THE LOST CITIES OF EL NORTE

Vivid history of the famed Spanish quest for fabled cities of gold.

The two principal expeditions that make up historian Stark’s narrative, the one more or less accidental by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the other, more deliberate, by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, have been well documented in the historical literature ever since they took place. The first drove the second: Cabeza de Vaca’s surviving comrades let slip tales they had heard of cities of gold, and Coronado’s ears perked up. So, too, did those of the first-generation conquistador Hernán Cortés, who figures in Stark’s pages more than in most other histories, and to very good effect: We don’t need a lot more evidence that Cortés, “drunk with sudden power and riches, and still not fully brought to heel,” was a bad hombre, but he stands in sharp contrast to the more humane Coronado. Or was he? One of the many interesting points that Stark lands concerns the Spanish policy that forbade mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, with the Spanish viceroy of New Spain directly ordering Coronado “not to inflict injury on or exercise force against the Indians [nor] take anything they may possess from them against their will.” As Stark shows, Coronado and his lieutenants frequently disregarded those orders and committed outright war crimes, among them the murder of a Plains Indian interpreter called the Turk, “quietly strangled by Coronado’s officers in the middle of the night and secretly buried.” Native resistance, Stark notes, soon pushed the Spanish back into Mexico. If it had not, he adds provocatively, the Spanish Empire might well have extended all the way to the Mississippi, containing the United States on the opposite shore and creating a culture “of Indigenous and European, something like today’s Brazil.” It makes for a fine thought experiment to close a highly readable historical yarn.

A welcome addition to the literature of Hispanic America and the American West.