Ep. 861: The Defeat of Coronado

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Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.

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Speaker 2: You can’t predict anything.

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Speaker 1: Brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com.

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Speaker 3: That’s f I R S T L I t E dot com.

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Speaker 1: Join today by Peter Stark. Rejoined by Peter Stark, author Adventure Here to talk about the insane, insane, almost hallucinogenic, crazy, crazy Coronado Expedition. Yeah, a hallucinogenic quality to the journey was like some of the first conquis, the doors to push their way up into the American Great Plains, the Texas Panhandle and just the wild things, the wild violent defeat that befell the Coronado Expedition.

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Speaker 2: And part of the reason why it was so wild and crazy and hallucinatory is they had no idea of what was up there, no zero zero. They called it ill nord date Mesterioso, the Mysterious North, And if you look at the maps from that era, you go north of a little bit north of where Mexico City is now, and it’s just it’s literally just blank spaces. And then they kind of sort of shoved China and over there on the on the left side, like China’s right about somewhere off there, and they’re thinking that California some island and and they say, well, we’re thinking, like China and Greater India are near the island of California. And so these guys are like, you know, talking about going into the unknown. They are utterly clueless, and they have a huge expedition and a huge mission.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, we’re going to tell that whole story Peter’s new book, The Lost Cities of Elnorte, Coronado’s Quest, the Unconquered West, and the Birth of American Indian Resistance. And Peter was on before. I’m trying to remember, like you were on with you when you.

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Speaker 2: Was Young Washington when we did and we had a we had a really fun, wide ranging conversation. It was about my book Young Washington was about young George Washington in his twenties when he was a real mess up in the in the wilderness of the Ohio Valley and you know, accidentally set off the French and Indian War, and you know stuff like that.

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Speaker 1: I want to touch on that for a minute because there’s a thing in there that I don’t think was relevant at the time. Okay, we talked before the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Oh, we talked before that, right, Yes, want me tell you a funny story about that. It has do with Washington. Okay, But first I want to tell you this. This is a personal thing. I’m not going to embarrass you. This is a person.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: You’re gonna embarrass me all you want. And I’ve got plenty of counter ammunition too. I might even have mentioned this team before.

00:03:26
Speaker 1: But like a thing like we were buddies, way like we were friends long before I had kids. Yeah, so long.

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Speaker 2: Before you had a TV show, Long before you had I mean you were building closets. The last I remembering stone closet shelving.

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Speaker 1: This is in the late nineties, I think late nineties. We were buddies. You had hunting, hunting, yeah right, My oldest kid is about to turn sixteen, so way before that. But you had young kids, like you had young, young kids, young young kids. And the thing that was like was so funny. I always wanted to tell you this. Maybe I have told you this. You’d like drop in. You know, we’d be hanging out, different writers and stuff, be hanging out, and you’d like drop in for a beer, right, you drop in for a beer, and we’d be in for like a bunch of beers. But you drop in for a beer and like race home. And I always thought that guy’s a lunatic. Yeah, what in the world would you go now? Five o’clock? Totally uncle, It’s like this guy’s got his schedule all wacked out. You know, you gotta run well. I just feel like that dude’s got his priorities crooked. On the other one.

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Speaker 2: I don’t know if we talked about this on the the last time we were here, but you know, we had this classic crazy hunt on the Missouri Breaks. It was a second time you went down there, and the first time we went down with Sandy Fraser, and then the next year we went with Fred Aflee. And remember that, just like this incredible arctic front moved in and I just remember the first night the campfire flames were like flat on the ground. You know, there weren’t there was no heat. They were just flat. It was a big, like a big campfire, and you know, that’s kind of my standard for campfires that don’t work.

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Speaker 1: And then the.

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Speaker 2: Next day, you know, there was already ice floating in the river that that first day that we were paddling, and then we camped with a flat campfire. And then the next day, or might have been the day after that, we started paddling again, and the river was just clogged with ice. I mean, you know, like flowing like like you had to dig your way through it. And I grew up on a frozen lake in Wisconsin, so I’ve got a lot of experience on what to do and not to do on ice because I’ve done a lot of things you don’t do, and you know, figured it out.

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Speaker 1: And so so.

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Speaker 2: We were you and and and Matt were in one canoe and Fred and I were in another canoe, and we started paddling across and we were planning on going down river that whole lower stretch of the Missouri, you know that the really remote stretch.

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Speaker 1: Its like once you’re in, you’re in.

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Speaker 2: And and Fred and I got part way out in the river and we’re like digging through these ice floes, and I was saying, you know, if we tip over here, we’re just dead. You know, there’s like there’s there’s not even a question about it. They can’t move through it. You can’t move through it. You couldn’t climb onto it, you couldn’t swim through it. And and the water is so cold. I mean, I guess you could climb into a swamp canoe, but that would last not very long. And you’re not getting that canoe to sure and so and so I said to Fred, you know, I don’t know about this. This this feels really, you know, sketchy to me. And Fred turns back. He’s in the boxes. Yeah, we’re daddy’s now, we shouldn’t be doing this stuff.

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Speaker 1: And then we try. Then I’m like, I don’t know, so if you die, who cares? And then we do.

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Speaker 2: And then we deliver this to the Ranilla brothers and they say, we do this all the time, like on the mass. You know, now it’s like you were pre children spouses. So yeah, you know that’s the standards change.

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Speaker 1: What I wanted to tell you about, I want to dive into Coronado because, like I said, it’s just it’s the most fascinating story. But uh Asani So a writer named Selena Zito wrote a book called Butler. Oh she’s like very quick because she’s from Pennsylvania. Okay, but she’s a calumnist and writer. Uh. And after the assassination attempt, she did like a very quick turn book on the assassination attemp called Butler. It’s her backyard, you know, on the phone and she was saying, you know, that’s the second president to be shot there. I hadn’t heard this. Well, I’m like, well, who else Washington? Yeah, during the like in the lead up to the French and Indian War, like like General Washington was shot there. Yes, yes, he was not a general, he was, no, but he was. He was. He was like a lower he’s like a lower ranking English officer sent on a mission.

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Speaker 2: And they got in some No, he wasn’t an English officer. He wanted to be a British officer. They wouldn’t let him into the British officer rings. So he was a Virginia colonial militia officer. And that was a cause of resentment for the next I mean, we’re still living with it today.

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Speaker 1: And one of the but you tell that story, but it’s just funny that, like, you know, messing up every detail. It was funny when she said that to me, like he was the second one, you know, I meaning that.

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Speaker 2: It was in that vicinity well, and I think there you know, there were several times when he was really shot at, and and one was you know, during the uh, you know Braddock’s defeat, when you know the British column under Braddock, General Braddock was marching towards Fort Duquine, which now Pittsburgh, and you know, they’re like the might of the British Empire, marching through the woods and in columns like the red coats and columns, and thinking they’re invincible until they get close to what’s now Pittsburgh, and all of a sudden, all hell breaks lose and they can’t even see they can’t even see anyone to shoot at because the Indian warriors are so well hidden. And there they’re also joined by like kind of you know, French guys who are also good woods woods fighters, and so they don’t even know who to shoot. And Washington is the one who survives that that battle, even though he was he was an aid to camp to Braddock because Braddock, they wouldn’t let him in as an officer yet he wanted to tag along, you know that Washington did, and he ended up Braddock was wounded, mortally wounded, and almost every British officer was killed almost instantly. And officers, the British officers are wearing really bright uniforms. And I’ve got to look into this just the actual color, even though I’m partly color blind, but the look into well, my wife helps me on this a lot. And uh, but the officers were really easily recognizable because they had, you know, really scarlet uniforms, and the regular soldiers were red but not so red. And and and Washington, you know, the officers just got wiped out instantly. And and Washington survived that battle. And he had like four bullet holes through his like haull and his coat, and he had I think at least two horses shot out from under him. And I’m pretty sure this has been some years since I did this research, but I think one of the reasons he wasn’t killed instantly is because he wasn’t wearing a British Royal Officers god uh uniform and it was more like a you know, like a like the buff colored thing they were wearing.

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Speaker 1: Would if that’s what if that’s like if you like, you know, you take history and move it down to these like these like crystalline moments, you know, of like turning points. If that like the fact that he didn’t have that bright red coat, right, yeah, that the continental Army would have the army would have never won, you know in America, would not have happened.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, I mean, and it was. It’s a really interesting moment. And now there’s a film that’s coming out about Young called Young Washington, which you know, I think they used my book as a source, but it’s not like based on my book, license your book. It’s you know, these are historical events, but it’s the thing I’m I’ve written about. But I think that’s a highlighted moment in the in the film, just what we’re talking about.

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Speaker 1: You know, who was there, you know, it was there that day. I do boon. Let me tell you what booned it.

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Speaker 2: Your buddy, As I remember this, he was like a wagon driver driving a freight wagon, right, I mean, you’re the I defer to you on boone because he you know, he was like a lowly Yeah, and he and his buddy, I think his cousin. It was also driving a freight wagon and so they saw what was happening. I think they just crossed the river, the Monongohela, and when all this chaos broke off, so they cleverly unhitched their mules from the wagons, turned around and ran with the teams in the other direction.

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Speaker 1: Is that right? I like to imagine that that was that that was deeply influential for Boone and his knowledge of like gorilla. Yes, warfare attack for sure in like bush warm Sorry always happens me.

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Speaker 2: But but that was that was bush war extraordinary and it was so dramatic And yeah, I think you’re totally right that that that was a really formative experience with him. And he could have you know, he could have kept you know, uh courageously riding his freight wagon forward, and you know, it just wouldn’t have worked.

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Speaker 1: That it was it was on that trip who was Boone? Like it was on that trip on that campaign the Boone met was John Finley.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, one of the other teamsters had been to Kentucky.

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Speaker 1: It was on that campaign about Boone learned about like he learned there is a gap to get through to the Kentucky through and then set off to find the Cumberland Gap from that.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, because Finley had been involved in Indian trade down the Ohio River, Okay, prior to his service as a teamster, And so it was like a campfire story, I believe, according to Boone’s you know Boone story, It’s like there’s sitting around the campfire late at night and Finley’s telling him about what’s over the mountains.

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Speaker 1: So if I was gonna do a movie about this, I would have Boone and him talking about all this, you know, the Cumberland Gap and all that, and I’d have Washington to come on and be like, get it straighten up, man, you know what I mean, like interrupting man scene would Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was Finley. He didn’t do any surveying, did he. I’m thinking of a different guy.

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Speaker 4: But but there was the Duke of Cumberland did a survey I believe, over like in that in that area. But yeah, I don’t think Finley was surveying.

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Speaker 2: I mean because one of the big problems was that George Washington and you know, these soon to be founding fathers were big landholders. Yeah, and the lands over the mountains, you know, which were really Indian lands and with many different tribes and that they wanted to survey those lands and you know, like steak them out. And so in seventeen seventy four, Washington and other founding would be soon to be Founding fathers sent a team of surveyors over the mountains and the Shawneese got really mad and and you know, pull their equipment off and I think sent them home.

