The Stories of El Dorado

But it was very different when they reached the desert and mountains, for they did not know how to bear the fatigue of such a journey, nor how to care for their horses, cattle and sheep. The animals died rapidly, and the soldiers got into many fights with the Indians who resented being robbed and badly treated. On they went through what we now call Arizona, over almost the same road that Fray Marcos had traveled, and found, instead of the fine, glittering city they expected, only a few houses of one of the Zuni Indian villages.

The hearts of the Spaniards sunk as they gazed upon it. Calling some of the men, Coronado said:

"Go in to the people of the city, and say that we come to defend and join with them in friendship."

They went and delivered Coronado's greeting, but were received with scorn.

"We did not ask you to come, and your chief had no right to send you. This is our land, and we can defend it. If you attempt to stay here we will kill every one of you." Even as the soldiers, carrying the message, turned to go away the people of Cibola began firing arrows at them. Coronado quickly gave the command to attack, which the Indians answered by a shower of arrows and stones which they sent down from their high-walled houses. They seemed bent upon killing Coronado; twice they felled him to the ground, but he recovered and led the charge with an arrow sticking through his foot.

"Santiago! and at them!" he shouted, as he rode forward in the last assault.

"Santiago," echoed his soldiers, close at his heels. When the Indians saw the horses coming at full speed into their village, they threw down their bows and arrows, and fled in every direction.

Then the Spaniards almost cried with anger and disappointment. The houses were really made of stone, but there were no jewels, no gold, no treasures of any kind—nothing, in fact, but a poor, miserable Indian pueblo, or village, built upon a high ledge of rocks, miles away from the fields of corn, beans and squashes, upon which they lived. All the Indians in that part of the United States built their houses in pueblos, or villages, but not one of them had any treasures. They irrigated the dry, sandy soil and tilled their fields, and were a simple, kindly people, until the greedy Spanish soldiers drove them into rebellion which has left their country bare and desolate, even to this day.

The Kingdom of Quivera

THE air was full of the chill and blast of winter, and with the first snow-flakes great discontent broke out in camp, and Coronado realized that he must find a place to make his men more comfortable.

"There are ten big community houses on top of that spider-shaped rock," he said, one morning to a squad of soldiers who had been drilling on parade ground, "and I want possession of it for the troops. Some one must go ahead first and report the situation."

"The rock is so high that our bullets scarcely reach to the top," said the scout, who had galloped over to the pueblo to spy out a way of doing what Coronado commanded. "But there are four winding paths leading up the sides, and we can ascend in single file."

"Have you tried it?" asked Coronado.

"Yes, and found it quite an easy task. I spent last night there, and as the rays of the sun took leave of the lofty Sierras, I felt forsaken, and as if I were about to float away into the darkness."

"Did the Indians suspect your purpose in coming?"

"Certainly not, and all my gloomy feelings passed away as soon as the fires began to blaze on the roofs at different heights of the same building. Inside the houses laughing voices greeted me, and I was glad to be the guest of such simple people."

"Do you think we would be safe from attacks and surprises at night?"

"Perfectly. And when once up there it would be almost impossible to come down at night. The narrow paths are really unsafe except in daylight."

It was not long until the Spaniards had forcible possession of the village, and during the long, dreary winter months they went about in rusty helmets, battered cuirasses, ragged doublets and worn-out boots, while the Indians wrapped themselves in thick coverings made of rabbit skins. Every morning the bell called them to mass, and then the criers went up and down announcing the day's duty to every one in the camp. On the plains below was heard the neighing of horses, the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep.

In the pueblos near by the Indians danced, and gathered around the fires to listen to the old men's stories of their past, and as the winter drew to a close the Spaniards were no longer homesick and despondent, but ready and willing to test the truth of some of the things the Indians had told them of the Wrathy Chieftain and the Kingdom of Quivera.

