This 16th-century woodcut, the product of an artist with a fertile imagination but little information, epitomizes the contemporary view that European discoverers were bringing civilization to the grateful natives of the New World.

Prologue

A magic date: 1492. The year began with Christopher Columbus watching the Moors surrender the city of Granada, their last stronghold in Spain, to the joint monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. He reminded them of the triumph in a summation he wrote later of what he too had accomplished that year. “I saw the banners of your Highnesses raised on the towers of the Alhambra in the city of Granada, and I saw the Moorish king go out of the gate of the city and kiss the hands of your Highnesses and of my lord the Prince.” Shortly after the victory, he added, “your Highnesses ... determined to send me, Christopher Columbus to the countries of India, so that I might see what they were like, the lands and the people, and might seek out and know the nature of everything that is there....”

This remarkable coincidence—the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and Columbus’s almost simultaneous discovery of the “Indies”—resulted in a burst of explosive expansionism. The following year, 1493, Columbus established Spain’s first colony in the New World on the island of Hispaniola, occupied now by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. By 1515 Cuba had been conquered and its cities of Santiago and Havana established as bases for further exploration. In 1519 Hernán Cortés swept out of Cuba into Mexico and found a new source of wealth for his country, his followers, and himself by looting the Aztec empire of stores of gold and silver the Indians had been accumulating for centuries. A decade later Francisco Pizarro began his dogged and even more lucrative conquest of the Incas of Peru.

Meanwhile, what of the Northern Mystery, as historian Herbert E. Bolton aptly named the unknown lands above Mexico? Was it not logical that similar treasures awaited discovery there? And so the fever for adventure and riches drew three more distance-defying explorers—Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo—into three different parts of what is now the United States. Each reached as far as he did because inside him burned the awesome, often contradictory, but always steel-bright fires of medieval Spain.

Our tangible connection to this age of pathfinding and discovery is a scattering of historic places stretching from Florida to California. They are evidence of Spanish life and color in the old borderlands. This book draws into a whole the stories of several such places. Here are the beginnings of Spanish North America.

Routes of the Explorers

Routes of the Explorers
[High-resolution Map]

The first Spanish expeditions into the northern borderlands of New Spain sampled the continent’s wondrous diversity. De Soto made his great march across a luxuriant country so stunning and productive that the expedition’s journals are full of admiring description. He encountered complex native societies, which were often organized into powerful chiefdoms—generous in peace but formidable in war. Centuries of settlement has greatly altered this landscape. Not so Coronado’s country. A traveler to the Southwest can still see places evocative of the first Spanish encounters with Indians of the pueblos and Plains. A sailor retracing Cabrillo’s route up the California coast runs past mountains that, in the words of the chronicler, “seem to reach the heavens ... [and are] covered with snow”—mountains he called the Sierra Nevada. They are today’s Santa Lucia range. Cabrillo’s voyage is now best followed in the imagination.