USA > Kansas > A standard history of Kansas and Kansans, Volume I > Part 8
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At that time Florida embraced all that part of North America, along the Atlantic seaboard and bordering on the Gulf of Mexico to the Rio Grande, which river was then called Rio de Palmas by the Spaniards. Narvaez made preparations for the immediate conquest of Florida. He sailed from Spain on the 17th of June, 1527. ITis course carried him to Cuba, where he overhauled his fleet, to which he added a vessel to replace one lost on the voyage. He then set sail for the Texas coast, but on the 15th of April he landed at Apalache Bay, having been driven from his course by a storm and the force of heavy eurrents. Supposing that he was not far distant from the point for which he was bound, he sent one ship back for recruits and directed the others to sail along the coast to Panuco, near the mouth of the Rio Grande.
The foree of Narvaez consisted of three hundred men; and he had fifty horses. On the 18th of April he began his mareh through the
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forests and over the quagmires of Florida. His course was north, but he soon turned toward the west. The natives became hostile. At a large river, reached on the 15th of May, he rested, while Cabeza de Vaca, the royal treasurer of the expedition, went with a small party down to the sea to find the ships. Not a sail was to be seen along the coast solitudes. and upon the return of the party the march was continued. Another large river was encountered, and this Narvaez descended to the sea. No ships were there to greet him.
The Spaniards were discouraged. No gold had been found, and no cities for sack and plunder had appeared. They had seen only naked savages living in cane huts and in poverty. They determined to build boats in which to quit those inhospitable shores, and to keep the sea to the westward. Late in 1528, a forge was set up, and such metal as their equipment afforded was made into tools and nails. With these, five boats were constructed. They were furnished with rigging from ropes made of the long hair saved from the manes and tails of their horses. Sails were provided from their clothing and the hides of their horses. Each boat was capable of carrying forty-five men, none of whom knew much of nav- igation. They hugged the shore and drew westward, and about the first of November they came into the mouth of a great river whose mighty vol- ume bore them far into the Gulf of Mexico. There two of the boats were lost, one of which was that of Narvaez, while the other carried the friars of the expedition. A great storm threw the remaining boats upon the shore beyond the Sabine in the winter of 1528-29.
How many survivors of the expedition suffered this shipwreck we do not know. Four finally reached the Spanish settlements. They were rescued on the coast of the Gulf of California in April, 1536. They had wandered in the wilds of Texas and the deserts and mountains of Northern Mexico, as we know those regions, for more than seven years. The leader of the band was Cabeza de Vaca, and the others were Maldo- nado, Dorantes, and a negro slave named Estevan. The route passed over by these wanderers can not now be established. How they had escaped and managed to survive they did not themselves know. They had been enslaved by savage tribes, had seen and hunted the buffalo, had acted as medicine men, had risen to influence, and had escaped from one tribe only to suffer the same routine of disaster in another. Cabeza de Vaca went on to Spain, but the others remained in Mexico. The stories of their adventures did not excite great interest, or, rather, was over- shadowed by those drifting in from Pern. They were for some time the guests of the Viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza, who bought the negro from his master, Dorantes. Cabeza de Vaca had been given a hawk's bell, made of copper, on which was cast or carved the figure of a human face. He related some accounts of the land to the north, which caused the people to believe rich countries might be found there. And these recalled, revived, and confirmed the stories told by the trader's son, the Indian Tejo.
In the revival of the myths of "The Seven Cities" it was said that other parties from the Spanish settlements had visited the rich countries
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of the North, especially after the return of the shipwrecked wanderers. Of what they saw there, of what they reported, we are not certain. But there was a growing desire to know what those hidden regions held. Men- doza determined to find out. He sent forth an expedition commanded by Friar Marcos de Niza, who is said to have made a prior journey into that land on his own account. He had came into Mexico from Peru, where he had gone with Pizarro, and where he had witnessed the murder of Atahualpa.
