Today, archaeologists are scouring historic sites in the Southwest and Central Plains searching for clues to the drama of our Indian past and the conquistador era. Ever so gradually, more and more revelations are coming to light. It is with the discovery of an outline of a prehistoric Indian pit house, a piece of chain mail, a rusted knife blade, or a copper arrowhead once employed by a Spanish crossbow that more truths about the past emerge.

But we have been rewarded in another very significant way. The Spanish were the first Europeans known to enter the American Southwest. As...

When the Spanish conquistadors came to America to conduct their conquests for the Spanish Empire, they were inspired and guided to an indefinable but significant extent by popular myths that featured fabulous cities of golden wealth or other worldly rewards. Because the ethic of recorded history requires tangible, provable fact, the concrete influence of elusive, popularly propagated myths has generally been slighted. Conversely, however, few historical studies, especially nationalistic ones, avoid dependence to some degree on mythical input relative to either events or personalities.

It may seem spurious to give myths such strong responsibility in as important an event as...

Spaniards of the sixteenth century knew Tierra Nueva only as a dark, undefined landmass connected to New Spain on the north. They had learned something of its western coastal line from naval explorations, but they knew nothing of the land’s shape, its breadth or depth, its mountains and rivers, or what dire dangers might lurk there. They knew nothing of its inhabitants, landscape, and animal life other than what the Cabeza de Vaca party had said about the region it had wandered through. Some still believed Tierra Nueva might ultimately be land-connected with China, India, or both. Others hoped that...

On the brisk Monday morning of February 28, 1540² (Julian calendar; March 2, Gregorian calendar), the mining town of Compostela, perched along Mexico’s west coast, stirred with excitement in witness of its moment of history. The small silver- and gold-mining village that Nuño de Guzmán had founded in 1535 as the capital of Nueva Galicia rested comfortably on a palm-treed plateau swathed in early morning by the shadows of the Sierra Madres to the east.

Resident Spaniards and Indian natives, many wrapped in blankets against the morning chill, gathered to watch as the governor of Nueva Galicia and captain general...

Coronado’s precise route beyond Chichilticale has never been resolved with certainty. It is clearly determined, however, that he marched north to the Zuni settlements on the Zuni River in present New Mexico just across its border with Arizona. A direct route thereto would have taken the expedition along the east side of the border through Apache Pass, past the Peloncillo Mountain range and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, past the site of present Eagar and St. Johns, Arizona, and across the Little Colorado River to the known location of Cibola on the Zuni River.

A participant in the march, writing from...

During the fall of 1540, a delegation of Indians arrived at Hawikuh to confer with Coronado. They were from a place to the east called Cicuye (Cicúique), today the site of Pecos, New Mexico. At their lead were two men, one of whom was a young warrior—tall and handsome with a fine physique. Because of his long mustache, the Spaniards dubbed him “Bigotes,” the Spanish word for whiskers. The other, a much older man, was known to the Spaniards as “Cacique” (chief), as he was head man of his pueblo. The visitors said they wished to meet the black-bearded...

When winter came, Coronado sent for a Tiguex chief he had met and declared that he needed clothing for his poorly clad, shivering troops. He demanded that he be furnished with about 300 mantas, or robes. The chief said he could not possibly provide them, suggesting that the matter be put before the various town governors. Instead, Coronado sent parties of soldiers to round up—by force—the needed cloaks and blankets from among the twelve Tiguex villages. At times, when people hesitated to give up the garments they were wearing, the soldiers stripped them from the person’s back and...

While Coronado was engaged in pacifying Tiguex, he could hardly wait until the Indians were quelled and warm weather came so he could continue his quest onward to the wondrous place the Turk called Quivira. Surely, Coronado reasoned, in everything the Turk told, there was enough truth to overcome the disappointments he and his men—and the viceroy who had invested so much money and faith in him—had thus far suffered.

The Turk, great prevaricator and storyteller that he was, had become suspect to some as a witch doctor of sorts who was in league with Satan. A superstitious...

The Teyas’s information regarding the expedition’s course received dramatic support from Sopete. The much-ignored “other” slave from the plains now caused a great commotion. Throwing himself on the ground, he made signs indicating that before he would continue to follow the Turk any further, he would let the Spaniards cut off his head. Finally, Coronado was ready to listen. He had the Turk and Xabe brought forth and demanded the truth. Though none of the expedition narratives reveal such, effective intimidation was likely applied. The Turk broke down and put his life at risk by revealing that, indeed, he had...

