CORONADO

Indian traders covered vast distances. We can thank the thirst for wealth for getting one account of this activity into the history books:

Pedro de Castañeda, “Relación de la jornada de Cíbola … ,” Nacera, ~1562, trans. George Parker Winship, The Coronado Expedition 1540-1542, (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896), pp. 472-3:

"In the year 1530 Nuño de Guzman, who was President of New Spain, had in his possession an Indian … who was called Tejo by the Spaniards. This Indian said he was the son of a trader who was dead, but that when he was a little boy his father had gone into the back country with fine feathers to trade for ornaments, and that when he came back he brought a large amount of gold and silver …. He went with him once or twice, and saw … seven very large towns which had streets of silver workers. It took forty days to go there from his country, through a wilderness in which nothing grew, except some very small plants about a span high. The way they went was up through the country between the two seas, following the northerly direction. [Nuño de Guzman] thought, from the forty days of which the Tejo Nuño had spoken, that it would be found to be about 200 leagues..." GET E BOOK

(Incidentally, and not unexpectedly, Nuño de Guzman set out in hot pursuit of the rumored villages, though his expedition of 400 Spaniards and 20,000 friendly Indians wasn’t as prepared for the task as Coronado’s later foray.)

That the American Indian got around is clear also from Coronado’s post-Hawikuh triumph (August 3, 1540) letter to Viceroy Mendoza that the elderly chiefs of Cibola.

Winship, p. 561:

"…declare that it was foretold among them more than fifty years ago that a people such as we are should come, and the direction they should come from, and that the whole country would be conquered." GET E BOOK

It does not take a great leap of imagination to believe that traders from Mexico City or even from the Caribbean islands might have brought news of what started happening as soon as Columbus arrived in 1492. The news the Cibolans heard may even have come from Tejo’s father.

With words come breath:

Herman J. Viola, Carolyn Margolis, eds., Seeds of change: a quincentennial commemoration, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 86:

[The smallpox that Columbus’ crew brought to San Salvador was the beginning of] America’s first recorded pandemic [and] spread far beyond the Antilles and Mexico. It rolled ahead of the Europeans.

Viola, p. 193:

In many regions by the time the first white man actually appeared his biological accoutrements had devastated the Indian populations by more than 75 percent. Entire tribes became extinct, and the surviving tribal remnants were critically weakened.

Viola, pp. 86-89:

"The people whom Pizarro conquered in Peru were the survivors of one of the worst periods of their history.

"To the north of Mexico …a decade after the fall of the Inca empire [when] …Hernando de Soto led an expedition on a long maraud through what is now the southeastern part of the United States, he found evidence of the passage of epidemic disease. In Cofachiqui, somewhere in present-day Georgia, he came upon recently emptied villages and large funereal houses filled with the drying cadavers of people who had perished in an epidemic. What he saw in Georgia may have, should have, reminded him of what he had seen in Peru.

About fifty epidemics swept through the Valley of Mexico between 1519 and 1810. Peru underwent twenty between the arrival of the Spaniards and 1720, Brazil perhaps forty of smallpox alone between 1560 and 1840.

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Of course smallpox was just one import to the Americas. In the 500 years since first contact, many things have arrived in the Americas, some good, some bad, ranging from wheat and peach trees to Dutch elm disease and AIDS.