this—along with a scrap of chain mail uncovered nearby—was evidence enough for local boosters to claim the hill as the farthest point reached by Coronado. In 1920, they christened it Coronado Heights, later crowning the broad top with a stone castle and a simple stone monument, etched with Coronado’s name and the words “A Place to Share.”
“People have taken that message rather literally over the years,” Nels said. “I’d guess at least three thousand people have lost their virginity up here. Major party spot.”
He led me inside the lichen-covered castle, a gloomy, mock-feudal fortress with a crenellated top and arrow slits in the walls. The interior had a great hall with a beamed ceiling and giant hearth. “This place is meant to honor Coronado,” Nels said, “but since we’re Scandinavians, we don’t have a clue about the Spanish. So we built a little Elsinore.”
As it happened, the Lindsborg boosters who conceived the memorial weren’t really admirers of Coronado at all. Quite the opposite. I later found a 1922 speech by the leading promoter of the Heights, who described “Coronado puffing his way up this hill in his cast-iron suit,” and contrasted him to the Swedish immigrants who “settled in the shadow of this majestic landmark and found the gold that Coronado missed.” These “frugal sons of the north had learned the lesson that the hot-blooded, adventurous Spaniards never learned,” he went on. “Only the wealth which comes from patient toil and the health that comes from the simple open life survives.”
Coronado Heights, in other words, celebrated the superiority of Lutheran Swedes over Catholic Spaniards. The sweeping view, at least, bore this out. From the rampart of the castle we gazed out at a manicured checkerboard of wheat and alfalfa. To the south soared the church spires of Lindsborg. Not far to the north lay the exact geographic center of the U.S. continent. The territory Coronado had spurned was now America’s heartland, one of the most productive agricultural districts in the world.
Still, Nels felt some sympathy for the conquistador. “He came all this way and looked out and saw grass and more grass—nowhere going on forever. I can see a weary spirit being broken by that view.”
We climbed down from the castle and drove back to Lindsborg for a Sunday lunch of Swedish meatballs, pickled herring, and dill potatoes. A Lutheran pastor in a starched collar circulated between tables, greeting congregants. “Swedes are very close to the vest, very Prairie Home Companion,” Nels confided. “To tell you the truth, I hate this place.”
Nels worked as a landscaper, but at heart he was a Beat poet. The night before, while chain-smoking and swigging aquavit, he’d recited entire poems by Allen Ginsberg. After lunch, when I dropped him at his trailer, he went inside and returned with his most prized possession, a signed first edition of William Burroughs’s debauched classic, Naked Lunch.
“I lived in New York for a while and found it weird that people still have this Wizard of Oz image of Kansans—they think we’re shorthand for clean, honest living,” he said. “I hope I changed some people’s stereotypes, at least about the clean-living part.”
Nels lit a final cigarette. “You know, in a way it’s too bad that Coronado cut and ran. If those mad Spaniards had stuck around, Kansas would be a lot more fun.”
UPON RETURNING FROM Kansas to New Mexico, Coronado hunkered down with his army for a last hard winter by the Rio Grande. Badly clothed, beset by lice, and surrounded by restive Indians, the Spanish were also divided among themselves. Many wanted to go back and settle Quivira, while others had “set their prow” toward home. “There began to be grumblings and sourness,” a soldier wrote.
Then, during a horse race, Coronado’s saddle cinch broke and he fell beneath his competitor’s mount, taking a kick to the head. Confined to his bed and convinced he was dying, Coronado expressed a “desire to return and die where he had a wife and children.” Or so his army was told. Some soldiers suspected that Coronado’s doctors and captains conspired to make his injury seem worse than it was, to justify the retreat to Mexico.
And so, in the spring of 1542, the demoralized army straggled back the way it had come two years before, from the pueblos to the desert to Mexico. As soon as the army reached Spanish-held land, men began peeling off, until the once mighty force had disintegrated. Coronado reached Mexico City leading fewer than a hundred men. The viceroy “did not receive him very graciously,” a soldier wrote. “His reputation was gone from this time on.”
When Coronado returned empty-handed, prominent colonists who had invested heavily in the expedition found themselves in financial straits. His return also coincided with the passage of new laws in Spain, designed to curtail abuses against Indians. Coronado’s expedition became a test case, with Crown lawyers charging that the torture of natives and burning of pueblos were unwarranted.
Coronado was ultimately exonerated (his field commander was blamed instead, and lightly punished). But the conquistador lost his governorship of a northern province, his estates, and the fortune he’d invested in the expedition. “I was left in debt and am so now,” Coronado stated in a legal petition, in 1553. He died soon after, at the age of about forty-four.
A decade later, one member of Coronado’s expedition sat down to write an account of what he’d seen in Tierra Nueva. Pedro de Castañeda had ridden with Coronado all the way to Quivira, and felt he’d glimpsed “the marrow of the land in these western parts.” In retrospect, Castañeda wished he had settled its fertile expanse. But “it was God’s pleasure,” he wistfully concluded, “that we who had been there should content ourselves with saying that we were the first who discovered it.”
In passing, Castañeda also related the incredible saga of a “tattooed Indian woman.” A captive of the Pueblo people, she was purchased from them by a Spanish captain and taken on the expedition to the Plains. When the army reached Texas, the woman recognized she was nearing her homeland and hid in a canyon before escaping the Spanish. She then fled east across Texas, only to be seized again, by
another group of bearded Spanish speakers. The Indian woman told her new captors that “she had run away from men like them,” and gave the names of Coronado’s captains as proof.
Castañeda learned all this upon his return to Mexico, where he met members of the Spanish party that had recaptured the woman. The men were survivors of another major expedition, this one led by Hernando de Soto, who had set off from Florida at almost the same time Coronado left Mexico. Several years later, the paths of the conquistadors’ armies—one wandering east, the other straggling west—had almost intersected in the middle of the continent.
Of the tattooed woman who witnessed the two greatest expeditions of conquest in North America, and became captive to both, nothing more is known.
CHAPTER 8
THE SOUTH
DE SOTO DOES DIXIE
Knights errant are exempt from all jurisdictional authority . . . their law is their sword, their edicts their courage, their statutes their will.
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
HERNANDO DE SOTO was a self-made conquistador, the first to spend more of his life in the New World than the Old. Born in Extremadura, the rugged Spanish province that also spawned Cortés and Pizarro, De Soto sailed to America at the age of fourteen and arrived with only a sword and buckler. He went straight to work, fighting Indians in Panama, and quickly won renown as a ruthless warrior: the go-to guy for brutal raids against natives. Contemporaries described him as dark, handsome, hotheaded (apasionado), “hard and dry of word,” and “very busy in hunting Indians.”
He was also a shrewd businessman, amassing a diversified portfolio of plundered gold, grants of Indian labor, and stakes in mining and shipping. De Soto sealed his fortune by joining in the conquest of Peru, where Pizarro dispatched him as an emissary to Atahualpa. With characteristic bravura, De Soto rode straight into the Incan camp and reared his foaming steed before the emperor. When the Spanish later garroted Atahualpa and looted Peru’s gold and silver, De Soto’s cut came to more than $10 million in today’s dollars.
