Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján (1510 - 22 September 1554), Anglicized as Vasquez de Coronado, was a Spanish conquistador and explorer. He explored the northwestern parts of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, nowadays the southwestern parts of the United States, in the unsuccessful search for the Seven Cities of Cibola (a fabled "land of gold" much like the more famous El Dorado).
He reached as a far as what is now Kansas, and in the process his explorers became the first Europeans to see landscape marks like the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, the Rio Grande and some others. The Coronado National Memorial near Sierra Vista, Arizona commemorates his expedition, as does the nearby Coronado Butte, Coronado Heights, Coronado National Forest and other places.
Unlike most other famous conquistadores, who were born poor, undistingished or both, Vázquez de Coronado hailed from an aristocrating family, and in fact arrived in the Americas as part of the entourage of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. He was given a governorship and turned out to be a good diplomat with the native elite, especially compared to his predecessor Nuño de Guzmán, who had been just denounced and sent in chains to Spain for disrupting local order — basically, for plotting to "conquer" a native realm that was already allied with Spain, the Purépecha, and savagely repressing both the indigenous and any Spaniard who disagreed. Vázquez would receive several positions of responsibility, among them governor of the modern lands of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Nayari, and later solidified his position by marrying Beatriz de Estrada, the daughter of Hernán Cortés's former treasurer.note
He seemed to to have secured a comfy life, but the legend of the Seven Cities of Gold caressed his ears one day by way of the African slave-turned-explorer Estevanico de Dorantes, one of the few survivors of the disastrous expedition by Pánfilo de Narváez, which also included Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Mendoza sent Estevanico with Friar Marcus de Niza in a preliminary exploration in 1539, and although the black explorer was executed by Zuñi natives (there are multiple versions about why, but the natives later claimed he ravished local women), Niza returned claiming to have sighted one of the fabulous cities, so Vázquez and Mendoza decided to gather a major expedition and give it a try the following year.
The expedition involved 340 Spaniards and 800 Mexica and Purépecha natives along with hundreds of horses and cows, as well as a support fleet that would try to shadow them through the Californian coast. Also, as Vázquez had correctly predicted it would be a difficult mission nonetheless, he organized supply lines along the trail and divided the contingent in smaller, independent groups so the grazing lands and water holes could recover. This proved the best decision, as after they went deep into the Nuevo México desert and reached the place Niza claimed to be their goal, they only found a group of humble Zuñi villages, causing such a disappointment that Vázquez angrily kicked Niza back to México (not literally, although he probably wished he could).
Vázquez deployed groups to search around for months, often not gold, but merely food and water, and in the process contacted the Hopi, Pueblo and Wichita tribes, some of them violently. Months passed, and by this point it's unlikely anybody in the expedition still harbored real hopes to find any fabulous civilization, but Gold Fever is a powerful energizer, and they kept searching on until 1542, Vázquez fell of his horse and was badly injured, upon which he finally saw the writing on the wall and ordered everybody to return.
The quest had been a big fiasco, as Cíbola failed to appear, and only 100 of the original Spaniards and so of the natives returned. Vázquez was left in bankruptcy due to the large inversion and, ironically for someone who had built his career by being relatively nice to the natives, he was accused himself of comitting abuses and war crimes against the tribes in his zeal to find Cíbola. He managed to get away with everything through his connections (it helped that those tribes were disperse communities without the imperial influence of the Mesoamericans, which would have probably crash-landed him in prison), but later got hit by the closure of the encomienda system, meaning he never recovered his economic status, and died several years later of an epidemic.
His nephew, Juan Vázquez de Coronado (not to confuse with his son also named Juan), would become famous too as the conqueror of Costa Rica.
In fiction
Film- Coronado's gold cross has a memorable appearance in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
- Coronado's ghost appears in Charlie's Ghost Story, played by Cheech Marin.
- Ignacio del Valle's historical novel Coronado features the expedition.
