#23 The Coronado Entrada into the American Southwest Part 1
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2021
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We are now in late May 1539, almost exactly 482 years ago as I write this. Friar Marcos is alone with a bunch of Indios Amigos – literally, friendly Indians who had not been enslaved — somewhere in Arizona, possibly in the Salt River Valley east of modern Phoenix. He has just learned that his guide and advance man Esteban, has died rather gruesomely along with a bunch of his Indian escorts at the hands of the angry chief of Cibola, the “city” purported to be the gateway to the Seven Cities of Gold. By his own somewhat suspect account, Fray Marcos has a decision to make – does he soldier on to lay eyes on Cibola himself, knowing that if he dies his mission will have been a complete failure, insofar as there will be no European to report on the territory? Or does he head back to Culiacan, on the west coast of Mexico, where Coronado is waiting for him, and base his report on the tales told by Indians, either at Esteban’s direction or otherwise?
Selected references for this episode
Robert Goodwin, Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South
George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542
F. S. Dellenbaugh, “The True Route of Coronado’s March”
George J. Undreiner, “Fray Marcos de Niza and His Journey to Cibola”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 23. |
| 0:11.7 | I'm your host, Jack Henneman, and I'm telling the history of the people and places within the borders of today's United States, which I now think of as a version of vast early America, a scholarly |
| 0:23.3 | trend with its own hashtag. More about that, some other time. I'm recording this episode on May |
| 0:30.2 | 27, 2021, in New Orleans, Louisiana, maybe half a mile from where Luis de Masczo Alvarado passed with the remnants of the Soto |
| 0:40.8 | expedition down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico in July 1543. |
| 0:48.6 | Indeed, you can sometimes hear the whistles of the ships and the big river from our house, |
| 0:53.3 | and if you rubberneck at our bathroom window at exactly the right time, |
| 0:58.9 | you can see the tops of the biggest container ships moving along. |
| 1:03.0 | Muscoza never gets the credit for being the European discoverer of the site of New Orleans. |
| 1:08.9 | But he and the other survivors of the Soto expedition were almost certainly the first Europeans to see the future site of the Crescent City. |
| 1:17.1 | If Ponce de Leon gets credit for Florida, Muscoe, it seems to me, ought to get it for New Orleans. |
| 1:23.6 | At least, if one is super into arguing about credit to Conquadors, which I would definitely do with strangers and bars if there were other people to do it with. |
| 1:34.2 | We are all lonely in some way. |
| 1:37.6 | Anyway, pardon the digression. |
| 1:40.3 | You will recall from last time that we have rolled back the clock on our timeline to cover the Coronado and Trada into the American Southwest, which occurred at the same time as the Soto expedition in the southeast and south. |
| 1:54.1 | The powers that be in Mexico, Viceroy Mendoza and Bishop Zuma Raga had contended over whether that mission should be fundamentally military and |
| 2:03.0 | commercial or evangelical. The clergy was ascendant in Seville, so Spain's King Charles had ordered |
| 2:10.6 | Visehori Mendoza to support a clerical expedition under Bishop Zumaraga's sponsorship. |
| 2:17.4 | Zimuraga tapped an old and trustworthy friend, who I perhaps unfairly referred to in that last |
| 2:24.9 | episode as a drunken friar. We'll get to that, the brother Marcos Dinesa, to lead a mission |
| 2:32.1 | of conversion and reconnaissance. |
| 2:41.4 | His guide was to be the language-savvy healer of the Indians, Esteban, one of the four Narvaise survivors. |
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