The Coronado Expedition from the Distance of 460 Years

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2831271
AutoresRick Hendricks (New Mexico State University, autor correspondente)
Ano2005
Volume85
Fascículo2
Páginas327-328
Data de publicação2005-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-85-2-327
OpenAlexW2040665789
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas15

Over the course of the last two decades, Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint have moved to the forefront of a long line of scholars dedicated to the study of the activities of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado from 1540 to 1542. Principal among their findings is that the Coronado expedition included as many as 1,500–2,000 individuals—rather than the 288 Europeans often cited from incomplete muster rolls. Of these people, 1,300 were Indians from central and western New Spain. The Flints’ contributions include numerous articles and several books covering a remarkably wide range of topics related to the Coronado expedition through the Southwest. As the title suggests, interest in and serious study of everything related to Coronado is almost half a millennia old.This volume, however, is strictly cutting edge. The result of a conference the editors hosted in April 2000, the book’s 17 chapters present findings from the fields of archaeology, genealogy, geography, history, and literature. An earlier, similar conference took place in 1992, and the reports presented at that time appeared in The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1544 Route across the Southwest (Univ. of Colorado Press, 1997). According to the Flints, this conference and book contributed to a major archaeological discovery—a campsite in the Texas Panhandle known as the Jimmy Owens Site.Several of the reports detail information derived from archaeological fieldwork conducted at this site. The most dramatic finding relates to crossbow boltheads. Frank R. Gagne Jr. presents evidence that boltheads located at the Jimmy Owens Site are “indistinguishable from boltheads from the other known Coronado expedition archeological sites in the Southwest” (p. 250). The finding of these copper crossbow boltheads, along with other sixteenth-century objects at the site, helps establish the site as a Coronado expedition encampment from the spring or early summer of 1541.The search for such specificity drives much of the research on the Coronado expedition. Despite the rich documentary record of Coronado’s activities in the Southwest, such questions as the exact route of the expedition, the precise barranca in which it camped, and the most likely place for a bridge to have been built are all at present still unknown, at least with certainty.The ingenuity of the scholars who contributed to this volume is noteworthy. One such example is Richard Flint’s report on reconciling the calendars of the Coronado expedition. Records that expedition members kept of its travel seem at great variance concerning the distance traveled and the timing of certain key events. The apparently contradictory information has plagued scholars attempting to retrace the expedition’s route. Flint’s comparison of three roughly contemporary documents posits the need to adjust for the calendar change from Julian to Gregorian and the notion that the expe dition traveled in groups rather than all together. Taking these and other factors into consideration explains most of the discrepancies among the accounts.Such academic cleverness characterizes much of this volume, but this is not a book written exclusively for scholars. There is something for the general reader of books on colonial Latin America. John Kessell captures the spirit of adventure of the Spaniards who decided to leave their homeland to see the marvels of the land beyond the western seas. Dee Brecheisen reports on his studies of mule shoes in sixteenth-century Panama and their implications for the identification of a distinctive “caret-head” nail found at the Jimmy Owens Site. Félix Barboza-Retana presents the results of a genealogical inquiry into the lives of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and his nephew, Juan Vázquez de Coro-nado. Barboza-Retana explains how two sons of a family of minor nobles in Salamanca, Spain, came to make their marks in the New World—Francisco in the far north of New Spain and Juan in Costa Rica.This volume’s most receptive audience will be the many readers with an abiding interest in the route of the Coronado expedition. For more than 160 years, ever since Henri Ternaux-Compans’s translation of Pedro de Castañeda de Náçera’s history of the expedition brought it to the attention of readers in the United States, people have sought to retrace Coronado’s journey’s through the Southwest. This volume does not answer all the remaining questions that would permit such a re-creation, but this work, along with the editors’ other publications, will remain the latest word on the subject until their ongoing research leads to another such book with even more revelations

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