De Soto, Coronado, Cabrillo: Explorers of the Northern Mystery

A Guide To Sites

Following the Explorers

Though nothing spectacular survives, travelers can find many rewarding historical places that conjure up the Spanish conquistadores and the natives they encountered. The four principal NPS sites are described briefly in the following pages. Many other parks and several Indian communities also preserve landscapes directly associated with the explorations. They are listed below. All these places are well worth a visit and several are worth a journey to anyone interested in the beginnings of North American history.

Ocmulgee National Monument Macon, GA 31201	Ancient mounds built by people of the Mississippian culture. De Soto passed through this region in 1540.
Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site Cartersville, GA 30120	De Soto visited this town (called Itaba) in August 1540.
Mound State Monument Moundville, AL 35474	A farming town which flourished AD 1000-1500; representative of the powerful chiefdoms found by De Soto.
Parkin Archeological State Park Parkin, AR 72373	Believed to be a center of an important chiefdom (Casqui) visited by De Soto in 1541.
Coronado State Monument P.O. Box 95 Bernalillo, NM 87004	A Pueblo village visited by the Coronado expedition in 1540. Polychrome murals in the kiva are a prize exhibit.
Pueblo of Acoma P.O. Box 309 New Mexico 87034	A fortress town inhabited by descendents of the Pueblo people who befriended the Alvarado party in 1540.
Zuni Pueblo Box 339 Zuni, NM 87327	The original Cibola of Spanish legend. Háwikuh, the place of Coronado’s first encounter with Pueblo Indians, is now a ruin.

De Soto National Memorial, Florida

De Soto’s army may well have come ashore at a spot on Tampa Bay that resembled this beach within the park. Below: replica armor and an early marker commemorating De Soto’s bold march.

De Soto National Memorial commemorates the first major European penetration of the southeastern United States. De Soto’s purpose, sanctioned by the King, was to conquer the land Spaniards called La Florida and settle it for Spain. He failed in both objects. There was no rich empire in the north, only a succession of chiefdoms, and his practice of looting villages and grabbing hostages alienated native inhabitants and turned his march into a siege. The lasting significance of the expedition was the information it yielded about the land and its Mississippian people in a late stage of that remarkable civilization.

The park was established in 1949 on the south shore of Tampa Bay. De Soto’s fleet may very well have sailed by this point in May 1539 to a landing spot farther around the bay. Attractions at the park include replicas of the type of weapons carried by the expedition and thickets of red mangrove, the so-called Florida land-builder. The journals tell of De Soto’s men cutting their way inland through mangrove tangles.

For more information about the park and its programs, write:

Superintendent

De Soto National Memorial

P.O. Box 15390

Bradenton, FL 34280

Demonstrations in winter give insight into military life and the Spanish world-view in the 16th century.

Coronado National Memorial, Arizona

The Huachucas rise like islands above the surrounding Sonoran desert. This landscape is little changed from Coronado’s day.

Following an ancient Indian trade path up the San Pedro valley, the Coronado expedition crossed the present Mexico-United States border just east of this park. Hikers on the Coronado Peak Trail looking down Montezuma Canyon can see in the far distance cottonwood trees that mark Coronado’s line of march.

The national memorial was established in 1941, 400th anniversary of the expedition. Its setting high in the Huachuca Mountains is a fitting place to recall the first major Spanish entrada into the American Southwest in all its color and fire: the gathering of the army at Compostela, arduous marches across wilderness, encounters with native cultures of great subtlety and art, discovery of a land of vast expanse and power, and above all the record of where they had been and what they had seen.

This is a park to see on foot. Trails lead to good viewing points and connect with others in Coronado National Forest, which surrounds the park.

For information about the park and its programs, write:

Superintendent

Coronado National Memorial

4104 E. Montezuma Canyon

Road, Hereford AZ 85615

The expedition traveled along the San Pedro River, east of the park.

Pecos National Historical Park, New Mexico

The kiva and the mission church frame the two worlds of the Pecos Indians. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Pecos Indians destroyed the first mission and built this kiva (now restored) within the mission’s convento. For a few years they followed their religion undisturbed.

