Nonfiction
Book
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Details
PUBLISHED
© 2026
EDITION
DESCRIPTION
xix, 405 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color), maps, portraits ; 24 cm
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LANGUAGE
NOTES
List of maps -- List of participants -- Prologue: Glint on the horizon -- Part I: La entrada - The entrance. The delicate lady -- Friars and fortune seekers -- An upraised visor -- The middle of the heart of Mother Earth -- Wandering the ocean -- Dowa Yalanne - Corn Mountain -- Part II: La tierra nueva - The new land. The heart of brightness -- A continent's marketplace -- Raising the cross -- Two tales of gold -- A silver tube -- Part III: The unraveling. The fog of war -- The deadly shrub -- A thousand arroyos -- Woodhenge -- Part IV: L salida - The exit. The breaking wave of empire -- The plot -- Between two horses -- Epilogue: The end of empire and the birth fo native resistance -- Fate of characters -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Selected bibliography -- Index
"In 1540, the grandest exploring expedition ever assembled in the Americas paraded north from the ruins of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, a glittering column of 2,000 men heading into the unknown. Their destination was El Norte Misterioso--The Mysterious North, present-day United States--where fabulous cities of gold were rumored to shine beyond the horizon. Two years later, survivors began stumbling back, half dead. Lost to poisoned arrows, brutal deserts, starvation, cold, desertion, and countless other hardships, 90% of those who left would never return. Led by Francisco Coronado and backed by the full weight of the Spanish empire, the superpower of its day, they had expected to seize the land, steal its riches, and subjugate its peoples, just as they had so recently done to the mighty Aztec and Inca empires. But instead they encountered the unconquered American West, populated by complex societies of indigenous nations, masters of a vast and unforgiving landscape who fiercely resisted this European 'incursion' onto their lands. Coronado and his people traversed 2,500 miles of unmapped terrain, ranging across the present-day U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Kansas. They were the first Europeans to gaze upon the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains; made first contact with the Puebloan peoples; crossed the Sonoran Desert and the Great Plains, where they encountered endless herds of bison and the nomadic tribes who followed them. After leading the largest exploring cavalcade ever assembled in the New World, wearing his gilded armor and bobbing plume, Coronado retreated back to Mexico City two years later accompanied only by a hundred or so hangers-on and carried on a litter, a broken man. America's Southwest and Plains would remain unconquered for the next 300 years."--