CORONADO

My hat, my helmet, whatever, is off to Stewart Udall. I mean, here’s a white guy who rose to the top of the U.S. as Secretary of the Interior, and what’s he do after that? He could have done anything. Or nothing. And what’s he do? He gets so deep into the history of the southwest he writes a book about it and the Spanish that made it happen. Thank you, Mr. Udall, for getting this into print. And with complete honesty, even admitting even he doesn’t know exactly what happened. - For most people, history would seem simple enough: You just report what happened, and you’re done. And if you’re there in real time, like Coronado was, you would think you would know what was going on at least. You can see yourself easily enough, and the landscape you’re in. But: What if you don’t even know where you are?

“The Texas Route Mysteries” is the title previous Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall gave to the section in his book dealing with the question of how far south the Turk was able to lead Coronado and company before Coronado felt like he was on a wild goose chase that he might not even survive. This pin on the map is located at what Udall concludes is suggested by the most persuasive argument. In this scenario, both the initial camp (made when Coronado had had enough) and the second camp (made to prepare for the parting of the ways of the bulk of the expedition from Coronado’s small exploratory band) were not very far apart. This location would make more sense (than Bolton’s proposed barrancas), given Coronado’s statement that his small band proceeded north “by the needle”. Because this location would allow the yellow line to skip dealing with the very long northwest-southeast canyon of which Tule and Palo Duro Canyons are a part, and just go straight north from near San Angelo, Texas, to connect with the Arkansas River at its big bend (instead of at present-day Ford, Kansas). It would also make more sense of present-day place names that Bolton cites as the route of Arellano’s return to Tiguex. (Bolton’s place names start considerably farther south than the blue line on the map, and I had to ignore some of the more southerly ones in order to plot the “blues” line as heading west directly from Tule Canyon, which is something else Bolton proposed. In fact I found Bolton’s call for Arellano’s return to commence going west from Tule Canyon to be inconsistent with his call for it to pass by various more southerly place names he designates as also marking Arellano’s route) One other problem I had with Bolton’s routing was the inconsistency in Bolton’s book in which he says Arellano headed back west to Tiguex directly from Tule Canyon, when he also states that Tule Canyon was the “first barranca.” This is inconsistent with his also saying that Arellano headed back from the “second barranca”, which Bolton places at Palo Duro Canyon (farther north than Tule Canyon).

If in fact Coronado went so far as the San Angelo area, the red line on the map ought to be an even deeper shade of red, to reflect an even greater degree of embarrassment and anger at having been led so far astray. But the shade of red belongs to a time that is long gone. At this point, the one thing we can be sure of is that it’s all the same to Coronado now.

So now I quote from a pretty interesting book called “To the inland empire: Coronado and our Spanish legacy”:

Stewart L. Udall, Jerry D. Jacka, To the inland empire: Coronado and our Spanish legacy, (Garden City: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 152 – 165:

"Since the 1920s, there has been a dispute in Texas about the location of Coronado's trails. In West Texas, Don Francisco and his companions described so few memorable landmarks that Dr. Bolton - and other Coronado aficionados -reached sharply conflicting conclusions about where, or how far, the conquistadores traveled in the Lone Star State.

"When the captain general wrote that he systematically sent ' ... captains and men in many directions to find out whether there was anything in this country which could be of service to your Majesty', he gave us reasons to use a wide-angle approach as we attempt to plot his travels on our maps. In my view, if Professor Bolton erred about the West Texas routes, it was because he apparently felt compelled to be decisive even though the reports cried out that the Spaniards were lost or bewildered.

"Dr. Bolton relied mainly on descriptions of distances traveled and prominent landmarks. This method worked well in tracing the routes from Compostela to the Rio Grande, so it must have seemed reasonable to him to use the same technique on the plains.

"Bolton asserted that from a bridge the Spaniards built over the Pecos River at Anton Chico, Don Francisco went north of Tucumcari to the Canadian River, where his force met the Querecho Indians. He next pronounced that the Spaniards ascended the Llano where today's Interstate Highway 40 climbs onto that mesa and thereafter marched toward Amarillo to a camp in the vicinity of Vega, Texas.

"The paramount reason why there is still a splendid trail mystery in West Texas in the 1980s is that the explorers lost their way for three weeks, victims of the famous "blinding effect" of the Llano Estacado. Coronado referred to an interval '. . . while we were lost on these plains' - and the silence and vagueness in this section of the chronicles suggests that all of the Spaniards were disoriented.

