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

10. The Relevance of Ethnology to the Routing of the Coronado Expedition in Sonora

his chapter focuses on the routing of the Coronado expedition in Sonora. As we all are aware, there has been considerable scholarly debate over Coronado’s route, owing to the vagueness of the chronicles with respect to the expedition’s itinerary. At present, there appear to be two principal schools of thought with respect to routing of the Coronado expedition in Sonora (Map 6). The older of the two schools, led by Carl Sauer (1932), has held that Coronado traveled through the middle and upper Río Sonora Valley to the headwaters of the Río San Pedro, subsequently turning to the northeast and to Cíbola. The second school, founded by Charles Di Peso (Di Peso et al. 1974), has held that Coronado traveled farther inland, principally up the Río Bavispe, to the Río San Bernardino, and then north along the Arizona–New Mexico border to Cíbola. Here I evaluate these different routes, particularly the Río Sonora route favored by Adolf Bandelier, Herbert Bolton, Sauer, and others. I pay particular attention to the explorers’ ethnographic observations and their degree of fit with ethnohistorical and archeological data. Basically, I conclude that the chronicles of the Coronado as well as other expeditions are remarkably consistent with archeological and other evidence of a large and sophisticated Ópata population in the Río C H A P T E R 1 0 The Relevance of Ethnology to the Routing of the Coronado Expedition in Sonora DANIEL T. REFF 137 DANIEL T. REFF 138 Map 6. Reconstruction of routes to Tierra Nueva. By Daniel Reff. THE RELEVANCE OF ETHNOLOGY TO THE ROUTING OF THE CORONADO EXPEDITION IN SONORA 139 Sonora Valley. This finding is significant for reasons that go beyond a determination of Coronado’s route. Specifically, the exploration chronicles often have been devalued as a source of data on native life in the Greater Southwest. Scholars continue to point out that the explorers were not social scientists,1 and accordingly, their comments on native life are ethnocentric, exaggerated, or were composed to defame or defend the explorers ’ actions (see, for example, McGuire and Villalpando 1991: 170). Although the chroniclers of the Coronado expedition clearly were not social scientists, formal social science education does not render observers free of bias, ethnocentrism, imprecision, and ulterior motives (Clifford 1988). Anthropologists in this regard have been lulled into a false sense of security with respect to the “accuracy” of modern ethnographic texts, as opposed to texts generated by pre-anthropology observers (Thomas 1989). Another important reason why the explorers’ comments have been held suspect is that often the explorers’ characterization of aboriginal culture was contradicted, in whole or in part, by the later Franciscans and Jesuits (Reff 1991; Upham 1982). The missionaries in the 1600s generally reported much smaller native populations as well as less complex native societies. This lack of correspondence between the explorers’ and missionaries’ writings has contributed to doubts about the reliability of the explorers’ accounts. Again, many have assumed—if only implicitly—that the missionaries, because they were religious, were trustworthy, whereas the explorers, because they were “soldiers of fortune,” were apt to lie to enhance the importance of their efforts on behalf of the crown (see, for instance, Mecham 1927: 157; Simmons 1979: 192). In the second part of this chapter I explore the reasons for the discrepancy between the explorers’ and later Jesuits’ descriptions of what the explorers referred to as the Señora Valley. Briefly, Jesuit and other colonial documents indicate that Old World diseases spread in advance of the mission frontier during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Diseases such as smallpox decimated many native populations during the interlude separating the time of the explorers and the founding of the first missions. Thus, the fact that the explorers’ comments are seemingly at odds with the later observations of the missionaries reflects disease and its consequences, not the explorers’ predilection to lie or exaggerate. The Sonoran Routing In reconstructing the route of the Coronado expedition, early theorists, such as Bolton (1949) and Sauer (1932), were convinced that Coronado’s expedition departed the villa of San Miguel de Culiacán and followed the foothills of southern Sonora to the Middle Río Yaqui (see Map 6). It has been generally assumed that the DANIEL T. REFF 140 expedition crossed the river at Sayopa, and proceeded in a northwesterly direction to the Río Sonora and...