In the year 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado came up from Mexico with
some 350 Spanish soldiers and crossed southeastern Arizona to Zuñi, a
pueblo 30 miles west of El Morro. Breaking up into several groups, they
went eastward 70 miles to Acoma Pueblo and thence to the Rio Grande. At
least one of the groups probably passed El Morro enroute.
The first known historical mention of El Morro is found in the journal
of Diego Pérez de Luxán, chronicler of the Espejo expedition of 1583.
Luxán stopped here for water on March 11 of that year.
For some 300 years, hundreds of Spanish soldiers and priests, enroute
between Santa Fe and Zuñi, and the Hopi villages farther north, passed
El Morro. Many left names and notations about themselves carved into the
soft sandstone.
After 1849, American soldiers, emigrants, freighters, and adventurers
camped here because of the never-failing waterhole. In 1906, El Morro
was set aside as a National Monument and additional name carving was
prohibited.
The name “El Morro” simply means “the headland” or “the bluff,” and
refers to the appearance of this mesa-point from a distance.