Notwithstanding the tragical consequences which the search for this phantom invariably entailed, it remained long fixed like an evil spell upon the northeastern half of the South American continent. Martin de Proveda tried and failed, in 1556, to reach Omagua and the “provinces of the dorado.” Diego de Cerpa, in 1569, and Pedro Malaver de Silva, in 1574, met their deaths at the mouths of the Orinoco. There Antonio de Berreo, after he had fruitlessly marched through the whole interior of Venezuela, fell a prisoner into the hands of the English in 1582. The great expedition of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 only got as far as the Salto Caroni. In the meanwhile the locality of the legend, as Humboldt has remarked, kept shifting farther to the east, till it took final refuge in Guyana, “in the periodically overflowed plains between the rivers Rupununi, Essequibo, and Branco”—but shrunken at the same time to a purely geographical myth of Lake Parime. As in the first half of the sixteenth century German soldiers were the earliest to pursue the gilded chieftain, the fact also appears like a curious fate that in the first half of the nineteenth century the German travellers Alexander von Humboldt and Schomburgk laid that phantom of the great lake, and with it terminated the last survival of the legend of the gilded man.
CIBOLA.
INTRODUCTION.
The most interesting period in the history of the discoveries on the American continent was in that part of the sixteenth century when the efforts of the Spanish people were directed to pushing from the already settled coast lands and isthmuses into the interior of both North and South America. I have already endeavored, in the preceding chapters, to project a brief view of the exploring expeditions of the Spaniards in northern South America. Since those sketches were composed, fortune has several times led me into those countries of southern North America which formed the scene of the most arduous efforts of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to reach the north. I now purpose, as a contribution I owe to knowledge, to follow step by step the tracks of the earliest Spanish campaigns in the southwest of the present United States into the interior of Sonora.
The value of historical research on the American continent consists not only in the enrichment it affords to the fund of scientific knowledge, which has an indirect influence upon life, but also in the destruction it effects of deeply rooted errors, in which it acts immediately upon practical life. Accordingly as we represent to ourselves a people or a country when they first become known to us, so we shape our expectations of them when we go to establish our home among them. A correct notion of the past furnishes the basis for an intelligent forecasting of the future. I have tried to show in the history of the dorado what harm may result from incorrect views of history and misapprehensions of manners and customs.
The errors of this kind which arose in the southern half of the Western Continent were, fortunately, corrected at a comparatively early date. In North America similar errors have been reëchoed, with mischievous results, down to near the present time. Expectations awakened and cherished in the beginning of the sixteenth century, not fulfilled but never completely dispelled, have in past years prepared for the failure of many enterprises in the southwest of the United States. These expectations were built upon the basis of a misunderstood fact. The tradition of the “Seven Cities of Cibola” included a kernel of fact enveloped by a shell of exaggerated fancies and hopes. Much interest has been taken in recent times in inquiries respecting the “where” and the “how” of that kernel. While those questions were correctly answered by earnest and intelligent investigation thirty years ago, the practical seeker has been led by them into many unfortunate wanderings, and the settler looking for his future in the west has been lured into attempts that have forever buried his fortunes and those of his companions. The following pages have been prepared in the hope that, conveying the warnings of history, they may furnish the basis for the formation of more correct views.
CHAPTER I.
THE AMAZONS.
Columbus had heard of the Amazons on his great voyage. He said, on the 4th of March, 1493, of the Caribs: “They are the same who have intercourse with the women on the first island which is found on the voyage from Spain to the Indies, on which no men live. These do not follow any womanly occupations, but use bows and arrows of cane, like those mentioned above, and cover and arm themselves with brazen plates, of which they have many.” In the same letter the Admiral spoke of a part of the island of Cuba (Juana), “called Cibau, where the people come into the world with tails;” and of another island, “where, as they assured me, the men have no hair.” In such a company, at that time, the Amazons also could not fail to be present.
The legend of the Amazons was unquestionably domiciled upon the American continent by the Spaniards, and was suggested by imperfectly understood accounts of distant tribes given by the natives, to whose words the Spaniards were not inattentive. Keeping pace with the efforts of the Spaniards to penetrate to the north, it appears first in the fourth letter of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V. (October 15, 1524): “And among the reports which he brought from that province [Colima] was an account of a very good harbor which was found on that coast; ... and also he told me of the lords of the province of Ciguatan, that many of them asserted there was an island inhabited only by women without any men, and that from time to time men went out to them from the mainland; ... when they bore daughters they kept them, but the sons were put away. This island is ten days distant from the province, and many persons have gone there from the province and seen them. I was also told that they were rich in pearls and in gold.”
It was Gonzalo Sandoval, Cortés’s most faithful lieutenant and friend, who brought this account. It was not allotted to Cortés himself to pursue the search for the Amazons’ island, for the insurrection which another associate in his conquest of the Mexican tribes, Cristóbal de Olid, excited against him in Honduras forced him into the arduous campaign in that part of Central America, in which he only with great difficulty escaped death. Until that remarkable expedition, which penetrated southward from Mexico to the now hardly accessible interior regions of Chiapas and Yucatan, the Spaniards held the northern coast of the Mexican gulf to the present state of Tamaulipas, but on the western coast they had advanced but little beyond the twentieth degree of north latitude in the state of Jalisco. The subjugation of the tribes of the Rio Pánuco on the eastern coast brought about a conflict in the year 1523 between Cortés and the contemporary discoverer, Francisco de Garay, which ended in Garay’s going to Mexico, where he espoused the natural daughter of Cortés, and then suddenly died. The behavior of Cortés had already aroused the distrust of the Spanish Government. There is no longer much doubt that, feeling his separation from the mother-country, and counting on the support of the natives, which he was beginning to cultivate systematically, he was working for the establishment of an independent kingdom in Mexico. He was therefore dangerous to all who stood near him in importance, and used every means to remove them. To this end he sent the most capable and most popular of his lieutenants, Pedro de Alvarado, to Guatemala, and Cristóbal de Olid to Honduras, while Sandoval, in whose frank and innocent character alone he could trust, was allowed to remain in Mexico. He had managed to get the first commissioner whom the Government sent to Mexico, Cristóbal de Tápia, out of the country; but Garay he permitted to come to Mexico—to die.