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Speaker 1: But that was really the beginning of this of this.

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Speaker 2: You know, that whole Ohio Valley conflict was those first surveyors coming in and like staking things out. Yeah, and so Washington had a big part in that too. Yeah, dude, mix it up. Let’s jump the corner. Ye yeah, talk about mixing it up back.

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Speaker 1: In time to we’re gonna go over go. So we’re gonna go from seventeen seventy four to fifteen forty Okay, we’re going We’re going back a couple hundred years. So now I want to I want to let you set the scene here a little bit, but I want to bring up and then I find interesting about this, and you can you can set scene like where the New World was at at this point. But you’re you’re you’re just always trained like when you’re a kid and you’re reading about these early explorers, You’re you’re always trained a little bit to like laugh at the I the some of their notions, the Fountain of Youth, the Cities of Gold, right right, Oh, how stupid, how silly they thought that there was these like cities of gold that were up in New Mexico or Texas. You know, how naive, right, But they are hauling, like the Spanish are hauling fortunes exactly out of South America, and like it’s like it’s they weren’t making stuff up. No, No, I mean, like they had arrived in cities, they had like legitimately found cities where they’re like these people were loaded and with the gold.

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Speaker 2: There were empires, you know, literal empires and emperors, and so like they ransomed Pizarro ransomed the Incan emperor for a literal room full of gold, I mean literally, yeah, and then they killed them and they melted down the golden bars and you know, shifted.

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Speaker 1: But so it wasn’t insane. It wasn’t like there’s got to be more of this out there, you know.

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Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean that’s a really good framing for the story, because you know, we know the you know, if we want to, I don’t want to go too far back. But you know, the Portuguese started sending ships in the fourteen hundreds to India and getting spices and you know, discovering those were worth a lot, you know, very very valuable trade. And then the Spanish are saying, wait, we want to hunk of that action. And then Columbus comes along and says, comes up with his wacko idea. It wasn’t that wacko, but he said he needed a lot of more. Need to do it. He said to the King and Queen of Spain. He convinced them to fund an expedition to go west to find the Indies. So you know, we know the story. He runs in to this unexpected continent, the Americas, and then you know the spa is the Spanish uh conky stars and explorers work their way through in very few number of years. And so in fifteen twenty that’s when Cortes, illegally against the king’s orders, marches to Teno cheat Lan which is now Mexico City, and knox.

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Speaker 1: Off is that supposed pronounced that? I hope so.

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Speaker 2: An accident end and and he knocks off the Aztec Empire. And one of the reasons he can do that with like a few hundred men. I mean, one, he has these horses with armor which are like you know, sherman tanks compared to what the native warriors have. And the other is he’s very lever in he’s he finds the tribes more than triban they’re like culture civilizations who are enemies of the Aztecs. And he says to those guys, hey, I can to help you knock off the Aztec emperor. And so that now he has thousands of enemy warriors and that’s how he knocks off the Aztecs so quickly. And then and that’s fifteen twenty, and there’s all sorts of wealth and gold and empires and land and you know, incredible, as you say, loads of treasure and that that’s fifteen twenty. And then fifteen thirty three, Pizarro finds his way into the Andes, you know, in west South and South America, and he finds the Inca Empire and and you know, and the emperor, and you know, kidnaps the emperor room full of gold, you know, piles of gold being shipped out of out of the Inca Empire out of the Aztec Empire. And then so that’s fifteen thirty three, fifteen thirty six. This rumor comes down that they’re more wealthy empires to the north and nobody knows what’s up there, and.

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Speaker 1: Some of that comes out of like there’s that explain that, like Alvarez Expedition.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, not Navarez, who was the name Novarez, Okay, but the Kabeza de Vaca.

00:20:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s like the Moor, like the dude called like the Moor and Cabeza d Vodka and those guys have just that crazy as.

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Speaker 2: It’s so crazy, and that kind of sets the tone. So that was I have to get the dates right, but that was the late fifteen twenties, and somewhere in there, you know, Punce dal Lyon was in there, and you know, the found a Youth story was emerging. But they were they were really trying, the Spaniards were really trying to get onto from from the Caribbean islands like Cuba and what’s now the Dominican Republic, get onto Florida and and and start colonizing for and you know, make that part of the Spanish Empire. So that and they were having a hard time doing it. And so in the late fifteen twenties there was a huge expedition sent under the commander was a guy named Navarez, and that essentially this huge expedition mini ships got completely wiped out by hurricanes and then by Native warriors. And to make a long story short, four guys end up surviving, and they managed to raft their way partly down the Gulf Coast from from Florida, and some of the main guys make it that far and then they die. But they raft part way down the Golf Court coast from Florida, and I think they get maybe about as far as the Mississippi River delta and then you know, wor shipwrecks, raft recks, disaster, and then the four survivors start walking and they know, like New Spain of some way that somewhere.

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Speaker 1: That way, dude when you look at him, but it is the craziest thing. They’re like they’re on the Golf coast and they’re and they’re Mexico City, you know, And and there are four guys, and then there are dozens of way inland, and there.

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Speaker 2: Are dozens and dozens of Indian tribes, you know, and and these are like four random guys coming up from the coast, and part of what what saves them is among the four there is a Moorish slave named Esteban, and so he has what I was named after. Yeah, he’s a dude. Yeah right, you could probably talk your way through dozens of tribes thousands of miles to arrive in Mexico City. And so, so, you know, he had black skin, and he was really he was like a good performer. He could sing, and he could dance, and he had he had like bells on his wrists and colorful clothing. You know, he’s really unlike the Spanish Spaniards dress. And so it came to be that the that the native people and in various tribes started coming to him as a medicine man and respecting him as a medicine man. And so these four guys managed to sort of get past tribe to tribe using their their you know, medicine powers, their spiritual powers to kind of pave the way and protect them. And it took them seven years to get to what’s now the west coast of Mexico. They got to basically where the headquarters of the Sinaloa Cartel.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: That’s what’s so crazy making now, like you get a couple delayed flights and you get somewhere two days day late, two days late. You’re like, dude.

00:23:54
Speaker 2: And then when they and then when they show up, there’s another conquista are coming up from the south and and and taking taking uh Indians as slaves and and really brutalizing that west coast of Mexico. And so some of his guys are on a slaving expedition and they see these four random you know, like wild men walking out of the bush and they and they’re dressed in animal skins, these guys, you know, and the four guys and the Spanish slaverskunkyster or slavers, Like who are these guys?

00:24:30
Speaker 1: You know, it’s like in the in the documents.

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Speaker 2: They one of them responds in perfect Castilian Spanish. It’s like formal, you know, he’s all ragged ye yeah, yeah, like assumed dead, yeah, assumed seven years. And and then so then they get back to Mexico City, you know, then they explain who they are they’re brought back to brought to Mexico City.

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Speaker 1: Those dudes had to be like, let me get this straight. You’re saying it’s such an unbelievable story. And as they’re saying, you walked from.

00:25:13
Speaker 2: The like this is where the space alien rumors really start. So then they get to Mexico City and you know they’re created, like wow, these guys are survivors and they and they you know, it turns out, you know, maybe they really did travel all this way. And in Mexico City, you know which is now it’s it’s been converting from an Aztecan empire, you know capital with all the stone pyramids. They’re ripping down the stones and making a big cathedral and you know, transforming it. Well, they were real they were repurposing the stones, the bloody stones I like to think into the you know, the.

00:25:51
Speaker 1: Sacostry of the theater. I write about this.

00:25:53
Speaker 2: I write about this in some detail actually, and one of the things they have to do really yeah, yeah, this is this is like a little side cathedrals out of those stones, out of those stones. And then one of the things I had to do is I did quite a lot of research. I mean, it was really interesting that the Spaniards in that era, you know, conquering the South American and Central American empires. You know, there were very developed religions and the Aztecs were you know, famous then and now for their their human sacrifice. You know, it was like they needed they believed that the gods needed to be fed blood. So there would be sacrifices all the time on top of these pyramids. And one was like I can’t you know, it was like twenty stories high or something. And so once the Aztecs are conquered, then the Spaniards are saying, well, we’re going to bring religion to these people, and so they get workers, I’m sure many of them are native slaves, to pull the pyramid down, you know, the many there are seventy of them in the central Mexico on big Square and start making a big cathedral. But the Spaniards are really freaked out about the spirits of the Aztecs and these other religions. And so whenever they would come across a like a chamber of worship or any spiritual thing having to do with these these and with these religions, they would bury it. They’d seal it underground because they’d have to seal the spirits in. And so, as I point out in this book, and I wandered around this area a lot in Mexico, city where the cathedral is built, and it’s been really cool archaeological work they’re done in recent decades.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: But they built the cathedral.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: It’s almost on top of what was called the Tower of Skulls, and it was like a tower of I’ve read about tower and they’re pictures of it. It is amazing, you know, all these skulls. It’s like a huge well with all these skulls on the inside. Bringing pictures of it. There are pictures of it. Yeah, archaeological photos. It’s been excavated.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: How many you’re in there?

00:28:05
Speaker 2: Hundreds and hundreds, I can we could call it well later we’ll see if we can call them up. I actually have some on my camera because I took.

00:28:15
Speaker 1: Phil has something to do over there.

00:28:19
Speaker 2: What’s it called the Tower of Skulls in Mexico City, And so they, you know, they built this cathedral on top of those of those Aztec you know, sacrifice sites, try to seal everything in the ground. Sure, and you know, part of my you know, this is sort of a speculative fun premise is that you know, when Coronado marys his twelve year old bride in that cathedral, they’re like standing on top of the tower of skulls, and some of those spirits aren’t all that well sealed in there, and they eventually.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: Kind of get into his head. I mean, this is like a metaphor really.

00:28:57
Speaker 2: So then what happens is the the four shipwreck survivors get to Mexico City, which is being transformed from the Aztec capital into a into the capital of New Spain, and you know these the bizarro and oh, there you go. There’s some skulls in the Tower of Skulls. I’ve got to I’ve got a picture on my cell phone. I’ve got one that’s clearer than that about that. You really see, it’s kind of an outline of skulls.

00:29:29
Speaker 4: It’s probably too late to redesign the studio.

00:29:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I mean this is what we’re looking at underground in the center of Mexico City, and it’s it’s there have been big excavations there in probably the last twenty years, and now it’s it’s really cool because you can walk down in some of them and they’re just right now part of everything. So the four shipwrecked survivors, you know, brought to Mexico City. The Cortez has just knocked off the Aztec empire like twenty five years earlier or fifteen years earlier, and Pizarro has just knocked off the Incas three years earlier, and you know, they’re all these like piles of gold coming, you know, being discovered in these empires in Central and South America. And so everybody asked these four shipwrecked survivors, hey, do you guys see any like gold up there?

