INTRODUCTION
From the time of the appearance in Mexico, in 1536, of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition of nine years before, with definite news of the hitherto unknown north, there had been a strong desire to explore that region, but nothing of importance was accomplished until 1539. In that year Fray Marcos of Nice, the Father Provincial of the Franciscan order in New Spain, with Estévan, the negro companion of Cabeza de Vaca, as a guide, penetrated the country to the northwest as far as the Seven Cities of Cibola, the villages of the ancestors of the present Zuñi Indians in western New Mexico. Estévan, preceding Fray Marcos by a few days and accompanied by natives whom he gathered en route, reached Hawikuh, the southernmost of the seven towns, where he and all but three of his Indian followers were killed. The survivors of this massacre fled back to Fray Marcos, whose life was now threatened by those who had lost their kindred at the hands of the Zuñis; but the friar, fearful that the world would lose the knowledge of his discoveries, appeased the wrath of his Indians by dividing among them the goods he had brought and induced them to continue until he reached a mesa from which was gained a view of the village in which Estévan had met his fate. Here Fray Marcos erected a cross, took possession of the region in the name of Spain, and hastened back to Mexico "with more fear than victuals."
The glowing accounts which the friar gave of what he had seen, and particularly of what he believed the Indians intended to communicate to him, resulted in another expedition in the following year (1540). This was planned by the Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza, and the command was given to Francisco Vazquez de Coronado.
The elaborate expedition of Coronado is the subject of the narrative of a private soldier in his army, Pedro de Castañeda, a native of Nájera, in the province of Logroño, in the upper valley of the Ebro, in Old Castile. Of the narrator little is known beyond the fact that he was one of the colonists who settled at San Miguel Culiacan, founded by Nuño de Guzman in 1531, where he doubtless lived when Coronado's force reached that point in its northward journey, and where, more than twenty years later, he wrote his account of the expedition and its achievements. The dates of Castañeda's birth and death are not known, but he was born probably between 1510 and 1518. In 1554, according to a document published in the Coleccion de Documentos Inéditos del Archivo de Indias (XIV. 206), his wife, María de Acosta, with her four sons and four daughters, filed a claim against the treasury of New Spain for payment for the service the husband and father had rendered in behalf of the King.
As a rhetorician and geographer Castañeda was not a paragon, as he himself confesses; but although his narration leaves the impression that its author was somewhat at odds with the world, it bears every evidence of honesty and a sincere desire to tell all he knew of the most remarkable expedition that ever traversed American soil—even of exploits in which the writer did not directly participate. Castañeda's narration is by far the most important of the several documents bearing on the expedition, and in some respects is one of the most noteworthy contributions to early American history.
The accompanying translation, by Mr. George Parker Winship of the John Carter Brown Library, was first published, together with other documents pertaining to the expedition, in the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, 1896), now out of print. Barring a few corrections, most of which were communicated to the present writer by Mr. Winship in 1899, the translation is here printed as it first appeared.
Mr. Winship's translation of Castañeda, together with the letters and the other narratives pertaining to the expedition, was reprinted, with an introduction, under the title The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542, from the City of Mexico to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado and the Buffalo Plains of Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska, as a volume of the "Trail Makers" series (New York, 1904).