After Coronado departed, Arellano and the main army rested for fifteen days in the second ravine. While there, they killed 500 bison and dried the meat to take with them on the trip back. Famished for fresh greenery, the Spaniards feasted on the wild but not yet ripe grapes, currants, mint-flavored wild marjoram, and the fruit of a rose-like plant that grew there.

During this rest period a tattooed Indian woman who was held as a slave by Juan de Zaldívar hid in a ravine and ran away. Her escape is particularly notable in that, by fleeing eastward, she was...

Shortly after Friar Juan Padilla’s party departed from Tiguex in April, Coronado started his army and colonists on their return to Mexico. He was still suffering from his head injury, and at times he was carried on a litter between two mules. His once grand expedition to Tierra Nueva was similarly dysfunctional, its morale broken by failure, by the resentment of those who felt the vaunted treasures had been overlooked at Quivira, and by sullen disdain among many for the man they had once adored as a noble leader. The return march was westward to Hawikuh and back down the...

Written history does not know, and this book cannot say, what actually happened to Captains Francisco Leyva de Bonilla and Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña. These two men defied Spanish law and, on their own, plunged ahead into Tierra Nueva in 1593, five years before Oñate reached Nueva Mexico. Did Gutiérrez murder Leyva, as the Indian guides reported? And, as the Escanjaques told Oñate when he arrived at Quivira in 1601, was Gutiérrez crippled by a prairie fire set by the Rayado Indians and still held captive? Oñate made no attempt to learn for certain or even to try to know...

The remains of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, as were those of his family members later, were interred at the Church of Santo Domingo in Mexico City. As time passed, participants in his grand entrada to Tierra Nueva would fade away and with them memories of the event. A brief account of the Coronado Expedition by Francisco López de Gómara, Historia de las Indías, was published in Spain in 1552 and reprinted several times. But while it is generally an accurate account, the book failed to reveal the harsh details of the adventure to descendant Spaniards in Mexico.²

Still, the vast,...

Even as Antonio de Espejo was exploring in present New Mexico, King Philip II had issued his decree authorizing the viceroy in Mexico to search for the proper person to lead a colonization effort into Tierra Nueva. It was mandatory that the person have his own wealth to finance the venture. The Spanish Crown was far from having any interest in backing such excursions, as historian Stafford Poole states: “Royal finances in Spain throughout the sixteenth century were precarious at best, but during the forty-two year reign of Philip II the crown lurched from one fiscal crisis to another.”²

In...

In 1605, one of the last of the Spanish conquistadors, Don Juan de Oñate, left posterity a personal note inscribed around an Indian petroglyph on the great cliff rock known today as El Morro in western New Mexico. In Spanish it reads: “Paso por aqui el adelantado don juan de onate del descubrimiento de la mar del sur a 16 de April de 1605.” As translated into English: “There passed this way the Adelantado Don Juan de Oñate from the discovery of the South Sea, on the 16th of April, 1605.”¹

No photographs record the presence of Spanish conquistadors actually...

In 1595, Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar had everything he had ever wanted in life—almost. He was very wealthy; he had a palatial home near Zacatecas, a solid military reputation as an Indian fighter, a proud Basque heritage, and a sound social and political position in Mexico stemming from the families of both his father and his mother as well as that of his wife. Also, it was very important to him that he had a young son who would carry the Oñate name into the future.

What he did not yet have was the very special, exalted...

Lope de Ulloa y Lemos and his staff arrived at the mines at Casco and began their inspection and inventory of the expedition on December 9, 1596. Don Juan de Oñate opened the event by presenting a large amount of steel and iron rods and plate, which he promised to make into goods. He followed with an assortment of plowshares, hoes, axes, saws, augers, chisels, adzes, blacksmith’s tools, and numerous small items such as pulleys, hocking blades, knives, padlocks, hammers, scissors, needles, mirrors, and trade items that included glass beads, bells, tin images, fans, necklaces, whistles, thimbles, and rings.²

Even...

As it had been for the Coronado Expedition, New Mexico quickly proved a harsh and difficult land for the Spaniards who came north with Oñate. Their provisions had been exhausted well before they reached the pueblo settlements in the fall of 1598. The expedition arrived not only destitute of food but poorly supplied with clothes and bedding to protect them through the extremely cold and snowy winter. The Spaniards spent long months shivering near whatever fires they could manage. They described it as “ocho meses de invierno y quarto de inferno” (eight months of winter and four in hell).² In...

With Villagrá chasing down the deserters and Vicente de Zaldívar away on his buffalo hunt, Oñate became anxious to explore the land and discover its still mysterious potential. Leaving his maestre de campo Juan de Zaldívar in charge at San Juan, he led a detachment of thirty-four mounted soldiers and Fray Alonso Martínez on a swing southward along the eastern side of the Sandia-Manzano Mountain ranges.² He examined the salines that spotted the region and won the obedience of the various pueblo towns located there.³

Evidently on a sudden but optimistic whim, on October 23, 1598, at the pueblo of...

