Critical Essay on the Sources of Information

THE original sources of information in regard to the early Spanish explorations of New Mexico have been made available for students within the last thirty years by the publication of several collections of documents, preserved either in Mexico or in the Archivo de Indias, at Seville, or in the great national repository at Simancas. The first to appear was the one entitled Documentos para la historia de Mejico, published by order of the Mexican Government between 1853 and 1857. This is distributed into four series, of which the third and the fourth contain important historical material bearing upon this subject. Next came the well-selected Coleccion de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y tierras adyacentes, undertaken by the late Buckingham Smith, of which, however, only the first volume appeared in Madrid, in 1857. Then Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, the accomplished translator of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, published in Mexico a valuable Coleccion de documentos para la historia de México, in two volumes, the first in 1858 and the second in 1866. But by far the most important of all is the great Coleccion de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonizacion de las posesiones Españolas en América y Oceanía, sacados en su mayor parte del real Archivo de Indias. Forty volumes of this indispensable repertory have already appeared at Madrid, between 1864 and 1884, edited by Joaquin Francesco Pacheco and other scholars. A most essential service, however, had been rendered to the students of early American history at a still earlier date by the publication of Henri Ternaux-Compans’ admirable series of Voyages, relations, et mémoires originaux pour servir à l’histoire de la découverte de l’Amérique, publiés pour la première fois en Français, of which twenty parts appeared in Paris between 1837 and 1841. Prior to this our knowledge had been mainly restricted to Italian translations of original narratives published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio in the third volume of his Navigationi et Viaggi, Venice, 1556 (reprinted in 1565 and subsequently); of most of which Richard Hakluyt has given an English version in the third volume of his Voyages, nauigations, traffiques, and discoueries, London, 1600 (reprinted in 1810).

The different expeditions, in their chronological order, may now be studied in the following original authorities:—

An account of the expedition of Nuño Beltran de Guzman to Ciguatan is contained in the Primera (segunda) (tercera) (quarta) relacion anonima de la jornada que hizo Nuño de Guzman à la Nueva Galicia, in Icazbalceta’s Coleccion, vol. ii. pp. 288-306; 439-483. Other narratives can be found in Pacheco’s Documentos Inéditos, tom. xiv., pp. 347-373, and 411-463; tom. xvi., pp. 363-375. De Guzman first conquered and then colonized Sinaloa, and even penetrated into Sonora, thus preparing the way for the subsequent explorations. Very little information, however, about New Mexico is to be obtained from any of these narratives.

Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca published his remarkable story at Zamora in 1542, under the title: La relacion que dio Aluar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca de lo acaescido en las Indias en la armada donde yua por gouernador Páphilo de Narbaez, desde el año de veynte y siete hasta el año de treynta y seys que boluio a Sevilla con tres de su compañia. Notwithstanding the vivid interest that will always attach to this thrilling story of adventure and suffering, the indications given in it of the routes by which he journeyed, and of the places and peoples he visited, are practically of far too vague a character to enable them to be satisfactorily identified, even if we feel warranted in placing implicit confidence in the author’s veracity.

The original report by Fray Marcos de Nizza (of Nice) of his Descubrimiento de las Siete Ciudades, can be found in Pacheco’s Documentos inéditos, tom. iii. p. 329; and the instructions received by him from the Viceroy Mendoza are given on p. 325 of the same volume. An Italian translation of the report is contained in Ramusio, Navigationi, vol. iii. p. 356 (ed. of 1565); and from this was made the English version in Hakluyt, Voyages, vol. iii. p. 438 (ed. of 1810). But on comparing both Ramusio’s and Hakluyt’s versions with the original, not only will it be found that in many places they are mere paraphrases, but that frequently additional particulars have been foisted into the text. Especially noticeable are the many exaggerated statements in regard to the quantities of gold and of precious stones seen by the monk during his journey, or about which stories are told to him by the natives, for which there is not a vestige of authority to be found in the original. Fray Marcos claims to have related what he himself saw or what was told to him; but it is evident not only that he was prone to lend a credulous ear to whatever fictions might be imposed upon him, but that he grossly misrepresented what he had himself seen. This is directly charged upon him by those who followed in his footsteps under Coronado, and who suffered grievously by reason of his falsifications; so that he was even compelled to flee to Mexico to escape the consequences of their just indignation. We think that he fairly deserves the epithet of “the lying monk,” which has been bestowed upon him, in spite of the air of probability which pervades the greater part of his narrative. But it must in justice be said, however, that he appears rather to have been carried away by religious enthusiasm than actuated by any personal or mercenary considerations; and with the hope of being able to convert the natives to Christianity, he invested them and their surroundings with the glow of his own imagination. Still, this need not militate against the truth of his statements in regard to the distances he travelled, or the physical characteristics of the regions through which his route lay; so that his narrative will always be important for the students of the topography, if not of the ethnology, of New Mexico at the period of its discovery.

