Francisco Vasquez de Coronado

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado , c.1510-1554, Spanish explorer. He went to Mexico with Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and in 1538 was made governor of Nueva Galicia. The viceroy, dazzled by the report of Fray Marcos de Niza of the great wealth of the Seven Cities of Cibola to the north, organized an elaborate expedition to explore by sea (see Alarcón, Hernando de ) and by land. Coronado, made captain general, set out in 1540 from Compostela, crossed modern Sonora and SE Arizona, and reached Cibola itself—the Zuñi country of New Mexico. He found neither splendor nor wealth in the native pueblos. Nevertheless he sent out his lieutenants: Pedro de Tovar visited the Hopi villages in N Arizona, García López de Cárdenas discovered the Grand Canyon, and Hernando de Alvarado struck out eastward and visited Acoma and the pueblos of the Rio Grande and the Pecos. Alvarado came upon a Native American from a Plains tribe nicknamed the Turk, who told fanciful tales of the wealthy kingdom of Quivira to the east. Coronado, still hopeful, spent a winter on the Rio Grande not far from the modern Santa Fe, waged needless warfare with Native Americans, then set out in 1541 to find Quivira under the false guidance of the Turk. Just where the party went is not certain, but it is generally thought they journeyed in the Texas Panhandle, reached Palo Duro Canyon (near Canyon, Tex.), then turned N through Oklahoma and into Kansas. They reached Quivira, which turned out to be no more than indigenous villages (probably of the Wichita), innocently empty of gold, silver, and jewels. The Spanish turned back in disillusion and spent the winter of 1541-42 on the Rio Grande, then in 1542 left the northern country to go ingloriously back to Nueva Galicia and into the terrors of the Mixtón War . In 1544, Coronado was dismissed from his governorship and lived the rest of his life in peaceful obscurity in Mexico City. He had found no cities of gold, no El Dorado; yet his expedition had acquainted the Spanish with the Pueblo and had opened the Southwest. Subsidiary expeditions from Nueva Galicia to S Arizona and Lower California make the scope of Coronado's achievement even more astonishing.

Bibliography: See F. W. Hodge and T. H. Lewis, ed., Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, Vol. II (1907); A. G. Day, Coronado's Quest (1940, repr. 1964).

Coronado, Francisco Vázquez de (1510–1554), explorer.A minor noble from Salamanca, Spain, Coronado sought his fortune in Mexico at age twenty‐five, married Beatríz de Estrada within two years, and in 1538 became provincial governor of Nueva Galicia. Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, spurred by tales of marvelous realms to the north, commissioned him to locate the Seven Cities of Cíbola and take over their wealth. Coronado risked much of his wife's estate to help finance the expedition, which included approximately 350 Spaniards, 1,000 Amerindian “volunteers,” and 1,500 animals. Departing Culiacán on 22 April 1540, the reconnaissance party reached contemporary Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, revealing Cíbola as Zuñi pueblos and the fabulous Kingdom of Quivira as a Wichita village. Discouraged by the lack of gold, worried about maintaining the army, and debilitated by a head injury, Coronado ordered the force home in early spring 1542. Accounting the mission a failure, the Crown charged him with incompetence and mistreatment of native peoples, but the Audiencia of Mexico exonerated him. Removed from the governorship, he held municipal office in Mexico City, where he died.

Coronado's excursion forewarned the pueblo peoples about Spanish intentions to subjugate and convert them even as his unenthusiastic reports about the American Southwest soured New Spain's interest in the region for forty years. Coronado demonstrated the vast expanse of the North American landmass, information readily assimilated into sixteenth‐century maps, but his knowledge of the interior did not circulate widely, and cartographers remained ignorant of its details until the eighteenth century.
See also Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; Spanish Settlements in North America.

Bibliography

Herbert E. Bolton , Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains, 1949; reprint 1990.
George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds., Narratives of the Coronado Expedition 1540–1542, 1940.

Charles L. Cohen

Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de (1510–54) Spanish explorer. He went to Mexico in 1535, and in 1540 headed an expedition to locate the seven cities of Cibola, reportedly the repositories of untold wealth. He explored the w coast of Mexico, found the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, followed the route of the Rio Grande, and then headed n through the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma and e Kansas.