Coronado Expedition (1540-1542): Searching for Cíbola

The Coronado expedition of 1540–1542 was a large Spanish venture from Mexico into the American Southwest in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola. Led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, it reached the Zuni and Rio Grande pueblos, sent the first Europeans to the Grand Canyon and crossed the Great Plains as far as Kansas. It found no gold, but it gave Europeans their first knowledge of a vast region and caused lasting harm to the peoples it met.

Background: rumours from the north

In 1536 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and three companions reached Spanish Mexico after eight years of wandering across the continent, the survivors of the Narváez expedition. They brought reports of permanent towns to the north. Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza decided to investigate.

In 1539 he sent a Franciscan friar, Marcos de Niza, northward with Esteban, an enslaved North African man who had been one of Cabeza de Vaca’s companions. Esteban went ahead and was killed at the Zuni town of Hawikuh. Fray Marcos returned claiming that he had seen from a distance a city larger than Mexico City, which he called Cíbola. His report, probably exaggerated or second-hand, set off great excitement.

Organising the expedition

Mendoza chose Coronado, the young governor of Nueva Galicia, to lead an expedition financed largely by private investors, including Coronado himself and his wife’s family. On 22 February 1540 the force was reviewed at Compostela, in western Mexico. It included roughly 350 Spaniards, some with their families, and between about 1,300 and 2,000 Indigenous allies from central and western Mexico, along with servants, enslaved people and large herds of horses, cattle and sheep.

A supporting fleet of three ships under Hernando de Alarcón sailed up the Gulf of California. Alarcón reached the mouth of the Colorado River and travelled some way upstream, but he never met the main army.

What happened

Cíbola and the Grand Canyon (1540)

Coronado pushed ahead with an advance party through Sonora and present-day Arizona. On 7 July 1540 he reached Hawikuh, the first Zuni town. When the Zuni refused to submit, the Spaniards attacked; Coronado was knocked down and injured by stones, but the town fell. Instead of a golden city, the Spaniards found a crowded pueblo of stone and adobe with maize and turquoise. Coronado wrote angrily to Mendoza that Fray Marcos had told the truth about nothing.

From Zuni, Coronado sent out scouting parties. Pedro de Tovar visited the Hopi villages. Hopi guides then led García López de Cárdenas to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in late summer 1540; his men tried for three days to descend to the river and failed. Hernando de Alvarado travelled east to Acoma, the Tiwa towns of the Rio Grande, the large pueblo of Pecos (Cicuye) and the edge of the buffalo plains.

The Tiguex War (1540–1541)

The expedition settled for the winter in the Rio Grande valley among the Tiwa pueblos, which the Spaniards called Tiguex, near present-day Albuquerque and Bernalillo. Taking over a pueblo for housing and demanding blankets and food in a cold winter provoked resistance. In the fighting that followed, the Spaniards besieged the pueblos of Arenal and Moho, and many Tiwa men were killed, including prisoners burned at the stake at Arenal. Survivors abandoned their towns.

Quivira and the plains (1541)

At Pecos the Spaniards met a Plains captive they called El Turco, “the Turk”, who described a rich land called Quivira far to the east. In April 1541 the army set out across the Llano Estacado, a flat plain so featureless that men became lost. They met nomadic bison hunters, called Querechos and Teyas in the sources, who used dogs to carry their tents.

Realising that the Turk’s directions were unreliable, Coronado sent most of the army back and rode north with about thirty horsemen. In the summer of 1541 he reached Quivira, the villages of grass houses of the ancestors of the Wichita people in central Kansas. There was no gold. The Turk confessed that he had tried to lead the Spaniards astray and was executed by garrotting.

The return and its aftermath

Coronado wintered again at Tiguex in 1541–1542. Around the end of December 1541 he was badly injured when his saddle girth broke during a race and he was struck by another horse. In spring 1542 he decided to abandon the enterprise. Two friars, including Juan de Padilla, stayed behind as missionaries and were later killed. The expedition straggled back to Mexico City in the autumn of 1542, with Coronado reporting to an unimpressed Mendoza.

In 1544 Coronado faced an official inquiry into the conduct of the expedition, including the treatment of the Pueblo peoples. He was cleared, though García López de Cárdenas was later convicted in Spain for his role in the Tiguex killings. Coronado died in Mexico City in 1554.

Key people

• Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (c. 1510–1554), commander of the expedition.
• Antonio de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain, who organised and backed it.
• Fray Marcos de Niza, whose report of Cíbola inspired it.
• García López de Cárdenas, Coronado’s field officer, first European at the Grand Canyon.
• El Turco, the Plains guide who told of Quivira.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Coronado was searching for the “Seven Cities of Gold” described in Native legend. Fact: The Seven Cities idea came from a medieval Iberian legend; the Spaniards attached it to reports of real Pueblo towns.
• Myth: The expedition was a small band of adventurers. Fact: With Indigenous allies and followers it numbered well over 2,000 people, one of the largest European expeditions in North America in the 16th century.
• Myth: Horses that escaped from Coronado’s herds gave rise to the horse cultures of the Plains peoples. Fact: Few if any of the expedition’s horses survived on the plains; Plains nations acquired horses mainly in the 17th century through trade and raiding from Spanish New Mexico, especially after 1680.

Legacy and archaeology

For a long time the route of the expedition was reconstructed only from the written accounts, above all the chronicle of Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, written some twenty years after the events. Since the 1990s archaeology has begun to fix parts of the trail on the ground.

At the Jimmy Owens site in Blanco Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, researchers found copper crossbow-bolt heads, horseshoe nails and other objects that match a camp of the expedition on the plains. At the Piedras Marcadas pueblo, within present-day Albuquerque, excavations have recovered lead shot and other weapon remains that many archaeologists link to the fighting of the Tiguex War. These finds confirm the broad outline of the chronicles while correcting earlier guesses about the route.

The expedition is commemorated today by the Coronado National Memorial near the Mexican border in Arizona. For the Zuni, Hopi and Tiwa peoples, however, it is remembered above all as the first episode of a long and often violent colonial experience.

Timeline

• 1539: Fray Marcos de Niza’s reconnaissance; Esteban is killed at Hawikuh.
• 1540, 22 February: The expedition is reviewed at Compostela.
• 1540, 7 July: Coronado captures Hawikuh, the first Zuni town.
• 1540, late summer: López de Cárdenas reaches the Grand Canyon.
• 1540–1541, winter: Tiguex War on the Rio Grande.
• 1541, April: The army sets out across the plains.
• 1541, summer: Coronado reaches Quivira in central Kansas.
• 1542, spring: The expedition turns back to Mexico.

Why it matters

The Coronado expedition, together with the de Soto expedition in the Southeast, ended Spanish hopes of another Aztec or Inca empire in North America. It produced the first written descriptions of the Pueblo peoples, the Grand Canyon and the bison of the Great Plains. Spain did not return to New Mexico in force until 1598, and the bitter memories of conquest helped shape later events such as the Pueblo Revolt.