The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1540-1542 Route across the Southwest (review)

Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 175-177

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Book Review

The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva:
The 1540-1542 Route across the Southwest

Colonial Period

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The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1540-1542 Route across the Southwest. Edited by Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint. Introduction by Carroll L. Riley. Historiographical chapters by joseph p. sánchez. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1997. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xix, 442 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

As the list of references cited in this book shows, it is obvious that over the past century a considerable corpus of literature has been devoted to Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's journey to the present southwestern United States and northern Mexico (1540-1542). Some scholars have deemed the entrada a failure because it did not achieve its principal goals of finding the Seven Cities of Cíbola and achieving great wealth for Spain in the frontera septentrional (northernmost frontier). Yet others have properly noted the expedition's achievements, such as the contributions to geographic knowledge, the contact established with the Pueblos and other Native Americans, and the information revealed about the flora and fauna of this vast frontier.

The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva is derived from a conference at New Mexico Highlands University in August 1992. Papers from it form the core of the book, and six other research studies have been added, all of which focus upon the probable and possible route of Vásquez de Coronado. Twenty-one scholars (anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, historians, one geographer, and one high school teacher) contribute to the book's 23 chapters, divided into the five segments of the expedition's route. Joseph P. Sánchez, an authority on Spanish colonial history in North America, provides four useful introductory and historiographical chapters examining the overall route through northern New Spain and the southwestern part of today's United States. The other chapters examine segments of the probable route and archaeological/ethnic aspects pertaining to it. These include studies written by editors Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint; an introduction by Carroll L. Riley; a study of documents by Charles W. Polzer, S.J.; and treatments of other specific topics by notable scholars, including the Flints and Riley.

With one exception, the authors have consulted and cited primary and secondary source material, although little of it in Spanish documents. Only Father Polzer concentrates upon these primary sources, but he notes perceptively that "the accounts depend on distant memory. We don't have the diaries" (p. 37). Unfortunately, the bibliography is a general list of mostly published works. It would have been more useful to separate primary and secondary materials, as well as books and articles, in a classified bibliography. There are also 30 illustrations (mostly archaeological) and 18 maps, which are clear but do not always depict Vásquez de Coronado's routes.

The main "value of the book," according to Riley in the introduction, is "the framing and clarification of questions about early Spanish exploration in the Southwest" (p. 27). Indeed, this reviewer would add that the book provides up-to-date differing interpretations based upon research of sites along the possible route--for example, Corazones, the route in Sonora, Coofor and Moho in the Río Grande Basin, and Palo Duro/Blanco canyons in West Texas. However, as Riley notes, "it may be that we will never completely delineate Coronado's trail" (p. 28). In their concluding remarks, the Flints state that "it is all but impossible to say with certainty that any particular event recorded in the sixteenth-century Coronado documents occurred at any specific place locatable on the ground of a modern map" (p. 384).

Overall, this reviewer believes that each chapter and the entire book are valuable studies of current research and interpretation concerning the possible route of Vásquez de Coronado. Thus the book will interest specialists in colonial Latin American history, especially those of Spanish exploration of the American Southwest. However, the book...