Essay on Sources
If any of the leading conquistadores who march through these pages kept a running account of his adventures, the journal has been lost. Except for occasional letters, the closest we can come to firsthand information are reminiscences written or dictated by lesser participants many years after the events described. Some supplementary material also comes from court testimony. More immediacy is lost by the fact that most English readers must depend on translations of varying accuracy and fluency. There are several translations of all main documents.
The first of the New World adventurers to reminisce in print was Cabeza de Vaca. His Relación ... appeared in 1542. Buckingham Smith’s English translation, first printed in 1855, was later included with several other documents in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, edited by Frederick Hodge and Theodore Lewis (New York, 1907).
The same work also contains Smith’s translation of Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto by an anonymous Hidalgo (gentleman or knight) of Elvas, Portugal, first published in Portugal in 1557 by a survivor of the long march. Smith’s translation, somewhat modified, reappeared in Gaylord Bourne’s two-volume Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto (New York, 1904). Bourne’s volumes also contain reminiscences by Rodrigo Ranjel, De Soto’s secretary, and Luis de Biedma, the latter a spare account. The longest and lushest of the De Soto tales is The Florida of the Inca, the Inca being Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish father and an Incan mother. He drew his information from the oral accounts of three of De Soto’s soldiers and used his active imagination to embellish what he heard. The first complete English translation, by John and Jeannette Varner, appeared in 1951 (reprinted by University of Texas Press, 1980). Miguel Albornoz has published a novelized biography, Hernando de Soto, Knight of the Americas, translated by Bruce Boeglin (New York, 1986).
Some secondary material, which uses anthropological, archeological, and geographic research to shed light on the early explorations, should be mentioned. One instance: Final Report of the United States De Soto Commission, John R. Swanton, chairman (Washington, D.C., 1939). The commission sought to retrace De Soto’s zigzagging route. Jeffery P. Brain’s new edition of the Final Report for the Smithsonian Press (Washington, D.C., 1985) revises Swanton’s conclusions in many places. Another interesting formulation is “De Soto Trail: National Historic Trail Study, Draft Report” (NPS, 1990). In an appendix Charles Hudson offers a new reconstruction of De Soto’s route. The articles in First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570, Jerald T. Milanich and Susan Milanich, eds., (Gainesville. 1989), fill out our understanding of New World societies during the first decades of exploration.
Still the best introduction to Coronado and his expedition is Herbert E. Bolton’s classic biography, Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains (1949). George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey have brought together in Narratives of the Coronado Expedition (Albuquerque, 1940) all the primary documents, including testimony from Coronado’s trial, that anyone except specialists needs to know about the first Spanish entrada into the American Southwest. The chief items are the Relacións of Juan de Jaramillo and Pedro de Castañeda. Castañeda’s Relación also appears in Hodges and Lewis.
A sampling of the historical dispute over Friar Marcos’s doings in the Southwest can be found in articles by Henry Wagner and Carl Sauer in the New Mexico Historical Review, April 1937, July 1937, and July 1941. See also Cleve Hallenbeck, The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza (Dallas 1949). The place of the religious in the Coronado expedition is examined by Fr. Angelico Chavez of New Mexico in Coronado’s Friars (Academy of American Franciscan History, Washington, D.C., 1968). John L. Kessell’s Kiva, Cross, and Crown (National Park Service, Washington, D.C., 1979) looks at the relationships between the Coronado expedition and the key pueblo of Pecos. Albert H. Schroeder has analyzed Coronado’s route across the Plains in Plains Anthropologist, February 1962. Carroll L. Riley, in the New Mexico Historical Review, October 1971, and The Kiva, winter 1975, shows that in Coronado’s time long trade routes and hence a rudimentary system of verbal communications, fortified by signs, linked Cíbola (Háwikuh) and the Indians of Mexico. Other trade trails carried goods and knowledge from the interior across the Colorado River to the Pacific and out onto the Plains. A new account of Coronado’s march is Stewart L. Udall, To the Inland Empire (New York, 1987).
The principal sources on Cabrillo (Juan Paez’s “Summary Log” and court testimony about Cabrillo’s accomplishments) were published by the Cabrillo Historical Association in The Cabrillo Era and His Voyage of Discovery (San Diego, 1982). The best biography, Harry Kelsey’s Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (The Huntington Library, 1986), is based on extensive new research in sources.
★GPO: 1992—312-246/40005