Images de page
PDF
ePub

Apaches roved and hailed him fearlessly from the doors of their painted skin tents) and into Texas. Here enormous herds of buffalo provided an abundance of meat. Castañeda speaks of seeing the skyline between the legs of bison grazing at a distance. "This country," he says, "is like a bowl, so that when a man sits down, the horizon surrounds him all around at the distance of a musket shot." The plains baffled the hunting parties. They wandered in circles about the heaps of "cows" they had killed until musket shots from the main camp gave them direction; and some hunters were lost. It seemed as if the vast prairie itself designed the destruction of the strangers who had invaded its solitude, for it wiped out their trails as the sea obliterates the mark of the keel. Castañeda exclaims, wonderingly: "Who could believe that a thousand horses and five hundred of our cows, and more than five thousand rams and ewes, and more than fifteen hundred friendly Indians and servants, in travelling over these plains, would leave no more trace where they had passed than if nothing had been there—nothing that it was necessary to make piles of bones and cow-dung now and then so that the rear-guard could follow the army. The grass never failed to

SO

become erect after it had been trodden down, and although it was short, it was as fresh and straight as before."

June found the army among the Teyas Indians in western Texas. By this time so many of El Turco's tales had been disproved that he traveled in irons. Food and water became scarce. Most important of all, the Teyas guides told Coronado that Quivira was north, not east. Coronado therefore ordered the main body, under Arellano, back to Tiguex, in New Mexico. He himself, with only thirty horsemen and six footmen, would push north, to follow the new directions. In vain his men besought him not to leave them leaderless. The melancholy induced, even in seasoned plainsmen at times, by the broad monotonous stretches of prairie obsessed them. They feared that death would halt them somewhere on their lost march and toss their skeletons among the buffalo bones sprinkling that relentless land which had refused their impress as conquerors. They feared to see their general's gleaming casque disappear once and forever over the northern rim of the sky, leaving no more trace than the wing of a golden eagle passing through the ether. But Coronado stubbornly held on his way

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade.

The army separated near the upper waters of the Brazos. After some thirty days Coronado and his little band crossed the Arkansas into Kansas. They continued in a northeasterly direction and, about a week later, reached the first of the Quivira towns in the vicinity of Great Bend, Kansas, where, then and for centuries after, lived Wichita Indians. Here no sparkling sails floated like petals on the clear surface of an immeasurable stream. No lordly chief drowsed to the murmur of innumerable bells. The water pitchers on the shoulders of the women, stooping in the low entrances of their grass-thatched huts, were not golden. "Neither gold nor silver nor any trace of either was found among these people." El Turco confessed that he had been detailed by the tribesmen of those whom Coronado had incinerated to lead the lying strangers out on the plains "and lose them." Wandering over the sun-baked prairie, food and water failing and their horses dying, the Spaniards would become so weak that should any return, the Tiguas could "kill them without any trouble, and thus they could take revenge for what had been done to them. . . as

L

for gold he did not know where there was any of it."

So Coronado had the Turk garroted, and set up a cross with the inscription, "Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, general of an expedition, reached this place." Then he turned back, empty-handed; for even explorers whom he had sent out northward, and who may have reached the Nebraska line, had found no sign of rich peoples nor of precious metals. Meanwhile Arellano had reached Tiguex safely. Arrived there some weeks later, Coronado sent out exploring parties, one of which visited Taos, that interesting town still lying between the Río Hondo and the Taos Mountains. Here the Spaniards found a high type of Indian civilization, large wellstocked granaries, and wooden bridges flung across the Taos River to connect the eighteen divisions of the town.1

Winter bore hard on Coronado's men, who were on scant rations and almost naked. The officers seized the most and the best of everything for themselves, and dangerous dissensions arose in

Taos today has about 425 Indian inhabitants; and it is also the home of a small but noted school of American painters, who are bringing the life and character of the Pueblo Indians and the color and atmosphere of the southwestern mesas prominently into American art.

the camp. Towards the end of winter Coronado, riding at the ring on a festival day, fell beneath the hoofs of his companion's horse and was dangerously injured in the head. His illness and his failures preyed on his mind; and he resolved to seek no farther for wealth, but to return to his wife in Mexico. In April, 1542, he and his disappointed band turned homeward. At that very time, far to the east, Hernando de Soto also was giving up the Golden Quest and turning his face towards Mexico, to die of a broken spirit a month later. Hungry and tattered, and harassed by Indians, Coronado and his army painfully made their way back towards New Galicia. The soldiers were in open revolt; they dropped out by the score and went on pillaging forays at their pleasure. With barely a hundred followers, Coronado presented himself before Mendoza, bringing with him nothing more precious than the gold-plated armor in which he had set out two years before. He had enriched neither himself nor his King, so his end is soon told: "he lost his reputation, and shortly thereafter the government of New Galicia."

Two soldiers had been left in Kansas; their fate is not known. Fray Juan Padilla, Fray Juan de la Cruz, and a lay brother, Luís Descalona,

« PrécédentContinuer »