CORONADO

Coronado reached what Fray Marcos identified as Cibola on July 7, 1540 and on that day took the first city, the pueblo of Hawikuh, which is at the north end of the golden trail. A peaceful conclusion would have been a miracle considering the two parties’ perspectives:

The Cibolans

• knew they weren’t living in an altogether peaceful world. They already had enemies: other Indians.

• They had already met the black Esteban carrying an enemy’s gourd rattle and incomprehensibly claiming to be a front man for white men. Maybe killing him hadn’t been so clever, because now

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

• They listened to the Requerimiento’s offer they could not refuse through an interpretor, such that they could understand it as much as they could understand anything so incredibly shocking.

The Spanish

• 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, 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.

• Because of failure to make contact with Alarcon’s supply ships, the troops were 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 altogether we did not have two bushels of corn [left].

There came a moment when even Frey Marcos de Nizza, (Indian sympathizer extraordinaire) gave Coronado his approval to storm the city after peaceful protestations were rebuffed. (At an earlier point in his career, Marcos de Nizza had provided the eye-witness account of the Spanish-Inca encounter in Peru that provided material for Bartolome de las Casas’ polemical pamphlets on the destruction of the Indies).