At Pecos the scouts were received with music and presents of cotton cloth and handfuls of turquoises, because the inhabitants were not sure but that the white men came from the sun, and were sent by the Golden Hearted, whom they revered and honored as the Wrathy Chieftain.

In this village they met a strange-looking Indian.

We will name this fellow the "Turk," because he looks so like one, and find out, if we can, where he lives. "May be his people have gold," said the soldiers, as soon as they arrived at Pecos.

"My home is very far to the east," said the Turk, when questioned, "and we have plenty of gold."

"What is the name of your country!"

"Quivera, and my king's name is Tatarax. He wears a long beard, and worships a golden cross and an image of the Queen of Heaven."

Had the Spaniards been at all cautious and shrewd they would have taken pains to find out how true this statement was, but they were so tired of being in camp, that they were glad of an opportunity to go on another expedition in search of an El Dorado, which they always hoped to find.

"The chiefs of the Pecos have taken a gold arm band of mine," said the Turk, wishing to make trouble between them and the Spaniards. "No matter what I say to them, they will not give it back to me."

He described the band as being so wide and heavy that Coronado was induced to seize the chiefs and carry them off to another pueblo in the hope of compelling the Pecos Indians to pay a big ransom for them. In addition the Spaniards demanded cotton clothes and provisions for their journey. The Indians refused, and fought two weeks before Coronado became satisfied that the Turk never had such a thing as an arm band, and that there was no gold in the village.

"It is no use to waste time looking for treasures in this part of the world," he finally told his men, and they immediately began to question the Turk.

"I know a country," he declared, "where there is a very wide river that has fish in it as big as a horse. The people tip their canoes with gold, and sometimes there are forty rowers in a boat. Every vessel they use is made of gold and silver."

All the time he was talking he watched the faces of the soldiers with keen craftiness, and when he saw how delighted they were, he made the story just as big as he could.

"There are plenty of such places," he said, with a toss of his head, "but my country of Quivera is the most important of them all, and I will take you there first."

When any one gets lost on the plains where there are no hills or trees to mark the way, they wander around in a circle, and finally get into a perfect frenzy by coming back to the same place over and over again.

This was what happened to the Spaniards under Coronado. They returned in a wide bend to Pecos, after marching for months on the desolate plains.

"Led around in a circle," he said, "as if by some evil spirit. Everywhere we went we found ourselves surrounded by herds of misshapen, crinkly-wooled cows. Some of them had calves, and the bulls had beards of sunburnt hair. Our horses took fright and ran away, while some of them plunged and threw their riders over their heads."

"Were these woolly cows ferocious?" asked the good padre, who had remained at Pecos to teach the Indians, and had never seen a buffalo.

"They are very terrible when they stampede. If they catch sight of a white man, they lower their heads and with a quick, short bellow set off at full tilt in a heavy, rolling gallop. On they come, like a mad rush of waters, tails high in the air and their big eyes gleaming with fright. We had much ado to keep out of their way, for they would run over and trample all to death."

"No wonder your horses ran away," said the padre. "It was quite enough to frighten anything."

"Finally we met some of the people who go around the country with the cows. They make tents of the hides and wear them for blankets, and keep huge dogs to carry their food and baggage. They were friendly to us, but knew nothing of Quivera and its treasures."

But the feeling of helplessness and desolation of the plains gradually left the Spaniards, and then they were ready to follow the Turk's lead again. This time they got lost in the desert, and many of them wandered off and died from thirst, and their bodies were eaten by wolves and coyotes. They kept going round and round in a circle until their tongues hung out of their mouths and they were delirious. In the hot, quivering air they imagined they saw cities, and lakes and springs of water, and they laughed and cried, and sung and danced in a raging fever. At last they began to suspect the Turk.

"He is purposely leading us astray," they said. "He is trying to lose us on these desolate plains where we will starve to death. He intends to desert and leave us here."

They put the Turk in chains, and then he confessed that he had never seen the big stone houses he said were in Quivera, but stoutly insisted that the country was rich in gold and silver.