The ruins of Pecos Pueblo and Spanish missions of the 17th- and 18th-centuries crown a small ridge overlooking the Pecos Valley in upper New Mexico. At the time of the Coronado entrada, the pueblo was a giant apartment house, several stories high, with a central plaza, 600 rooms, and many kivas—home to 2,000 souls. The village prospered because it commanded the trade path between Pueblo farmers of the Rio Grande and buffalo hunters of the Plains. Pecos was a crossroads of commerce and culture, and its people grew adept at trade and war. The arrival of Franciscan priests in the 1600s with Spanish custom, religion, law inexorably altered Pueblo life. The Spaniards built a spacious mission church on the south end of the ridge, and a second but smaller one when the first church was destroyed in the Pueblo revolt of 1680. Pecos continued as a mission for more than a century. Disease and Comanche raids spelt decline in the late 18th century. The last inhabitants—fewer than 20—drifted away in 1838.

The park is 25 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Among its features are the ruins of the ancient pueblo, two restored kivas, and adobe mission walls. For information on the park and its programs, write:

Superintendent

Pecos National Historical

Park

P.O. Drawer 418

Pecos NM 87552-0418

Extensive pinyon-juniper forests once surrounded Pecos Pueblo.

The vessel is a 16th-century olla. The Spanish spur dates from the 17th century.

Cabrillo National Monument, California

The Old Point Loma Lighthouse, built 1854.

Gray whale migrations in winter are an annual spectacle.

This park honors the man who led the first European exploring expedition along the California coast. Sailing under a Spanish flag, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo departed on 27 June 1542 from the port of Navidad on Mexico’s west coast. He commanded the ship San Salvador (with a crew of 60); with him was Victoria, and another smaller vessel. His objective: “to discover the coast of New Spain.” Three months later he hove to in “a very good enclosed port”—San Diego Bay. This was the mariner’s first landfall north of Baja peninsula. Cabrillo himself died and was buried in the Channel Islands. His crew went on to explore as far north as Oregon, seeing new landmarks and new peoples, not all friendly.

The park is located on Point Loma, within the city of San Diego. Features include a heroic statue of Cabrillo, dramatic views of the Pacific and San Diego Bay, and Old Point Loma Lighthouse, a 1850s structure. In winter, the point is a good place to see the annual migration of the gray whale.

For information about the park and its programs, write:

Superintendent

Cabrillo National Memorial

P.O. Box 6670

San Diego CA 92166

The 14-foot sandstone statue of Cabrillo is the work of Portuguese sculptor Alvaro DeBree. Completed in 1939 for the San Francisco World’s Fair, it was eventually relocated here. The portrait is conjectural; there is no known likeness of the explorer.

Essay on Sources

If any of the leading conquistadores who march through these pages kept a running account of his adventures, the journal has been lost. Except for occasional letters, the closest we can come to firsthand information are reminiscences written or dictated by lesser participants many years after the events described. Some supplementary material also comes from court testimony. More immediacy is lost by the fact that most English readers must depend on translations of varying accuracy and fluency. There are several translations of all main documents.

The first of the New World adventurers to reminisce in print was Cabeza de Vaca. His Relación ... appeared in 1542. Buckingham Smith’s English translation, first printed in 1855, was later included with several other documents in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, edited by Frederick Hodge and Theodore Lewis (New York, 1907).

The same work also contains Smith’s translation of Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto by an anonymous Hidalgo (gentleman or knight) of Elvas, Portugal, first published in Portugal in 1557 by a survivor of the long march. Smith’s translation, somewhat modified, reappeared in Gaylord Bourne’s two-volume Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto (New York, 1904). Bourne’s volumes also contain reminiscences by Rodrigo Ranjel, De Soto’s secretary, and Luis de Biedma, the latter a spare account. The longest and lushest of the De Soto tales is The Florida of the Inca, the Inca being Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish father and an Incan mother. He drew his information from the oral accounts of three of De Soto’s soldiers and used his active imagination to embellish what he heard. The first complete English translation, by John and Jeannette Varner, appeared in 1951 (reprinted by University of Texas Press, 1980). Miguel Albornoz has published a novelized biography, Hernando de Soto, Knight of the Americas, translated by Bruce Boeglin (New York, 1986).