00:30:27
Speaker 1: Empires? It’s so wild, And these guys are like, you never to run into your empire.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Run you’re running in any empire. You’re seven years of ship and these guys are.

00:30:46
Speaker 1: Kind of like, oh, well, I’m not sure. We’re not sure about that. But it’s all all it takes. It’s like there’s just some little rumor that gets started and yeah, like some dudes told us about whatever, yeah, or they told it.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: I think I think the close thing that actual detail was that there were they’d heard about seven cities up there. There were seven cities, and and and that you know, this is like in the south north of Mexico, whatever’s up there, and you know what’s now in the American southwest, and and that directly feeds in to this old old Spanish Iberian story that when the Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula, like in seven fifty or ad or something, that the Catholic bishops, seven Catholic bishops took all the wealth and all the gold from the church, you know, the cathedrals from seven cathedrals, and the seven bishops took the piles of wealth and gold and they put them in seven boats and they sailed west across the ocean and founded seven wealthy cities across the ocean. So so that became when when it was heard that there were seven cities somewhere north of Mexico City, people that, oh, those are the seven Cities of Gold. You know, this is what we’ve been talking about for five hundred years. And there they are. And so this whole thing just gets cranked up, and and they send a reconnaissance party up there.

00:32:19
Speaker 1: This this isn’t like this way, this rumor mill thing isn’t an isolated instant. Because we’re talking about in a project I’m working on right now, we’re talking about like the French upon the Saint Lawrence. Oh, that’s a cool story. And again they like they get they take some indigenous people, bring them, bring them back to France, and then they kind of they’re grilling them and grilling them and grilling them, and you can see that they sort of pick up on what they want to hear. I mean that’s exactly. Oh yeah, yeah, way up there is a place like what you’re talking about. But then it gets kind of like crazier and they’re like, oh, and there’s people that that have no anus. Okay, there’s there’s a people that are just one legged. It’s like all everything is gold, you know. And then and again they’re like legitimately trying to find it, but you get a sense that the indigenous people are like, yeah, just kind of play along, you know.

00:33:29
Speaker 2: And they don’t really know what these these these Europeans are talking about.

00:33:33
Speaker 1: Asking them and ask them and eventually okay, yeah, sure the neighbors find whatever you need to the neighbors, because there’s none of that here.

00:33:44
Speaker 2: That comes into this Coronado story too, ye big time. And so and then so they send the the Viceroy Mendoza, who’s that he’s like the King’s representative in Spain and he’s arrived and just the year before scouting mission. Yeah, so Mendoza, well, Coronado is a protege of the Vice Roy Mendoza. Mendoza has been sent to New Spain by the king to reign in Cortez, because Cortez is like thinking all of new Spain is his, you know, And the King of Spain says, Vice you know, Mendoza, my trusted man, you’re my viceroy. You go and reign in Cortez. And that’s how Coronado is. Like a young protege of Vice Roy Mendoza comes with from Spain to Mexico with Vice Roy Mendoza. Then the rumors of gold start to the north, and Vice Roy Mendoza sends a scouts up to see if they’re true. And he sends this dude, among others, a guy named Fray Marcos, who there’s a long story that I won’t go into, but it’s you know, another long traumatic story. And and Fray Marcos comes back, you know, months later and says, oh, yeah, yeah, I saw those I saw this, you know, incredible city up there, and you know, the Golden City’s incredible stuff.

00:35:02
Speaker 1: He says, he first hand saw it. He said, he’s first hand sought.

00:35:06
Speaker 2: And then he gets back to Mexico City and well, then why is he saying that? That’s a question for the ages people have wondered that. And and then but he so he gets I mean maybe it’s the same thing, like he’s telling people what they want to hear, and and you know, maybe he didn’t tell them exactly that, but he said, yeah, there are big they’re big, tall cities up up that way, which in fact there were pueblos, and and so he goes back to Mexico City and and you know, it comes back, Oh yeah, there’s seven cities up there. And so now it’s just like this frenzy starts in Mexico City. All these people want to invest in this expedition and and take part in it, and you know invest in it too, because they know they’re going to find piles of gold north of you know, in the in the mysterious north. They just know it. It’s you know, it’s happened in Mexico, it’s happened in the Andes with the Incas, so it’s happening in other places too in the south. And you know, they’re golden cities and piles of gold. So this it becomes this massive effort and it’s it’s now it’s believed to be close to three thousand people. Uh, you know, hundreds of Spanish Spaniards dressed like conkystadors with armor or with leather armor, and you know, lances and armored horses, and then thousands of as Techan warriors accompanying them, and thousands of there at least a thousand horses with this with these guys, and there are maybe five thousand sheep, and there are thousands of cattle that’s unclear how many exactly cattle. But this is all to feed this expedition. You know, you can imagine like three thousand people that doesn’t even include that, like their wives along, their children along, they’re you know, cobblers and gunsmiths and everything else. So you need all this food, you know, on the hoof to feed this expedition. And and and so it heads north in the spring of fifteen forty and they’re going up there to raise Hell, they’re going up there. They’re going to go find the Golden Cities and take it, take it. And yeah, yeah, yeah, they that’s the plan. But there’s a whole you know, other dimension to the story. Well, there are two dimensions. One that the real wealth, it turned out was, and they were realizing at the time, was not so much in the gold which you could you know, take and then go spend, but was in taking fertile lands and making those you’re in comey, Inda’s your your own estates, and they’d be worked by you know, partially enslaved people or native labor. And so that’s where you could really make a lot of money by having a big estate that was you know, fertile estate that produced a lot. So that was one thing they were looking for in addition to the Golden Cities. And then the the other thing that was going on, which i’m spacing out now, as they’re coming north, they they are told by the King of Spain, and through vice Roy Mendoza, the King of Spain is saying, We’re not going to have it many more of this brutality stuff that’s been going on. You know, We’re not going to go like hacking up the Aztecs or the native people. We’re not going to go steal their food. We’re not going to go hang them. We’re not We’re going to be humane. And it’s like it’s supposed to be this whole shift in the Spanish Empire that is going to be humane rather than cruel, you know, rather than forceful, and so Cornado is under orders from Vice Roy Mendoza. You have to be kind with the native people. You can’t raise villages, you have to really have you have to be humanitarian. And so Cornado now has this you know, uh uh order, but he didn’t stick to that. He tried to for about a week. I mean that, uh, he tried to, and and that as he as soon as he got going north that he had guys with them who were X you know, X cruel conquistadors, and they started running out of food. They you know, like their supply trains were separated and they needed corn rather than just cattle. And so the ex concystadors go into a village and just take food, and the native people attack. And one of the ex conquistadors is trying to flush some native warriors out of a patch of brush and he forgots for guests to put down his visor on his helmet. Bam, an arrow right in the eye kills him dead. And he’s the chief of staff to the whole expedition. So that causes all his buddies to go up in arms. You know, sem Diego is the chief of staff now shot with a native arrow in the eye. So they say, Okay, we’ve got to punish these natives shrill the lessons.

00:40:20
Speaker 1: So where where is is this in Mexico?

00:40:22
Speaker 2: Still it would be it would be like north of well, far north of Acapulco. But you know where where like Coolia Khan and Sineloa is in the south of there.

00:40:34
Speaker 1: You hit the US months away.

00:40:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so so they they because their buddy got hit in the eye with an arrow, you know, the clunky stord buddy. They hang a bunch of the native warriors and the native people and you know, kind of ran they just randomly set snag a bunch and hang them. And that’s sort of like the beginning of this is not the human expedition that it was cracked out to be. And but that that that story goes way on to the north. You pick it up from here. I can, I can, I can? I can keep going with it. That that that they spend six months basically, And I calculated that if you put that all the animals and people knows the tail in that expedition, it would stretch for fifteen miles.

00:41:32
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, yeah, think of.

00:41:33
Speaker 2: All that that that dust and the piles of dung, and it’s track, you know, just Hotter Hill and Hotter Yeah, and I mean, how do they do that? It’s just it’s hard to imagine. But they finally they finally get up. After months, they finally cross into what’s now southern Arizona.

00:41:59
Speaker 1: Okay, so they they entered they entered into Arizona. Not in Mexican, yeah, but just right next to New Mexico. It’d be south of Phoenix and south of Tucson. Because people have done a pretty good job of piecing together what this route is, even though there’s like certain questions here, there are certain ques and just in that that’s where they’re real questions, is right in that area. And I think you’ve had haven’t you had Denny Seymour on here yet? Yeah?

00:42:18
Speaker 2: So she’s yeah, she’s on one’s looked at that. She’s really looking at that. And so she has, you know, she she’s done research in one valley and then there’s another valley, and there’s discussion in which route was which and where they both used or how do that all work?

00:42:35
Speaker 1: But she’s found cool stuff. I mean, it’s amazing. She’s done great work. When they when they hit what’s now in the US, did they have a sense of how far they were, like, what was their comprehension of how far they were going to go, because I mean they ultimately make it up into Texas and Kansas, make it they almost made it. The hour think they were going.

00:42:58
Speaker 2: I figured out there were just a few weeks short of getting to Chicago, which was which was then an it was it was an Indian portage at that I mean it was for for thousands of years.

00:43:08
Speaker 1: But they were headed that way.

00:43:09
Speaker 2: And so so their their aim was to get to the Seven Cities, and they they knew it was up there somewhere, and you know, Fray Marcos had reported, yeah, there’s seven cities up there, and there are you know, one hundred days travel away or eighty days travel or whatever. And so so then after fray Marcos reports this, and the expedition starts coming up you know, by sometimes that by pieces, sometimes huge chunks. It finally crosses what’s now with Coronado. What’s now It would be like you know, Phoenix, you’re familiar with Phoenix, And if you look east of Phoenix, there’s big mountain range right there, you know, big deserty tall mountain ranges called the Superstition Mountains and if you go on the other side of the Superstition Mountains. I mean even today you can look at Google Maps, there’s not a whole lot of human presence at all, almost zero. And you know, desert and rough well, they cross that and they they call it the Day’s Polato because there’s no food for fifteen days and they and people are starving, and you know, the astec and warriors, you know, they’re they’re like the lowest in the in the pyramid, the food pyramid. There the guys that get you know, they have to be carrying their own food or they die. You know, once in a while they’ll eat a horse. Three guys poison themselves by eating plants around a little spring they found, and you know it’s like these luscious, like really salad looking greens. They’re so hungry they just they just slam them down. Die and they die die. Yeah, And they finally emerge from the northern end of the Day’s pop Lato, and then they go over some smaller ranges and they go over a ridge. There’s this’s the story is more complicated than this. But they go over a ridge and they see this pueblo, which is, you know, a pretty big one seven stories high. But fray Marcos, who’s with him, has been saying these are like golden cities, and yeah it’s pretty high, but it’s built of like a rock and and and you know it’s not like big smooth dungeon walls and gags and everything.

