by Tony Horwitz
The next day, the Spanish finally glimpsed the destination they’d dreamed of for so long. When they saw the first of Cibola’s cities, one soldier wrote, “such were the curses that some of them hurled at Fray Marcos that may God not allow them to reach his ears.” The friar had told of a settlement more impressive than Mexico City, “the grandest and best” yet found in America. What the Spanish beheld, the soldier wrote, was “a small pueblo crowded together and spilling down a cliff.” In Mexico, he added, there were ranch settlements “which from a distance have a better appearance.”
Coronado didn’t record his first impression of Cibola. Instead, he described a curious ritual the Spanish performed outside the pueblo’s walls. Coronado sent several soldiers, a friar, and an Indian interpreter ahead to deliver the edict called the Requerimiento, or Summons. Drafted three decades earlier by a Spanish jurist, the document was part of the Crown’s tortured attempt to define “just war” against Indians: a sort of sixteenth-century Geneva Convention. Conquistadors carried copies of the Requerimiento all over the Americas and were commanded to read it to Indians before commencing battle.
The proclamation opened with an abridged history of the world: God’s creation of heaven and earth; Adam and Eve; St. Peter and the papacy. It also explained that the pontiff in Rome had authorized Spain’s claim to the New World, a grant recorded in various documents. “These you may view, if you wish,” the Requerimiento assured its Indian audience. Then came the summons. Natives who peacefully accepted the Spanish Crown as “king and lord” would be welcomed “with complete affection and charity,” and extended many privileges. Indians should pause to consider this generous offer, taking as much time as “is reasonable.”
However, if they delayed, or refused to submit, the consequences would be immediate and awful. “I assure you that, with the help of God, I will attack you mightily. I will make war against you everywhere and in every way. . . . I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slaves. . . . I will take your property. I will do all the harm and damage to you that I can.” And further: “I declare that the deaths and injuries that occur as a result of this would be your fault and not His Majesty’s, nor ours.”
The document concluded with the chilling legalism of Spanish conquest; a notary, required to be present at the scene, signed an affidavit attesting that the edict had been pronounced. In modern terms, the Spanish thereby affirmed that natives had been read their Miranda rights. In practice, the Requerimiento was more akin to last rites—a death sentence delivered in language Indians couldn’t possibly comprehend, in the name of forces they couldn’t possibly imagine. Who was “God, Our Lord”? The “Pope”? The “exalted and powerful monarch” of a place called Castile and Leon?
As if the Requerimiento wasn’t a bald enough sanction for slaughter, it was often read without an interpreter present, or was delivered from a distance of several miles, or uttered at night while Indians slept, unaware of an impending attack. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas declared that he didn’t know “whether to laugh or to cry” at the absurdity of the document.
The Indians gathered before Cibola had a different response. “Being arrogant people,” Coronado wrote, “they showed it little respect.” So little, in fact, that one warrior shot an arrow through the robe of the friar attending the reading. After a brief skirmish, the natives retreated inside their well-fortified pueblo.
Attacking a walled city customarily required a siege. But desperation, once again, dictated the Spanish strategy. Because the pueblo “was where the foodstuffs were that we needed so sorely,” Coronado wrote, he dismounted and prepared his men for a frontal assault. The first pitched battle between Europeans and Indians in the American Southwest would be waged, not for God or gold or glory, but “because the hunger we were suffering did not permit delay.”
Coronado ordered his crossbowmen and harquebusiers to fire at warriors guarding the pueblo’s narrow entrance. But the crossbowmen quickly broke their strings, and the musketeers “were so weak and debilitated that they could hardly stay on their feet.” Meanwhile, Indians were hurling large stones from atop the pueblo’s rooftops. Coronado, in his plumed helmet and gilded armor, presented a conspicuous target. Twice, stones knocked him to the ground. He was carried off the field, having sustained two face wounds, many blows to his arms and legs, and an arrow in the foot.
The Spanish nonetheless succeeded in fighting their way inside the pueblo. Prior to the battle, the Cibolans had evacuated women, children, and old people, leaving only warriors. After a short fight, they too abandoned the pueblo. The Spanish didn’t pursue them, instead falling on the spoils of victory.