The negro Estevan was the guide of the expedition led by Friar Marcos to discover "The Seven Cities." He was well fitted for that service, for he had doubtless been near that country with Cabeza de Vaca. Approaching the borders of that land, he was directed to go on before, and to report to the friar upon his discoveries. If what he found was favorable, he was to send back a white cross as large as the palm of the hand, and if the country was better than Mexico, he was to send a larger eross. He penetrated to the Seven Cities, to which he Inred the friar by sending back immense crosses. But before the arrival of Friar Marcos, the negro was killed by the Indians because of his rapacity and his lascivious conduct. He collected a quantity of turquois and demanded that women be given to him at every village.
The party, upon the death of Estevan, desired to return at once to Mexico, but Friar Marcos persisted until he dared go no farther. Then he prevailed on two chiefs to take him into a mountain, from the top of which he was able to see one of the cities of Cibola. It was set upon a hill and glittered in the desert sun. He was told that there were other cities beyond, where the people wore clothes of cotton and had much gold.
Friar Marcos returned, arriving at the Mexican settlements in August, 1539. He is said to have made what was in effect two reports- one stating what he had himself seen, and one setting out what the Indians had told him. But the people did not discriminate. It was soon spread abroad that the good friar had reported as facts all the things spoken by him. It came to be of common report that the houses of the Seven Cities were four stories high, with doors faced with pre- cious stones. The Spanish population of New Spain were eager to go there. The principal men of the provinces, and even those in Spain, became rivals for the royal permission to explore and settle the coun- try of Cibola. This privilege went finally to Mendoza, the viceroy, who selected the post of Compostela, on the Pacific, as the point of assembly. He appointed as commander of the expedition Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.
The force allowed Coronado consisted of about two hundred and sixty horsemen, seventy footmen, and a motley throng of Indians vari- ously estimated at from three hundred to one thousand. This army of conquest started from Compostela on Monday, February 23, 1540, and followed the common highway to San Miguel de Culican. This march occupied about a month. The army left Culican on the 22d of April, and its general direction was northeast. Coronado, with a select com-
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pany, went on in advance. The route led them into that land embraced in Eastern Arizona, as we know the country. The Indians were alarmed at the approach of so large a force of strangers, and gave battle. They were defeated, and the Spaniards took possession of the Zuni villages on the 7th day of July, 1540. How different the reality from the golden stories which had stirred New Spain! The Seven Cities were the filthy, unlighted, unventilated, gloomy pueblos to be seen to this day on the Zuni and Moki Indian reservations in Arizona.
And so was the mystery of the Seven Cities solved, to the dismay of Friar Marcos, who stood with his countrymen in the midst of the rude mud-and-stone communal dwellings of the squalid desert tribes.
Coronado sent out detachments to explore the regions round about. One of these was commanded by Don Hernando de Alvarado, and started eastward on the 29th of August. This was in consequence of the appearance before Coronado of a chief from the province of Cieuye, said to be seventy leagues east of Cibola. The chief came, he said, in response to the invitation made generally to the Indians to come before the commandant as friends. The Spaniards called this chief Bigotes, that is, Whiskers, for he wore a long mustache. He brought presents, and he invited Coronado to pass through his eoun- try, should he desire to do so. Among the presents borne by Whiskers to the Spanish commander was the skin of a buffalo. It had the hair still on it, and this hair was a sore puzzle to the Spaniards. They could not understand how a "cow" could have such hair.
Whiskers became the guide of the expedition sent out under Alva- rado, who reached the village of Tiguex on a river which the Indians called by the same name, on the 7th of September. This river was the Rio Grande, and Alvarado reported to Coronado that there were eighty villages scattered along its course. The country was much better than that of Cibola, and Alvarado advised that Tiguex be made the winter quarters for the army.