00:45:29
Speaker 1: Now that thing. I feel like I’ve read about this, and I feel like I read some writer historians speculating that maybe he looked at it from a distance when it was like lit by the evening sun. Yeah, that’s my theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s like Alpin trying to like give him some credit to be like, well, maybe the sun was hitting it in the way that it looked like it was gold.

00:45:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it looked like it was well and part of the story, yeah exactly. That’s one of the theories.

00:45:58
Speaker 4: Did they just smiths what fray Marco was saying? At what point did his word not hold any.

00:46:04
Speaker 1: When they came over there?

00:46:05
Speaker 2: Rich and and the guy one of the chroniclers said, you would not have been wanted to be there to hear the words that were thrown on fray Marcos that.

00:46:20
Speaker 1: And oh stone it was gold.

00:46:27
Speaker 2: And I mean part of that story it’s there. There’s so many aspects and details. But the with Fray Marcos’s reconnaissance party, Esteban went and and so, and he was like a real you know, rugged traveler. It’s is Fray Marco’s actually, But so Esteban apparently had a weakness for Native women and he liked to collect turquoises. And so by the time he got he was the first guy to get to this city, the pueblo. But he the the the Zuni is it it was the pueblo.

00:47:03
Speaker 1: I’ve been yeah, I’ve been there. Oh yeah, I’ve been there with Zuni dudes. And he went to that old the old pueblo site and then kind of pointing out the Coronado stuff. Yeah, I mean, like, dude, like it was yesterday. Though it was like yesterday, you know what I mean, like the culture that came from there.

00:47:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you could be right on. I had a Zuni guide who who grew up there. He grew up a mile from that, this this first pueblos called Hawaku. And he said, well, you see that that patches, you know, trees over there, that’s that’s my grandmother’s house. That’s where I grew up. And you know, and so we’re standing on the ruins of Hawaku and he’s saying, yeah, well the front gates here, and they would come from that path over the you know, that pass over there, And as you say, it was like, yeah, it’s like you know, you’re you’re going you’re walking through the park and you know, and you’re in your local park and he’s pointing out this.

00:47:53
Speaker 1: It’s like us earlier, like like for for us at our culture, like talking about the American Revolution and stuff like to the zoom you know, I mean these were I mean, like to the Zuni today, it’s it’s like a major you know, I mean, it’s a major event, and it is a major thing like culturally in the in the telling, and if there’s they have the familiarity with it that we would have with all the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. Oh yeah, yeah, it’s just I mean very yes. So that’s that’s where this happened, and that’s what happened, and it led to this and.

00:48:26
Speaker 2: So Esteban and so you know, he ends up at Hawaku and they and they soon kill him because they figure out he looks there’s some he has some resemblance to an enemy warrior. They don’t like the way he’s treating women or whatever, they kill him. And and so it’s unclear whether fray Marcos makes it all the way to the pueblo, the Zuni Pueblo Hawaku, or if he’s like, you know, several days in the rear and and and gets the report of Esteban’s death from from native guides who are kind of like running back and forth. So it’s not clear if Fray Marcos actually laid eyes on the on the pueblo during the reconnaissance run, but he’s certainly had a He made it very abundantly clear that these were wealthy cities and the seven Wealthy Cities in the North. And I you know, so he’s an interesting personality and I’ve kind of I’ve described him in my Lost Cities book as that in a way, he’s like a ah, you know, in a mountain endurance athlete, because he’s been with he was on the Pizarro expedition, and you know, so he might have witnessed that room full of gold. And he’s also like, you know, these guys often go barefoot, and you know, he’s this frame. Marcus is like a serious traveler, and I think like as being this endurance athlete that just can cover you know, dozens and dozens of miles a day, which I’m sure he was, because there are reports of how far he’d go. And I think that he was, you know, invested with his passion to you know, to collect Indian souls for Christianity. So I mean that was one way for a friar to you know, really make a name for himself in the church and in the eyes of God. You know, you can say thousands of heathen souls, millions of them. So I think that was a really a real driving force for Fray Marcos to like get this whole expedition up there, because not only were they looking for the Golden Cities fertile Land, they were also looking for India, which they thought was just over the mountain. And then they were also they were charged by the King and Queen of Spain was saving souls with converting them from you know, Heathenism to Christianity, so called Heathenism, and and so that it was I describe it this book, it’s like there’s a special unit embedded with this huge cavalcade and they’re these Franciscan priests who are you know, they’re like the spiritual spearhead of the of the of the whole, and Fray Marcus is one of these guys. And so so he had kind of a personal interest I think, in in in in leading, you know, and convincing getting here. He was he he wasn’t there for the gold, he was there for the souls. And and yeah, so they come over their riots and there’s the alleged city of Gold and it’s like this ship storm comes down on Fray Marcos and you know, I’m surprised I didn’t kill him on the spot. Well they couldn’t because you know, he’s a man of God. That would not That would not have been good if you were if you were an ordinary, you know, citizen, he would have he would have been so dead, probably in the worst ways. And so then making long story short, not that long. At this point, they march up to the across the plane and you I think you probably heard the story some of it, and towards Hawiku and they stop what’s described as a cross bowl shot away. So that’s probably like three hundred yards four hundred yards when you’re the ballistics guys, And wouldn’t you say a quarter mile maybe? And man, I don’t know, with those crossbows, they might have been really good ones.

00:52:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, they’re like cocking them with their feet and stuff.

00:52:20
Speaker 4: We’re also not in the practice of launching arrows this forty five degree.

00:52:25
Speaker 2: Well exactly, and so they but anyway, they’re a cross bow bolt shot away and they stop. And meanwhile, the like actual squadrons of Zuni warriors have come out, uh with with what they’re called bot priests, the Zuni priests in the forefront, and the Zuni priests have poured down a line of corn meal across the plane.

00:52:50
Speaker 1: Huh.

00:52:51
Speaker 2: And it’s very clear what this corn meal line means. It means do not cross this line.

00:52:58
Speaker 1: It’s the line of the saying.

00:53:02
Speaker 2: And and so at this point I never heard this detail about the corner mea, oh the court. Yeah, that’s one of the coolest details. And it’s happened in other pueblos as well after this and turned the expedition and so it was a real thing. And and so then you know Coronado, you know, these guys aren’t horses and armor and banners, and you know, I’m sure they have all their finery on. And Cornado has a suit of gilded armor, gilded helmet, huge plume, you know, armored horses, and they and they ride up and they stop at the corn mill line, and they, by requirement of the King and Queen of Spain, they pull out this document. It’s called the Requerimento, which means like the requirement, And they’re required by the King and Queen of Spain to read this document to the Zunis three times in Latin.

00:53:56
Speaker 1: And this movie needs to be called the requirement.

00:54:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, so here the requirements go like this. It’s actually I think the requirement. I don’t know if it’s a requirement applying to the Zunis or it’s a requirement applying to the conquistadors that they have to read.

00:54:11
Speaker 1: The document home. So it’s red and Latin thread Latin. There’s no three times. There’s no effort to translate.

00:54:16
Speaker 2: Well suppose there’s supposedly, you know, some accounts say that there was a one guy on the you know, native guy on the expedition who knew what he’d have to know it both Spanish and not Huattel, which is the aspect language. So it might have been translated as far as not Wattel, but no farther than that.

00:54:38
Speaker 1: Hey, we tried it.

00:54:41
Speaker 2: We tried, and so the requerimento severy law. But it basically goes like this, you know, reading out in Latin. Okay, you all are children of Adam and Eve and God creative Adam and Eve and God. Uh embodiment on earth is the Pope, and the pope power is embodied in the King and Queen of Spain. Okay, And we are representatives of the King and Queen of Spain.

00:55:13
Speaker 1: So I e.

00:55:13
Speaker 2: And according to Middle medieval logic, we’re speaking directly from God. Is kind of the way this this is the preamble, sort of like the declaration of independence, Like here’s where the power comes from. Yeah, we’re representatives of God. And you have two choices. One you accept us to send fathers among you and and and show us show you our ways in religion.

00:55:44
Speaker 1: Or two.

00:55:46
Speaker 2: And if you do that option one, you’ll be treated with the utmost kindness and generosity and care. Option two is you refuse to let fathers come among you, and what will happen is will kill you all and enslave your women and children. So take your choice one or two. That’s the requirement.

00:56:11
Speaker 1: That’s the requirement.

00:56:14
Speaker 2: And so you know, and they’re like literally parked at the corner meal line and at this point somewhere, you know, and everybody’s getting agitated. I think both the Astec and warriors. These guys are serious, serious, you know, they’re they’re like the Native warriors in the Eastern Woodlands, I mean, you know, over the planes or any any North American Native warriors, very serious about warfare and skilled. And they’re getting agitated. And the Zuni warriors they’re all, you know, they’re all they all have bows and arrows, and they start like launching these warning shots towards the Spaniards and their horses. Oh they do, yeah, And first they’re they’re at a distance these warning shots. And the way the Spaniards describe it is like these guys, these Zuni warriors, you know, they they were shooting these straight shots that weren’t very accurate, but i mean, you know, like a Native archer, you know, these guys are described as being able to hit a rabbit while they are running, the warrior and the rabbit’s running and hit it with an arrow. So these are not straight shots. These were extremely accurate, but they got closer and closer, and finally one of the arrows Pierce’s Fray Marcos’s wrote, not Fray Marcos, Frey Luis’s robe and pins it to the ground. Okay, at that point all hell breaks loose, and Coronado says the essentially it’s it’s the Spanish charge. It says Santiago Sierra Espana, which means Saint James. That’s the patron saint of Spain, Saint James, and close Spain like protect us Saint James. We’re gonna go charge. And then they charge on their horses and they they they they, you know, essentially route these all these you know, several hundred Zuni warriors who chase back into the pueblo and some are some are killed by on the on the plane, but most get back into the pueblo and they the seventh story Hawaku Pueblo and they pull up all the ladders and and meanwhile that so yeah, so they pull up all the ladders, and so now Cornado’s guys are so weak from hunger because they’ve gone across this desk Poblado. You know, so they some of these journals say, yeah, it was that all we wanted was food. You know, at that point, it was just food. It was like the gold was almost secondary, and so they swarm around the pueblo and the the harkuboose uh arquebusiers you know, you know, the muskets are like a cannon on a proped on a stick that are on a stand, the ones we see in the Remington painting. Those guys are so weak with hunger they can’t stand up to shoot an old real shot that that, and and so, but you know there’s still enough guys, and and I think especially the as tech and warriors are playing much more a part of this than than the span this accounts let on. But you know, they’re they’re surrounding the pueblo and they’re swarming it. And but they’re these pebbles are built like fortresses. The lower walls are totally blank by by design, and you know, not a door, not a window, and they’re tall so you just can’t get up them. But there’s one ladder and behind that’s hanging down that the Zuni’s apparently forgot to haul up. And the Spaniards find this one ladder and Cornado, you know, he’s the guys like thirty years old, you know, early thirties.