“We found what we needed more than gold and silver,” one soldier wrote. “Corn and beans and fowls, better than those of New Spain, and salt, the best and whitest that I have seen in all my life.”
THE ROUTE FROM Chichilticale to Cibola, a passage Coronado described as tristissimo, appeared just as bleak today. Descending Apache Pass, I sped past arid scrub, a bare mountain branded with a ranch trademark, and a sign warning “State Prison: Don’t Stop for Hitchhikers.” Then I entered Greenlee County, the least populous in Arizona: only five people per square mile, one-sixteenth the national average.
Reaching the county seat of Clifton, an old mining town at the foot of a mountain road called the Coronado Trail, I stopped at the office of the local newspaper, The Copper Era. Its editor, Walter Mares, sat smoking and gulping coffee at a desk so cluttered he could barely find space to set down his mug. Heavyset, with graying hair and mustache, Walter had spent much of his twenty-three-year tenure covering labor strikes, copper price collapses, and floods in the deep canyon enclosing Clifton. But he also wrote features about the Coronado Trail, which gave beleaguered Clifton its town motto—“Where the Trail Begins”—and a small point of tourist interest to promote at civic events and state fairs.
As part of this, Walter sometimes donned a conquistador’s helmet and gave talks about Coronado. “Kids always ask me, ‘Who are you supposed to be—Columbus?’ ” he said. “They have no idea about their own history.” This had prompted Walter to become a serious student of Coronado, and, rarer still, a great admirer of conquistadors.
“Americans today get tired walking to and from their cars,” he said. “These guys were marching miles and miles with no idea who or what they’d meet. The Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail—those were trails! Coronado didn’t have one until Arizona paved the road here and named it after him.”
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t so. Coronado, like other early Europeans, generally followed Indian trails. But as I tried to compose a diplomatic correction, Walter raced ahead.
“Our whole sense of history is twisted,” he said. “The Pilgrims, they were boat people. Johnny-come-latelies. Intolerant sons of bitches who came to America so they could persecute people in a way they couldn’t back home.” Walter tossed his cigarette in his coffee. “I hate the whole Thanksgiving story. We should be eating chili, not turkey. But no one wants to recognize the Spanish because it would mean admitting that they got here decades before the English.”
Walter traced his own lineage to the Spanish colonists who followed in Coronado’s wake, settling northern New Mexico in the late 1500s and early 1600s. He’d grown up a few miles from the New Mexico line, in the Colorado town of Romeo, an unromantic burg where his family lived without running water. “In history class, all we heard about was the Forty-niners and mountain men and Pike’s fucking Peak,” Walter said. “Anglos called us ‘chili eaters’ and looked down on us as newcomers, even though we’d been there three hundred years before the so-called pioneers came west.”
Walter didn’t like being lumped with Mexicans in the Southwest, either. Most were recent arrivals; even their language was different from that of the colonists who had come centuries before. “I’m Spanish,” he said. “Mexico only had control of the Southwest for about twenty-five years, after becoming independent from Spain and before l
osing this land to the U.S.”
Walter paused to search his desk for a fresh cigarette, giving me a chance to pose the obvious question: what about conquistadors’ brutal treatment of Indians?
“Okay, the Spanish were butchers,” he acknowledged. “So was everyone then. At least the Spanish debated violence and slavery, and made policies towards Indians based on morality as they saw it. Also, their butchery lasted about fifty years. If you start with the Anglos, and all the others who joined them, you’re looking at centuries of killing and oppression of Indians, not to mention blacks. So who are the true bad guys here?”
Spanish burning Indians at the stake, from a sixteenth-century German book—typical of “Black Legend” images popular in northern Europe at the time
This struck me as a depressing sort of calculus: ranking European-Americans from bad to worse. But Walter had a point. In my reading on the conquistadors, I’d learned about la leyenda negra—the black legend—which first took root amid the religious strife and imperial rivalries of sixteenth-century Europe. Inspired by hatred of Catholic Spain, and by the reports of Las Casas and others about atrocities against Indians, Protestants in northern Europe published grisly engravings and lurid tracts that portrayed Spain’s conquest of America as uniquely barbarous: the Inquisition writ large.