After sending back his report, Alvarado went on to the eastward five days, when he arrived at the village or communal dwelling of Cicuye. There Alvarado learned that he was on the border of the country of the wild cows. He found at Cieuye an Indian who is set down as a slave, but who was only a captive, and a native of some country far to the east, bordering evidently on the Mississippi. He was different in appearance from the Indians of the desert regions, and he resembled a Turk, from which circumstance he was called the "Turk." He was probably an Arkansas Quapaw Indian, and from the villages on the west side of the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio.1 To him
1 Under various headings in the Handbook of American Indians, issued by the Bureau of Ethnology it is said that the Turk was a Pawnee "evidently a Pawnee." I have not found anything to support that view except the statements in the work above referred to. Mr. Dunbar, in his article, "The White Man's Foot in Kansas" published in Vohne X. Kansas State Historical Collections, says in reference to this matter :
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history assigns the honor of having first mentioned Quivira to Euro- peans. He acted as guide on a trip Alvarado made from Cicuye to see the cows. The Spanish captain, however, lost interest in the eows and the country where they roamed. The Turk told him such wondrous tales of gold and silver to be found and to be had in Quivira that chas- ing the stupid and lumbering buffalo seemed a waste of time and energy that should be used in making an early conquest of the golden land. And the buffalo was not to be seen in vast herds at that season of the year. Those found by Alvarado were in scattered bunches and per- haps along the waters of the Upper Canadian.
The Turk was to play an important part in the future movements of the Coronado expedition. He must have gone with Alvarado when that captain returned to Tiguex. There, during the winter, he related to Coronado the wonders of the country of Quivira and two adjoining provinces-Arche and Guaes. In Quivira there was some silver and gold. he said, but more in the adjacent lands. It is admitted that he was a man of superior intelligence, and it is probable that when he learned that the Spaniards desired gold above all other things, he told of great store of it in these distant countries, doubtless hoping these stories would in some way turn to his own benefit. He overplayed the part which he had assumed, or which, as he later elaimed, was assigned to him by the people of Cicuve, and was found to be lying, but so intent
The Turk was no doubt a native of some tribe near the Mississippi, for his description of the seene quoted from Castaneda, one of the chron- iclers of Coronado's march, portrays an ordinary familiar seene upon the Mississippi River at that time; while the second writer, the Knight of Elvas, a chronicler of Soto's expedition, presents an ornate naval display on the part of the Indians before the Spanish chieftain. Though the conditions were so diverse, the underlined portions indicate essential resemblance. The two passages are as follows :
He (Turk) elaimed that in his native country, where the land was level, there was a river two leagues in width, in which were fishes as large as horses, and many canoes of great size with more than twenty oarsmen upon either side. The boats carried sails and the chiefs sat at the stern. under awnings, while upon the prow was a large eagle of gold.
The next day, the cacique arrived with 200 canoes filled with men, having weapons. They were painted with ochre, wearing great bunches of white and other plumes of many colors, having feathered shields in their hands, with which they sheltered the oarsmen upon either side, the warriors standing ereet from bow to stern, holding hows and arrows. The barge in which the cacique came had an arning at the poop under which he sat.
The absurdity of contending that the Turk was a Pawnee Indian is clearly shown by these quotations. The Turk lived on the Mississippi. If he were a Pawnee, then the Pawnee Indian country bordered on the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio, and the Pawnees were the Indians who met De Soto.
There is another horn to this dilemma. If the Turk were a Pawnee and the Pawnee country came down to the Kansas River about the month of the Big Blue, then his description of the river must be made to apply to the Kansas-something which is preposterous.
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were the Spaniards on finding another Peru that they disregarded that fact.
On the 23d of April, 1541, Coronado set out from Tignex to find the rich land of Quivira. The Turk was the guide, and once upon the way, there remained no doubt of his knowledge of the country to be tra- versed. Coronado went by Cienye, but did not stop there. He was impa- tient to reach the golden settlements and held steadily to the eastward. In nine days from Cienye the army emerged on the Great Plains and saw the buffalo, then just beginning the annual migration to the north. Still the Turk pointed to the east, and the Spaniards toiled in that diree- tion thirty-five days without a single sign of civilization to encourage them. Other Indians were found, following the buffalo herds, the Querechos and the Teyas. They were first spoken to by the Turk, and later they confirmed what he had said about Quivira. An advance guard was sent on to find the country of Haya or Haxa, described by the Turk, but no such land appeared. With Coronado was an inhabitant of Qui- vira, one Ysopete, who insisted from the start that the Turk was lying. At first no credit attached to what he said, but on the treeless wastes doubt of what the Turk was saying became general in the army. Upon their entry into the settlements of Cona, a portion of the country of the Teyas, the Turk was not permitted to first talk with the people. They said Quivira was in the North-or towards the North-and not in the direction in which the Turk was taking them. Then heed was given to what Ysopete had said of the Turk and his stories.