"In his book, Bolton first acknowledges the existence of this gap by admitting '. . . [ they] wandered for many days over the trackless plains going generally southeastward.' Then, with sudden strokes, we learn he is "certain" that Tule Canyon was the First Barranca, that Palo Duro Canyon was the Second Barranca, and that the Spaniards never left the Llano Estacado while they were in present-day Texas. Although it is probably a sound surmise that Coronado and his crew discovered the Palo Duro Canyon [now the most scenic state park in Texas] and explored in and around Tule Canyon - there is convincing evidence that the conquistadores did leave the Llano and did journey much farther south than Bolton suspected.

"As a trail guide, Dr. Bolton has a springy step and takes his Spaniards to their destinations with military precision. He informs us, for example, that Coronado and his Quivira-bound horsemen, . . ascended the Texas Panhandle west of the 100th meridian ... and continued with a slight eastward swing through southern Kansas to the Arkansas River.

"And with equal dispatch, he states that Indian guides led Arellano and his army 'almost due west' up the South Tule River between Plainview and Tulia, on to Blackwater Draw, near Muleshoe, up New Mexico's Portales Valley, down the palisades of the Llano Estacado to a spring at Taiban, and thence to the Pecos River near old Fort Sumner". . . below the bridge that had been built on the outward journey.

"Texas students of Coronado's journeys began printing their own findings even before Herbert Bolton finished Coronado, Knight of Pueblos and Plains. In 1944, W. C. Holden, a Texas historian, reviewed the chronicles, walked or rode over the same ground Herbert Bolton had traversed, and rejected Bolton's conclusion that Coronado left the Pecos and marched directly to the Canadian River. It was Dr. Holden's judgment that the conquistadores hugged the Pecos to Santa Rosa, then turned east and climbed onto the Llano on a "middle crossing" Indian trail that took them down Frio Draw. That assumption caused him to conclude that Coronado met the Querecho Indians not on the Canadian, but at the confluence of the Frio and Tierra Blanca creeks, east of Hereford, Texas.

"The noted petroleum geologist E. DeGolyer was the next Texan to tackle the Coronado conundrum. He was the first to suggest that Coronado not only traveled much farther south but actually rode off the Llano before he turned about on his quest for Quivira. DeColyer located the First Barranca a few miles southeast of Lubbock in Yellowhouse Canyon and fixed the site of the Second Barranca north of that locale in the 'breaks' somewhere east of the Caprock promontories of the Llano Estacado.

It was, however, an imaginative Wichita Falls high school instructor who raised the most serious questions about the Bolton scenario. This self-styled trail detective was J. W. Williams. He developed elegant horticultural insights to support a theory that Don Francisco not only left the Cap rock, but toured far to the south before he became aware he was being led in 'the wrong direction.'

"Williams was an amateur botanist, and his outdoor intuition told him the flora of the land - the pecan trees, plums, and wild grapes described by the Spaniards - might supply markers that would fix the southern terminus of the march and resolve "the Coronado tangle." He solved his "case" by studying the history of the native trees of West Texas and by compiling expert knowledge about the ripening cycles of wild grapes and plums in this region.

"As a botanical Sherlock Holmes, Williams first ascertained that there were no wild pecan trees in or near the Llano Estacado. He then conducted an analysis that demonstrated that the westernmost county in West Texas with large groves of pecan trees (i.e., the one closest to New Mexico's reach of the Pecos River) was Sterling County, just north of San Angelo. Williams next 'drove a nail into a map' to tie the Spaniards to the ravine where he presumed they ended their southerly wanderings.

"To support his pecan thesis, J. W. Williams assembled an array of horticultural evidence demonstrating that only near the latitude of Sterling County would one find wild grapes (probably of the mustang variety) 'beginning to ripen' in June as Coronado and his men roamed about in West Texas. Here, he felt, was evidence offered by nature which, like a porcupine, would be difficult to deal with.

"Since this modest high school teacher first published his findings, twenty-five years ago, no one has disputed the conclusions he developed while he was sleuthing in the bushes, although his site on the North Concho tributary of the Colorado River is more comparable to an arroyo or a valle than a barranca. Yet if Williams' evidence is irrefutable, it is obvious that he knocked Herbert Bolton's Texas trail thesis into a ten-gallon hat: he disqualified Tule and Palo Duro canyons as the two historic barrancas; he established that the Spaniards were not only led off the Llano but actually entered the valley of the North Concho River (a tributary of Cabeza de Vaca's 'river of nuts') and intersected the path followed by De Vaca six years earlier. And, finally, Williams' finding explained what Castaneda meant when he wrote about'. . . the great detour they had made toward Florida.'

