Will There be a Coronado Trail?

Wednesday, 23 February 2011 02:09

In 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition from Mexico to the U.S. in search of Cibola, or the Seven Cities of Gold.  For almost 200 years scholars have been trying to find the route taken by Coronado and his men, and today historians are closer than ever to the truth.

The Coronado National Memorial has marked the site of Coronado’s entrance into the U.S. through the San Pedro Valley for decades. However, it is Coronado’s trail through the U.S. that has left many wondering for years.

In 1992, the National Park Service held a conference with scholars and historians from around the country to determine if there was enough evidence of Coronado’s exact route to begin marking the trail.

“The NPS’s conclusion, correct at the time, was that scholarly opinion was too diverse to permit the delineation of a consensus route,” said Richard Flint, research associate in history at the Center for Desert Archaeology. “But today, there is a greatly increased agreement among scholars concerning long stretches of the route.”

The evidence was found in the diary entries of two Spanish soldiers who were traveling with Coronado.  Their entries were written in outdated Spanish and confusion over the translations is part of what delayed the process.

“It wasn’t the same type of Spanish we see today,” said Gayle Hartmann, a local historian who has worked on some of the Coronado archeological digs. “A lot of the terminology was different and there was no punctuation. You couldn’t tell where one sentence ended and the next began.”

Flint and his wife, Shirley, are two of the key researchers who worked on the translations and it was the debate over these translations that has led scholars on a goose chase trying to determine the actual route.

“There was one translation of the diaries that they thought was a deep and reedy river so everyone was thinking they crossed the Gila, near Safford,” Hartmann said.  “But it turns out it was a mistranslation and it was actually a deep and narrow canyon, which we later learned was Apache Pass.”

It has long been suggested that Coronado came up into the U.S. through the San Pedro Valley before heading east into the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains. This is where the trail had been blurred.

The Coronado chroniclers talk about a place called Chichilticale, what has been translated as ‘the red house.’

“There has been a lot of ink spilled over the years as to where the red house was located and this mining geologist from New Mexico thought he had found a possible location in southeast Arizona,” Hartmann said. “There was a coin that looked to be left by them and this proved that they did go through Apache Pass and then up along the New Mexico and Arizona border.”

It is believed that the Coronado Expedition then traveled up through Albuquerque, New Mexico before heading into northeast Texas.

Archeological digs were performed in Floydada, Texas in the mid 90s.  Scholars found about 40 crossbow points believed to have been used by Coronado and his men, as well as a number of caret head nails that were commonly used for horseshoes.

“They had written about this big storm while they were down in this canyon and how their horses all spooked, and believe it or not, I think that’s what we found,” Hartmann said. “These nails were all over the place, in the mud about 10 cm. below the surface.”

After Texas, it is believed that Coronado led his men up through Kansas, before returning home in frustration from failing to find the Seven Cities of Gold.

Research continues along the suspected trail and many hope, that one day with enough evidence, the Coronado Trail can be marked, just like the Anza Trail, which runs from Southern Arizona all the way up through San Francisco, Calif.

The Flints are working to have Congress reauthorize the National Trail Study in hopes that the progress made in the past 20 years will be enough to put together a national commission to oversee the research necessary to definitively know the entire trail.

“The expedition represents a watershed event in the history of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico and certainly deserves to be commemorated in that way,” Flint said.

Written by Erica Coleman You are reading Will There be a Coronado Trail? articles