Nineteenth-century jingoists in the United States revived and improved the black legend, to justify annexation of Spanish and Mexican land. Added to the catalogue of Spain’s ancient faults—cruelty, greed, indolence, fanaticism, authoritarianism—was the mixed population of its colonies. This was evidence, to white Americans, of degeneracy. Texas’s fight with Mexico, Stephen Austin declared, pitted a “mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race against civilization and the Anglo-American race.” It was the manifest destiny of white Americans to seize and civilize the benighted Spanish lands, just as it was to take the territory of Indian savages.
The black legend had faded in the twentieth century, but traces of the old bias were now resurfacing. Since crossing the border, I’d heard little on my car radio except angry debate about the “invasion” of Hispanic “aliens,” and the threat they posed to the nation’s education, economy, and identity.
“Every time I hear that stuff about English-first in schools, English only, English everything,” Walter said, “I want to shout, ‘Hey, the Spanish were here first!’ Not counting the Indians, of course.”
Closing his office for the day, Walter took me for a tour of Clifton, driving along Coronado Boulevard, past the Coronado Beauty Parlor and a ruined building that once housed the Coronado Inn. Then we climbed out of the canyon and parked beside a modern open-pit mine.
This wasn’t so much a pit as a stripped and decapitated mountain: a man-made mesa, five miles across. Tank-sized shovels dumped ore onto the biggest trucks I’d ever seen, with tires twice my height. A conveyor belt snaked through the crater, past orange-red cavities and mountainous slag heaps tinted blue by malachite. The mine produced more copper than any site in North America. One of its largest lodes was called the Coronado Pit.
“People think the conquistadors were mad and greedy, always searching for pay dirt,” Walter said, over the clank and crush of machinery. “Well, here we are, still digging.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Those evil Spaniards weren’t aliens, they were us. Get rich quick—that’s the American dream, isn’t it?”
IN 1540, THE Spanish dream of easy riches dissolved as soon as Coronado’s men fought their way into Cibola. “So as not to beat around the bush,” Coronado wrote the viceroy, “I can say truthfully that he [Fray Marcos] has not spoken the truth in anything he said.” The glittering cities turned out to be “small towns” of stone. The only mineral of any value was turquoise, which Cibolans used to decorate their multistory houses. “I think they have turquoise in quantity,” Coronado wrote, but “by the time I arrived, this had disappeared, along with the rest of their possessions.” There was nothing to loot, except corn.
Several days after the battle for Cibola, a native delegation appeared, offering “some turquoises and poor, little mantas,” or cloaks. Coronado reiterated his claim that he’d come to Cibola so Indians could “know the true God for their Lord, and His Majesty for their king and earthly lord.” Again, natives were unimpressed. Briefly returning to their homes, they “fled to the hills, leaving their towns deserted.”
Though Spanish contact with Cibolans was cursory, it left a strong impression on the invaders. “I have not seen one important house here, from which the superiority of any person over another might be distinguished,” Coronado wrote. Instead, Cibola was governed by a council of elders. Priests also held great sway, orating like town criers from the rooftops of houses. Overall, the conquistador judged Cibolans “intelligent,” “very well brought up,” and exceptionally skillful at needlework and other crafts.
But none of this compensated for the absence of riches. Coronado ended his letter to the viceroy by listing the native items he was sending back to Mexico, including baskets, turquoise pendants, and a “cow skin,” undoubtedly the hide of a buffalo, a creature the Spanish had not yet seen. Fray Marcos was also sent home, probably to protect him from the wrath of disappointed soldiers.
“There does not appear to me to be any prospect of obtaining gold and silver,” Coronado concluded, “but I trust in God that if it exists here we will obtain it.”
