CORONADO

Some people think I’m nuts to be doing this Coronado thing when I could just stay in Wichita flipping houses, fixing ‘em up, making the kind of dough there’s just no way to make working the fields like what got my family going here. But one day, I was in Lyons to show a client a farm, and I stopped in this kind of quaint place called the Coronado Quivira Museum. I had no idea what it was about, but if you know your history, the name says it all. Because the Quiviran Indians living in the area, and Coronado, well, I’ve told you about Coronado already. And I spent the rest of the day there. Fascinated. And later, I came across this book by Stewart Udall, and what he said helped me understand how I got so drawn in. He called the place “... the best Coronado museum in the Southwest”, and he must have known what he was talking about because he’d been Secretary of the Interior under two presidents anyway. This gives you an idea:

Stewart L. Udall, Jerry D. Jacka, To the inland empire : Coronado and our Spanish legacy, (Garden City: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 169-170:

Interest in Don Francisco and [the Quivira] Indians began in Lyons in the 1920s, when two country newspapermen, Horace and Paul Jones, envisioned a link between the Indian artifacts Rice County farmers were unearthing and the half-forgotten story of the trek of Vazquez de Coronado to America’s inland empire. . .

The enthusiasm of these two men triggered . . . . a series of initial “digs” carried out over several decades under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian’s digger-in-chief was a Kansas farm boy, Waldo R. Wedel, who became the authority on Quiviran culture. By collating and dating a trove of [sixteenth-century] artifacts (including imported Pueblo Indian pottery), Dr. Wedel assembled conclusive proof that Rice County was the center of a sixteenth-century Quiviran civilization, which later disappeared.

Since the 1920s, no community in the Southwest has shown greater interest in Coronado’s saga than Lyons, the seat of Rice County. . .They have dramatized the import of fragments of sixteenth-century Spanish chain-mail armor found in Kansas fields. . . With uncommon pride, the townfolk of Lyons have burnished our Spanish legacy and kept the flames of memory flickering around the Spanish pioneers who discovered their area.

So there you are. And I think if the rest of the country celebrates the Fourth of July, maybe they ought to hear about Coronado who was scouting the area before the so-called pioneers had even heard of it. Everybody goes to the Grand Canyon once anyway, so do it there.

AURA

And while they’re there, you could also mention something else I read in that book. Yeah. I got it after you told us about it. So here’s a one liner from that book that might even get Sine curious:

p. 170:

. . . Local history buffs have helped Dr. Wedel demonstrate that the “council circles” arranged by the Quivirans were probably solstice registers. . . . And they are now supporting a promising new line of research . . . interpreting a serpentine intaglio construct recently uncovered near the council circles.” - So, while you’re at it, don’t forget about the Indians.

CORONADO

That was back in the late ‘80s. But they apparently got other people curious, too, since in late 2018, Donald Blakeslee of Wichita State had his archeology students looking under Arkansas City for Quivira. They think 20,000 people lived there, versus the 10,000 or so Arkansas City has now. That’s an hour south of Wichita, and the museum is about an hour north.

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