The main corps under Coronado had returned to Mexico. While the expedition had suffered in the beginning from the disadvantages occasioned by intense eagerness and haste to reach its object, the retreat afforded a spectacle of sad disappointment, discontent, and consequent insubordination. Between the Rio Grande and Zuñi disease broke out among the horses, under which more than thirty perished. It was, perhaps, the same disease which now prevails occasionally among horses in New Mexico, and is called el mal. The Spaniards rested in Zuñi, and some of the Mexican Indians remained there—a fact which should be carefully regarded in the investigation of the myths and usages of the natives. Although the people were friendly, they followed the troop for several days, and tried to compel some of the men to stay. The troop reached Chichiltic-calli without delay, and were met there by Juan Gallegas, who had come from Mexico with reinforcements and ammunition. He was very angry at finding the army on the retreat. The fabulous reports which, reinforced by the representations of “the Turk,” had reached Mexico had produced a revival of speculative excitement respecting New Mexico, and the newly arrived soldiers were greatly dissatisfied. Some of the officers made use of this feeling to urge at least that a permanent settlement should be founded, but Coronado’s soldiers opposed this, and insisted on continuing the retreat. Coronado himself pleaded illness, and seemed to have lost all his energy.
The troop therefore moved again, to make their way into Sonora. The Opatas opposed them, annoying the march daily, and killing men and horses with poisoned arrows. No pause occurred in the hostilities till Batuco was reached; thence the despondent company proceeded unhindered to Culiacan, and there all the bonds of discipline were broken. Coronado started from Culiacan for Mexico on the 4th of July, 1542. When he arrived at the capital he was followed by hardly a hundred soldiers. The rest had scattered to the right and left on the way.
As the entrance into the capital was gloomy, so was his reception by the viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza, a hard blow for Coronado, from which he never recovered. This officer, the highest in authority in Mexico, declared to his former favorite that he was disappointed and angry that he had given up the north, and in such terms that Coronado withdrew to the present Cuernavaca, where he needed to give himself no more concern about his province of New Galicia, and died there in retirement. In the year 1548 the government was compelled, on account of his entire incapacity for business, to appoint a court of audiencia for the “kingdom of New Galicia.” Little is known concerning the proceedings that were instituted against him. The once honored, now despised nobleman was deserted in early old age, and died neglected.
Was the disfavor into which he had fallen, and which cast a gloomy shadow over the whole of his after-life, deserved? As a leader Coronado was always worthy of distinction; he never spared himself, but always had a fatherly care for his subordinates; and if we regard the whole course of the campaign, we must acknowledge that he always acted prudently and yet decisively. Two dark features are visible in his intercourse with the natives: the abduction of the chiefs of Pecos, and the cruelties against the Tiguas at Bernalillo. In the former case Coronado followed an example which stood prominent at the time in the view of every Spaniard, and of many a champion in the rest of Europe—that of Hernando Cortés; and he afterward repaired his fault. The responsibility for the atrocious cruelties at Tiguex does not fall so much upon him as upon Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas. A proof that he did not, as a rule, behave badly toward the Indians is afforded by the fact that during the whole course of the expedition, which lasted two years and extended over so wide a territory, and in which so many different tribes were encountered, only four cases of real hostilities occurred, and only one of these was of great importance.
The conception which has been often formed of Coronado as a wicked adventurer is therefore unjust. Equally wrong and unfounded are the accusations which Mendoza formulated against him, and on the ground of which he treated the knight so severely. The following are assigned as the reasons by which the action of the viceroy was determined: first, while Alarcon wrote with the fullest detail in his reports, the letters of Coronado were short, and therefore unsatisfactory; second, Coronado wrote also directly to the emperor and king (Charles V.), which the viceroy considered a presumption on his part, and even regarded as bordering on treason; third, his evacuation of New Mexico and return seemed at least a gross violation of duty, for it was ascribed to disobedience, incapacity, and cowardice.
The letters of Coronado (of which I am acquainted only with those written to the emperor) are, indeed, not to be compared with the detailed daybook-like reports of Alarcon. But the latter, being most of the time on shipboard, had leisure and opportunity to prepare even more voluminous reports than he really made. It is not strange that he expanded his accounts. Coronado, on the other hand, was living under conditions which often made writing impossible, as I have many times experienced. No one is disposed to write long letters in the pueblo houses; moreover, in winter and on the road to Quivira the ink may have failed. Don Antonio de Mendoza understood none of these conditions, and did not realize the great difference between the situations of the seaman and of the officer in the heart of the continent. With all the traits for which he was distinguished, the viceroy was first of all things a European officer, who, however ably he could direct from his desk, had no comprehension of American camp-life. Coronado’s letters to the emperor and king were, it is true, an imprudence on his part that bordered on insubordination, and (in view of the previous difficulties of Cortés with Diego Velasquez) might easily have aroused suspicion in the viceroy.
