With ample food supplies for everyone, Coronado now used the town as his headquarters, and from this pueblo sent out expeditions to explore the country all around them. Fifty miles to the west lay the Petrified Forest, near which the Spaniards must have passed without paying any attention to it. A little further north lay the amazing ruins of Chaco Canyon, built centuries earlier by the Anasazi; but these, too, escaped Spanish notice and were not discovered for another few centuries.
One party went out to search for a large river, said to be found somewhere in the west. Though the soldiers found a few isolated villages, most of Arizona seemed uninhabited. For nearly a month they plodded westward through this flat and monotonous country until they stood staring wonderingly into the yawning expanse of the Grand Canyon. Before them, too, lay the mighty Colorado River, only there was no way to reach it. For days they tried to find a way down the jagged, rocky canyon walls, but were unable to reach the bottom. The Indian guides warned them that the next water in this country lay three to four days away, and the Spaniards reluctantly turned back to the main force. Behind them, the Grand Canyon lay peaceful, undisturbed by white men for another two hundred years.
While Coronado’s parties searched the countryside, there arrived at the pueblo some Indians from another town, dressed in bison hides and bison-horn headgear. These hides interested the Spaniards intensely, and the Indians tried as best as they could to describe the animals, even making some drawings to be taken back to Mexico. The puzzled Spaniards finally concluded that they must be cows with hair like a lion’s, and they called them vacas de Cibalo; cibalo, in fact, is still the Spanish word for the American bison.
One of Coronado’s expeditions had meanwhile penetrated deep into New Mexico, past the Acoma Pueblo to Cicuye on the Pecos River, about thirty miles southeast from today’s Santa Fe. There the Spaniards met an Indian slave, “a native of the farthest interior,” possibly a Pawnee. This Indian spun marvelous tales of his native land, which lay far north of the Pueblo country and which he called Quivera. At first the Spaniards had hoped he would guide them to the vast buffalo herds about which they had become very curious, but once they heard his fanciful stories, “they did not care to look for the cattle anymore.”
Coronado, too, listened eagerly to these stories, and though all the other Indians declared that Quivera existed only in the slave’s imagination, the Spaniards chose to believe him anyway. In the spring of 1541, the entire force set out once again in pursuit of yet another tall tale.
As the Spaniards moved eastward through New Mexico, they now encountered the first of the great buffalo herds of the Plains. A few days later, near the Texas border, they met Indians who called themselves Querechos – the first of many encounters between white men and Plains Indians. The Indians, probably Apaches or Tonkowas, lived in their tents of bison hides and followed the great herds wherever they went; they had not yet any horses, of course, and all their belongings were carried or pulled along by dogs. The Plains Indians moved on peacefully, and Coronado’s men had witnessed what few white men were ever to see – a classic picture of the Plains Indians’ life, as yet completely untouched by European influences.
Trouble began as soon as the troops moved out into the prairieland. Except for the teepees of occasional nomadic Indians, this country had no landmarks at all – no streams, no trees, no bushes, not even stones. The deep prairie grass covered everything, and as far as the Spaniards could see, there was only flat expanse of grass, stretching from horizon to horizon. There was no way to determine directions, and sometimes the entire expedition was forced to halt until sunset before they could tell east from west. If men got lost, they could not even follow their comrades’ tracks, for the trampled grass soon stood up again as clean and as straight as before.
And there were still larger herds of buffalo, so incredibly large that, as Coronado later reported to his king, “. . . traveling over the plains, there was not a single day until my return that I lost sight of them.” Once, when the Spaniards frightened the always nervous animals, they witnessed the full fury of a stampede. Thousands of animals dashed toward a ravine, and “so many cattle fell in that it was filled, and the rest of the cattle crossed over them.”
As the Spaniards moved into Oklahoma, they were relieved to find a more pleasant country, but the local Indians, the Tejas, could not confirm the tales of gold and silver. On the contrary, they declared, it was doubtful whether they could even find enough food and water in the land of Quivera. But the Spaniards clung desperately to their last glimmers of hope, and for another month marched on through the seemingly endless Plains, until even the most stubborn among them was ready to give up. They had reached Quivera, the rich black soil of Kansas; they had now come nearly 2,500 miles from Mexico, yet nowhere had they seen even so much as a trace or a hint of any cities, much less of gold or any other treasures. The Indians of Quivera lived in simple grass huts, and it was these people who finally convinced the white men that ahead lay only more of the same. There was no sense in going any farther.