Francisco de Coronado

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was born in 1510 in Salamanca, a university city in the Spanish kingdom of Castile ^[1]. His father, Juan Vázquez de Coronado, held administrative posts and had served under the powerful Mendoza family; the household belonged to the minor nobility, respectable but not wealthy ^[2]. As a younger son, Francisco could expect little from the family estate. Under Castilian custom the bulk of the inheritance passed to his elder brother, which left the young man to seek his fortune through royal service or the church.

Any Francisco de Coronado biography has to begin with this problem of a second son's prospects, because it explains the leap he made in 1535. That year Antonio de Mendoza sailed to take up his appointment as the first viceroy of New Spain, and Coronado, then about twenty five, crossed the Atlantic in his entourage ^[1]. The connection between the two families gave him an entry into colonial administration that most emigrants never had. He arrived in Mexico City barely a decade and a half after the fall of the Aztec capital, when the colony was still raw and openings for ambitious men were plentiful.

Coronado rose quickly under Mendoza's patronage. He proved himself in 1537 by helping to put down a rebellion of enslaved Black miners at Amatepeque, and he served on the Mexico City council ^[2]. His marriage secured his position even more firmly. In 1537 he wed Beatriz de Estrada, daughter of the late royal treasurer Alonso de Estrada, and the match brought him one of the largest estates in New Spain ^[1]. Within a few years the second son from Salamanca controlled land, income, and the viceroy's confidence.

In 1538 Mendoza appointed him governor of Nueva Galicia, a frontier province in western Mexico that included the towns of Guadalajara and Compostela ^[2]. The post placed him at the edge of the known Spanish world, exactly where rumors from the north arrived first. Those rumors were multiplying. In 1536 the castaway Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had walked out of the interior after eight years of wandering, carrying secondhand reports of populous towns to the north ^[3].

Mendoza sent the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza north in 1539 to investigate. The friar returned claiming he had seen, from a distance, a city called Cíbola that appeared larger than Mexico City ^[3]. His report fused with an old Iberian legend about seven golden cities founded by fleeing bishops, and it convinced the viceroy to organize a major expedition. Mendoza chose his trusted governor to lead it. Coronado invested heavily in the venture himself, borrowing against his wife's estate to help finance it ^[2].

The force that assembled at Compostela in February 1540 was enormous for its time: roughly 350 Spanish soldiers, many of them mounted, along with somewhere between one and two thousand Mexican Indian allies, plus servants, enslaved people, friars, and herds of horses, cattle, and sheep ^[4]. A supply fleet under Hernando de Alarcón sailed up the Gulf of California to support the land column, though the two never managed to link up. Who was Francisco de Coronado at this moment? A thirty year old governor commanding what was, by head count, one of the largest European expeditions yet launched into North America ^[4].

The advance party reached Cíbola in July 1540. It turned out to be Hawikuh, a Zuni pueblo in what is now western New Mexico: a compact town of stone and adobe, with no gold at all ^[3]. The Zunis resisted, and Coronado was knocked unconscious by stones during the assault before his men took the town. Marcos de Niza, traveling with the army, was sent back to Mexico in disgrace ^[3].

From Hawikuh, Coronado dispatched parties in several directions, and these side journeys produced the expedition's most remarkable discoveries. Pedro de Tovar visited the Hopi towns. García López de Cárdenas, following Hopi directions, reached the rim of the Grand Canyon, making his party the first Europeans known to have seen it ^[5]. Hernando de Alvarado traveled east to the Rio Grande valley, where dozens of pueblos clustered, and onward to the great trading pueblo of Pecos. The army wintered on the Rio Grande near present day Bernalillo, New Mexico, in a district the Spaniards called Tiguex.

The winter turned violent. Spanish demands for food, blankets, and shelter drove the Tiguex pueblos to resist, and the resulting Tiguex War of 1540 to 1541 saw pueblos besieged and burned, with captives executed ^[4]. It was the harshest episode of the entire venture and it poisoned relations with the Pueblo peoples for decades.

