Coronado and the Fool's Gold of Quivira

Now don't roll through this country thinking nobody important ever came this way before the cowboys — because near five hundred years ago, the first Europeans ever to cross these plains came through right around here, and they came chasing a lie. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick, and this is the tale of Coronado and the gold that wasn't.

Wind back to fifteen forty-one. A Spanish conquistador named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado had marched a small army up out of Mexico, hunting for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold — cities of solid treasure that were supposed to be up here in the unknown north. Well, he'd found the pueblos of New Mexico, and they were made of mud, not gold, and his men were furious and broke. And that's when a captured Plains Indian the Spanish called the Turk told them exactly what they wanted to hear: oh yes, he said, there's a mighty kingdom to the east called Quivira, rich beyond dreaming, where the king naps under a tree hung with little golden bells and eats off plates of solid gold.

So Coronado took his men and rode east, out onto these very plains — the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains — likely crossing near this canyon, maybe watering right down in it. And friend, it near killed them. Picture Spanish knights in steel armor, on horses, out on that flat, endless, waterless grass in the heat, no landmarks, no edges, the horizon the exact same in every direction till a man could go mad. They got lost. They damn near starved. They said the land was so flat and featureless that when the lead men walked through the grass, it sprang right back up behind them, and you couldn't even tell an army had passed. Some of them wandered in circles for days.

And when they finally staggered all the way to Quivira — up in what's Kansas now — you know what they found? Grass huts. A humble, peaceable village of farming folk, the Wichita, living in houses of straw and raising corn. No gold. Not one bell, not one plate, not one nugget. Nothing at all. The Turk had made the whole thing up — some say to lure the Spanish out onto the trackless plains to die of thirst and be rid of them for good. When Coronado finally understood he'd been played for a fool, he had the poor Turk strangled, and turned his broken, starving column around, and limped all the way back to Mexico with nothing to show for two years and a fortune but blisters and betrayal.

So here's what I like about it, standing in this canyon. The first Europeans across these plains came for gold, and there wasn't any, and the land nearly ate them alive for their greed. All that steel and cruelty, chasing a story a desperate prisoner spun out of thin air. And meanwhile the real treasure of this country — this canyon, that endless grass that fattened millions of buffalo, the water, the land its very self — they rode right past it, blind, because it didn't glitter. Sometimes the richest thing for a hundred miles is the very thing the treasure-hunters trample flat, looking for something that was never there at all. Ride on, friend. You've got better sense than old Coronado.