CORONADO

The Mahaffie House rest stop on the Santa Fe Trail in Olathe, Kansas for the oh-so-weary pioneers traipsing across the continent to set up their little farms etc etc is NOT the reason Olathe should be on the map. If you’re looking for gut-wrenching, I say check out Prairie Center in Olathe when the grass is as high as an elephant’s eye, and imagine you are Coronado with all your men behind you and you are in Texas up to here with the stuff to where you can’t even see where you’re going. I will have to admit that the Indian [the Turk’s] tempting Coronado and his company into the vast flat grasslands of west Texas as a way of seeing them “get lost” was a stroke of genius. If they had not had naval technology (the compass) unknown to the Indians, the Indians’ plot might have worked.

A Franciscan with the expedition, writing to fellow clergy in New Spain, probably from Tiguex on the Rio Grande during the summer, fall, of 1541, described the experience.

“Relación…,” trans. George Parker Winship, The Coronado Expedition 1540-1542, (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896), p. 578:

. . . It was so dangerous to travel or to go away from the camp in these plains, that it is as if one was traveling on the sea, since the only roads are those of the cows [That’s what they called the buffalo bison.], and they are so level and have no mountain or prominent landmark, that if one went out of sight of it, he was lost, and in this way we lost one man, and others who went hunting wandered around two or three days lost . . . .

It is still possible to experience being lost in the native tall grasses of the midwest prairie if you go to the Prairie Center southwest of Kansas City to Olathe. Three hundred acres of native tall grass reach their full height of 12 feet each summer (but there are paths to keep you from getting lost). And here are a few links to keep you on track:

● Prairie Center - Intro, Hours, Directions, Contact

● 10 day weather forecast

Among the Fish

Other experiences Coronado and his men had on their excursion to Texas and Kansas were the plentitude of buffalo, and the Teyas and Querechos Indians who lived off the buffalo. Here’s what they said:

“Relación…,” pp. 576, 578:

". . . There is such a quantity of buffalo that I do not know what to compare them with, except with the fish in the sea, because on this journey, as also on that which the whole army afterward made when it was going to Quivira, there were so many that many times when we started to pass through the midst of them and wanted to go through to the other side of them, we were not able to, because the country was covered with them. The flesh of these is as good as that of Castile, and some said it was even better. . . .

. . .Two kinds of people travel around these plains with the cows [the buffalo again]; one is called Querechos and the others Teyas: they are very well built, and painted, and are enemies of each other. They have no other settlement or location than comes from traveling around with the cows. They kill all of these they wish, and tan the hides. . . . Make a note of that, would you, Aura.

One of Coronado’s soldiers wrote down his observations of the plains Indians also:

“Relación…,” p. 570:

. . . With the skins they make their houses, with the skins they clothe and shoe themselves, of the skins they make rope, and also of the wool; from the sinews they make thread, with which they sew their clothes and also their houses; from the bones they make awls; the dung serves them for wood, because there is nothing else in that country; the stomachs serve them for pitchers and vessels from which they drink; they live on the flesh; they sometimes eat it half roasted and warmed over the dung, at other times raw; seizing it with their fingers, they pull it out with one hand and with a flint knife in the other they cut off mouthfuls, and thus swallow it half chewed; they eat the fat raw, without warming it; they drink the blood just as it leaves the cows, and at other times after it has run out, cold and raw; they have no other means of livelihood.

“Relación…,” p. 578:

[The Franciscan adds] . . . the tents they make are like field tents, and they set them up over some poles they have made for this purpose, which come together and are tied at the top, and when they go from one place to another they carry them on some dogs they have, of which they have many, and they load them with the tents and poles and other things, for the country is so level, as I said, that they can make use of these, because they carry the poles dragging along on the ground. . . . Skins of deer and cows [are] left over. They exchange some cloaks with the natives of the river for corn.

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