At Tiguex the Spaniards heard a new story from a captive Plains Indian they nicknamed El Turco, who described a rich land called Quivira far to the east where even common people ate from golden dishes ^[3]. In the spring of 1541 Coronado led the army onto the Great Plains, crossing the Texas Panhandle and encountering vast herds of bison and the nomadic peoples who hunted them. Finding the full force too slow, he sent most of it back and pressed on with about thirty horsemen.

Quivira, reached in the summer of 1541 in central Kansas, was a cluster of grass lodge villages of the ancestors of the Wichita people. There was no gold ^[4]. Under questioning, El Turco admitted he had invented the story, reportedly at the urging of the people of Pecos, who hoped the Spaniards would be lost on the plains. Coronado had him garroted ^[3]. Among the verifiable Francisco de Coronado facts, this march stands out for its sheer distance: his men had traveled well over a thousand miles from Compostela and had crossed the continent's interior grasslands before any other Europeans except a handful of castaways.

Back at Tiguex for a second winter, Coronado suffered a serious head injury when he fell from his horse during a race and was trampled ^[1]. Weakened and discouraged, he ordered the return to Mexico in April 1542. Two Franciscans, Juan de Padilla and Luis de Úbeda, chose to stay behind as missionaries; Padilla was later killed on the plains, and he is often counted among the first Christian martyrs in what became the United States ^[5]. The army that straggled back into Mexico in late 1542 was a fraction of the column that had set out, and it carried no treasure.

The expedition ruined Coronado financially and politically. He had returned without gold, and both he and his backers, including the viceroy, had lost heavily on the venture ^[2]. He resumed his governorship of Nueva Galicia, but in 1544 a royal inquiry examined his conduct, weighing charges that included cruelty toward the Indians of his province and mismanagement of the expedition. He was removed from the governorship in 1544, though the audiencia in Mexico City eventually cleared him of the most serious charges in 1546 ^[1]. His field master García López de Cárdenas was less fortunate and was convicted in Spain for the brutality of the Tiguex campaign ^[4].

Coronado spent his remaining years in Mexico City as a member of the municipal council, a respected if diminished figure managing his wife's estates ^[2]. His health, damaged by the fall at Tiguex, continued to decline. He died in Mexico City on September 22, 1554, at about forty four years of age, and was buried in the church of Santo Domingo ^[1]. Beatriz de Estrada, who had borne him eight children, survived him.

Measured against its own goals, the expedition failed completely. Yet the list of Francisco de Coronado achievements looks very different from a distance of five centuries. His men produced the first European descriptions of the Grand Canyon, the Zuni and Hopi pueblos, the Rio Grande valley settlements, the Llano Estacado, and the bison herds of the southern plains ^[5]. The chronicle written years later by expedition member Pedro de Castañeda remains a foundational document for the early history and ethnography of the American Southwest ^[3]. Spanish maps and ambitions in North America were reshaped by what the expedition reported, even though colonization of New Mexico waited another half century until Juan de Oñate's entrada of 1598.

The expedition's costs fell hardest on the peoples it encountered. The Tiguex War brought destruction to the Rio Grande pueblos, and Pueblo oral traditions preserved the memory of the violence long afterward ^[4]. Modern historians treat Coronado neither as the heroic pathfinder of older textbooks nor as a simple villain, but as the commander of a venture whose logistics were extraordinary and whose conduct toward Native communities was often brutal ^[4].

His name is fixed across the map of the region he crossed. Coronado National Memorial in southern Arizona, established near the route's presumed entry point into the present United States, commemorates the expedition, and towns, schools, islands, and highways from California to Kansas carry the name ^[6]. Archaeologists continue to trace his route through finds of sixteenth century crossbow bolt heads, nails, and chain mail at sites in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, work that keeps one of the most ambitious journeys of the Early Modern era under active study ^[5].