Some secondary material, which uses anthropological, archeological, and geographic research to shed light on the early explorations, should be mentioned. One instance: Final Report of the United States De Soto Commission, John R. Swanton, chairman (Washington, D.C., 1939). The commission sought to retrace De Soto’s zigzagging route. Jeffery P. Brain’s new edition of the Final Report for the Smithsonian Press (Washington, D.C., 1985) revises Swanton’s conclusions in many places. Another interesting formulation is “De Soto Trail: National Historic Trail Study, Draft Report” (NPS, 1990). In an appendix Charles Hudson offers a new reconstruction of De Soto’s route. The articles in First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570, Jerald T. Milanich and Susan Milanich, eds., (Gainesville. 1989), fill out our understanding of New World societies during the first decades of exploration.

Still the best introduction to Coronado and his expedition is Herbert E. Bolton’s classic biography, Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains (1949). George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey have brought together in Narratives of the Coronado Expedition (Albuquerque, 1940) all the primary documents, including testimony from Coronado’s trial, that anyone except specialists needs to know about the first Spanish entrada into the American Southwest. The chief items are the Relacións of Juan de Jaramillo and Pedro de Castañeda. Castañeda’s Relación also appears in Hodges and Lewis.

A sampling of the historical dispute over Friar Marcos’s doings in the Southwest can be found in articles by Henry Wagner and Carl Sauer in the New Mexico Historical Review, April 1937, July 1937, and July 1941. See also Cleve Hallenbeck, The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza (Dallas 1949). The place of the religious in the Coronado expedition is examined by Fr. Angelico Chavez of New Mexico in Coronado’s Friars (Academy of American Franciscan History, Washington, D.C., 1968). John L. Kessell’s Kiva, Cross, and Crown (National Park Service, Washington, D.C., 1979) looks at the relationships between the Coronado expedition and the key pueblo of Pecos. Albert H. Schroeder has analyzed Coronado’s route across the Plains in Plains Anthropologist, February 1962. Carroll L. Riley, in the New Mexico Historical Review, October 1971, and The Kiva, winter 1975, shows that in Coronado’s time long trade routes and hence a rudimentary system of verbal communications, fortified by signs, linked Cíbola (Háwikuh) and the Indians of Mexico. Other trade trails carried goods and knowledge from the interior across the Colorado River to the Pacific and out onto the Plains. A new account of Coronado’s march is Stewart L. Udall, To the Inland Empire (New York, 1987).

The principal sources on Cabrillo (Juan Paez’s “Summary Log” and court testimony about Cabrillo’s accomplishments) were published by the Cabrillo Historical Association in The Cabrillo Era and His Voyage of Discovery (San Diego, 1982). The best biography, Harry Kelsey’s Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (The Huntington Library, 1986), is based on extensive new research in sources.

★GPO: 1992—312-246/40005

Footnotes

[1]Paul Horgan in Great River identifies Rio de las Palmas with today’s Rio Grande. Other historians favor Soto la Marina, about 30 miles north of Tampico, formerly Pánuco.

[2]Such is the conclusion of the U.S. De Soto Commission headed by John R. Swanton (Final Report, Washington, D.C., 1939), which was appointed by President Roosevelt to study the explorer’s route to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the landing, an opinion affirmed by two other scholars, Charles Hudson and Jerald T. Milanich. For a contrary opinion that favors the Fort Myers area, see R.F. Schell, De Soto Didn’t Land at Tampa, Fort Myers Beach, 1966. Jeffery P. Brain in a new edition of the report for the Smithsonian Press (1985) concludes that the most we can now say is that De Soto landed somewhere along the central Florida gulf coast, “between the Caloosahatchie River to south and the vicinity of Tampa Bay to the north.” It is conceivable that future archeological studies will narrow down the landing site.

[3]Because Vásquez was the family name of the conquistador, the young man should properly be called Vásquez. This account, however, will follow established American custom and call him Coronado.

