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TWELVE The Jimmy Owens Site: New Perspectives on the Coronado Expedition DONALD J. BLAKESLEE AND JAY C. BLAINE IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN one hundred years since George Winship published translations of some documents of the Coronado expedition, an event that initiated modern investigations of that epochal journey. In the ensuing century, numerous scholars have attempted to trace the route of the expedition. Some agreement has been achieved regarding the most easily identified portions of the route: the Zuni pueblos, the pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, and the grass house villages of the Wichita Indians in central Kansas. For the Texas portion of the route, however, the documentary accounts are vague and sometimes mutually contradictory. As a result, many routes have been proposed, from several that never take Coronado south of the Canadian River to others that have him on the Conchas River, far to the south. Until now, there has been no material evidence to confirm the location of any of the camps on his Texas route. In this chapter, we report work done at the Jimmy Owens Site (FL), with an emphasis on the problems the site presents to the archeologist. We review the evidence we believe demonstrates that the site was created by the expeditionary force of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and we discuss the data accumulated so far with regard to determining which of the army’s two main camps this site might represent. We end with a brief description of plans for future work at the site. Discovery of the Jimmy Owens Site A series of symposia held in Amarillo, Texas; Lyons, Kansas; and Las Vegas, New Mexico, have brought together a wide range of people interested in the Coronado  route. In , the late Margaret Harper of Canyon, Texas, organized the first symposium . After listening to the evidence presented there, the senior author of this chapter concluded that just enough evidence might be available to enable delineation of the route—a judgment made on the basis of experience tracing the route of the Mallet expedition of , for which a seven-page document provides the only written description. Out of the second and third symposia, there developed a loosely organized set of people who continued to investigate the Texas portion of the route. They included, besides Blakeslee, the late Billy Harrison, archeologist, PanhandlePlains Museum, Canyon, Texas; the late Al Schroeder, archeologist and ethnohistorian , National Park Service, Santa Fe; David Snow, archeologist, Museum of New Mexico; the late Mildred Wedel, ethnohistorian, Smithsonian Institution; the late Waldo Wedel, archeologist emeritus, Smithsonian Institution; numerous local residents and amateur archeologists; and, among the other contributors to this volume, Jay Blaine, Richard Flint, Shirley Cushing Flint, William Hartmann, the late Jack Hughes, and Carroll Riley. As our study of the problem proceeded, we developed a methodology that involved several critical elements. The first was open debate; for every issue in the overall problem, someone stepped forward as a devil’s advocate, challenging the general consensus. A second element was fieldwork. Grants from Wichita State University and the Harrington Foundation enabled some of us to travel across the parts of Texas specified in various hypotheses regarding the route. Later, the Summerlee Foundation of Dallas supported two years of excavation and other work at the Jimmy Owens Site. Jack Hughes and Billy Harrison contributed their vast knowledge of the local archeology, geology, vegetation, and water holes. Blakeslee began a review of Indian trails, a study that has been expanded enormously by Alvin Lynn, a local resident. We even traveled the Panhandle in the same season that Vázquez de Coronado was there in order to get the best possible sense of what his men had experienced. The final element in our approach has been a critical reanalysis of all of the previously proposed routes, an effort made relatively easy by the historiography of Joseph Sánchez. Some proposed routes were no more than assertions of faith that Coronado had been in a certain region. Others used descriptions of the landscape or the vegetation to support one hypothesis or another. What we did was to take all of the documentary evidence as criteria by which to judge the accuracy of the various hypotheses. This process led most of us to reject all of the proposed routes except for the set that had Coronado’s main camp somewhere between Yellow House Canyon on the south and Palo Duro Canyon on the north. Only this area fits the bulk of the documentary evidence.  THE...

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