The entrada to Cíbola and Quivira

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado · 1540 CE – 1542 CE · Earth

The entrada to Cíbola and Quivira — Francisco Vázquez de Coronado · 1540 CE – 1542 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Take possession of the Seven Cities of Cíbola reported by Fray Marcos de Niza and find the wealth that was assumed to lie beyond them.

Historical context

Fray Marcos came back in 1539 with a description of a town larger than Mexico City, seen from a hilltop and never entered, and within a year Mendoza had raised the best-equipped expedition ever sent north from New Spain. Two-thirds of its people were indigenous allies, and the whole enterprise was financed on the assumption of loot. Two years later the army came home with maps in its head and nothing in its hands, and Spain lost interest in the north for forty years.

The voyage, step by step

  1. The muster at Compostela

    February 1540

    In February the viceroy reviews an army of fifteen hundred people and a thousand horses.

  2. San Gerónimo de los Corazones

    1540 CE

    A garrison town is planted in the Sonora valley to keep the road open behind the advance guard.

  3. Cíbola taken, July 1540

    July 1540

    The advance guard storms a town of some two hundred houses and finds maize instead of gold.

  4. Cárdenas at the great gorge

    1540 CE

    Twelve horsemen guided from the Hopi mesas stand on a rim above a river they cannot reach.

  5. The winter at Tiguex

    1541 CE

    A dozen Tiwa towns are emptied of food, blankets and houses, and the river country goes to war.

  6. The sea of grass

    1541 CE

    On the Llano Estacado the army walks for days without a landmark, among bison beyond counting.

  7. Quivira

    1541 CE

    Thirty horsemen reach the grass-lodge towns of the Wichita on the Arkansas and find no metal at all.

  8. The march home

    1542 CE

    At Pecos the army turns south for Mexico, leaving two friars behind who choose to stay.

Outcome

Found stone towns and grass lodges instead of gold, opened the Southwest and the southern plains to Spanish knowledge, and returned in 1542 with a third of the army lost and no treasure.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado

Governor of Nueva Galicia who led fifteen hundred people north in 1540 in search of the Seven Cities, found the Pueblo towns, the Grand Canyon and the grass lodges of Quivira, and came home with nothing.

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Sources

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