Coronado and his escort covered the 800 miles to Culiacán on horseback, as befitted grandees. Marcos’s party walked, the friars in loose gray robes and sandaled feet. After bidding farewell to the governor at the outpost, the explorers and their Indian porters forged ahead on March 7, 1539. (In two more months De Soto would leave Cuba for Florida.) Fray Onorato soon fell ill and turned back. Undeterred, Marcos continued on to a settlement called Vacapa, close to the boundary between the present-day states of Sinaloa and Sonora. There he decided to pause while messengers summoned Indians from the coast, for part of his errand was to learn whether a big expedition could be supplied by ships.
Estéban refused to wait. Away from the friar’s restraints, he ceased being a slave and became a king. During his wanderings across the continent he had learned how to get along with Indians, speak their languages, win their gifts, and (we can suppose) entice their young women. But he dared not simply run away. So he said that as he advanced, accompanied by two huge hounds and part of the Indian bearers, he would keep Marcos informed of his gleanings. Unable to write, he devised a symbol that could be delivered by messengers. A small cross would signify that he had heard of a northern city that sounded moderately important. A medium-sized cross would proclaim a significant city, and a big one something truly superlative.
Presumably this tactic was devised to corroborate what the messengers told Marcos to his face. Told him—this man who knew none of the local Indian tongues and whose Spanish was not of the best? How?
Actually, it would have been easy, except for Marcos’s dangerous preconceptions. A long trade trail linked the jungles of Mexico to the merchandising town of Háwikuh in the Zuñi country of today’s New Mexico. Háwikuh’s middlemen trans-shipped along the trail tanned buffalo hides from the plains, turquoise from New Mexico, cotton mantas from the Hopi villages in Arizona, and bits of clear green olivine called peridot (the source perhaps of Cabeza de Vaca’s lost arrowheads). They received in exchange brightly colored parrot and macaw feathers and sometimes the birds themselves, plus coral and raw carved seashells from the Gulf. Flowing with the goods was a traders’ lingua franca, a melange of the principal languages the merchants encountered along the way—their own native tongue, bits of that spoken by the Pimas and Opatas of northern Mexico, Nahuatl, the tongue of the Aztecs, and bits of Spanish. So there was a medium by which Estéban’s messengers, especially the one who brought a cross as big as a man, could talk to the eager friar.
From the cross’s bearers and from other informants along the way, Marcos heard of, and sent back reports to Mendoza, about the rich kingdom called Cíbola and its seven cities, one of which, he understood, was also named Cíbola. Terraced houses of stone rose three and four stories high. Doors were decorated with turquoise: clothing and ornaments were lavish. Near to this magnificent kingdom were others, equally rich.
Antonio de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain. A capable administrator, he laid the foundations for three centuries of Spanish rule in the Americas. He encouraged industry, education, and the work of the church. Firm but just, he tried to protect the Indians from the worst abuses but was not able to bring about emancipation.
Coronado saw country like this south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as he marched toward the Great Plains.
Mere travelers’ yarns? Not necessarily. Consider who Estéban’s messengers were. They resided in small, trailside settlements made up of jacals built of mud-daubed sticks. In comparison, the terraced pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico, inhabited by hundreds of people who had sufficient leisure to attend to other pursuits than just getting enough to eat—such places, which most of them had only heard about from boastful peddlers, were bound to seem impressive. Talking through interpreters in signs and their lingua franca jumble, they tried to convey their wonder to Marcos—as did one person who said he was a native of Cíbola and apparently enjoyed bragging about it. While listening, moreover, Marcos was remembering the Incas and Aztecs and the legends of the Seven Cities of Antilia. Seven in Cíbola as well! Whose imagination would not be fired?