The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 15years later, another explorer, the Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza (1495?–1542), saw
the Zuni village from afar, its light adobe walls glistening in the evening sun, he was
convinced that he had discovered the Seven Cities, their streets paved with gold; and
he reported back to that effect to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City. “I continued
my journey till I came in sight of Cibula,” he wrote in 1539 in A Relation of the
Reverend Fray Marcos de Niza, Touching His Discovery of the Kingdom of Ceuola or
Cibula. “It appeared to be a very beautiful city.” And although he decided not to
enter it at this time, “considering my danger” as he put it, “and that if I died I would
not be able to give an account of that country,” he was sure that it was “bigger than
the city of Mexico,” that there was “much gold in it” and that “the natives of it deal
in vessels and jewels for the ears and little plates with which they relieve themselves
of sweat.” Such fabulous wealth clearly had to be in the right hands, and its present
caretakers taught the twin blessings of Christianity and civilization. “It occurred to
me to call this country the new kingdom of St. Francis,” Fray Marcos de Niza recalled;
and there, outside the city, “with the aid of the Indians,” he “made a heap of stones”
with “on top of it” “a small, slender cross.” The cross was a sign, he explained, that
“all the seven cities” had been taken “in the name of Don Antonio de Mendoza,
viceroy and governor of New Spain for the Emperor, our Lord.” With one simple
stroke, announcing both spiritual dominion and material appropriation, the Old
World declared that it would take control of the New.
The accounts of fabulous wealth waiting to be possessed, and a native population
ripe for conquest and conversion, encouraged a full-scale expedition in 1540 headed
by a protégé of the viceroy of New Spain, one Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.
Coronado found no gold, of course, even though some members of the expedition
journeyed as far as what would later be Kansas, where they encountered the Wichita
tribe. One Native American scout, a Plains Indian nicknamed “the Turk,” lured them
on with promises that they would soon find the city of their dreams. But eventually,
in 1542, the Spanish explorers returned south, having garroted “the Turk” as a
punishment for misleading them, their only consolation being that they had subdued
and stolen from the Pueblo Indians. They had not found streets paved with gold.
However, as the account of the Coronado expedition written by Pedro de Casteneda
(1520?–1570?) over twenty years later (translated and published in 1904 as The
Journey of Coronado 1540–1542) reveals, they had found something else: the vastness
of America, the immense emptiness of the plains, over which every now and then
great herds of buffalo would appear. “Many fellows were lost at this time,” Pedro de
Casteneda writes, “who went out hunting and did not get back to the army for two
or three days, wandering about the country as if they were crazy, in one direction or
another, not knowing where they started from.” If space is the central fact of
American experience, as writers from Walt Whitman to Charles Olson have claimed,
then this was the European discovery of it. Along with that, as in so many American
stories and poems, went the discovery of the sense of being lost in America –
sometimes exhilarating and at others, as here, genuinely terrifying. The Spanish
could not get over the size and strangeness of everything. “All over the plains,” Pedro
de Casteneda reported, there were vast numbers of bulls: “the number of those thatGGray_c01.indd 15ray_c 01 .indd 15 8 8/1/2011 7:54:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 53 AM