Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City

The Search for Quivira

The Search for Quivira It is not a hilly country, but one with mesas, plains, and charming rivers with fine waters, and it pleased me, indeed. —Juan Jamarillo’s Narrative of Quivira I first became aware of the Coronado expedition in the middle of third grade, when my teacher, a young nun named Sister Fidel Marie, took our class on a tour of the stained glass windows in Dodge City’s Sacred Heart Cathedral. Most of the saints depicted in the windows—Frances Cabrini, Martin de Porres, Rose of Lima—were New World saints of a fairly recent vintage, Sister informed us. However, only one of them had walked the very ground where we now stood. “Which one?” we demanded to know. “Father Padilla,” Sister said, pointing to a blue window in the southwest corner of the church depicting a gaunt, grayskinned monk with sad, wounded eyes. As we stood looking up at the window, Sister explained that Fray Padilla, good Franciscan that he was, had walked all the way from Mexico to what would become Dodge City, and that once he got to Kansas, he refused to leave. “Father Padilla was a missionary and a very holy man,” Sister concluded. “He loved God and Kansas—even to the point of dying for them.” This last part struck me as unreliable nunspeak, and I remember thinking at the time, She’s got to be kidding. Who gives up his life for a place like this? But even so, I was intrigued. The idea that my flat, windblown home state had some connection to a period of time I 1 3 8 ❍ T h e C o u n t r y associated with castles and knights in shining armor filled me with hope and longing. Several years after this, as part of an obligatory course in Kansas history, I dutifully learned the most salient facts about the expedition, such as when it began and ended (1540–42) and the most probable route the conquistadors had taken through Kansas (due north from the Oklahoma border to Dodge City, and from there, up the Arkansas River valley as far as Salina or Junction City). However, bored teenager that I was, little about any of this impressed me. Only much later, after I had moved away from Kansas and begun to suffer the first twinges of nostalgia , did I begin to read books about the expedition, such as Castaneda ’s Narrative and Bolton’s Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains. What I discovered in these books shocked and thrilled me. The Kansas I had known all my life, defined by dilapidated Main Streets and blowing dirt, was nowhere to be seen; in its place was a hauntingly beautiful world of tall grass and sweetly flowing rivers that went by the mysterious name of Quivira. ❍ Six miles east of Dodge City, all but lost amid an industrial corridor of beef-packing plants and feedlots, a thirty-eight-foot concrete cross rises from the low hills lining the north bank of the Arkansas River. Seen from below and against a backdrop of yawning blue, the cross, known locally as the Coronado Cross, looks curiously like a sword thrust into the hillside by an angry giant: either that or the headstone of some massive, anonymous tomb. It’s still dark when I pull my mile-worn Jeep into the scrappy roadside park beneath Coronado Cross. Just behind me, on US Highway 400, semis scream past carrying live cattle to slaughter, boxed and frozen beef in the opposite direction. In the final minutes before dawn, I train the Jeep’s headlights on the park’s six-foot-high roadside marker and begin reading. The Coronado Historical Park commemorates Coronado ’s journey in 1540–41 searching for gold. Following the safe crossing of the treacherous Arkansas nearby, Coronado and his entourage celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving in this vicinity. 1 3 9 ❍ T h e Sea r c h f o r Q u i v i r a The cross on the hill serves as a memorial of that first Christian service held west of the Mississippi on June 29, 1541. What glory these words signify . If only they were true! In fact, the “Mass of Thanksgiving” featured so prominently here (to say nothing of the stories of Sister Fidel Marie) is mentioned nowhere in the firsthand accounts of the expedition I’ve been reading...