HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 



The Causes of the Coronado Expedition, 1528-1539 

 alvar nunez cabeza de vaca 



The American Indians are always on the move. Tribes shift the 

 location of their homes from season to season and from year to year, 

 while individuals wander at will, hunting, trading or gossiping. This is 

 very largely true today, and when the Europeans first came in contact 

 with the American aborigines, it was a characteristic feature of Indian 

 life. The Shawnees, for example, have, drifted from Georgia to the 

 great lakes, and part of the way back, during the period since their 

 peregrinations can first be traced. Traders from tribe to tribe, in 

 the days when European commercial ideas were unknown in North 

 America, carried bits of copper dug from the mines in which the abo- 

 riginal implements are still found, on the shores of Lake Superior, to 

 the Atlantic coast on the one side and to the Rocky mountains on the 

 other. The Indian gossips of central Mexico, in 1535, described to 

 the Spaniards the villages of New Mexico and Arizona, with their many- 

 storied houses of stone and adobe. The Spanish colonists were always 

 eager to learn about unexplored regions lying outside the limits of the 

 white settlements, and their Indian neighbors and servants in the val- 

 ley of Mexico told them many tales of the people who lived beyond the 

 mountains which hemmed in New Spain on the north. One of these 

 stories may be found in another part of this memoir, where it is pre- 

 served in the narrative of Pedro Castafieda, the historian of the Coro- 

 nado expedition. Castaneda's hearsay report of the Indian story, which 

 was related by an adventurous trader who had penetrated the country 

 far to the north, compares not unfavorably with the somewhat similar 

 stories which Marco Polo told to entertain his Venetian friends. 1 But 

 whatever may have been known before, the information which led to 

 the expedition of Friar Marcos de Niza and to that of Francisco Vaz- 

 quez Coronado was brought to New Spain late in the spring of 153G by 

 Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. 



In 1520, before Cortes, the conqueror of Motecuhzoma, had made his 

 peace with the Emperor Charles V and with the authorities at Cuba, 

 Panfilo de Narvaez was dispatched to the Mexican mainland, at the 



'Tin- Indian's story is in the first chapter of CastaSeda'a Narrative. Some additional information 

 isjEiven in Bandolier's Contributions to the History of the Southwest, the first chapter of "which is 

 entitled "Sketch of the knowledge which the Spaniards in Mexico possessed of the countries north of 

 the province of New Galicia previous to the return of Cabeza de Vaca.'' For bibliographic references 

 to this and other works referred to throughout this memoir, see the list at the end of the paper. 



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