01:00:03
Speaker 1: Oh he’s young like that, he’s young.

01:00:05
Speaker 2: He’s borrowed his wife’s money to fund the expedition and his team. He married Beatrice when she was twelve, and she was one of the richest women, probably was the richest woman in New Spain. She had all these estates and so and a pretty fierce mother. And so he used her money to fund this expedition. And you know, I was saying, well, he didn’t have the money, so he did it in a time honored way. He borrowed his wife’s money. And so he’s under a lot of pressure, and so he sees his ladder and he wants to be the guy, you know, the warrior, the point, the leader, and so he gets off his horse and he in his golden armor, he starts up this ladder. He does he does personally. There are many accounts of this, and I wouldn’t leave from the front leading well for a moment. And he’s part way up the ladder when like this entire avalanche of boulders comes down on him, and you know, it was like a like a trap, a booby trap, and he just got crushed to the ground and including a huge slab hit him on the directly on the helmet, and he would have died right there, except he had some of his his uh key captains who are also armored through their bodies, on top of him to protect them from the you know, this complete.

01:01:30
Speaker 1: Pummeling of rocks.

01:01:32
Speaker 2: And then they managed to drag him away and he was very seriously uh head injured, and you know, it was out for hours, if not longer, and he awoke and he was in some tent off to the side of the field. Knocked him out good though.

01:01:48
Speaker 1: They knocked him out really good.

01:01:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean you can imagine a slab of stone on a metal helmet. It was like, you know, you’re talking about the NFL hits to the head on a helmet like this is a big, huge blow. And so then when he awakes, he’s learned that as men have taken the pueblo, which is kind of right, but kind of not because basically the Zuni warriors just fled out the back and through this they’d already cleared out all the women and children and anything of value. And one of the really cool parts of this story, I think, having to do with the whole all the all those pueblo areas. I mean, there are many different pueblos through that whole region, you know, each is a different society community, and many of them have a place of refuge. I mean, I think they’re all And so the Zuni have this really cool place of refuge. It’s called daway Ylane, which is or corn Mountain or thunder Mountain, and it’s this huge mesa that’s several hundred feet high, you know, unscalable unless you know exactly what you’re doing. And it gets enough rainfall and there’s enough soil that they can grow cross up there, and they have villages and wells, and they’re totally self they can be totally self sustaining up there, and you know, I describe it like having a spaceship just hovering over the Zuni Valley where they can hang out indefinitely. And so that’s where the people from Habaku and the warriors and eventually most of the people in the Zuni Valley end up on the top of Dawa Lani and so you know, it’s like they’re in no hurry to come down, and you know, Coronado and his guys are looking around, like how can we get at these people?

01:03:35
Speaker 1: You know, it’s like we can’t even get a hold of one of them, Like they still want to get them.

01:03:39
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean they’re looking for the sols to save in gold to take and so you know, and finally the Zuni send like an emissaries to Coronado and and they meet peacefully, and that the Zunis. At this point, Cornado and his guys have like a few little gems and like a little pebble of gold, and they hold it up to the Zunis and say, do you guys have any of this? And there’s more dimension of the story, but essentially it goes like this, do you guys have any of this? And the Zunis say, oh that that, Oh no, we don’t have any of that.

01:04:24
Speaker 1: But if you keep going that way, you’ll find a whole lot of Yeah, the neighbors.

01:04:31
Speaker 2: In fact, we’ll give you guides to get there. So, making a long story short, that’s how they almost end up in Chicago, and and that that they’re they’re really cool close.

01:04:43
Speaker 1: Like I’ve read about this this move they do, and it seems like historians recognize that it really is manipulation. Yeah, they are legitimately taking the pressure off and just getting them some getting them out of here.

01:05:03
Speaker 2: Well, you know, yes, I mean there are some historians who have said, no, I don’t think that’s right, but others have said, yeah, that they were deceived. I mean that there was a conscious deception. And I’m and I think that’s kind of almost the common wisdom these days, the common take on it. And I you know, I really went into this in great depth for several years and read every kind of possible account of what went on.

01:05:30
Speaker 1: Don’t they eventually get when they give them a guide who’s supposed to take them? Don’t they eventually get fed up with that guy? Yeah? Yeah, So what happens is that there’s the Zunie. What you have to realize. I address this quite a lot in the book. So, like the Zunis have all these different communities, but they’re separate, and yet they’re they’re interrelated, and they’re actually, you know, some are enemies with each other, but mostly not. And they’re interrelated, you know, and they’re they’re close culturally. They have different languages and their religions are somewhat different, but they’re each one has like a council of elders, and these council of elders are it’s it’s like a non hierarchical system of governance. It’s you know, there’s no like king, there’s no one chief. And so partly what happens is the Spaniards, like they get to Hawaku or the Zuni Valley and they say, like, you know, where’s the king’s house, where’s the castle? And they keep asking it over and over they can’t find it because there there isn’t one. And that was one of the reasons that the Aztec and the Incas were so easy to knock off, I mean relatively so, because they’re looking for like they’re looking for the head of the.

01:06:44
Speaker 2: Snake, the head of the snake, and and that’s that’s what worked for them in those in the South American empires, in the Pueblo culture and in the Pueblo cultures. You know, I describe it as like this huge interwoven fabric, and you know, Corneatto could come up there and slash at it all they wanted, but it’s not you know, it’s not going to really make much of it, cous and.

01:07:03
Speaker 1: So you’re not going to get them to capitulate because you capture some specific feature.

01:07:09
Speaker 2: They’ve been it is not their first rodeo, and they have these refuges where they can just disappear and in these mountain refuges in the in the Spaniards, their enemies just can’t get at them. So they’re they’re very resilient, you know, to to attack in in many fashions. And then but what happens is the zoonies. So there, you know you’ve been there. Like it’s very remote. I mean even today it’s you know, western New Mexico and the Zoonies, you know, put out word I think on they’re very established trading trails, including all the way to the coast and way inland and down to Mexico City. The Zunis send out messengers uh to the east to now to what’s now you know where Santa Fe is and Albuquerque. You know the Rio grand Valley which is several hundred miles to the east of Zuni. And if you go just beyond the Rio Grande Valley, there’s a it’s like an a southern part of the Sangreda Christian range where it’s like a divide where rivers flow down to the plains on one side and into the Rio Grande on the other side. So it’s it’s it’s like a natural kind of subcontinental divide almost and on top of that divide is a very elaborate pueblo called k because it’s known today as Pecos and it’s a it’s a National Historic site, the ruins of it. And this is a massive, highly developed pueblo that’s been at the epicenter of like almost cross continental trade for centuries. And the so the people of Pequye trade with the people of the plains with you know, buffalo, buffalo hides and meat and other things. And they have worn from the pueblos to the east, and seashells from the coast and macaw feathers from the real Yeah. Yeah, the macaffe is a huge deal. And so this this Pekos is like this international emporium of trade, you know, would be very cliently fifteen miles southeast of Santa Fe today. And they so the Zunis send send their messengers to the Pecos and and you know it’s like they collaborate.

01:09:33
Speaker 1: What are we going to do about these guys?

01:09:35
Speaker 2: And so the there’s a the leaders that some of the elders, they’re actually younger guys, once older ones, younger from Pekos come to the Zunis and meet Coronado and say and tell them about you know, Coronado’s asking, well, like what’s out there, blah blah blah, you know, and they have and they said, well, yeah, I mean they are these like these big planes with more animals than you can ever imagine. And in fact, there’s a tattoo of one of these big animals, meaning a bison on one of the on one of the Pekos guys. Really yeah, and so and so they point to the Pekos guys, the diplomats from Peko’s point, Yeah, see that there. It looks like an ocean full of these things. And and the Spaniards are, oh, that sounds pretty cool. Let’s let’s check it out. So that’s when Coronado he’s in Zuni, you know, Hawaku, and he’s set up like a like a court, you know, like a throne with an aunting and you know, he’s like the king of whatever deserted pueblo and and so you know, he’s he’s smart about it, he’s you know, he’s a well organized guy. And so he sends he decides to send out reconnaissance parties and one goes from Zuni to the east towards Queka, Pekos and then aiming for the buffet low plains, and one to the west where they hear there’s a big river and they think maybe they’re going to hit China or or something. You know, they think China is over there. They’ve heard there’s a big river. I think another one is maybe going to the southwest, but you know, looking for the ocean. Yeah, the other guys looking for the ocean. So the expedition that the reconnaissance party that’s sent to the east gets to Peikos and they the diplomats and Pekos say yeah, well we’ll give you, uh see, how does this work. We’ll give you guides to take you farther east and out onto the plains. And so this party goes out onto the plains, you know, it’s a smaller reconnaissance party, and and and they see buffalo, you know, and it’s like this is amazing. And then and the one of the guides, you know, like figures out there looking for gold and he says, oh, well, we actually there’s a lot of gold, but we got to go farther for it. And the Spaniards say, like, are you sure there’s gold?

01:12:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s gold.

01:12:13
Speaker 2: You know, my buddy Bigota’s back in Pekos has a golden bracelet, and so you can imagine that suddenly that reconnaissance party spins around, goes back to Pekos.

01:12:24
Speaker 1: Oh see the bracelet.

01:12:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, see the bracelet, and the Goodes is like, I don’t know. So you know, they end up torturing pagodas to try to get the bracelet, and you know, relations go south at this point, Oh my god.

01:12:37
Speaker 1: And so.

01:12:39
Speaker 2: That they they essentially regroup because winter is coming on. They regroup in the in the pueblos which are north of Albuquerque, like between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. There are a lot it’s a very populated pueblo in area and you know, really good agricultural and real grand And meanwhile that as part of this whole thing. I mean, this story is so crazy. I can just go on and on because there’s so many different dimensions. But one of the crazier ones is that Vice Roy Mendoza doesn’t want these guys raiding villages for food. So Vice Roy Mendoza is going to have a convoy of ships supplying them with more food and warm clothing and more ammo and all these things, and it’s going to go off the west coast of Mexico. And everybody’s thinking well, the Coronado rod is going to be up the west coast of Mexico.

01:13:41
Speaker 1: And so this.

01:13:44
Speaker 2: Big flotilla under Captain al Ercan, who’s a cool guy and leaves great journals, starts going up the coast of Mexico and goes into every little bay and inlet, you know, sticks down across and looks for Cornado and the expedition, and it’s like.

01:14:00
Speaker 1: They’re not they’re not saying that. And meanwhile the coast is let’s see, I’ll do it your away.

