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The Hidden History of Texas Looking for Gold and Glory – Before I get too far into it today, how about subscribing to the podcast. Tell your friends that you’ve found the coolest place on the net to learn about Texas history. Well maybe not the coolest, but a pretty cool place, thanks I’d appreciate it.

As I’ve discussed in the past, the Spanish presence in the Americas was pretty much an accident. Until Columbus bumped into the islands of Guanahani (Watling Island in the Bahamas) which Columbus named “San Salvador”, Cuba, and Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They had no idea anything or anyone was between them and Asia, remember they were looking for a shortcut route to India. Even then it wasn’t until 1519 when Alonso Álvarez de Pineda mapped the Gulf Coast for the first time that they began to realize they had stumbled upon something far different than what they originally thought. So, what intrigued the Spanish so much about this new continent they encountered?

I’ve talked about how in 1528 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, explored the Gulf Coast and his exploration fell apart. He got shipwrecked and he and some of his crew wandered across present-day Texas and northern Mexico. During their journeys and capture they heard stories from the people about cities or places that were “wealthy”. Now we don’t know exactly what the indigenous people meant by wealth or how they described the various locations, but de Vaca’s later telling of those encounters sparked an interest in what the Spanish called or were labeled the “Seven Cities of Gold” or “the Seven Cities of Cibola” But why? Why would these stories matter to the Spanish?

In the early 8^th century Muslims had conquered what is now Spain and Portugal. The story goes that in 714 seven Catholic bishops and their faithful followers fled across the Atlantic to a land known as Antilia, the name of which, incidentally, was the source of the name Antilles, which was initially applied to the West Indian islands of the Caribbean. The story was that when they fled, they took with them vast amounts of wealth, especially in gold and silver and each of the bishops had established a city. The story, or fable, was that those 7 cities were to be found in this ‘new’ country.

However, the Antillean islands failed to produce large quantities of gold and silver, but by 1539 the lands that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions reported on were thought to contain an El Dorado (or The Gold) known as Cíbola. In that year, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza dispatched Fray Marcos de Niza and the African Estevanico to search the area. This exploration cost the life of Estevanico at Háwikuh, the southernmost of the Zuñi pueblos in western New Mexico.

On his return to New Spain (today’s Mexico), Fray Marcos reported that he had seen golden cities, the smallest of which was larger than Mexico City. Today we know that the good frier exaggerated what he saw, why I have no idea, but he definitely didn’t see any golden cities and certainly not one larger than Mexico City would have been at that time. In 1539, Mexico City, then known as Tenochtitlan, was a large and populous city. Estimates for its population ranged from 200,000 to 400,000, so as I said, the good frier was a, as we say, a teller of tall tales.

However, in 1540 a follow-up expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado captured Háwikuh and learned the true nature of it as well as other nearby pueblos. In the following year, disappointed over the failure to find the Seven Cities of Cíbola Coronado launched a futile search for Quivira-(another legendary wealthy city) an undertaking that crossed the Panhandle. His toute took him from Arizona to New Mexico into Texas up to Oklahoma, and finally Kansas. It was there that he did find Quivira, it was situated in what is now central Kansas, now nobody is really certain of its exact location, and most think it was near present-day Lyons or Salina. What did he find? Who lived there?

The people of Quivira were ancestral Wichita, a tribe known for their agriculture, bison hunting, and trading networks. Personally, I think the fact that it was a major trading center, led the Spanish to believe it would have been a wealthy city. To the people who lived there it most likely was, the Spanish didn’t really understand the differences in the cultures and how each looked at material things.  That is why in 1541 when Coronado arrived there, he found villages of grass huts and a population focused on agriculture and hunting bison.  Quivira was a major trading center, with connections to other tribes across the Great Plains and beyond. They were known for their tobacco pipes and even traded obsidian from Mexico. Even though Coronado reported on what he found that didn’t stop future expeditions from trying to locate a city of gold led by people such as Francisco Leyva de Bonilla and Juan de Oñate attempting to find it.

The expedition was a failure economically, but it did generate a wealth of geographic and ethnographic information which, even to this day, has proven valuable to historians such as me.

That’s going to do it for this episode, talk to you next time – I’m Hank Wilson – and this is the Hidden History of Texas