Cities of Gold by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Published: 2016-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

But could he continue? Provisions were running short, most of all their water. In May, they had started out from New Mexico worried about rivers too swollen to cross. Two months later, the streams on which they depended for fresh water were shriveling up in the heat of the summer. More often than not, spotting what looked like a stream yielded only the disappointment of a dry wash. The corn they had brought from New Mexico was almost gone, and so too was the supply of meat that had once seemed endless. The buffalo, upon which they had depended for a fresh supply of meat, had also reacted to the heat and the lack of water. The great herds had migrated away from the southern Plains. Where once there was nothing “but cows and the sky,” there was now nothing but the wrathful, hailstorm sky.

The distances were seemingly infinite, and progress was slow, especially when they were compelled to search for waylaid hunters from the group, who lost their way searching for game. If he was to find any sort of resolution to the question of Quivira, Coronado knew that he had to speed up the pace. The only way to do that, he decided, was to separate the fastest parts of the expedition from the slowest.

Joining his officers for a council, they all agreed. Coronado would press on with thirty horsemen, half a dozen foot soldiers, and some Tejas guides, and head northeast. Meanwhile, Tristan de Arellano would turn back to Tiwa with the remainder of the army. The place where the two contingents of conquistadors parted is unknown, but it was probably somewhere in the Texas panhandle east of present-day Amarillo.

Castañeda reports that “when the men in the army learned of this decision, they begged their general not to leave them to conduct the further search, but declared that they all wanted to die with him and did not want to go back.” This had to have warmed the old conquistador's heart, but the decision had been made.

Both Ysopete and the Turk would accompany Coronado, but Castañeda notes that from this point, the discredited Turk was “taken along in chains.”

Heading north, Coronado and his men crossed an endless undulation of canyons, ravines, and dry creek beds. They marveled at the vast profusion of prairie dog towns, something they could never have imagined. They passed the occasional river, flowing with the water they now greatly prized. They crossed the Canadian River (which appears on early Spanish maps as the Magdalena), passed through what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, and rode into modern Kansas.

On the Feast Day of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29) the expedition reached the “river below Quivira,” which is thought to have been the Arkansas River, at a place somewhere east of present-day Dodge City. The date is according to Castañeda. Others have calculated different dates; Adolph Bandelier mentions August 21. From here, their Tejas guides took them in a northeasterly direction, following the river for about a week.

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