I FOUND A sign for the Coronado Scenic Trail beside a slag heap at the edge of the open-pit mine near Clifton. The trail was better known as the Devil’s Highway, because of its high fatality rate and the route number it bore on road maps—666, which is linked in the Book of Revelation to the Antichrist. After lobbying by religious groups, Arizona had renumbered the highway, to Route 191. But the road still had a devilish cast. It commenced with a steep climb and panoramic views of the red and hellish mine pit. Then came endless hairpin curves, more than five hundred in all, and vertiginous glimpses of the three-thousand-foot plunge awaiting careless motorists.
After winding along the road for several hours, I reached a log lodge perched at 9,100 feet. It was here, in 1926, that the Coronado Trail had been inaugurated with barbecued bear, a rodeo, and a “devil dance” by Apaches. None of this had much to do with Coronado’s passage; nor, it turned out, did the road itself. According to the lodge’s literature, Coronado probably stuck to lower ground rather than risk “the rocky and waterless terrain of the Coronado Trail.” Few tourists came this way, either. The 120-mile trail was less traveled than any other federal highway in the continental United States.
The mountains, at least, offered relief from the heat. In the course of my drive, the temperature had dipped to fifty degrees, forty degrees lower than in the high desert I’d crossed the day before. But descending the trail to the town of Eager and driving on toward New Mexico, I entered yet another baked plain, treeless and sandy, with parched riverbeds and signs warning “Blowing Dust Area.” The only scenery was a creaking windmill and a gate marked “Slim Pickin’s Ranch.” Like Coronado and his men, I was weary of despoblado and desperate to reach the Seven Cities, or any place, really.
CIBOLA, IN 1540, wasn’t a collection of seven “cities” but rather a cluster of well-spaced pueblos, possibly numbering only six. Nor were any of these settlements called Cibola by their inhabitants, the Zuni people. Curiously, the Zuni term for the Spanish—tsibolo’wa—may itself be derived from “Cibola,” the unfamiliar sound they kept hearing the bearded white strangers repeat.
A century and a half after Coronado’s arrival, the Zuni gathered within a single pueblo, and their descendants still live in the town that has grown up around it. This gives the Zuni people a rare distinction among North American tribes: though hit by the first wave of Spanish conquest, they nonetheless occupy the same territory they did when Europeans encountered them over 450 years ago.
The Zuni, to a much greater degree than most U.S. tribes, have also retained their own language and religion. All this enticed me—as did the t
ribe’s exotic name, its reputation for fine jewelry, and the prospect of visiting a laddered and walled pueblo, a sight I’d never seen. After a thousand miles of hot and dusty driving, Zuni loomed in my imagination as an enchanted land, if not of gold then of silver and turquoise and tradition.
Just past the New Mexico line I came to a sign saying, “You Are Entering Zuni-Land, Welcome.” Then another arid plain, a scattering of trailers and small houses, and Zuni’s commercial district, mostly jewelry shops strung along the highway. Following a sign to the local museum, I stepped from my car and was greeted by a stiff wind that buffeted my face with dust. Everything around me—vehicles, buildings, street—wore a coat the color of dun and rust, as if the earth were rising, or drawing the town back into the ground.
This earthiness infused Zuni belief as well. According to the tribe’s creation story, the world’s first people climbed ladders from deep underground before emerging through a great crevasse, sometimes identified as today’s Grand Canyon. They then wandered in search of a promised land called the middle place, guided by a giant water bug that stretched its legs to the far corners of the world. Just beneath the bug’s heart was a spot equidistant from all these points. Zuni called this Halona Idiwan’a, the Middle Anthill of the World, and they had lived there ever since.
At least, that’s what I gleaned from the museum, and from the many books and articles I later read. The Zuni cosmos, like the Dreamtime of Australian Aborigines, doesn’t translate easily into Western language and concepts. The Zuni, for instance, divide the world into two realms, the “raw” and the “cooked.” Humans are cooked, while the earth, wind, and man-made objects are raw. Simply rendering Zuni language in written form requires a thicket of esoteric symbols to denote glottal stops, voiceless lateral fricatives, and other sounds. The result looks like t?ek?ohanan:e, or onaya:nak^ä a:'ci'wan:i. Linguists classify Zuni as one of the world’s few “language isolates,” bearing no apparent kinship to any other tongue.