Ternaux-Compans (Voyages, etc., vol. ix. p. 256) has made a most faithful French translation, from copies of the originals at Simancas, of Fray Marcos’s report, and of the letter from Mendoza to the Emperor Charles V., which accompanied it, as well as of the instructions received by the Friar from Mendoza.

The story of Coronado’s romantic expedition in search of “The Seven Cities of Cibola” has been told with more or less of detail by four different persons who took part in it. We have also three of his own letters and despatches narrating his earlier proceedings. Of these, the first is a brief one, written to the Viceroy Mendoza, dated Culiacan, March 8, 1539, transmitting a report received from Fray Marcos while upon his journey. An English version of this can be found in Hakluyt, Voyages, vol. iii. p. 434 (ed. of 1810), translated from Ramusio, Navigationi, vol. iii. p. 395 (ed. of 1565); and a French translation, in Ternaux-Compans, vol. ix. p. 349. Next comes a short letter to the Viceroy dated April 10, 1539, in which he tells about the preparations for his ineffectual expedition to Topira; Hakluyt, p. 352; Ramusio, p. 435; Ternaux-Compans, p. 352. Of much greater importance, however, is the full report transmitted by him to Mendoza from Cibola (or Granada, as he called it), August 3, 1540, setting forth everything that had occurred between that date and April 22, when he had started. An Italian version of this is given by Ramusio, Navigationi, vol. iii. p. 359 (ed. of 1565); Relatione de Francisco Vazquez de Coronado del viagio alle dette setta cita. An English translation can be found in Hakluyt, Voyages, vol. iii. p. 446 (ed. of 1810). Finally, there is the letter which he wrote to the Emperor Charles V., from Tiguex, after his return from Quivira, in which is related the course of events from April 23, 1541, up to October 20 of the same year. This can be found in Pacheco’s Documentos inéditos, tom. iii. p. 363; and it has been repeated in tom. xiii. p. 261. A French translation of it is given in the Voyages of Ternaux-Compans, vol. ix. p. 355.

The four narratives by other pens are—

1. An anonymous Relacion del suceso de la jornada que Francisco Vazquez hizo en el descubrimiento de Cibola, contained in Buckingham Smith’s Coleccion de varios documentos, p. 147. This was afterwards printed in Pacheco’s Documentos inéditos, tom. xiv. p. 318, but with the erroneous date of 1531, instead of 1541.

2. A second anonymous account, entitled Traslado de las nuevas y noticias que dieron sobre el descobrimiento de una Cibdad que llamaron de Cibola, situada en la Tierra Nueva, can also be found in Documentos inéditos, tom. xix. p. 529, with the same error in the date.

3. Of much greater value is the Relacion que dió el Capitan Joan Jaramillo, de la jornada que hizo à la tierra nueva de la que fué General Francisco Vazquez de Coronado; of which a French translation was first published by Ternaux-Compans, in his Voyages, etc., vol. ix. p. 364. The original was afterwards printed in Buckingham Smith’s Coleccion, p. 155, and subsequently in Pacheco’s Documentos inéditos, tom. xiv. p. 304, but under the erroneous date of 1537. It is a straightforward, soldierly narrative, well written, and with many picturesque details, and it contains an unusual amount of topographical information; so that it is of great value in establishing the route followed by the expedition, and in identifying the various localities.

