[Illustration: Map: Coronado's March Through Puebloland]
Marching from Cíbola to Pecos, Alvarado’s soldiers saw Puebloland in the
morningtide of its history, a time of prosperity and relative peace.
Village after village welcomed the Spaniards. At Acoma, built on a mesa,
“the natives ... came down to meet us peacefully” and gave the Spaniards
supplies for their journey. In Tiguex province, they met Indians “more
devoted to agriculture than to war” who gave them food, cloth, and
skins. At the huge pueblo of Braba (present Taos), more hospitality.
Cicuyé (Pecos), their destination, greeted Alvarado with drums and
flutes and plied the soldiers with clothing and turquoise (but the women
kept hidden). The record is clear that when the intruders came
peacefully, first encounters were not always hostile.
[Illustration: Coronado’s army on the march]
Perhaps there was no gold in the town, but there was food and the
Spaniards were half-starved. Coronado deployed horsemen entirely around
the town to prevent anyone’s escaping while he himself dismounted and
led an attack on foot up the slope toward the pueblo’s single narrow,
twisting entry. Clad in gilded armor that attracted attention (and must
have been clumsy to run in), he was straightway knocked senseless by a
huge stone. Two officers shielded his body while he was dragged to
safety.
Advantage of position was with the defenders, and the Spaniards, we are
told, were in bad shape. The strings of the crossbows, rotted by the
sun, snapped when cranked tight. The arquebusers were too weak from
hunger and heat to join the onslaught. Yet no one was killed and only a
dozen were hurt. Within less than an hour the town surrendered, an
outcome difficult to understand unless the defenders hurled their
missiles so wildly that none took effect, whereupon they gave up,
terrified by the enemy’s relentless momentum and flashing swords, a
weapon they had never before encountered.
After Coronado had recovered from his concussion and his men had sated
their hunger on Háwikuh’s corn, beans, and turkeys (which the Indians
raised for feathers rather than food), he began assessing his situation.
Couriers brought in delegations from the neighboring towns, and he put
what he learned from them into a long letter he wrote Mendoza and dated
August 3, 1540. It is a prized ethnographical document now because of
its generally accurate descriptions of the Pueblos. Mendoza must have
found it discouraging. No gold. But Coronado was determined, he wrote,
to keep pressing the search. To strengthen his forces he sent orders,
via the letter-bearers, for the bulk of the main army to advance to
Háwikuh. The remainder were to establish a halfway station beside the
long trail. This station was entrusted to Melchior Díaz. As soon as Díaz
had put things in shape there, he was to ride to the Gulf in search of
Alarcón’s supply ships. Fray Marcos, ill, disgraced, and fearing for his
safety, went home with the messengers.
_On Cíbola: “Although [the Seven Cities] are not decorated with
turquoises, nor made of lime or good bricks, nevertheless they are
very good houses, three, four, and five storeys high, and they have
very ... good rooms with corridors, and some quite good apartments
underground and paved, which are built for winter and are something
like hot-houses [kivas].... In [Háwikuh] are perhaps 200 houses, all
surrounded by a wall.... The people of these towns are fairly large
and seem to me to be quite intelligent ... most of them are entirely
naked except for the covering required for decency ... they wear the
hair on their heads like the Mexicans, and are well formed and
comely ... the food they eat in this country consists of maize, of
which they have a great abundance, beans, and game.... They make the
best tortillas I have ever seen anywhere, and this is what everybody
ordinarily eats.”_
—_Coronado to Mendoza, 3 August 1540_
Meanwhile exploring parties had gone northwest from Háwikuh to lay claim
to the “kingdom of Tusayan,” or, as we would say, the Hopi villages.
Nothing the Spaniards wanted was there, either—except for ill-understood
talk about a big river farther to the west. It could be crucial. It must
flow into the sea and might furnish a route inland for Alarcón. Promptly
Coronado ordered Garcia López de Cárdenas to investigate.
The result was the first sighting, by Europeans, of the Grand Canyon at
a point generally believed to have been Desert View. Awed by the chasm,
the party explored along the rim until thirst turned them back. Clearly
such a stream could not serve as a supply route.
A few weeks later and many hundreds of miles farther downstream Melchior
Díaz at last unearthed (literally) the first clues about Hernando de
Alarcón’s whereabouts. After straightening out affairs at the halfway
station named San Gerónimo, he led 25 cavalrymen and some Indians west
to the Gulf’s torrid coast, driving a herd of sheep along for food. A
swing north along the desolate beaches brought him to the banks of a
river. He continued along it for perhaps 90 miles, until encountering
Indians who showed him where another bearded man like himself had hidden
some letters. The documents he dug up have since disappeared, but from
other sources it is possible to guess what they said.
Alarcón had reached the river mouth about August 25, 1540. He had been
preceded there by Cortés’s man, Francisco de Ulloa, who a year earlier
had been trying to find an inlet that would enable his commander to beat
Mendoza to the Seven Cities. Because Ulloa believed that Baja California
was an island, he had been surprised to find himself pinched into the
head of a gulf. A most disconcerting place—shoals, seemingly bottomless
mudbanks, and a terrifying tidal bore, raging tumults of water caused
when the inflowing tide rushed in a great wave upriver against the
current.