01:14:05
Speaker 2: But you know, it’s like, you know, here’s Baja, and here’s the you know, Sea of Cortes, and here’s Mexico. And so Coronado starts on the coast, but he goes straight north and so meanwhile the coast is veering like that, and the ships are going up like this, and they they get, you know, towards towards the head of the gulf, and and then Coronado is looking for the ships, and the ships are looking for Cornado. But there’s like four hundred miles of desert between them, and so this is a problem. And the ships have the warm clothes and they the Aztecan warriors and plus the Spaniards. You know, they’re all from like these really subtropical or temperate clothes, and they’re in the high elevation, yeah, like Zunia, I think is seven thousand feet and you know it’s high, high mountain, high desert, and they’re getting hit by blizzards and they’re you know, just about dying. And they they finally established a winter quarters over in a pueblo near what’s now Albuquerque, in the Rio Grande, and they it seems they forcefully take it from the pueblo and people, even though they say they we just moved in, they borrowed.

01:15:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they borrowed it.

01:15:28
Speaker 2: And so there ends up being even the account and the Spanish accounts don’t point to a lot of violence at first, but it soon becomes violent, and including when the Spaniards are freezing their butts off and they noticed that the Puebloans have robes. I’d love to have one made of turkey feathers. I mean it’s like the original down coat. And they have bison robes, you know, really warm, and the Spaniards are like in their you know, summer jogging clothes them down and you know, subtropics, and so the Spaniards sent an expedition to a Pueblo, a neighbor in Pueblo to collect feather capes and buffalo feather capes and buffalo capes. And the Puebloans don’t want to give them over the the capes, so the Spaniards just grab them, and then one guy rapes a woman, and then the Puebloans start getting really pissed. They one night they run, they run the Spaniards horses out of the corral. You know, it’s like it really feels like they kind of figured out, how do we get to the weak point of these guys, And you know, what’s the I could just imagine this council of elders like chewing this over many councils of elders. They have so much power, you know, the Spaniards, you know, with their their their steel and their horses. But if we could just get at those horses, we could really undercut them. And so they they stampede the horses out of a corral and they’ve never seen horses, you know, horses disappeared from North America, like I can’t remember thousands and thousands, right, and and so then then so now the horses are gone, and the Coronado sends out his right hand man to go find like what’s what’s happening to the horses, and he finds a lot of them in like a fenced in area near one of the pueblos and like inside the pueblo walls, and the Puebloans are shooting arrows at the horses to see how easily it is to kill these guys.

01:17:38
Speaker 1: Running around, And.

01:17:42
Speaker 2: So he reports back to Cornado this is what they’re doing, and Coronado says, go take that pueblo and that ends up being this bloody massacre, and the Puebloans eventually surrender, you know, they’re supposed to hold up make the sign of the cross to surrender, and they render, but this guy that Cordano’s right hand man pulls him out and ties them to steaks and burns them at the steak and you know, just essentially murders them. Yeah, and after that things really go south.

01:18:14
Speaker 1: And so now, yeah, then they get like sadistic man like they’re like cutting people’s hands.

01:18:19
Speaker 2: Well that comes later, that’s what Boniate, but I mean he was famously did that in Akama.

01:18:24
Speaker 1: That’s like.

01:18:27
Speaker 2: What was that fifteen ninety nine anything. But they were doing, yeah, they were putting dogs on guys, you know, chaining guy you know, chaining people up, and setting war dogs on the on the Puebloan people to you know, torture them and get information out of them.

01:18:43
Speaker 1: And then.

01:18:45
Speaker 2: So they they end up regrouping that winter, and then in the spring they launched this big expedition to go find the gold, like these alleged Golden empires where there are giant canoes on these rivers and their golden bells hanging on these canoes, and these chiefs sleep under trees with golden bells jingling in the wind. And so they they they aim for this thing, for this these Eastern empires, and they have given two guides, and the guides this is what you’re referring to. One is one is a uh. You know, there were slaves who were taken in from the eastern tribes in combat, and so these slaves are they’re like guide slaves and guide captives. And they start leading Cornad in all the wrong direction. And then Cornado, one of the guides, start contradicting each other and that ends up being a mess between these guides, and they finally start veering where the real treasure is supposed to be northeast, and that’s where they get to Kansas.

01:20:01
Speaker 1: One of my favorite details out of this, and we’ve we’ve talked about it and wrote about it is when they’re on the Texas Payanhandle and they start, yeah, when they start finding the the the like the buffalo people, the nomads. Someone remarks on that they pressure flake their stone knives with their teeth. Oh really, I didn’t know that. I believe it. I mean that could you do that? No, they pressure he says, they sharpened their blades under their teeth.

01:20:34
Speaker 4: And he says he also describes like the the teepees and he says they have you know, they live like Arabs, and he makes this connection between.

01:20:45
Speaker 2: Nomadic Yeah, And I think that’s a really interesting point too, that that you know, again corn Oto, it couldn’t attack these people because he move into attack and they just like pack up and the night and move and they could probably move faster than he could. And so, you know, the lack of actual settlements was a real detriment to what he was trying to achieve. This, you know, this idea of conquest and taking possession. Because every time he took tried to take possession of something like that. People who lived there just like, Okay, we’re out of here. Yeah that’s your patch. What a talk about this for a minute, is.

01:21:29
Speaker 1: Tell me about this idea that that as the expedition starts to fall apart and Coronado’s getting duped and things seem more and more kind of tenuous and a little more chaotic, that he he’s losing his mind.

01:21:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m you know, I’m really firmly convinced of this, and I haven’t seen any interpretations like this, partly because the science is so new that so he you know, he wang down the head by literally it’s described as a slab of rock, and then going up that ladder the first time, and then they he and it’s you know, in this first stab out into the plains, they go through the Texas plant panhandle, they get up to Kansas and the land starts getting really good up there, but it starts turning to winter. You know, it’s getting into fall, and they don’t want to get caught in winter on the plains. This is the so this would be the winter of it would be fall fifteen forty one, and so Cornado says, Okay, let’s go back to our winter quarters in the Rio Grande valley where it’s a little bit warmer, and we’ll regroup there and then we’ll come up this way in the spring. You know, with our full force. These lands are getting more fertile. The guides are saying, you know, the big empire is just over that way, that Golden Empire. So we’re in a regroup and come back the next, you know, the next spring. So they go back to their winter quarters in the Rio grand near Albuquerque, and they’re holed up there and the relations with the natives are really tense. It’s come to be called the Tea Wish War that’s now known as And in the spring they’re about to launch again, and you know, nice day and people are in high spirits and Coronado and his one of his main captain go and have a horse race against each other. And as they’re galloping along this plane, the salad garth and Coronado’s horse breaks and it’s the people on the expedition thinks it’s because they’ve been stored for so long, you know, they’re new satelegers, but they’ve rotted. And his salad earth breaks. The saddle spins, he falls off, he lands underneath the other guy’s horse. The other guy’s horse at full gallop, kicks him in the head. Ok, he’s out for like three weeks in a coma. I mean way out, real, way out.

01:24:00
Speaker 1: I know that. Yeah, yeah, totally gone. Totally different than the rock hitting him in the head.

01:24:04
Speaker 2: Totally different. I mean that was not good. But this is this is like near death. You know, everybody’s saying he’s near death. And and so then when he finally come starts coming out of that coma, he’s like, you know, strange, and he’s really paranoid and he doesn’t want anybody, you know, kind of he wants to be protected himself from his men, and he’s you know, trying to gear himself up for this next phase. But it’s clear that he’s like really wanged out. And then the news comes in that there’s been a native uprising down near that Arizona border where they’ve tried to establish a midway station, so the way back to Mexico City he’s cut. There’s no hope of resupply. Essentially, they’re trapped out here, and it’s like Cornado, it’s just he kind of goes into depression, and not kind of he goes he literally goes into depression and paranoia and like.

01:25:14
Speaker 1: It was all for nothing. So he’s recognizing that this whole thing is.

01:25:19
Speaker 2: He doesn’t want to go back. You know, he could still go farther up towards Kansas and you know, get to Iowa.

01:25:25
Speaker 1: But if he goes back, he’s going to be shamed.

01:25:28
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, totally yeah, total unbelievable shame, humiliation, failure, and spent all his wife’s money, his mother in law’s money, Vice Roymond Doze’s money, and the guys on his expedition have invested in the expedition themselves. And so he’s in this situation where it’s like, I just what happens that this is in one of the journals that when he was in this condition, which really sounds it’s like, and I’ve dealt with depression, and it really it feels so true the way the brain thinks in these circumstances, that depressed circumstances. And so he’s coming out of this coma. He’s you know, in this pueblo room, you know, and it’s like winter and he’s closed in and he comes out of the coma and he and then he remembers that when he was a young man in Salamanca that a mathematical friend of his, and mathematical in this case means like astrological friend told him that he would he would go away and he would become famous in foreign lands, and then he would take a big fall and die. And this convinces him that he’s about to die right here, and he says, he says, you know, these are according to that, like the literal journals written by the guys who were there at the time. He says, I just want to go back and die in the arms of my beatrice in Mexico City. And so now he has to figure out how is he going to turn like two thousand and three thousand gold hungry Spandards and Aztecs around, And he kind of lays a plot to do it. I mean, he’s clear enough to do that that he and he probably has help. But he manages to start a little rebellion among the soldiers, among the little group who convinced their officers to like sign on with something, and they convince somebody else and somebody else until he gets this packet of signed papers from the officers which don’t say like we’re going back. They’re kind of noncommittal, but they’re these signed papers and he locks them up and he said, well, I got all your signatures saying that you want to.

01:27:55
Speaker 1: Go back, So now we’re going back. And you in that move, you mentioned the thing a minute ago that kind of informs that move. And I forgot about when i’d read about this, is that guys on the expedition kicked in money. Yeah, I kind of forgot that, like some like a lot of these guys guys, Yeah, they’re like, yeah, I’ll throw in with you, and I’ll throw in my own investment. And so not only is he not only has like Coronado got to face this right the failure, but there’s people, you know, lower ranking individuals that are also.

01:28:35
Speaker 2: Screwed exactly, and not only lower ranking that a lot of these guys are aristocrats, but they’re second sons, and and so they’ve come to the New World, as Coronado has, as a second son, seeking a fortune and they don’t have one at home. But there, you know, there are a lot of opportunities, you know, knock off the empire in the New World. And one of the great quotes that I didn’t end up in that book because I saw it after after I’d finished the AFT. Is that one of the one of the like the clerics in Mexico City and fifteen, like fifteen thirties, when this expedition is mounting up, says like, well, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. Coronado took all these guys, these young aristocrats out of out of Mexico City because there are a bunch of like no goods floating around like quirks and water.

01:29:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s because like you could picture that if you were just like enlisted men, you know, and you go on this trip as like as as you imagined a contemporary soldier under a command structure, and then you realize it’s a fool’s errand you might be relieved when someone says, I screwed up, let’s go home. But in this case, you got a lot of people who are like really invested and literally invested in the success, probably even down to the Aztec warriors, like they’re planning on getting some yeah, and I better some of them. A bunch of the people are probably going to be like, yeah, it’s time to go home, But there’s gonna be a big contingent that is, like, what are you talking about? A huge we have not. And so there was a huge rebellion.