[4]Among the 30 riders was Juan de Zaldívar. As a consequence, Zaldívar had to leave behind a captive Indian woman he had picked up in Tiguex. Rather than return there she fled down a fork of the Brazos River that rises in the Staked Plains. Somewhere near present Waco, Texas, she perhaps met the survivors of De Soto’s party as they were trying to reach Pánuco, Mexico, by land. See page 50 above. If true, and it seems likely, it was the only contact between the two groups, who at one point were within 300 to 400 miles of each other.

[5]Too few records have survived for anyone to say with certainty where Cabrillo was born or grew up. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, a Spanish chronicler, identified him in 1615 as Portuguese. Set against this is the testimony of the explorer’s grandson in 1617 that “My paternal grandfather, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo came [to the New World] from the Kingdoms of Spain....” The NPS has adopted the view that Cabrillo was Portuguese. Many historians, including Cabrillo’s most recent biographer Harry Kelsey, aver that he was Spanish. David Lavender believes that the question is both elusive and unimportant. What is certain, Lavender points out, is that like many adventurers from other countries Cabrillo spent a good part of his life in the service of Spain and opened new lands to Spanish settlement. Ed.

[6]Recent scholarship has shown that accounts which say Cabrillo commanded two ships on his northern journey, as most accounts do, were following mistakes made by the first Spanish historians of the expedition. Unfortunately, Cabrillo’s own log has disappeared and is known only through an often vague, chronologically mixed-up summary attributed to a Juan Páez, of whom little is known. Better sources are the testimony given by witnesses in legal actions brought by Cabrillo’s heirs to recover property taken from his estate after his death. For details see Harry Kelsey’s biography, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (1986). and the Cabrillo Historical Association’s 1982 publication, The Cabrillo Era and His Voyage of Discovery, especially articles by Kelsey and James R. Moriarty, III.

National Park Service

Sources

Alabama Museum of Natural History 51 (palette stone)
Andersen, Roy 68-69; 82
Batchelor, John 90-91, 92, 93
Bell, Fred 100
Cook, Kathleen Norris 84
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection 28 (bottom)
Florida Division of Historical Resources 43 (all except olive jar)
Florida Museum of Natural History 43 (olive jar)
Glanzman, Louis S. 16; 18-19; 34-35; 44; 64-65; 94 (Chumash Indian)
Gnass, Jeff 104; 108 (lighthouse)
Gray, Tom Back cover (upper left); 36; 102-3
Harrington, Marshall 108-9 (San Diego, gray whale)
Hudson, Charles 46-47 (route information)
Huey, George H. H. 107
Huntington Library 57
Jacka, Jerry Back cover (upper right); 58-59; 73; 79; 80; 106
Lanza, Patricia 77
Library of Congress 4 (De Bry woodcut); 23 (from Das Trachtenbuch des Christian Weiditz); 31 (from Gomara’s History); 38; 94 (right)
Mang, Fred 96
Muench, David 54; 98-99
Museo Civico Navale di Genova-Pegli 15 (portrait)
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon 14
National Geographic Society 24 (artist, Felipe Davalos); 26-27 (Michael A. Hampshire)
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 88
Odyssey Productions (R. Frerck) 20; 22; 28 (top)
Palazzo Tursi, Genoa 15 (coat-of-arms)
Parkin Archeological State Park, Arkansas 48
Peabody Museum, Harvard University 50
Smithsonian Institution 51 (stone axe)
Till, Tom 105
Townsend, L. Kenneth 54-55, 74-75
University of California, Berkeley, Lowie Museum of Anthropology 95
Westlight (Bill Ross) Back cover, lower left; 109

U.S. Department of the Interior

As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the Interior has responsibility for most of our nationally owned public lands and natural and cultural resources. This includes fostering wise use of our land and water resources, protecting our fish and wildlife, preserving the environmental and cultural values of our national parks and historical places, and providing for the enjoyment of life through outdoor recreation. The Department assesses our energy and mineral resources and works to assure that their development is in the best interest of all our people. The Department also promotes the goals of the Take Pride in America campaign by encouraging stewardship and citizen responsibility for the public lands and promoting citizen participation in their care. The Department also has a major responsibility for American Indian reservation communities and for people who live in Island Territories under U.S. Administration.