The sight had turned Ulloa back, but Alarcón was more persistent. He
worked a tortuous way through the shoals and, with waves dashing over
the deck of his flagship, rode the bore into the channel on August 26.
Unable to sail upward against the current, he anchored his three vessels
behind a protecting point. Lowering two ship’s launches, he ticked off
20 men, some to work the oars, the others to walk along the bank,
pulling two ropes. Eventually Cócopa Indians appeared, highly excited.
None of them understood the _lingua franca_ of his interpreter, but by
signs and a passing out of trinkets, Alarcón in time prevailed on them
to bring food and to help with the cordelling.
On September 6, two months after the battle at Háwikuh, the slow-moving
boats reached, it is believed, a point near the junction of the Colorado
and Gila rivers, the site of today’s Yuma, Arizona. Nearby, Alarcón’s
interpreter found Indians with whom he could converse. Their news was
startling. Far inland, white men were causing trouble among the native
inhabitants. Coronado’s army, surely, which Alarcón had been directed to
supply. But how?
When none of his own men and none of the Indians would agree to carry a
message to Háwikuh, Alarcón decided to return to the ships, take on
fresh supplies, and go to Cíbola himself. During the attempt he advanced
one day’s journey farther upstream than he had gone before, but then
physical difficulties and the growing hostility of the Indians forced
him to halt. After burying the letter Díaz found, he returned to Mendoza
with valuable information about the new land—but, again, no gold.
Having found the letter, Díaz continued upstream for another five or six
days, perhaps to learn whether this was indeed the lower end of the big
river about which the Hopis had spoken. Evidently satisfied that it was,
he sent the Indian footmen of his party and the sheep across the stream
on rafts made of reeds. Riders swam over on their horses, and the whole
party turned back downstream. At some point in those grisly deserts,
Díaz’s greyhound began tormenting a sheep. Díaz ran at the dog with his
lance. The point stuck in the ground. Before he could stop his horse,
the butt pierced his groin. His distraught men put him on a litter,
recrossed the river (it is very low in the fall of the year), and
hurried toward San Gerónimo, to no avail. He died and was buried no one
knows where.
Of the Coronado party’s far-flung explorations, the one that had the
greatest impact on its future was Hernando de Alvarado’s trip to the
Great Plains. It was touched off by the appearance at Háwikuh, late in
August, of a still undefined party of Indians—traders probably, but
perhaps a group who felt they should learn more about what was going on
in Cíbola.
They hailed from the pueblo of Cicuyé, located near a river we call
Pecos in north-central New Mexico. (Cicuyé was the inhabitants’ name for
their town; Pecos, now applied to both the river and the pueblo ruins,
derives from _Pekush_, a word other Pueblo Indians used in speaking of
the settlement.) The travelers were led by an elder whom the Spaniards
called _Cacique_, as if it were a name. (Actually, it was an Arawak word
meaning “chief.” The _conquistadores_ had picked it up first in the West
Indies and later had applied it to Indian leaders throughout Latin
America.) Accompanying Cacique was a husky, talkative young man adorned
with drooping mustaches, unusual in an Indian. Coronado’s people named
him _Bigotes_, or, in English, Whiskers. Bigotes apparently spoke some
Nahuatl, which meant he could converse after a fashion with a few of the
explorers, notably Father Juan de Padilla, who seems to have been going
slowly mad. Another attention-catcher among the visitors was an Indian
from the Great Plains who had a painted picture of a buffalo on his bare
chest.
Coronado considered the newcomers a peace delegation. He gave them glass
trinkets, beads, and little bells that entranced them. They responded
with head dresses, shields, and a wooly hide that, they signified, had
been taken from an animal like the one pictured on the chest of one of
their number. As the concept became clearer, pulses jumped, for here was
a firm tie-in with Cabeza de Vaca’s story about the huge “cows” of the
new land and of multistoried cities nearby.
Eager to learn more, Coronado prevailed on the amiable group to lead a
party of his own men eastward to see Cicuyé and its surrounding lands—24
riders, four crossbowmen, Fray Juan de Padilla, and a lay brother, Luís
de Ubeda. In high spirits they struck off through a malpais of
congealed, jumbled, sharp-edged boulders of black lava that made the
riders dismount and lead their suffering animals. This short-cut brought
them to the amazing town of Acucu (today’s Acoma), perched on the summit
of a butte approachable (as far as the Spaniards saw) only by a stairway
carved into the pink sandstone. After an uneasy confrontation at the
base of the cliffs, the Indians of Acucu invited them to climb arduously
to the top, where they were heaped with presents of hides, cotton cloth,
turkeys and other foods.
[Illustration: The immense headland of El Morro, also known as
Inscription Rock, was a landmark for western travelers. Lured by the
shaded pool at the base, they camped nearby and often left a record
of their passage in the rock’s soft sandstone face. The party that
Coronado dispatched to Acoma in August 1540 passed well south of the
mesa and probably never saw it. The main army that ascended the Zuñi
Valley several months later may have stopped at El Morro, but if so,
they left no inscriptions. The headland is now the centerpiece of El
Morro National Monument.]