The Prairie Indians begged Coronado to turn back.

"The land of Quivera is forty days' journey toward the north," they said, "and you will suffer from hunger long before you reach other tribes."

But Coronado had spent all his money and was in debt deeply, so he determined to take twenty-nine picked horsemen and go forward. Leaving the rest of the company to find their way back to Pecos, he engaged some new guides among the Prairie Indians and pushed on determined to find Quivera. They rode directly north until they came to a place in Kansas near where the city of Leavenworth is now located.

In the meantime the Pecos Indians went on the warpath and refused to receive or aid the Spaniards who left Coronado and went back to them. He found them encamped before the pueblo when he returned months after, weary, empty-handed, and disappointed.

"I have found Quivera and explored it well," he said, "but it has no permanent settlement, and no gold and silver. I was expecting to see houses several stories high, made of stone. Instead of that they are simple huts and the inhabitants are perfectly savage."

The Turk tried to secure his freedom by saying that the Pecos Indians had hired him to lose the Spaniards on the plains, but no one paid any attention to him. In revenge he said to the people of Quivera:

"Do not let one of these white men escape alive. They will bring others of their kind and rob you of all your possessions and ill treat your women and children. They have already killed many of the Pecos."

Some one told Coronado what was being said, and he ordered his soldiers to take the Turk out and hang him to the first tree they found, which they did.

Coronado spoke the truth about Quivera, but even the men who went with him believed that there was a land near by where they would find great riches, and they kept repeating all the stories about El Dorado until Coronado was obliged to promise them that he would make another effort to find it.

"If we go north again we can be certain of good food for the soil is the best that can be found for all kinds of crops. In Quivera we were given plums, nuts, very fine grapes, mulberries and flax. I really believe we shall make some important discoveries very soon."

One day at Pecos after he had made friends with the Indians, he was tilting with an officer in his command when his saddle girth broke while his horse was running at full speed. He fell on his head and was run over and so badly hurt that for days it was thought he would die. Before he got well news came from Mexico that the Indians behind him were on the warpath, and then he knew he must retreat as quickly as possible. So instead of going in quest of the roving band of Quivera Indians, he was obliged to return to the city of Mexico. Here the Viceroy received him coldly and upbraided him, saying:

"It is a source of keen disappointment and regret to me, that you, my trusted friend and favorite officer, should abandon the rich treasures of the north. I wish you to go to your estate and live in retirement for the remaining years of your life. I will try to find some one more worthy of my confidence for future work."

Reduced to poverty, with many debts unpaid, and disgraced by the Viceroy, the poor unfortunate nobleman lived only a few years on his estate in Mexico and died heartbroken over his failures.

Everybody in Mexico believed that he was mistaken, and several other expeditions set out to find the Kingdom of Quivera. More than a century afterward the legend settled around one of the missions founded by the padres, and for years people thought this was the Grand Quivera. Great treasures were supposed to be buried there by the missionaries when the insurrection of 1680 came. That year all the Indians in the region of Arizona and New Mexico organized a general uprising and they not only killed all the whites they could find but sacked and burned the missions. And that is the last ever heard of the one known as the Grand Quivera. No treasures were ever found in or near its ruins. There are ten curious maps of that time and each one locates the kingdom of Quivera in a different place. One of them brings it as far north as the Sacramento Valley in California.

Really Quivera is a will-o'-the-wisp, and from a roving band of Indians, has become a wandering treasure city, and a land of vague and mysterious proportions.

The Land of Gold

IF any of the boys and girls born in the United States were asked "Where is the land of gold?" they would answer "It is California," and if any of the children born in California were asked "What is El Dorado?" they would say "Why, that means the land of gold."

So it does and for two reasons.

