The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 63, July 1959 - April, 1960 Page: 192
684 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
For three dayss his party moved ahead among these Indians of
Cona. Then for not less than four days9 the Spaniards traveled
forward again before Coronado finally decided that his party
which had set out for Quivira had been led in the wrong direction
by his Indian guide.'0
At this point the expedition had reached a large ravine with
a little bit of a river at the bottom of it." From this ravine Coro-
nado with thirty of his best horsemen went north,12 while he left
his army at the encampment to hunt buffalo and build up its
meat supply before turning back to New Mexico.
At this terminal point of the Coronado journey in Texas the
trail detective's problem becomes acute-and blooms with excite-
ment. If this large ravine can be located with certainty-and this
paper will present strong evidence that it can-the entire puzzle
of finding the Texas segment of the Coronado route is more than
half solved. Historians have nailed down one end of this route
at a point some twenty miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
If in this article the other end can be nailed down, the problem
of fitting intermediate points into place becomes far simpler.
Here, though it may seem fantastic, this study will begin the
search for the place to drive that nail in the map of Texas by the
aid of simple arithmetic. Though there be skeptics, there is abun-
dant evidence that at least one historian's statistics of the Texas
leg of the Coronado journey are remarkably accurate."8 For thirty-
slbid., 507.
9lbid., 504-508, 580-584. Coronado's letter to the King dated on October 20o, 1541,
indicates that there were seventeen days of travel from the Rio Grande to the
place where the Spaniards met the Querecho Indians on the Plains. Footnote 4
shows that there were eight days travel from there to the east edge of the Plains
which is a total of twenty-five days of travel from the Rio Grande to the east edge
of the Plains. Discrepancies in accounting for time between the Rio Grande and
Coronado's bridge amount to one day-which may mean that it required twenty-six
days travel from the Rio Grande to the east edge of the Plains. Add to this four
days of travel to Cona and three days through Cona and the total becomes either
thirty-two or thirty-three days. Thus thirty-seven days were required on the out-
going journey-which means that either four or five days were left from Cona to
the end of the journey in Texas.
lolbid., 507.
"Ibid.
laIbid., 508. This study does not propose to delineate Coronado's northward
march.
i3Castafieda, who was a part of the Coronado Expedition, gives the distancex92
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 63, July 1959 - April, 1960, periodical, 1960; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101186/m1/254/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.