After resting in a river-bottom where there were trees-a ravine as the old writers have it-it was decided that Coronado should take thirty horsemen and "half a dozen foot-soldiers" and go on to Quivira. The remaining portion of the army was to return to Tignex, which it did by a shorter way than that taken in the ontward march. The Teyas furnished new guides, and Coronado bore to the northward. The Turk was carried along, now a prisoner, and not permitted to converse with Ysopete or the Teyas. On a day counted that of St. Peter and St. Paul in the old calendar of the Roman Church a tolerable river was found and erossed, and which was named for the day of its discovery. This river is spoken of as "there below Quivira," by which we are to sup- pose it was south of that land-or perhaps bounded its southern bor- ders. It is more likely that Quivira was up the stream from that point. This river has been identified with the Arkansas by most writers, and the point of erossing, where it turns to the northeast below the present Fort Dodge, or Dodge City.
Coronado followed this river-"went upon the other side on the north, the direction turning towards the northeast." In three days Indian hunters were found killing the buffalo-"and some even had their wives with them." They began to run away, but Ysopete ealled to them in their own tongue, when they turned ahont and approached the Spaniards without fear.
Coronado was reassured. He felt once more certain of his ground. He had emerged from the labyrinth in which the Turk had songht to
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involve him. As he stood recovered there, the sense of location returned to him. And standing on the shores of the river given the holy name, reflecting doubtless on perils now safely passed, another matter occu- pied his attention. He weighed the fate of that Indian who had led him astray in those wilds. A judgment was determined and a death decreed. The Turk-in chains now at the rear of the army-was brought to account. Perhaps they asked him why he had deceived them. No doubt he stated his reasons like a brave man. Who shall blame him for his course? He had seen, maybe, the butchery of the revolted inhabitants of Tiguex. He evidently knew of the fate of those hundreds who had perished at the stake or had been trampled into the earth by Spanish horses after they had surrendered and had been granted peace. These strangers astride fierce animals seemed invincible. In brutality and cruelty they surpassed the barbarous Indians. They were devoid of honor. Their plighted word was worthless. To the Turk it was plain that if they came in numbers the Indians must per- ish or be enslaved. To avert this calamity to his people he planned to lead the strangers a devious course through deadly mazes. And now he faced the cruel Spaniard and admitted again the truth, though he knew his life was forfeit and his doom at hand. From the temper of his race we know that he was not appalled at his fate. He stood on the shores of two rivers-one seen, the other unseen. There may have been bars of tawny sand lying over beyond the shining river flowing there at his feet. Our knowledge of plains-streams might permit us to say there were water-bushes fringing its intangible shores. Up and beyond, there were the rolling, limitless prairies covered with billowy turbulent herds of wild oxen. And over all were the opalescent skies of the Great Plains, merging into a mystic shimmering haze at the horizon. And, perchance, the Turk saw these and was not moved as the garotte tightened about his throat and he was no more-"an example" to those assembled there-the first of his people to die on the soil of Kansas by the hand of the white man.
So, thus perished the Turk. He carried to Europeans the first tid- ings of Quivira-Kansas. He was the prey, the first Kansas victim of the brutal spirit which wrecked nations in the New World-then seek- ing other countries, including his own, for destruction. He was a hero. He acted only as has every patriot in the world with the fate of a peo- ple weighing on his soul. Lettered bronze and graven granite should rise in his honor on the plains he sought to save to his race.
Vengeance wreaked, Coronado continued his journey. He came into the land of Quivira. Indeed, he then stood on the borders of Quivira, but the settlements were some leagues beyond. It was a country inhab- ited by just such Indians as were found on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska two centuries later. They planted a little corn, but they lived chiefly by hunting the buffalo. They had no gold nor anything else a civilized man would covet. Coronado spent twenty-five days in Qui- vira, traversing the whole width of the land. Then he returned to
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Tiguex, using a shorter route, probably the ancient road later known as the Old Santa Fe Trail.