01:30:10
Speaker 2: I mean his guys, I mean the real knights, you know, the guys who were the higher st up the you know, the mounted guys with armor and everything else. They rebelled. They said, no, we’re not going to do this. We’ll go back up to you know, up to Iowa, up to the looking for Harrah Hay, the the next promised land. You could go home, you know, we’ll keep going. And he wouldn’t let them do that. And you know, and then he started saying, anybody’s talking about going home, I’m gonna have hung hanged. And so it was anybody who resisted going home. Yeah, and so so he so he was. And there was a there was a couple from Mexico City and like he was, you know, he’s like a cobbler or something, and she was his wife and they were kind of little entrepreneurs, and you know, she was saying, yeah, I want to stay here. You know, there’s like land of opportunity. And he said, you talk like that again, you’re gonna be strung up by a rope. And so I mean this is a testimony that came out literally in an inquisition afterwards. You know, this is a direct word. They investigated investigator like whether he abused the Indians.

01:31:21
Speaker 1: So he’s like, I’m going home. Everybody’s going on, we’re done, We’re done, and they’ll only people get my wife on a fishing trip. Everybody’s going see, you are not staying just to make this business trip is over.

01:31:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it was kind of yeah, it was very much like that. And then but the people he did allow to stay were the where the friars because you know, it’s going to be their mission to start, you know, to you know, save souls. And so I think almost all of them stayed, uh, and I think about ninety five percent were soon dispatched by Oh yeah, that doesn’t sound like And there’s there’s a big cross up and in like central Kansas, almost northern Kansas. Huge, you know, like thirty feet high, and it’s uh, it’s a cross that marks the spot of the martyrdom of Frey Padilla because he was trying to start a mission up there in they call it the land that they were searching. The first big one up there was called Queverra. Oh yeah, so you’ve heard that. I mean, that’s a Quivera. It’s like, you know, the mythical land of treasure. And so when Coronado was turning around, Frey Padilla said, well, I want to go back to the land of Quevea and start a mission. And Cornado said, okay, yeah, you’re gonna have some mules. You can have this, you can have that, you can have some servants. And so Frey Padilla went up there and started a mission. And then it’s not entirely clear what happened, but he might have started to try to go farther east to find the name Golden Land, you know, the next hope for a golden land, hoay, and that it’s described that one day he was I think he was walking maybe east or whatever, and he was approached on the other way all these native warriors with bows and arrows raised. And the story goes that he gets down in the path or the road and he starts praying to God. Next thing happens. He’s a pincushion that tips over and now there’s a cross up there, huge cross for there.

01:33:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. So when like in the title of your book, in the subtitle, you say, in the Birth of the American Indian resistance. I mean this really it’s kind of like an interesting if we’re talking about like what became the United States, right, right, this is like an interesting case where you had these invading conquerors there were I mean, they were defeated and sent packing. They were that’s it’s a remarkable story.

01:34:06
Speaker 2: And and in that sense, and I you know, it’s it’s become known, it’s it’s it’s known as the first named war in what’s now the United States between Europeans and called it’s called the Tea Wish War t I g U e X. And that, Yeah, the Spaniards were thoroughly defeated, sent back, thwarted, you know, in some ways crushed, and.

01:34:33
Speaker 3: That like for a long time though, because that’s the weird like picture from the picture from the native perspective at that time would be like this just outlandish thing shows up.

01:34:44
Speaker 1: Outlandish. It just seems like like insurmountable, like like like a.

01:34:47
Speaker 2: God like yeah, I mean like like outer space people.

01:34:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you figured out, you figured out they go away. And then a long time passed decades before probably felt like oh we won, yeah yeah, and you know.

01:35:03
Speaker 2: There the Spaniards didn’t send a serious expedition for another I think it was sixty years.

01:35:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and even then for a long time, for a generation.

01:35:12
Speaker 2: Or at least, like they beat exactly, yeah, repelled and invading people.

01:35:19
Speaker 1: And the invading people went.

01:35:20
Speaker 2: Away, they went away, they went away. And and you know, that’s the subtitle is the Birth of American Indian Resistance, because it was like that, especially the Puebloans, you know, they wove themselves together in this in this real net that that didn’t really have to confront the Spaniards directly in terms of warfare, but really just outsmarted them in a lot of ways. And and the Port Bloans understood how to survive in that climate way better, and and and how to get.

01:35:52
Speaker 1: Who the Spaniards were.

01:35:53
Speaker 2: I mean they were utterly helpless without without the Puebloan corn they you know they were, or the buffalo on.

01:35:58
Speaker 1: The Yeah, it’s like you know, learning recognizing that the landscape plays in your favor. It has elements of like an insurgency. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean, Like like you you create, you create a structure that’s hard to sort of like decapitate. You find a way to like not confront in big battles. Right, you pick your moments, You.

01:36:23
Speaker 2: Pick your moment. I’ve in Washington did that a lot in the Revolutionary War. You know, you tried to avoid you know, yeah, avoiding them.

01:36:28
Speaker 1: The way to win is not fight keeping.

01:36:32
Speaker 4: And also just an individual like the individual acts of oh it’s it’s over there, it’s not here, is what you’re looking for, Like all these little individual you know, there’s a larger political resistance, a large individual acts of working for one’s own self interest.

01:36:50
Speaker 2: And and and it feels so much like it’s coordinated. I mean, that’s you know, and you know, I think some historians initially didn’t believe that, but you know, if you really look at the documentation, there’s more coming out more.

01:37:02
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. And the tendency, for the tendency for so long is to ignore that that that people had a like indigenous people had like a strategic awareness and right, you know, I mean or even communicated with each other over over you know, one hundred miles.

01:37:18
Speaker 2: It’s like, oh, they’re in one campfire over there, in one campfire over there, and there’s no connection between the two.

01:37:23
Speaker 1: And again, man, it’s not you know, you look at these other areas, it’s it’s like it’s not an isolated strategy. No, not at all.

01:37:31
Speaker 2: And in this case, rendald As, you were saying that, you know, misleading them. So one of the cool things about the misleading was that, you know, when they first had the like the slave guides, the captive guides, and they’re leaving Pekoas you know, which is now the sound Great Cristo Range and going towards the buffalo planes. The guides lead them towards you know, like towards Texas, to the to the south east, and they get to a place where they’re you know, they’re just like they’re lost on the buffalo planes. They don’t know what to do, and it turns out that they’re like the real settlements. They eventually learned that the one guide rats on the other guide. The real settlements are up to the northeast at you know, Quavera, where their land is way richer than it is down on the on the Texas Panhandle. But the the thinking is, i mean, one notion is that the guides and the Puebloans who told the GUIDs to do this, we’re leading the Spaniards and this you know, huge, huge party that’s massively hungry all the time out into these barren regions where there were there was just not enough food to sustain, and so it was like they’re going to starve them out by sending them, sending them into into a into an era deserted, era desert area.

01:38:54
Speaker 1: So what uh, last question for you is what what comes the ornato?

01:39:01
Speaker 2: That’s yeah, and well, hen well, you know the way I frame this is he starts out the spring of fifteen forty at the head of the grandest cavalcade the New World has ever seen, you know, two thousand guys and banners, blah blah blah. And he comes back two and a half years later, carried on a litter, a broken man, depressed, with one hundred followers kind of stumbling behind. And Vice Roy Mendoza, the accounts go greet him very coldly.

01:39:34
Speaker 1: And his wife.

01:39:35
Speaker 2: You want to the mother in law as a whole, she’s a I mean, she took Cortes on mono almano in legal lawsuits. She was a real battle you know, ready to battle. And so so then but Vice Roy Mendoza, you know, this is his young his protege that he’s bringing along for decades. He said, you know, okay, I’ll give you this kind of side job. You know, he’s like on the city council. I think he also gets to be the governor of Nueva Galicia, which is up near what’s now Pert de viert And and then the word comes out that he abused the Indians, and so then he gets hauled into Mexico City, and there’s like several years of an inquiry into what he did, and there’s you know, the testimony that you know, books of the testimony that come out, and he ends up being acquitted. One of his his like right hand man, his main captain, Cardinists, gets convicted, ends up doing like after much you know, legal turmoil, ends up doing some community work and on the Mediterranean coast and normaloga. That’s how all the punishment came down for this the only person who’s who was tried convicted for abusing the natives. And then but Cornado State in Mexico City, you know, and had I can’t remember. They had six or seven kids, and and he he served in some capacity on the civil council, a city council. But I came across this letter and I later found it and quote it in one book. But in the archives in Mexico City, reporting on Cornado after he’d come back, and this letter in Spanish, you know, written in fifteen forty four or something said or the report I think the viceroy of the king said, you know, ever since he came back from that expedition, he hasn’t been the same person. They say he took a fall from a horse, and it’s never been the same.

01:41:45
Speaker 1: Really, it was now death Chile. Yeah, it’s funny.

01:41:49
Speaker 2: I’ve only seen that in one book, and I didn’t I saw it later, but I found built. I came across it in these archives and it was like, oh.

01:41:57
Speaker 1: That is the connection was made at the time.

01:41:59
Speaker 2: It was made at the time. Yeah, he was never the same. And you know what’s It’s like, he’s more he’s like being kept at home with his wife and children, and his homes like on the on the square, you know, it’s like kitty corner to Cortesa’s palace, and so he’s being kept in his wife’s house and his wife’s family’s stone mansion and they and this letter says and at this point he is more fit to be governed than governed really, So I mean that’s just like, that’s the time at the time and so and so that’s one of the things that which I bring up to some degree in this book. It’s like, you know, here’s a case of like brain damage. I mean, it’s really clear. It’s really clear if you know anything about CTE, which I my father I think had it. So I followed it for years and it’s it’s only and studied seriously for like twenty years.

01:43:02
Speaker 5: They were they were like a long ways away from identifying that really, I mean just in the last few decades when you know, now we’re talking about so many you know, NFL football players, and twenty years ago it was not even mentioned, I don’t think.

01:43:16
Speaker 1: And it’s a it’s an interesting pursuit, like a historian thing would be that that you would track down that in history, you would track down individuals that had that had behavioral patterns. Oh really, you know what I mean that you can I wonder if you would find more like these these inexplicable figures in history or whatever, that you might find more things of like that, like more cases where where someone might have suffered that from traumatic brain interests.

01:43:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, well just think about how many you know, for a million, thousands of thousands, of years, humans at war have been bashing each other on the head and that’s one of the things I’ve another fun research for this book dug into this that I think it’s something like ten percent and it might is it. I think it’s Neanderthals or very early people. Ten percent of the males have had what’s called prep pannation. That’s when it’s it was known to medical procedure pressure. Yeah, you drill a hole in the head and relieve brain pressure, and that believes it relieves evil spirits, basically depression.

01:44:34
Speaker 1: And so this has been something that’s that humans have been living with for since the beginning. That’s crazy thing, man.