4. But if our knowledge of the expedition had been confined to the authorities thus far indicated, we should have had a very imperfect idea both of its events and of its results. In 1838 Ternaux-Compans published a translation into French of a quarto manuscript, of 157 leaves, which he had found in the Uguina Collection, at Paris, under the title Relation du Voyage de Cibola enterpris in 1540; ou l’on traite de toutes les peuplades qui habitent cette contrée, de leurs mœurs et coutumes, par Pédro de Castañeda de Nagera (Voyages, vol. ix. p. 1). Nothing has been discovered in relation to this writer except what is contained in his own account. He states that he “wrote his narrative in the city of Culiacan, where he was living in the midst of misery and dangers, as the whole country was in a state of insurrection” (p. 233). The volume bears the indorsement, “Finished copying at Seville, Oct. 26, 1596.” As his name is not mentioned in the list of officers which he has given, it is supposed that he was only a private soldier. The work shows that he was a man of considerable education, but it is evidently the production of a novice in the art of literary composition. It is an attempt at a methodical narrative, divided into three parts, but it is quite difficult to follow in it the order of events. In the first part he treats of the incidents of the expedition, and of the army and its officers; the second contains a description of the provinces, villages, and mountains that were discovered, of the religion and customs of the inhabitants, and of the animals, fruits, and vegetables to be found; and in the last part he tells about the return of the army, and explains the reasons for abandoning the attempt at colonization. As he wrote more than twenty years after the events he has described, he sometimes signifies his inability to remember precisely the number of miles travelled, or of the days during which they journeyed. He has even fallen into the error of making the day on which the expedition entered Campostello, Shrove Tuesday, 1541 (p. 24), although he gives the correct date, 1540, in the Dedicatory Epistle (p. xiv). Throughout his entire narrative, whenever he gives the date of the year, it is always one too large, as can be seen on pp. 101, 137, and 213. He professes to have written for the purpose of correcting the many misrepresentations and fables that had sprung up in regard to the country they had discovered, and the character of the people, and the nature of the animals to be found there. Castañeda impresses the reader as a religious, humane, and candid man, who cannot fail to win his confidence in the truth of the events he relates. He does not hesitate to expose and to comment upon the cruel and rapacious acts of his own countrymen; and he does full justice both to the natural amiability and to the valor of the natives. His various observations show him to have been a man of sagacity and good judgment. Mr. Bandelier vouches for the remarkable accuracy of his description of the country, although the distances generally are estimated one third too great (Historical Introduction to Studies among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico, p. 22). The Castañeda MS. is now in the Lenox library.

These are all the original sources of knowledge in regard to the earliest attempts at exploration in New Mexico by the Spaniards, and especially respecting Coronado’s expedition to the Seven Cities of Cibola. The historians of Mexico, from Gomara down, while adding no new information to that detailed by Castañeda, are in agreement with him as to the general facts.

Renewed attention was directed to Coronado’s expedition and to the probable locality of Cibola by the publication of the reports contained in the Notes of a Military Reconnoissance made by Lieut.-Colonel William H. Emory, in 1846-1847, with the advance guard of the army of the West, during the war between the United States and Mexico, and the Report of Lieutenant J. W. Abert of his examination of New Mexico. Colonel Emory, in a letter to Hon. Albert Gallatin, dated Oct. 8, 1847, made the statement that he had met with “an Indian race living in four-story houses, built upon rocky promontories, inaccessible to a savage foe, cultivating the soil, and answering the description of the seven cities of Coronado, except in their present insignificance in size and population, and the fact that the towns, though near each other, are not in a (continuous) valley six leagues long, but on different branches of the same stream” (p. 133). He had in mind the villages in the vicinity of Ciboletta, Laguna, etc., on the Rio San Jose, a tributary of the Rio Grande del Norte, about ninety miles east of the present Zuñi pueblo. This opinion was corroborated by Lieutenant Abert (p. 491). Mr. Gallatin thereupon proceeded to prepare for the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (vol. ii. p. liii, 1848) an elaborate essay on the Ancient semi-civilization of New Mexico, Rio Gila, and its vicinity, in which large use was made of these military reports, and to which was prefixed a map compiled by Mr. E. G. Squier. In November of the same year Mr. Squier contributed to the American Review an article on New Mexico and California. The ancient monuments and the aboriginal semi-civilized nations of New Mexico and California, with an abstract of the early Spanish explorations and conquests in those regions, particularly those falling within the territory of the United States. Mr. Gallatin came to the conclusion that the seven cities “appear to have been near the sources of a tributary of the great Colorado, and not of the Rio del Norte” (p. lxxii); but he inclined to the opinion that they had been destroyed by the Apaches (p. xciv). Mr. Squier identified Cibola with Zuñi; but there are inconsistencies to be found between his map and statements contained in his article. In that same year Lieutenant J. H. Simpson, in his Journal of a Military Reconnoissance from Santa Fé to the Navajo Country, gave a detailed description of Zuñi, which he considered to be the site of Cibola.

