#51 The Rediscovery of New Mexico and the Last Conquistadors 1580 – 1610

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is 1580. Virtually no Spaniards have returned to New Mexico or the American southwest since the return of the remnants of the Coronado and Soto expeditions in 1542. Neither had found a third great indigenous civilization to conquer, or even more than scant evidence of precious metals. By 1580 most of the survivors of those expeditions had died, and the narratives produced in their aftermath would have been known to very few people. The most durable legacy of those expeditions would have been the rumors of gold, which always persist long after the actual facts are gone from living memory. So it was that circa 1580 various aspirational conquistadors set to scheming for a return to the region that some were now dreaming of as “New Mexico.” These new Spanish probes into the American southwest were minor affairs and of relatively little consequence, except insofar as they stirred up the Indians living in the Pueblos of the region and generated a new round of propaganda that would lead to the colonization project of Juan de Oñate y Salazar in 1598. That would be of surpassing significance, for Oñate would stay for twelve years, kill a lot of Indians, found Santa Fe just before he departed, and establish the foundation of Spanish society in the southwestern United States.

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Selected references for this episode

George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580-1594 (Coronado cuarto centennial publications, 1540-1940)

Stan Hoig, Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oña te

John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico

J. Lloyd Mecham, “Antonio de Es pejo and His Journey to New Mexico”, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1926

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 51.
0:10.9	I am your host, Jack Henneman, and I'm recording this episode on December 17th, 2021, in Austin, Texas.
0:19.8	If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism.
0:28.7	If you like what you hear, please consider giving us a robust rating in your podcast app of choice or writing a review on Apple.
0:40.4	This is a laborer of love and your feedback is very motivating. We are firmly back on the timeline after a couple of sidebars in the
0:48.2	concluding episode on Novo, Albion, and Drake's legacy. Yes, that episode was, as some have pointed out, a bit esoteric.
0:57.5	That will happen occasionally since, well, I am following my muse, and occasionally my muse gets
1:03.9	very esoteric. For those of you who have not heard it, or bailed before the end, episode 50 told of historians
1:13.7	doing bad things in the service of defending a particular narrative, a rather unethical
1:20.4	version of weaponizing history. We discussed Melissa Darby's well-argued hypothesis that Herbert E. Bolton, chairman of the History Department at the University of California at Berkeley, had been the instigator of one of history's great frauds, the faking of the plate of brass that Drake used to mark the location of Novo Albion somewhere on the
1:46.2	Pacific coast of today's United States.
1:50.0	Bolton's scheme to cement California's claim to Drake's Fair and Good Bay.
1:56.4	Along the way, we talked about one of Bolton's protégés, George P. Hammond, and Darby's discovery that he was
2:03.2	probably the architect of another famous historical fraud, the so-called Darestone, supposedly
2:10.3	carved by Virginia Dare's mother years after the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. Both Bolton and Hammond ended up as president of the
2:20.8	American Historical Association back in the day, which is holding its 2022 annual meeting on
2:27.2	January 6th to 9th in New Orleans. I will be attending that meeting. Actually, I'll be in New Orleans,
2:33.4	even if they cancel that meeting
2:35.0	because of the COVID. So if you are going to be in the Crescent City during that stretch and want to get
2:40.8	together, please get in touch via email at the History of the Americans at gmail.com or via the contact
2:48.4	page on the website, the History of the Americans.com.
2:53.5	Now, just because Bolton and Hammond may have committed frauds does not mean that they weren't
	...

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