The Spanish Pioneers

by Charles Fletcher Lummis

Fray (brother) Marcos was a native of the province of Nizza, then a part of Savoy, and must have come to America in 1531. He accompanied Pizarro to Peru, and thence finally returned to Mexico. He was the first to explore the unknown lands of which Vaca had heard such wonderful reports from the Indians, though he had never seen them himself,—"the Seven Cities of Cibola, full of gold," and countless other marvels. Fray Marcos started on foot from Culiacan (in Sinaloa, on the western edge of Mexico) in the spring of 1539, with the negro Estévanico, who had been one of Vaca's companions, and a few Indians. A lay brother, Onorato, who started with him, fell sick at once and went no farther. Now, here was a genuine Spanish exploration, a fair sample of hundreds,—this fearless priest, unarmed, with a score of unreliable men, starting on a year's walk through a desert where even in this day of railroads and highways and trails and developed water men yearly lose their lives by thirst, to say nothing of the thousands who have been killed there by Indians. But trifles like these only whetted the appetite of the Spaniard; and Fray Marcos kept his footsore way, until early in June, 1539, he actually came to the Seven Cities of Cibola. These were in the extreme west of New Mexico, around the present strange Indian pueblo of Zuñi, which is all that is left of those famous cities, and is itself to-day very much as the hero-priest saw it three hundred and fifty years ago. At the foot of the wonderful cliff of Toyallahnah, the sacred thunder mountain of Zuñi, the negro Estévanico was killed by the Indians, and Fray Marcos escaped a similar fate only by a hasty retreat. He learned what he could of the strange terraced towns of which he got a glimpse, and returned to Mexico with great news. He has been accused of misrepresentation and exaggeration in his reports; but if his critics had not been so ignorant of the locality, of the Indians and of their traditions, they never would have spoken. Fray Marcos's statements were absolutely truthful.

When the good priest told his story, we may be sure that there was a pricking-up of ears throughout New Spain (the general Spanish name then for Mexico); and as soon as ever an armed expedition could be fitted out, it started for the Seven Cities of Cibola, with Fray Marcos himself as guide. Of that expedition you shall hear in a moment. Fray Marcos accompanied it as far as Zuñi, and then returned to Mexico, being sadly crippled by rheumatism, from which he never fully recovered. He died in the convent in the City of Mexico, March 25, 1558.

The man whom Fray Marcos led to the Seven Cities of Cibola was the greatest explorer that ever trod the northern continent, though his explorations brought to himself only disaster and bitterness,—Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. A native of Salamanca, Spain, Coronado was young, ambitious, and already renowned. He was governor of the Mexican province of New Galicia when the news of the Seven Cities came. Mendoza, against the strong opposition of Cortez, decided upon a move which would rid the country of a few hundred daring young Spanish blades with whom peace did not at all agree, and at the same time conquer new countries for the Crown. So he gave Coronado command of an expedition of about two hundred and fifty Spaniards to colonize the lands which Fray Marcos had discovered, with strict orders never to come back!

Coronado and his little army left Culiacan early in 1540. Guided by the tireless priest they reached Zuñi in July, and took the pueblo after a sharp fight, which was the end of hostilities there. Thence Coronado sent small expeditions to the strange cliff-built pueblos of Moqui (in the northeastern part of Arizona), to the grand cañon of the Colorado, and to the pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mexico. That winter he moved his whole command to Tiguex, where is now the pretty New Mexican village of Bernalillo, on the Rio Grande, and there had a serious and discreditable war with the Tigua Pueblos.

It was here that he heard that golden myth which lured him to frightful hardships, and hundreds since to death,—the fable of the Quivira. This, so Indians from the vast plains assured him, was an Indian city where all was pure gold. In the spring of 1541 Coronado and his men started in quest of the Quivira, and marched as far across those awful plains as the centre of our present Indian territory. Here, seeing that he had been deceived, Coronado sent back his army to Tiguex, and himself with thirty men pushed on across the Arkansas River, and as far as northeastern Kansas,—that is, three-fourths of the way from the Gulf of California to New York, and by his circuitous route much farther.

There he found the tribe of the Quiviras,—roaming savages who chased the buffalo,—but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of incessant marching and awful hardships. Soon after his return, he was so seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked; and disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative obscurity.

This was a sad end for the remarkable man who had found out so many thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries before any of our blood saw any of it,—a well-born, college-bred, ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He was a city-bred man, and no frontiersman; and being accustomed only to Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California, he knew nothing of, and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands, that New Mexico was successfully colonized.

While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a golden fable across their desolate plains, his countrymen had found and were exploring another of our States,—our golden garden of California. Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three centuries later.

After the discouraging discoveries of Coronado, the Spaniards for many years paid little attention to New Mexico. There was enough doing in Mexico itself to keep even that indomitable Spanish energy busy for awhile in the civilizing of their new empire. Fray Pedro de Gante had founded in Mexico, in 1524, the first schools in the New World; and thereafter every church and convent in Spanish America had always a school for the Indians attached. In 1524 there was not a single Indian in Mexico's countless thousands who knew what letters were; but twenty years later such large numbers of them had learned to read and write that Bishop Zumarraga had a book made for them in their own language. By 1543 there were even industrial schools for the Indians in Mexico. It was this same good Bishop Zumarraga who brought the first printing-press to the New World, in 1536. It was set up in the City of Mexico, and was soon very actively at work. The oldest book printed in America that remains to us came from that press in 1539. A majority of the first books printed there were to make the Indian languages intelligible,—a policy of humane scholarship which no other nation colonizing in the New World ever copied. The first music printed in America came from this press in 1584.

The most striking thing of all, as showing the scholarly attitude of the Spaniards toward the new continents, was a result entirely unique. Not only did their intellectual activity breed among themselves a galaxy of eminent writers, but in a very few years there was a school of important Indian authors. It would be an irreparable loss to knowledge of the true history of America if we were to lose the chronicles of such Indian writers as Tezozomoc, Camargo, and Pomar, in Mexico; Juan de Santa Cruz, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, in Peru; and many others. And what a gain to science if we had taken pains to raise up our own aborigines to such helpfulness to themselves and to human knowledge!