In writing thus far I have followed the preponderance of evidence as developed by a majority of the writers on the subject. I have not been always satisfied with the routes indicated by these students, and per- haps they were not themselves convinced that they were right in every instance. It was necessary for them to reconcile many contradictory statements found in the old Spanish chronicles-and not a few had to be rejected altogether. The boldest dissenter from their conclusions is F. S. Dellenhaugh, himself a student and explorer, and long familiar with both the topography and geography of all the country traversed by Coronado. He contends with an astonishing array of evidence that the route of the expedition lay much more to the east than it has been placed. Cibola was on the Mimbres about the present Demming, rather than at the Zuni. His location of Tiguex, it seems to me, can not be disproven, and is much lower down the Rio Grande than the generally accepted site at Bernalillo.2
The information which has come down to us in insufficient. By it we can not trace the old routes with certainty. Archaeology and a full knowl- edge of the modern geography of the Southwest and Mexico may aid us much. With all this, however, in neither the desert regions nor on the Great Plains can the trails passed over by Coronado be surely identi- fied. But they may be approximately fixed.
The march having for its immediate object the discovery of Qui- vira began at Cienye. This pueblo has been by many identified with the ruins of Pecos. If we accept Mr. Dellenbaugh's location of Tiguex, the village of Cienye was far south of the Pecos ruin. The direction from
2 See his article. "The True Route of Coronado's March," in the Bul- letin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, 1897. In his "Notes on the Location of the Tigues." he says:
Benavides spent abont seven years in the Rio Grande region of New Mexico prior to 1630. He was in charge of the church missions. He was a very intelligent man, and it is proper to regard his statements as fairly accurate. Tle says the first villages coming up the river from Mexico were one hundred leagues south of Taos. They were Qualen and Seneeu. This is apparently the same point at which Onate placed his first vil- lages forty-one leagues above El Paso. Fifteen leagues up the river from Seneen was Sevilleta. Then there was a blank of seven leagues. Then came the Teoas villages, evidently identical with the Tiguex of Coronado and the Tiguas of Espejo. These villages extended up the river from the first one, twelve or fifteen leagues. Then came an interval of four leagues to the next village up the river. San Felipe, which appears to be the same as the town mentioned by Onate. From San Felipe it was about eleven leagues to Santa Ana, the location of which is more easily fixed because it was about twelve leagues cast of Acoma. Thus Santa Ana and the Emeies of Espejo seem to have been very near together. Tignex, therefore, was down the river from a point twelve or fifteen leagues east of Acoma. Consequently the site assigned to it by modern writers at Bernalillo is not correct.
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Cieuye was to the east by south, coming out on the Llano Estacado, where the buffalo herds were found in such numbers. Following the buffalo were found two plains tribes, the Querechos and the Teyas, now supposed to have been the Tonkawas of West-central Texas, and the Comanches. The Turk was put forward always to speak first to these wanderers. Then they confirmed to the Spaniards what the Turk had said from the beginning. The march had deflected more and more to the south. When the halt was called at the ravine-the valley of some plains-river-it is said by most students that Coronado was in North Texas, possibly on the Brazos, the Trinity, or the Colorado. It is most likely that he was then in Central Texas. For it is confidently asserted by some accounts that he was at a village which Cabeza de Vaca had passed through in his escape from captivity.3
There the Teyas of Cona were questioned before the Turk was per- mitted to converse with them. They said that there was indeed a coun- try called Quivira, but that it was not to be found in the direction in which they were traveling. It was in the North, or "towards the north," and to reach it the army would have to right about and change its course. It was at Cona that the Turk was thrown into chains.
The information imparted by the Teyas of Cona turned Coronado, with thirty horsemen and a few followers to the north, as we have seen. They were told that they would find no good road to Quivira, and we know that the rivers running eastward over the Great Plains had to be crossed by the army. Most writers now draw a straight north-and-south line across the map, with a ruler, from Texas to a point on the Arkansas River just west of its turn to make the Great Bend, for this march of Coronado from the Cona towns to the borders of Quivira. The authority for this is the accidental phrase "by the needle" used in deserihing the march.
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