In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate by Stan Hoig
  • Richard Flint
Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate. By Stan Hoig. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013. Pp. 352. Illustrations, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index.)

One might imagine that I would be pleased with Stan Hoig’s Came Men on Horses, a narrative account of the Coronado and Oñate expeditions, particularly because it liberally quotes from and cites the published work on the Coronado [End Page 435] Expedition by me and my collaborator, my wife Shirley Cushing Flint. Indeed, 264 out of the 362 footnotes to the introduction and first ten chapters of Came Men on Horses cite our work. Around and between those many direct quotations, though, is much quicksand of misinformation and mistakes. Came Men on Horses would be an unfortunate class assignment or recreational read. That is because it is larded with factual errors and fails to distinguish between conjecture, scholarly argument, and fact.

Examples from a single page in the book will suffice to indicate how problematic are Hoig’s compilation and recounting of long-established data about the Coronado and Oñate expeditions. On page 41, the text begins, “On a brisk Monday morning of February 28, 1540 (Julian calendar; March 2, Gregorian calendar). . .” The actual equivalent Gregorian date is March 10. Hoig then follows that error by referring to Compostela, the capital of Nueva Galicia, as “perched along Mexico’s west coast.” He seems unaware that in 1540 the town was located at the site of modern Tepic, about thirty kilometers inland from the coast. In the next sentence Hoig states that Compostela was founded in 1535, whereas it was actually founded in 1531. This is all in the space of one paragraph on one page.

The earlier working title of the manuscript, “Somewhere Quivira,” reveals Hoig’s main interest in the subject of the Coronado and Oñate expeditions, namely the location of and routes to the land of Quivira—long thought to be in what is now central Kansas. Chapters 8 and 20 and appendix C of Came Men on Horses are clearly the parts of the book that held the keenest interest for Hoig himself. They are the longest chapters and, not surprisingly, they contain most of the original scholarship in the book.

Hoig’s route hypothesis concerning the Coronado expedition is based largely on comparison of three English translations of sixteenth-century Spanish documents—those of George Winship (1896), George Hammond and Agapito Rey (1940), and the Flints (2005). Hoig, though, was apparently unable to consult the original Spanish accounts and so had no means of assessing the relative accuracy of the various translations. He was left, therefore, to mix and match from among translations of widely divergent accuracy, based solely on how a given translation comported with his own vision.

The route hypotheses outlined in Came Men on Horses lack rigorous documentary or archaeological foundation. But these are obviously the sections of the book where Hoig was most at home. As hypotheses, or “conjectures” as Hoig calls them, the material on expeditionary routes in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas might best have been presented as journal articles, rather being buried among flawed general accounts of the two expeditions. While Hoig’s writing style is engaging, I remain profoundly disappointed with Came Men on Horses.

Richard Flint
University of New Mexico
...

pdf

Share