The explorations carried on in New Mexico and Arizona, from 1853 to 1856, during the search for a suitable route for the Pacific Railroad, took Lieutenant A. W. Whipple and Professor W. W. Turner over the same ground, and they both came to a similar conclusion (Pacific Railroad Reports, vol. iii. pp. 68, 104). But in 1857 Mr. H. M. Breckenridge published at Pittsburg a brief narrative of the Early discoveries by Spaniards in New Mexico, containing an account of the castles of Cibola and the present appearance of their ruins, in which he maintained that Cibola was the well-known ruin called Casa Grande, on the river Gila. Mr. R. H. Kern, however, upheld the Zuñi theory in his map, prepared in 1854 to accompany Schoolcraft’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America (vol. iv. p. 33); and Mr. Schoolcraft himself adopted the same view (vol. vi. p. 70, 1857).

In the year 1869 important additions were made to our knowledge of the early history of New Mexico, and especially of Coronado’s expedition. Mr. W. H. H. Davis, who had held an official position in that Territory, and in 1856 had published an interesting study of it under the title of El Gringo, gave to the world the first history of The Spanish Conquest of New Mexico, Doylestown, Penn. In the same year Brevet Brigadier General Simpson, who had had his attention directed to the question twenty years previously, prepared for the Annual Report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1869 a thorough study, accompanied by a map, of Coronado’s March in search of the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” and discussion of their probable location. In April of the same year there appeared in the North American Review an article by the late Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, entitled The Seven Cities of Cibola, in which that eminent archæologist made an elaborate argument in favor of the identification of that site with the remarkable group of ruined stone structures, discovered not long before in the valley of the Rio Chaco, one of the affluents of the Colorado, about one hundred miles to the northeast of Zuñi. On this point, however, both Mr. Davis (p. 119) and General Simpson have pronounced in favor of Zuñi, and General Simpson has even undertaken to answer Mr. Morgan’s arguments in detail (p. 232). Mr. Morgan, nevertheless, still held to his opinion in his Study of the houses of the American Aborigines, p. 46 (First annual report of the Archæological Institute of America, 1880) expanded into the House and House-life of the American Aborigines (Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain region, in charge of J. W. Powell, vol. iv., 1881, pp. 167-170).

The Spanish Conquest of New Mexico, by Mr. Davis, is a valuable contribution to history, in which faithful and diligent use has been made of the original authorities and of unpublished documents; and it is the only full and connected narrative that has yet appeared of the series of events which it relates. The important episode to which General Simpson confines his attention is treated in abundant detail, and great acuteness and local knowledge are displayed in the discussion of the route followed by Coronado. It is likely to remain always the leading authority upon this subject.

In his elaborate work upon The Native Races of the Pacific States, Mr. H. H. Bancroft adopted the Zuñi theory as to the site of Cibola (vol. iv. p. 674), repeated in his History of the Pacific States (vol. x. p. 85). This is also the opinion maintained by Mr. A. F. Bandelier in his Historical Introduction to Studies among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico, p. 12 (Papers of the Archæological Institute of America. American series, no. 1, Boston, 1881). This is a very careful and thorough investigation of the whole subject of the geography of New Mexico and of the tribal relations of its inhabitants.

At a meeting, however, of the American Antiquarian Society in April, 1881, Rev. E. E. Hale read a paper entitled Coronado’s Discovery of the Seven Cities, in which he expressed himself as inclined to abandon his previously maintained opinion in favor of the Zuñi identification, on account of certain newly discovered evidence set forth in an accompanying letter from Lieutenant J. G. Bourke, who argued that the Moqui pueblos better satisfy the conditions of the question. To this the present writer replied in a communication at the following October meeting of the society, under the title What is the true site of “The Seven Cities of Cibola” visited by Coronado in 1540? In this all the different opinions are discussed and the Zuñi theory upheld.

The same view is supported by Mr. L. Bradford Prince, late Chief-Justice of New Mexico, in his Historical Sketches of New Mexico from the earliest records to the American occupation, 1883 (p. 115). This modest little volume is the first attempt yet made to write a continuous history of the Territory down to the year 1847. It is a useful and in the main a trustworthy compendium. But in the chapter upon Coronado he has followed Castañeda’s erroneous dates, as Davis also has done before him, and he has fallen into a few other mistakes.