Pleasant encounters characterized the rest of the journey east. Alvarado sent a cross ahead of his party to the “province” of Tiguex (rendered Tiwa today), a concentration of 12 pueblos located on both sides of the Rio Grande in a broad valley at the foot of the abrupt Sandía Mountains. Thus prepared, retinues of important elders greeted them, decked out in ceremonial regalia and marching to the shrill piping of bone flutes. Presumably either Alvarado or Fray Padilla read them the requerimiento that made each town subject to the King of Spain. To this they added the Church’s authority by erecting in the villages they visited, as far north as Braba (Taos), large crosses made by Brother Luis de Ubeda with an adze and chisel he had brought along for this purpose. Reactions were surprising, perhaps because the Indians also used varieties of the cross pattern in some of their ceremonies. They eagerly bedecked Brother Luis’s Christian symbols with prayer feathers and rosettes made of plant fiber, sometimes climbing on each other’s shoulders to reach the tops of the cruciforms.
Impressed by Tiguex’s friendly people and stores of food, Alvarado sent Coronado a message suggesting that the recombined army winter there rather than in the high, cold lands of Cíbola. Then on he went across what is now called Glorieta Pass into the valley of the Pecos River.
There on a flat-topped ridge between a tributary stream and the main river was the finest pueblo the Spaniards had seen. The pattern was familiar: terraced houses rising four stories high around several plazas. Additional storage was provided in extensions running out from some of the corners of the main square. Balconies that provided walkways for the people on the upper floors served also to shade those beneath. Ladders running through holes in the walks served in the place of stairs. A constant need for firewood and building material had eliminated the forests for a mile or more around the pueblo, opening fine vistas of the high peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the north, the red cliffs of Glorieta Mesa to the west, and the lower Tecolote foothills to the east.
By dominating the main trail linking the Plains Indians and the Pueblos of the Southwest, Cicuyé had become an even more powerful trade center than Háwikuh, and its people boasted that no enemy had been able to conquer them. But what of these bearded strangers who, with their swords and horses, had overrun Háwikuh in a single rush? Acting perhaps on the advice of Bigotes and Cacique, the people of Cicuyé decided to be friendly. An unarmed delegation marched out beating drums, playing on bone whistles, and carrying gifts. They listened blankly to the reading of the requerimiento, which demanded their submission to the King of Spain, then let the strangers rest among them for a few days (meanwhile keeping their young women out of sight), and gladly furnished guides when Alvarado announced he wished to continue far enough east to see the “cows” and the people who lived among them.
The guides were Plains Indians. Though they have been called “slaves” of Bigotes and Cacique, it seems more likely they were traders who, having been stranded in Cicuyé after bartering their goods, earned their keep by performing menial tasks while waiting for an opportunity to return home. One was named Ysopete, and may have been—accounts vary—the youth whose chest bore the tattoo of a buffalo. A Wichita Indian from central Kansas, Ysopete designated his homeland as Quivira: thus a new word in American mythology. With him was El Turco, the Turk, so-called by the Spaniards “because,” wrote Pedro de Castañeda, “he looked like one.” The resemblance probably arose from his turban, a headdress used by the Pawnees of eastern Kansas, or, in the Turk’s language, Harahey.
Shortly after reaching the plains east of the Pecos River, Alvarado’s explorers found themselves in the middle of a vast herd of buffalo. Lancing the huge beasts from a running horse and afterwards dining on the tender, roasted meat of their humps made for high living, but the sport was soon forgotten in a greater excitement. The Turk said he knew where there was gold. In Quivira. And even more in Harahey.
This ancient pueblo kiva at Pecos is one of two restored kivas in the park. At center is the firepit and stone draft deflector.
Did the Pawnee (if he was a Pawnee) really say that? Some anthropologists, Carroll Riley and Mildred Mott Wedell among them, have wondered. As a trader, the Turk knew a smattering of Nahuatl, as did the missionary friar, Juan de Padilla, one of his chief interrogators. To this stumbling lingua franca, El Turco added the fluent sign language of the Plains Indians, bits of which the Spaniards were beginning to pick up, though not as skillfully as they thought. Moreover, the talkers on both sides were discussing ideas and objects the others know nothing about. These opportunities for misunderstanding were immeasurably increased by the determination of Juan de Padilla to find the legendary Seven Cities of Antilia.
A word about Padilla. He had served as a soldier under Cortés in Mexico until deciding to enter the Franciscan order. He was hot-tempered, obstinate, and consumed with the hope of bringing the lost citizens—the wealthy, Christian citizens—of Antilia back into the mainstream of Catholicism. He believed implicitly that their gorgeous metropolises lay somewhere in the north. Meager Háwikuh and the Hopi villages had shocked him profoundly, but word of true urban centers farther east—Quivira!—reinvigorated his faith. He talked earnestly to the Turk about the kind of places he wanted to discover and listened with intense preconceptions to the trader’s answers.