1539 - Greater Southwest
The exploration of North America's interior and Florida have related ties through the ill-fated expedition of 1528 under Pánfilo de Narváez, whose surviving men were shipwrecked on the various islands off the Texas coast. Eight years later, four men led by Cabeza de Vaca, who had wandered for several years through western Texas, southern New Mexico, and northern Chihuahua, reached Corazones, then the northernmost Spanish outpost in Sonora. Once rescued, they told of the many Indian tribes they had seen in their flight to safety.
The upshot was official Spanish interest in what lay in the interior. In 1539, the Spanish sent two reconnaissance parties northward to ascertain the possibilities of finding rich and powerful Indian kingdoms like those of the Aztecs and Incas. Melchior Diaz led one of the scouting parties, which crossed the Colorado River near its confluence with the Gila River into eastern California. The other, under Fray Marcos de Niza, reported on a large Indian district called Cibola, present-day Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. The two preliminary scouting missions led to a major reconnaissance of the Greater Southwest.
Within a year, the large Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led expedition of 1100 men left Compostela on the west Mexican coast bound for Cibola in New Mexico. Crossing the Sonora River Valley, they entered the present-day United States through southeastern Arizona. Near where the explorers crossed is Coronado National Memorial, a site dedicated to the first expedition to explore the Greater American Southwest that provided Europeans their first glimpse of a six-state area stretching from eastern California to Arizona , New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and central Kansas.
The entrada gave Europeans their first views of the Grand Canyon, as seen by García López de Cárdenas; of the Hopi Pueblos as seen by Pedro de Tovar; of Acoma Pueblo, Pecos Pueblo, the Río Grande, the Pecos River, and the large buffalo herds of the Great Plains as described by Hernando de Alvarado; of the first notice of the Great Divide, the watershed that separates waters flowing toward the Pacific Ocean from those flowing east to the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico reported by Juan Jaramillo in his narrative; and many other wonders.
The expedition marked the first intensive contact between the Spanish and Pueblo and Great Plains tribes. It provided another first, one that would establish the colonial-native relationship in the area for the next 280 years. In two decisive contests caused by the Spanish intrusion and demands for food and provisions in the cold north country, Pueblo groups fell to the powerful military force of the Spaniards.
Forty-eight years after Columbus' voyage, the men of Vázquez de Coronado stood outside a pueblo fortress called Cicuye (Pecos) near the edge of the Great Plains. Long a center of trade between the pueblos of the Río Grande and Great Plains tribes, Pecos was one of the largest pueblos the Europeans saw in 1540.
Simultaneous with the expedition of Vázquez de Coronado in the Southwest and the De Soto expedition in the Southeast, Spanish officials launched a third expedition led by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. Hoping to discover a route to China and the Philippines by following the Pacific coast around from California, Rodríguez Cabrillo set sail to prove his theory.
Although sound, his plan failed because of the great distance and the lack of knowledge of the extent of the Pacific Ocean. Departing the west Mexican coast, his expedition sailed along the Baja California coast to San Diego Bay, which he named and claimed for Spain. Proceeding northward beyond San Clemente Island, his ships sailed past the Channel Islands and Monterey Bay until they reached Cape Blanco on the Oregon Coast. Rodríguez Cabrillo and his men were the first Europeans to explore, chart, and give place-names to sites along that long stretch of the Pacific Coast.
By 1610, much of the interior between Florida and California was well known. In 1605, Juan de Oñate, who had founded New Mexico in 1598, led an expedition west from there to the Colorado River. He was the first European to leave his name on a sandstone promontory that would become a landmark for Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American explorers. El Morro National Monument in New Mexico preserves their stories along with those of Native Americans, who first discovered the waterhole and subsequently established a pueblo (Atsinna) atop the promontory.
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