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RICHARD FLINT AND SHIRLEY CUSHING FLINT 220 etween February 1540 and June 1542 an international cavalcade that numbered fifteen hundred people or more traveled, under the leadership of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, on foot and horseback, trailed by a large herd of livestock, some four thousand miles from westcentral Mexico to the heart of the Great Plains of North America and back. They went to bring under the sway of the Spanish king a far-off land reputedly rich in material wealth and populated by “primitive” peoples ripe for assimilation into the Christian faith. Members of the expedition tell of trudging over rugged highlands, immense plains, and treacherous rivers during their two years journeying to and from the north, and taking the measure of that land of fabulous possibilities, the terra incognita that is modern northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Almost at the outset of the great march a delay of several days was necessary at a river deep in Mexico (now identified as the Río de Santiago near Centispác) to ferry the sheep in the stock train across one at a time, slung over the backs of horses. It was likely at this same Río de Santiago a little more than two years later, on the return trip, that while trying to ford the river a horse drowned and a soldier was attacked and killed by an alligator. C H A P T E R 1 7 RICHARD FLINT AND SHIRLEY CUSHING FLINT The Coronado Expedition Cicúye to the Río de Cicúye Bridge1 220 THE CORONADO EXPEDITION: CICÚYE TO THE RÍO DE CICÚYE BRIDGE 221 Over and over on the way north, swollen rivers rendered the necessary fords risky and toilsome. Then, late in the spring of 1540, Coronado, with a small vanguard , encountered a full-running river (now thought to be in either east-central Arizona or southwest New Mexico). Fording the river proved impossible, so the party built rafts upon which to float themselves and their animals across the river they named Río de las Balsas (rafts), to commemorate that crossing on makeshift flatboats. As the season advanced and the expedition neared its immediate goal, the native cities of Cíbola, high rivers were no further problem. And still later in the year, chroniclers of the expedition record no difficulties in crossing and recrossing the great river on the banks of which winter quarters were established late in 1540 (almost assuredly the Rio Grande near present Bernalillo, New Mexico; see Chapter 16). The spring of 1541 presented a new goal for the Spanish expeditionary force, the tantalizing wealth of distant Quivira. After leaving winter quarters the expedition marched for four days to the east of the Rio Grande; the first stop was the pueblo of Cicúye. Three or four days beyond that pueblo they encountered a deep river that they called Río de Cicúye. To get their baggage and large herds across, they resorted to building a bridge (although they apparently had not and did not again go to such effort to cross any other river on the expedition’s course). The job took four days, after which they safely crossed the river and spent much of the remainder of the summer in a frustrating trek across the plains to the goldless grass huts of the actual Quivira.2 Sixteenth-century documentary evidence about the location of the bridge and the route from Cicúye to the bridge is vague and ambiguous. Direct references exist in two narratives written years after the expedition by members of the party Juan de Jaramillo and Pedro de Castañeda de Náçera. JARAMILLO: From here [Cicuique/Cicúye] we proceeded in three days to another river which we Spaniards called Cicuique. If I remember correctly, it seems to me that to reach this river, at the point where we crossed it, we went somewhat more to the northeast. Upon crossing it we turned more to the left, which must be more to the northeast, and we began to enter the plains where the cattle [bison] roam (Hammond and Rey 1940: 300). CASTAÑEDA: The army departed from Cicúye. . . . They traveled in the direction of the plains, which are on the other side of the mountain range. After four days’ march they came to a deep river carrying a large volume of water flowing from the direction of Cicúye. The general [Coronado] named it...

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