Respecting the evacuation of New Mexico, I have minutely examined the course of events, in order to make a judgment upon it possible. There was no cowardice. Coronado’s wounds, and the result of the expedition to Quivira, with homesickness and a weakened bodily condition, probably contributed much to a discouragement which was based on the conviction that the country was not worth the effort which its control would cost. Coronado accused his predecessor, Fray Marcos, the discoverer of New Mexico, unjustly, as I have already shown, of having published exaggerated accounts of that country. He did not anticipate, he could not anticipate, that his own accounts, which fully agreed, so far as they concerned the same regions, with those of the monk, might afford occasion, to a superficial review, for the same reproaches against him as he made against the Franciscan, and supply material for distortions and mistakes the practical results of which would be as evil in the nineteenth century as were those of the exaggerated accounts of Cibola in the sixteenth century.
With the return to Mexico of the little army that Coronado commanded, the name of Cibola lost its fascination. The legend of the Amazons had, in the north, passed into that of the “seven cities,” and these are accounted for by the seven pueblos or villages of Zuñi. But Quivira continued to exercise an unperceived influence on the imaginations of men. Notwithstanding, or perhaps because, Coronado had told the unadorned truth concerning the situation and conditions of the place, the world presumed that he was mistaken, and insisted on continuing the search for it. And although Juan de Oñate, in 1599, and Saldivar, in 1618, went out in the direction which Coronado had designated, and found only what he had found, yet was Quivira more persistently sought, and at a greater distance; and it became a phantom, like the Dorado, which hovered with visions of golden treasures before the fancies of the Spaniards, in the northeast and east of New Mexico. It was forgotten that the Quiviras were a wandering horde of Prairie Indians, who lived with the herds of bison, and not a sedentary people; that the mission of Jumanos, which Fray Francisco Letrado had founded, was visited by Quiviras, and the church there was the religious centre for all these wandering tribes after 1636; and that the Quiviras were then roaming around for a distance of forty leagues, or one hundred and eight miles, eastward, or in southeastern New Mexico, and that, therefore, they had moved southward. The insurrection of 1680 produced such a confusion in the ethnographic conditions of New Mexico that Quivira passed out of mind, and when the revolution extended to Chihuahua and Sonora in 1684, the only thought was of self-preservation. After the re-conquest of New Mexico by Diego de Vargas (1692 to 1694) followed the irruption of the Comanches from the north, greatly disturbing the former ethnographic conditions, in the east and down into Texas. The Jumanos had already vanished, and even the name of the Quiviras, if it was a real name, was lost; but not the recollection of the golden stories which had been associated with them. A golden kingdom had grown in imagination out of the tribe, and to this golden kingdom belonged, as did the city of Manoa to the South American Dorado, a great capital in New Mexico, called la gran Quivira. This treasure-city had lain in ruins since the insurrection of 1680; but its treasures were supposed to be buried in the neighborhood, for it was said there had once been a wealthy mission there, and the priests had buried and hidden the vessels of the church. Thus the Indian kingdom of Quivira of “the Turk” was metamorphosed in the course of two centuries into an opulent Indian mission, and its vessels of gold and silver into a church service. But where Quivira should be looked for was forgotten.
In the middle of the last century a Spanish captain of engineers, Don Bernardo de Mier y Pacheco, went upon a scientific and political mission for the Crown in New Mexico. He explored the ruins of the country, and the numerous pueblos of the Cañon de Chaca (in the present home of the Navajos) excited his interest in the highest degree. When he began to concern himself about the situation of Quivira, it was supposed that he had plans and documentary evidences to assist him in finding the place. The measurements which he made in the ruins of the Chaca convinced the people that Quivira was there, and this conviction grew and spread rapidly. There was living at that time in Socorro on the Rio Grande an old Indian who was called “Tio Juan Largo.” When he heard of the search of the Spanish officer, he protested at once against the idea that Quivira could be found in the northwest, and insisted that the ruins of the former mission of the Jumanos and Quiviras were east of Socorro, on the “Mesa Jumana.” He was a Jumano Indian—perhaps the last who passed for one. Attention was then turned at once to the region east of Socorro. The country beyond the Sierra Oscura, between the Rio Grande and the Pecos, had remained uninhabited after the insurrection of 1680, and the small settlements of Manzano and Abó, in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake, were not founded till about 1841 and 1869. The Apaches Taraones and the Comanches had, as it were, frightened all life away from the region. Ruins of pueblos and imposing stone churches, burnt out, with their enclosures open to the sky and the clouds, remains of the modest prosperity which the pueblo Indians enjoyed under the guidance of the Franciscan monks, before their unfortunate insurrection, lie scattered on the cliffs. Definite recollections are associated with all these ruins; the descendants of the Indians of Cuaray, Chililé, and Tajique still live at Isleta in Texas, and the posterity of the inhabitants of Abó at Senecú near El Paso del Norte. The existence of these ruins and a dim outline of their history were never absent from the recollections of the Spaniards.