Cortez named it California after the heroine of a romance of chivalry he had read when he was in Spain. The book said there was an island on the right hand of the Indies very near the terrestrial Paradise, peopled with black women, who were Amazons, and wore gold ornaments in great profusion. Down in his heart Cortez cherished the hope that he might find the northwest passage to India, not because he cared very much for science, but because he believed the most extravagant stories about the silks, spices, sweet-smelling gums and rare gems to be found there. His ill-gotten Mexican gold did him very little good, and was soon all expended, and he was anxious to find some other country to conquer. The very next year after the death of Montezuma, Cortez heard of the Land of Gold, and came over to a cove on the Pacific Coast of Mexico where he laid out a town and built some ships for the purpose of finding the new wonderland. All he ever discovered was the peninsula of Lower California, where the Indians already knew about the pearl fisheries. This was what he thought was an island, and what he named California.

One of his officers sailed around the island of St. Thomas, and on a Sunday morning he said he saw a merman swimming close to his ship.

"It came alongside the vessel," he declared, "and raised its head and looked at us two or three times. It was as full of antics as a monkey. Sometimes it would dive, and then raise up out of the water and wash its face with its hands. Finally a sea bird drove it away."

Of course he was mistaken, for what he really did see was either a walrus or a big seal as both animals abound in the Pacific Ocean.

It was more than three hundred years after Cabrillo sailed into the Gate of Palms at the entrance to the bay of San Diego, before gold was discovered in California. The country had been settled by Spanish Cavaliers and padres and there were missions for the teaching of the Indians. Mexico had rebelled against the King of Spain and the United States had made war on Mexico and won. Then a man by the name of Marshall found some free gold. It was in the sand at the bottom of a ditch he was digging to get water to run a sawmill he was building. He knew at once that the bright yellow pebbles he held in his hands were gold, so he hurried to the men at work on the watershed and said:

"I have found it!" and that is what the motto, Eureka! on the state shield of California really means.

"What is it you have found, Mr. Marshall?" asked the men.

"Gold!" he exclaimed, excitedly. The men threw down their tools and gathered about him to examine the new find.

"No, no; you are mistaken," they said, when they had turned the pebbles over, and held them to the light, and hammered them with a stone.

"I am certain that it is," he stoutly maintained, but they only laughed at him. He paid no attention to them but turned on the water the next night. Then he picked up all the yellow lumps he found in the sand, and putting them into a little bag hastened to the man for whom he was building the mill, and said:

"I have found gold at the sawmill, and want you to come and see for yourself."

His employer tested and weighed the shining mass carefully, and finally said:

"You are right. It is real gold. Go back to the mill, but say nothing until we get it finished. If you do the men will quit work and we shall have no one to take their places."

But the secret was too good to keep, and in a few days the whole country raised the same sordid cry of "gold, gold, gold," which had brought the Spaniards to the coast. In less than a year eighty thousand people came to California looking for gold. From an independent republic, California became a state and with its admission into the Union the search for El Dorado passed from Spanish into American hands. Both the padres and Cavaliers in California as elsewhere in the Americas enslaved the Indians in a system of peonage which thinned out their ranks, and led to many hostile outbreaks before they were finally subdued. The gold seekers had to do some of the fighting, but they did not rob and pillage the country, nor were they allowed to be unnecessarily cruel. One of our great writers has said of the Indian:

"The red man of America has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Like some of the dumb creatures he pines and dies in captivity. If today we see them with their energies broken we simply learn from that what a terrible thing is slavery. In their faltering steps and meek and melancholy aspect we read the sad characteristics of a conquered race."

His faith in the traditions of his forefathers, the belief that the Golden Hearted would come again to bring him all that his heart desired finally enslaved and ruined him.

If we pity the Indian we must also feel sorry for the miserable ending of all the Spanish leaders who searched for El Dorado. Columbus spent the last years of his life in prison; Balboa, who discovered the Pacific Ocean, was treacherously executed and lies in an unknown grave near Panama; Pizarro was assassinated and buried in Peru; Magellan was killed by the natives in the Philippine Islands; Cortez was accused of strangling his wife to death, and finally deprived of all honors and wealth; Guzman died in poverty and distress while Coronado was said to be insane after his return to Mexico. For the crime and violence done by Spain in these expeditions she has not only lost all the revenues, but no longer owns a foot of land in any part of the new world.

