tors might beat him to the allegedly fabulously
wealthy Seven Cities of Cíbola, a region sup-
posedly situated inland above northern Mex-
ico’s frontier. The claim that such cities existed
had been reported by the survivors of Cabeza
de Vaca’s epic trek.Coronado and the Seven Cities B 107
Seven Cities of Cíbola =
Spain’s search for seven rich cities north of the Mexican frontier appears to have
begun with the childhood memories of Tejo, an Indian slave owned by Nuño Bel-
trán de Guzmán, the brutal first governor of New Spain. According to the chron-
icler of Coronado’s expedition, Pedro de Casteñeda, Tejo told Guzmán that when
he was a boy, his trader father had “gone into the back country with fine feath-
ers to trade for ornaments, and that when he came back, he brought large
amounts of gold and silver, of which there was a large amount in that country.
He went with him once or twice, and saw some very large villages which com-
pared with Mexico [City] and its environs. He had seen seven large towns which
had streets of silver workers.”
Guzmán led an expedition in 1530 to search for these “Seven Cities,” but the
venture ended when his followers mutinied in the harsh terrain of northwestern
Mexico. In 1536, however, when Cabeza de Vaca’s party emerged from the
desert and told Mendoza they had heard of powerful villages to the north, Men-
doza and other speculators assumed the Narváez expedition survivors were
speaking of the Seven Cities.
The Seven Cities became known as Cíbola through the 1539 report of Marcos
de Niza. When Niza’s scout Estéban arrived at what he thought was the first of
the Seven Cities—the Zuni pueblo of Háwikuh, in reality—he sent back word
that Cíbola had been reached. The origin of the word Cíbolaitself is uncertain.
Some anthropologists claim it was based on the name of a Zuni pueblo—Shiv-
ola. Another theory is that Cíbola was a Spanish mispronunciation of Ashiwi,
the name by which the Zuni then called themselves. If so, it would have been
logical for Estéban to report that Indian guides informed him that they had
arrived at the communities of the Ashiwi—the cities of Cíbola. The Spanish later
named the bison they were seeing cíbolo,apparently because they originally
associated these animals with the same region as the legendary Seven Cities.
Part of the allure of the search for seven cities lay in Catholic hopes that
Cíbola might be the mythical Seven Cities of Antilia. According to Spanish and
Portuguese legends, after the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in A.D.
714, seven Spanish or Portuguese bishops were said to cross the Atlantic to the
island of Antilia, some 2,500 miles west of Europe, where they founded a pros-
perous Christian utopia. While the fortune hunters in Coronado’s expedition
sought gold, the friars in his ranks hoped to connect the fabled wealth and reli-
gious harmony of the island of Antilia with the rest of the Christian world.\