CORONADO

A peaceful conclusion would have been a miracle considering how the Spanish saw things:

• Coronado’s troops believed they were marching towards a prize they meant to have, just as others had already done in Mexico and Peru under Cortes and Pizzaro.

• Among Coronado’s troops were such as Cortes veteran Hernando de Alvarado (first to reach the Buffalo plains and the Rio Grande (Tiguex)), and Alfonso Manrique de Lara, veteran of Pizzaro’s Peruvian campaign that took the Incan spoils. Cortes himself would have been there if he’d been allowed.

• They read the Requerimiento’s offer the Cibolans could not refuse through an interpretor, such that the Cibolans could understand it as much as they could understand anything so incredible.

• Because of failure to make contact with Alarcon’s supply ships, the troops were hungry and desperate for food by the time they approached Hawikuh,

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, “… al Signor Antonio de Mendoza …,” trans. George Parker Winship, The Coronado Expedition 1540-1542, (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896), p. 556:

… since [as Coronado said,] altogether we did not have two bushels of corn [left].

A peaceful conclusion also would have been a miracle considering how the Cibolans saw things:

• They already had enemies: other Indians.

• They had already met the black Esteban carrying an enemy’s gourd rattle and incomprehensibly claiming to be the front man for white Christians.

• They had on their doorstep a force of approximately a hundred white men, eighty of them on horseback, (the rest, approximating 900 (including the Indians), were in Culiacan waiting to come along later.)

There came a moment when even the priest Frey Marcos de Nizza gave Coronado his approval to storm the city after peaceful protestations were rebuffed. And Frey Marcos was not into war: Although he’s the one whose reconnaissance reports led to Coronado’s expedition, he’s also the one whose sympathetic eye-witness account of what happened to the Inca in Peru provided the material for Bartolome de las Casas’ polemical pamphlets on the destruction of the Indies).

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