Let us be thankful that the wisdom and liberty of our own government has saved us from making such terrible mistakes, and doing such grievous wrongs in our attempts to find El Dorado. The brave men and women who crossed the plains long before we had a railroad were willing to work for the riches they wanted. They did not come with the idea of robbing anybody, and when they found the gold they were generous and kind to less fortunate neighbors and friends.

"In this land of sunshine and flowers," they said, "we find gold in the crops of the chickens we have for our Sunday dinners, and our children build doll-houses with the odd-shaped nuggets given to them by the big-hearted miners."

It is hard to imagine the stirring times that followed. Everybody had the gold fever, and in crossing the plains they heard the name El Dorado as soon as they came near where Coronado had been. Some of them made up a song about it, which was for many years very popular among the men in the mining camps. This is one verse of it:

We'll rock the cradle around Pike's PeakIn search of the gold dust that we seek,The Indians ask us why we're hereWe tell them we're born as free as the air,And oh!Boys ho!To the mountains we will goFor there is plenty of goldOut West we are toldIn the new El Dorado.

Many of the emigrants sickened and died on the way; others were killed by the hostile Indians, and all were subjected to a life of hardship and toil, because they were the builders of a new commonwealth. Once in California they found many trying situations, not the least of which was an occasional fight with the huge grizzly bears that roamed through the forests. Many times the men were obliged to organize a hunt for the purpose of ridding a district of a nest of grizzlies. Not only would the bears fight ferociously, but they did not hesitate to go into a corral and carry off calves, hogs and sheep under the very eyes of the owner.

"Never for a moment imagine that a grizzly bear will run from you," said the leader of a hunting party filling his powder horn and putting a box of caps into his pocket. "Take good aim at the center of his forehead. Otherwise one shot will not kill him, and remember that he cannot climb. If you get into close quarters, try to get up a tree as fast as you can."

"We know his trail and we are going to send our dogs in to start him out of his den."

"Unless your dogs know how to attack him it is very unsafe to let them go near. One blow from a grizzly's paw will kill any dog, and we cannot afford to lose any of yours," said the leader, doubtfully.

"My dogs know all about bear hunting. They will keep well behind him, and after we have crippled him, they will snap at his heels and worry him so he cannot chase the last man who shoots at him."

"Will a grizzly do that?" asked a man who had never been in a bear hunt before.

"Indeed he will. If you watch closely you can tell how many times he is hit for he will fall down, roll over and slap himself wherever the bullet strikes him."

"I would not advise you to waste any time trying to find out who fired the last shot, for the bear will never make a mistake about it. He knows, and is always after the last one."

"Separate into pairs," said the leader, when he had finished examining the bear tracks in the path they were following. "Take your stations about a hundred yards apart, and when you hear the grizzly coming, aim as I have already told you, and then look out for trouble."

"Do you think we are likely to find him soon?" asked the newcomer, nervously.

"He is in that thicket where the dogs are keeping up such a loud barking. You will hear him snapping and growling in a few minutes."

"The grass and underbrush are so high I am afraid I will not be able to see him," said the timid, inexperienced hunter.

"You can tell by the way the dogs bark when he is coming, and you can easily hear the click of his sharp claws before he gets too near for comfort," said the leader, with a smile. "Make sure that the trigger of your gun is properly set, and you will be all right."

He had stationed other men farther up the ravine, and in a few minutes the dogs yelped warningly, and the man at the upper station shouted:

"Look out! here he comes!"

"Bang!" went the gun, and then the dogs rushed by in a solid pack with a huge she bear at their heels.

"There are two of them," somebody said, and in a moment everything was in the wildest confusion.