"To tie up his loose ends, J. W. Williams then proceeded to plot a trail he presumed the expedition followed on its way back to New Mexico. Relying on landmarks, he concluded that Arellano's Indian guides had him backtrack north to the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, up that stream past Lubbock to the area where Yellowhouse Canyon tapers into a plains draw, and then back to the Pecos River via the Portales Valley, Taiban Spring, and Fort Sumner.

"Williams made an obvious mistake at the conclusion of his paper when he undertook the task of locating the First Barranca. The chronicles are clear that the two barrancas were a few miles apart in the same botanical belt. Yet this energetic schoolman turned his back on the floral proofs he had gathered and announced that the First Barranca was Quitaque Canyon, a scenic jewel just south of Texas' Caprock Canyons State Park. This choice was odd, because Quitaque is two hundred miles north of San Angelo, out of the pecan orchards, at a latitude where grapes do not ripen in the month of June.

"Building on the basic data provided by J. W. Williams, the next West Texan to tackle the Coronado thicket was R. M. Wagstaff, a prominent Abilene lawyer. Wagstaff regarded Williams' tree-and-shrub evidence as 'unanswerable,' but he was convinced the Wichita Falls teacher was wrong about Quitaque. Wagstaff adroitly used Williams' trees and bushes to prove that the North Concho ravine in Sterling County - not Quitaque Canyon - was the First Barranca.

"Solicitor Wagstaff's interest was piqued by facts Bolton and the others had largely overlooked. What caught the eye of this barrister-turned-detective was the flat declaration in two of the chronicles that when Coronado left the Second Barranca and set out for Quivira, he used a compass to march "north by the needle" to the point where the great bend of the Arkansas River begins in Kansas. Wagstaff reasoned that a hallowed rule of evidence sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court – and some commonsense calculations about the distance the conquistadores traveled in four summer days - would enable him to follow a line of longitude and locate the ravine the Spaniards described as the Second Barranca.

"In a famous boundary case in the early years of the republic, the U.S. Supreme Court held that where a 'known point' can be linked to a direction of the compass '. . . the dictate of common sense' is to 'reverse the calls' to locate an unknown point needed to establish a marker or a boundary line. Using this rule of law, Wagstaff drew a line due south from the town of Ford, Kansas, to a ravine on the Elm Fork of the Brazos River west of Buffalo Gap - in an area equidistant from the cities of Sweetwater and Abilene, Texas. With a legalistic flourish, he proclaimed this was the site of the Second Barranca.

"If one accepts the 'Wagstaff Line' as being logical - and also assumes that Coronado sent his riders '... out in all directions' - it follows that the 1541 conquistadores effectively explored a belt of land at least twenty-five miles wide on either side of the 100th meridian. This means, in turn, that a large number of unsuspecting communities in West Texas, Oklahoma, and southwestern Kansas were in the path of discovery trod by Coronado and his thirty companions.

Counselor Wagstaff made one final point before he rested his case. To prove the Spaniards explored the midsection of West Texas, he focused on passages in the Spanish chronicles that demonstrate that Don Francisco's route overlapped Cabeza de Vaca's. Castaneda wrote: '. . . Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes had passed this way.' Likewise, Jaramillo mentioned that at one of the barrancas '. . . there was an old blind man with a beard' who 'had seen four others like us many days before." To Wagstaff, these references demonstrated that the captain general reached the summer hunting ground of the Teyas Indians in the Colorado River uplands and was thus cogent evidence that both historic barrancas were in the Sterling-Abilene-Sweetwater triangle of West Texas.

To which I say: All this sounds as plausible as anything else, barring archaeological evidence. (Like, where are all the shards from the expedition’s dishes that got broken in the hailstorm at the barranca?) But, I wouldn’t pin too much on Coronado’s encounter with an “old blind man with a beard” who knew of Cabeza de Vaca’s passage through the area as proving his path intersected with Cabeza de Vaca’s. This was a good decade later, the old blind man might very well have died, and beards probably were not unique in the culture of the time. Might there not be more than one old bearded blind man who had at least heard the mind-boggling news that three white men with a black man were performing miraculous cures that were drawing Indians from miles around?

Sorry. Didn’t mean to bore you. You’re here for the Grand Canyon. But if you know Texas, it’s kind of interesting.

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