The defeat of the Spaniards at Acoma presented the ominous threat that the pueblo villages might unite in a general insurrection against their Spanish intruders. With the loss of so many men, Oñate’s fighting strength was precariously low, at fewer than 120 men.² The sense of immediate danger increased when the compliant Indians of San Juan reported a rumor that Indians from other villages were preparing to attack. Oñate posted men to defend the entrances to San Juan’s central plaza, while the wives of officers were sent to the pueblo rooftops as sentinels.

The best remedy against such an uprising,...

With the Acoma affair settled to his satisfaction, Oñate could now turn to other matters. In his report on the buffalo, Vicente had mentioned that during his visit to the prairies, campfire ashes and horse dung had been found that, so Jusepe said—though it may be hard to believe—had been left behind by the Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña and Francisco Leyva de Bonilla entrada eight years earlier. The Indian had also told of reaching a great settlement on the buffalo prairie, so large that they had traveled through it for two days.

This was especially interesting to Oñate....

The records are vague, but sometime after he wrote his letter to Viceroy Monterrey from San Juan de los Caballeros on March 2, 1599, and prior to July 28, 1600, Oñate moved his capital to the pueblo of San Gabriel.² He had wanted to establish a town at San Juan with an alcalde mayor, but his Spanish colonists were weary of the privations they were enduring. They refused, fearing that founding a town would cause them to remain in New Mexico even longer. Many of them wanted desperately to return to Mexico.³

But Oñate did move his colony headquarters across...

There is no mention in the Spanish records that the Oñate Expedition was advantaged by accounts of the Coronado Expedition sixty years earlier. In taking a direct course from San Gabriel eastward to the Canadian River, Oñate avoided the hazard of becoming lost on the prairies of the Texas Panhandle. He was possibly aided by Indians, including Jusepe, who were interviewed earlier regarding the interior country beyond New Mexico. Even as the expedition was still in the field in October 1601, Sergeant Alonso de la Vega, who had accompanied the march for fifty leagues until he fell ill and returned,...

When the Quivira expedition returned to San Gabriel, Oñate found to his great dismay that during his absence a sizable number of colonists, officers, soldiers, and churchmen had banded together and returned to Mexico. When he departed for the plains in June, he had left behind seventy people, including a number of families.² As they watched him march away with a large portion of his army, a majority of those remaining felt a great rush of freedom. They saw their chance to escape from the oppression and sordid conditions under which they had lived for many months.

Led by the...

At virtually the same time the Mexico City theologians were deciding against him, Don Juan de Oñate’s power was enhanced considerably when King Philip appointed him adelantado of the provinces of New Mexico. Philip declared: “You shall have the power to exercise this office in all the cases and matters pertaining thereto, in the same manner as is done by my adelantados in the kingdoms of Castile and in the Indies.” ²

This appointment came as a result of efforts by Don Juan’s brother, Don Alonso de Oñate, who had been in Spain since early 1600 bombarding the king with...

When all was said and done, Don Juan de Oñate had conducted the first colonization of New Mexico, one of the earliest within the present United States. He had done so at great personal and financial sacrifice, proffered at the altar of conquistador glory. Like Coronado, he essentially failed in his efforts, though he did leave behind the remnants of a Spanish settlement upon which others could build. He had also re-explored areas of the North American Southwest and Central Plains, shedding new light on those regions. The Spanish government had done very little to either support or encourage him....

On June 1, 1613, King Philip III, who had been kept advised of the charges against Oñate, wrote to Diego Fernández de Córdoba—the marquis of Guadalcázar and a relative of the king—explaining why an investigation of Don Juan de Oñate, his captains, and others had been delayed. Criminal judge Don Francisco Leoz, who had been commissioned to investigate and prosecute Oñate, had encountered social difficulties. “The accused,” Leoz noted, “are among the most powerful and influential people in that kingdom [Mexico].”²

Leoz had requested that he be relieved of the potential task of sentencing the accused because of...

Individuals who have been differently persuaded, as well as organized groups formed to honor Coronado and Oñate, will naturally resent any challenge to the idea that the two men were noble leaders who exercised benevolent oversight of those under their authority. Most of us have been trained early in our school years to see certain historical figures in a puri-fied, heroic sense.

There is good in this, it can be argued, in shaping young minds to appreciate and accept moral values and honor their national heritage. But in adult life we must recognize the inherent danger of closing our minds...