Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

1990

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly [GPQ 10 (Summer 1990): 139·151].Copyright 1990 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Abstract

Four hundred and forty-nine years ago this summer, the Kansas prairies were visited for the first time by white men. These were a select group of Spanish adventurers from Mexico led by a thirty-year-old nobleman by the name of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado. Francisco was a lad of eleven years when Hernando Cortez looted the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, and sent back to Spain a vast treasure in gold, silver, and precious stones. One of several younger sons, and thus denied by the rule of primogeniture from inheriting any significant share of the family patrimony, Francisco followed the example of many of his contemporaries and headed for the land of promise-the New World. He arrived in Mexico City with the viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, a year or two after Francisco Pizarro, a cousin of Cortez, plundered the Inca capital of Cuzco in Peru, greatly enriching himself and returning another fabulous fortune to Spain. Within two years of his coming, Don Francisco married a beautiful, wealthy, and well-connected heiress. By 1538, three years after his arrival in Mexico and while he was still only twenty-eight years old, Coronado was appointed to the governorship of New Galicia on the northwestern frontier of New Spain. The record, to quote the historian Herbert E. Bolton, strongly suggests that Coronado had what it takes (Bolton 1949; Udall 1987).

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