CORONADO

That’s the question: How do you tell somebody you’ve got to have what they’ve got in a way they can sympathize with. I want to meet the salesman who can make that happen!

The story Fray Marcos brought to Viceroy Mendoza from his ill-fated journey to Cibola was that there was - must be - something there worth having, and that apparently the Cibolans were not above killing anyone who might come close.

While the Coronado expedition was mustering at Compostela, Mendoza sent a reconnaissance mission of fifteen horsemen under Melchoir Díaz to verify Friar Marcos’ story. Diáz reported to Mendoza what he learned from Indians he met along the way before winter stopped him short of Cibola itself, and Mendoza’s letter to the King quotes at length from the letter Diáz dispatched to Mendoza:

Antonio de Mendoza, “… al emperador …,” [Jacona, April 17, 1540], trans. George Parker Winship, The Coronado Expedition 1540-1542, (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896), p. 551:

The death of Esteban the negro took place in the way the father, Friar Marcos, described it to your lordship, and so I do not make a report of it here, except that the people at Cibóla sent word to those of this village and in its neighborhood that if any Christians should come, they ought not to consider them as anything peculiar, and ought to kill them, because they were mortal - saying that they had learned this because they kept the bones of the one who had come there: and that, if they did not dare to do this, they should send word so that those (at Cibóla) could come and do it.

So Coronado knew he was marching into a possibly hazardous situation, but he also had the King’s instructions to be fair to the natives and attempt to win them over with trade and being friendly.

Coronado meant to negotiate. Before the massed armies met, he sent out a small group to reconnoiter. Cardenas, heading this group, encountered a group of four Cibolans with the same purpose, and with sign language told them the Spanish had come in peace, and he gave them small gifts which they accepted. The Cibolans promised food for the troops. Cardenas held two of them hostage until Coronado’s arrival, and Coronado was pleasant to them and gave additional gifts.

The next day, Coronado and his group came across another small group of Cibolans and explained through interpretors that they had come to bring them within the dominion of the Spanish King, and that if they submitted peacefully, they would not be harmed. Though Coronado would have preferred a peaceful encounter, his threat and his holding the two hostages, he made a peaceful encounter less likely. I’d like to think I could have made it happen, but . . . I wasn’t on the scene then.

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