Coronado's Golden Quest

This whole grand road is named for a man who came through this country nearly five hundred years ago chasing a dream of gold — and found only heartbreak.

It was fifteen forty. Word had raced through Spanish Mexico of seven fabulous cities somewhere to the north — the Seven Cities of Cíbola — cities of GOLD, doorways studded with turquoise, streets paved with riches beyond imagining. A friar had come back from a scouting trip swearing he had seen one of them shining from a distance. He had not. But that is how these things start.

And a young, ambitious, extremely well-connected conquistador named Francisco Vásquez de Coronado bet everything he had on finding them. Understand what everything meant: he mortgaged his wife's estate. He raised an expedition of hundreds of Spanish soldiers in armour, over a thousand native allies, priests, servants, and great herds of horses, cattle and sheep driven along as walking rations. Then he marched north into a country no European had ever crossed, on the strength of a rumour.

And he found adobe.

He fought his way to the fabled cities of Cíbola and discovered they were the Zuni pueblos — mud-and-stone villages of farming people, well built, well defended, and containing no gold whatsoever. The people there were not pleased to see him and said so with arrows. He took the village and found corn.

Now here is the part that turns this from a failure into something sadder and more human. He could not accept it. He had spent his fortune and his name, and there were three hundred men standing in the desert waiting to be told what happened next. So he kept going. He sent parties out in every direction — one of them became the first Europeans ever to stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, looked at the greatest hole on earth, failed to get down to the river, and moved on unimpressed because it was not gold.

Then a captive the Spanish nicknamed the Turk told Coronado about a place further out on the plains called Quivira, where the chief supposedly napped under a tree hung with golden bells. So Coronado marched his men out into what is now Kansas. Two more years. Across country with no water and no landmarks, so featureless his men navigated by driving stakes and counting steps. And at the end of it he found Quivira, and Quivira was a village of grass lodges belonging to farming people who had no gold either. The Turk admitted he had made it up to lead the Spanish out onto the plains to die. They strangled him for it.

Coronado limped back to Mexico a broken man. He fell from a horse on the way and never fully recovered. His fortune was gone, his health was gone, he was investigated for the brutality of the expedition, and his name became a byword for a fool's errand. He died at forty-four, largely forgotten.

And yet. That expedition put European eyes on the Grand Canyon, the pueblos, the buffalo plains, and this whole vast Southwest for the first time. It failed at absolutely everything it set out to do and changed the map of the world anyway.

So there is your thought for the first miles of this road, friend. Sometimes the treasure you are chasing is not there at all. And the thing you actually find — the country itself — turns out to be worth more than the gold you went looking for, though it may take four hundred years and a paved road for anybody to notice.