01:44:43
Speaker 2: There’s another aspect of all this that that just in the big picture to bring up and then we can you know, take it wherever. But that you know, part of my thesis is that thanks to the Puebloans, they managed to thwart Spanish settlement in what’s now the West, you know. And later there were the Apaches and the Commanchees, but the Puebloans were really the first line and they and they kept their cultures remarkably intact to this day and a lot. Yeah, and so the Spaniards, you know, they like on the map they claimed all the way up to you know what’s now Canada and that they said, this is been. And it was like just a joke because they had they had Santa Fe. They had a settlement at Santa Fe, and that was kind of it. They had a few scattered settlements, but they had a very light colonial presence, and for you know, they established Santa Fe in like sixteen oh nine or ten or something like that. And then so and then once the US westward movement started, you know, we can go back to Daniel Boone. Those guys come over the mountains in like seventeen seventy four, right, and they start settling in the Kentucky Valley. And it took British that American you know, resident citizens two hundred years to get from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River settlement. And it took them less than fifty years to get from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast. And one of the reasons is there was no of course, there were Indian tribes, but there were there was no colonial presence. There was no empire hanging on to that. The Spain said, yeah, that’s ours, but I mean, it was there was no sign or sight of Spain at all. And so that’s part of my thesis is that that this this the Puebloan you know blockade I call it, kept the what’s now the western US and something of a power vacuum in terms of European powers, so that when the US came pushed west and westward movement, it just rolled through.

01:46:58
Speaker 1: You know, this is the theme I’ve touched on a lot in American history. It is particularly in the West, but it’s applicable in other parts of the country too. Is that looking at it now, your tendency is to compress the timelines, right that it was like European powers hit the coast and just oh yeah, right, right, do you know what I mean? But it’s just it’s like you assume it was like preordainedous progress. Yeah, it seems it just seems like that it hit and happened. But you imagine Ryanda and I ha just finished a project about the Buffalo Hide hunters, and a lot of that project takes place post Civil War. Okay, so eighteen seventies on the test on the planes on Theano Esticado, and it has it has a that’s when we talk about Coronado, but it has a very frontier feel. They’re getting killed by comanches. Okay, they’re like, they’re just post shovel warrior tying post Civil war. They’re getting killed by comanches. They’re looking at maps that have big holes in the maps, and it’s been three hundred years is that? Wow? Three hundred years and there were other Europeans messing around there. It’s so crazy. And you take like where we’re sitting now, right, and you start going back. So we’re gonna go from now and we’re gonna go back three hundred years right to try to get like what does that mean. It’s like, it’s where you’re sitting now and you’re going back to like the American Revolution before the French and Indian. Yeah, it’s like that is the distance what separates you now from the French and Indian War or whatever, which you can’t even fathom was separating Like those buffalo hide hunters on the plane post war Buffalo post Civil war buffalo hide hunters who felt like they were on a frontier. They’re getting killed by comanches. That distance separates them from the first people that showed up there. It got killed by exactly. Yeah, I mean it was a long long it was longer than the history of our own country. They were like still that they were in conflict with Europeans, with European people. Yeah.

01:49:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s bizarre and it just doesn’t enter our conscious and that’s one of the reasons I run like.

01:49:26
Speaker 1: It just happened. Yeah, I mean, like the.

01:49:30
Speaker 4: Christopher Columbus to the American Revolution is a shorter period of time than Coronado to the US claiming all that country like Guadaloup bead dollgo right, right, I mean that’s three hundred and six years or whatever.

01:49:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it’s three centuries. Yeah, And you know I make that point, it’s like three it thwarted, you know, European expansion into the West. The Puebloans and you know, especially the Puebloans thwarted European expansion into the West for three centuries before it really came in went with with a westward movement. Yeah, it’s in terms of our historical perspective, it’s just we have such an orientation in our American history with you know, with good reason a lot of ways, but it’s it’s focused on the Atlantic coast, you know, like that’s the epicenter and then everything flows out from there. But in fact, the Spaniards were way earlier, coming from the south. So I had one guy I was doing a radio call in show. I was really productive.

01:50:47
Speaker 1: You’ve been there, right, And I’m always glad I did those, and but.

01:50:53
Speaker 2: One guy, you know, and I was talking about this Coronado story, and one guy we feel are really interested in this history. But one guy called in and said, well, it was like.

01:51:01
Speaker 1: Oh that kind of reading. I think you remember. You got to do those call in where you got to do like they’ll set you up and you got to call thirteen morning shows. No idea of what you’re calling a radio radio tour. Yeah, like some guys like duh, some guy, uh, Peter, I don’t know, roll some kind But what’s going on, Peter, I’m going this morning exactly, wrote the book, Peter. We gotta go. And then and then sometimes when I’ve had sometimes I’m sure you’ven done this, it’s like I’ve had you got an AM station and FM station back to back, and then it’s like an AM station. Yeah, yeah, I was going I was going up tomorrow’s all caffinated, ready to go. And then you get to the f M station.

01:51:40
Speaker 2: Okay, now we’re going to look at this history very seriously. It was a call in, yeah, question yeah, kgv Oh Actually it’s a it’s pretty it’s a pretty.

01:51:52
Speaker 1: Big known one. And they’re screening the calls. They’re screening the calls. No, they come, they come sign guys like what’s the drunkest you’ve ever been?

01:52:07
Speaker 2: Always gets your stories there, so that’d be good too. So so anyway, this this call, this guy call hs in. You know, it’s really I’m telling this sort of you know Cornado story and early American history in the Spanish, you know, coming up from the south. And and he said, well, yeah, so it’s like, you know, it was like the the Spanish did an end run around you know, North America and around the British and North American history. And I said, no, the Spanish wouldn’t call it an end run. They’d call it one right up the middle. It was one hundred years earlier.

01:52:47
Speaker 1: Well man, it’s been great. Uh once once again, Peter Stark new book, The Lost Cities of Ilonorte, Coronadle’s Quest, the Unconquered West, and the Birth of American Indian Resistance. Peter, thanks for coming on man, it was really fun. Steve last you got one more in you? You got two more in you? Poison arrow No no, no books? Oh you do one? Yeah.

01:53:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m thinking, I’m you know, I’m gonna have to pick your brain, which like you must have spirit book projects lying around.

01:53:20
Speaker 1: I got some, I got some handful, but at some point I’m just gonna fish man.

01:53:26
Speaker 2: But yeah, so I’m I’m thinking, you know, more along these early exploration.

01:53:32
Speaker 1: Uh.

01:53:33
Speaker 2: And I you know, I wrote this book of Storia. That’s that’s done really well. I’m still doing really well. And this this book has some of the kind of that rock and roll feeling, like this craziness the Historia has. These two are very similar. And so I’m I’m I’m kind of looking for something along those lines. And it’s probably you know, west towards the west, and I have something in mind. I won’t go into it exactly. But another thing is a cannibalism. So I was a good seller. Ye people like to read about cannibalism.

01:54:06
Speaker 1: They do it stirs you up. I do. I’ll give you one hot tip and I had to warn you though I gave the same David Grant, he was kicking around his next book, and oh yeah, scare of that guy hit. You know, he’s that here’s a hot tip for you, okay, And I’d lay it out a book for him. What was that? Maybe he’s halfway done with it. He acted like he was honestly interested. Was a book about tell you no, you can’t tell me? Well not now I meet Phil’s gotta turned the equipment off. Oh okay, I took the world. I was telling him what his next book ought to be. Yeah, okay, I’ll tell you. You know, I just I got a David Grand story. I got a David Grand story.

01:54:44
Speaker 2: So when I was researching that Young Washington book, so that came out in twenty eighteen, so there’s like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and you know, I always keep kind of a file of possible book ideas. And I was researching that and and uh, George’s young wife, George Washington’s young life, sorry, and his older brother had been uh, you know, kind of cut his teeth in the War of Jenkins Ear as a young Royal Navy officer and War of Jenkins Ear. That’s pretty interesting. So I dove into the and then well, and then there was this like crazy story growing out of the War of Jenkins. Ear about this British navy fleet that went around the coast of South Tip of South America and shipwrecked on the western coast of South America and ended up, you know, cannibalizing each other and that ended up. And then I pitched it to my agent, you know, you know, I was about to pitch it to my agent, like this is kind of a wild story, and then I have this my agent’s voice as a stewart, my agent’s voice, No, that’s about British. You want to write about Americans. And so then it turns out then you know it’s the wager.

01:55:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, slow him down.

01:56:07
Speaker 2: Anyway, Well we didn’t talk about poison arrows after, but you know, warners hurt Sid’s poison arrow that he said not to touch these Opata native warriors and what’s now Sonora, Mexico had these arrows that were tipped with and with the Spanish called called a year but dey la flecha, you know, flee for the arrow that they dipped their tips in. And the Spanish were terrified of it because if it seems like if it hit you directly, you’d like kind of fall over dead. But they had armor on, so you know, they wouldn’t really get hit much. But it turns out if you just got a little nick from that arrow, like one guy, his arm just started deteriorating and falling off like a piece of well done pot roast, and so it would it would deteriorate your body. And the the the journals say that like, yeah, seventeen of these guys Spaniards like they died from the poison. Arrows were the most horrible stench and painful death. And so this is the the flesh eating poison.

01:57:15
Speaker 1: What do they think it was made out of? It?

01:57:17
Speaker 2: Well, I’ve really looked into that. It’s it’s it’s from a you know, euphobia, it’s a it’s a plant. They’re like, it’s so complicated, and I’ve asked like three different biochemists about it. That there’s so many different species that are that are related, and a lot of them have have toxins of various types in them, various combinations. But I’m thinking that these arrows, they might have been there might have been two different types of poison, one on the arrow or more one that was a quick acting one and that that got in your bloodstream and another one that was a slow acting rot the flesh, you know, combination. So it’s like when the Spaniards came the Hope. But I said, well, you know, let’s check our pharma pharmaceutical shelf here and see what we can and how we can incur the most pain on these people. Yeah, it’s always it’s wild. I mean, they’re really sophisticated.

01:58:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s it’s cool because you don’t think of you know, you always think of the aerotoxins in Africa, South America.

01:58:22
Speaker 2: You know, a lot of people don’t think about aerotoxins. I mean it’s like a high desert plant or you know, desert shrubs.

01:58:27
Speaker 4: I was going to walk away from this conversation with your larger point about Indian agency in the Southwest. Now all I can think about is describing necrosis as a well done pot roast.

01:58:39
Speaker 1: So that’s my Okay, Well, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

01:58:47
Speaker 2: You know, a vivid image about this is this is why the the colonial powers didn’t establish a very strong presence in the Southwest. But they were like being turned into pot roads.

01:59:00
Speaker 1: All right, boy, check it out. There’s so many I mean, obviously we didn’t even scratch the surface. Man, Peter Stark’s The Lost Cities of Eleonorte, Coronidle’s Quest, the Unconquered West, and the birth of American Indian Resistance. Peter Stark, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks Steve. Thanks. N’s really fun.