In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

Straightway an expedition was fitted out, of braggadocios and gallants, of noble desperadoes and desperate nobles—in short, of the best blood in all New Spain. Coronado took the head, and would not Coronado outdo the deeds of the great Cortes himself? The almost fabulous wealth and splendor of Mexico had prepared the naturally credulous minds of the Spaniards for even the most fantastic things. So it did not prove difficult to man and equip an army to conquer Cibola. The vanguard was all of "heroes," the rear was an ever-swelling army of camp followers.

They rode five hundred leagues; the honored friars, no longer timid, accompanying. Their plump horses grew thin and weak, and the riders walked beside them and shouldered their own empty treasure sacks, hoping ever to feed and fill in the rich country beyond. But every day was one of cactus and wild dusty waste. The hands of the prickly pears were dusty—water was the rarest things in the earth. But what did it matter? The rich rare Cibola was near.

Scores of times were the friars called upon to retell their story. And they abated no jot of the splendors. They sustained the courage of the army to cross one of the most dreadful wildernesses in the New World. And the Spaniards thought themselves well on the way to India or the fabulous approaches to Tibet and Turkestan.

When one reflects that this adventurous army, like that of Cortes, asked nothing else but gold, real fortune, one can understand the extent of their disillusion and chagrin. From a historical and geographical view it was a most valuable and interesting expedition. But what did that matter to them? When they found Cibola and realized that it had no treasure they journeyed another thousand miles in quest of it, the even more fantastic "Kingdom of Quivira" and people of a weaker race than Spaniards would have vanished away and disappeared in the deserts, like the streams of the Rockies.

There was a Cibola, there is a Cibola, and Cibola will be. It is one of the most undisturbed spots in the world. The Zunyi Indians who inhabited the Seven Cities and who still live among the ruins of them, hold a remarkable belief. They are geoplanarians and have always considered the earth to be flat, and that at the extremities there is danger of falling off. Our London, New York, Tokio, San Francisco, Capetown, Melbourne, and the rest, they would reckon highly dangerous—and quite truly. Ages ago, it is said, the guardian Spirit led the Zunyi tribe to the safest spot, that is, to the very center of the earth, the point furthest away from the edge. The sacred rock, Hepatinah, in the Zunyi land, to-day as then, marks the center. There were a few thousand Indians in those cities when the Spaniards came and there are a few thousand still. They live in houses of dried mud and of quarried stone—they are heavily and beautifully adorned with turquoise and silver. They are gentle and mild in character but very firm of will, people of changeless purpose, and they have successfully withstood soldiers, missionaries, pioneers, commercial travelers and tourists for four hundred years. They are worshipers of Nature gods and have a religion which is all playfulness, dance, and drama, very beautiful in its expression and evidently more real to them than the faith of the missionaries.

I set out for Cibola on foot; Wilfrid Ewart went by car. My starting point was the Penitente village of San Rafael in New Mexico. Nearly all the inhabitants there practice self-flagellation in Lent and are Spanish-speaking. Not that their forefathers were followers of Coronado. The upper Rio Grande country was settled at a much later date, and then very sparsely and by people whose Catholicism was not entirely orthodox. The Penitentes are a "peculiar people," said by some to be an attempt to realize the Third Order of St. Francis, and quite possible having their causa prima in the zeal of the Franciscans. Be that as it may, San Rafael is a wide-spread, untidy and inhospitable settlement on a plain covered otherwise with innumerable volcanic cinders. The cactus alone of all the vegetable world seems at home among the gnarled and crusted and broken rocks and the blue-black cakes and slabs of volcanic asphalt. There are lines of tumbledown adobe houses down below, and three moradas or Penitente chapels on the hills above.

Among the inhabitants is a Jewish storekeeper, Solomon Bibo, once Governor of the Indian pueblo of Acoma, near by, and lord of the "Enchanted Mesa." "Mesa," by the way, is our old friend "mensa," a table, with the "n" left out, and means in Spanish a tableland. As the main characteristic of the country is the dark, sharp-edged tableland, we may have frequently to refer to "mesas."

As a young man, Solomon Bibo came into these parts and sold goods by the wayside, sold them to the Indians, started a trading post, married an Indian girl, won his way to the hearts and councils of the Acoma Indians, who, by the way, four hundred years before, from the height of their mesa, fiercely withstood Coronado. And Solomon who must have learned their language, and danced their dances, entered the tribe and was elected Governor.

That partly answers the question why Jews are not seen to go to Aberdeen. Why should they, when they can go to Acoma and become, as it were, princes?

However, Sol Bibo had had his day at the pueblo and was now leading storekeeper in San Rafael among these less congenial though not less profitable Penitente Spaniards.