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Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (Spanish pronunciation: [fɾanˈθisko ˈβaθkeθ ðe koɾoˈnaðo]; 1510 – 22 September 1554) was a Spanish conquistador and explorer who led a large expedition from what is now Mexico to present-day Kansas through parts of the southwestern United States between 1540 and 1542. Vázquez de Coronado had hoped to reach the Cities of Cíbola, often referred to now as the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. His expedition marked the first European sightings of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, among other landmarks. His name is often Anglicized as Vasquez de Coronado or just Coronado. Early life Vázquez de Coronado was born into a noble family in Salamanca, in 1510 as the second son of Juan Vázquez de Coronado and Isabel de Luján. Juan Vázquez held various positions in the administration of the recently captured Emirate of Granada under Íñigo López de Mendoza, its first Christian governor. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado went to New Spain (present-day Mexico) in 1535 at about age 25, in the entourage of its first Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, the son of his father's patron and Vázquez de Coronado's personal friend. In New Spain, he married twelve-year-old Beatriz de Estrada, called "the Saint" (la Santa), sister of Leonor de Estrada, ancestor of the de Alvarado family and daughter of Treasurer and Governor Alonso de Estrada y Hidalgo, Lord of Picón, and his wife Marina Flores Gutiérrez de la Caballería, from a converso Jewish family. Vázquez de Coronado inherited a large portion of a Mexican encomendero estate through Beatriz and had eight children by her. Expedition Preparation Vázquez de Coronado was the Governor of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia (New Galicia), a province of New Spain located northwest of Mexico and comprising the contemporary Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Nayarit. In 1539, he dispatched Friar Marcos de Niza and Estevanico (more properly known as Estevan), a survivor of the Narváez expedition, on an expedition north from Compostela toward present-day New Mexico. When de Niza returned, he told of a city of vast wealth, a golden city called Cíbola, whose Zuni residents were assumed to have murdered Estevan. Though he did not claim to have entered the city of Cíbola, he mentioned that it stood on a high hill and that it appeared wealthy and as large as Mexico City. Vázquez de Coronado assembled an expedition with two components. One component carried the bulk of the expedition's supplies, traveling via the Guadalupe River and Gulf of California under the leadership of Hernando de Alarcón. The other component traveled by land, along the trail on which Friar Marcos de Niza had followed Esteban. Vázquez de Coronado and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza invested large sums of their own money in the venture. Mendoza appointed Vázquez de Coronado the commander of the expedition, with the mission to find the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. This is the reason he pawned his wife's estates and was lent 70,000 pesos. In the autumn of 1539, Mendoza ordered Melchior Díaz, commander of the Spanish outpost at San Miguel de Culiacán, to investigate Friar de Niza's findings, and on November 17, 1539, Díaz departed for Cíbola with fifteen horsemen. At the ruins of Chichilticalli, he turned around because of "snows and fierce winds from across the wilderness". Díaz had encountered Vázquez de Coronado before he had departed San Miguel de Culiacán, and reported that initial investigations into Friar de Niza's report disproved the existence of the bountiful land he had described. Díaz's report was delivered to Viceroy Mendoza on March 20, 1540. Expedition Vázquez de Coronado set out from Compostela on February 23, 1540, at the head of a much larger expedition composed of about 400 European men-at-arms (mostly Spaniards), 1,300 to 2,000 Mexican Indian allies, four Franciscan friars (the most notable of whom were Juan de Padilla and the newly appointed provincial superior of the Franciscan order in the New World, Marcos de Niza), and several slaves, both natives and Africans. Many other family members and servants also joined the party. He followed the Sinaloan coast northward, keeping the Gulf of California on his left to the west until he reached the northernmost Spanish settlement in Mexico, San Miguel de Culiacán, about March 28, 1540, whereupon he rested his expedition before they began trekking the inland trail. Aside from his mission to verify Friar de Niza's report, Melchior Díaz had also taken notice of the forage and food situation along the trail, and reported that the land along the route would not be able to support a large concentrated body of soldiers and animals. Vázquez de Coronado, therefore, decided to divide his expedition into small groups and time their departures so that grazing lands and water holes along the trail could recover. At intervals along the trail, Vázquez de Coronado established camps and stationed garrisons of soldiers to keep the supply route open. For example, in September 1540, Melchior Díaz, along with "seventy or eighty of the weakest and least reliable men" in Vázquez de Coronado's army, remained at the town of San Jerónimo, in the valley of Corazones, or "Hearts". Once the scouting and planning was done, Vázquez de Coronado led the first group of soldiers up the trail. They were horsemen and foot soldiers who were able to travel quickly, while the main bulk of the expedition would set out later. After leaving Culiacán on April 22, 1540, Vázquez de Coronado followed the coast, "bearing off to the left", as Mota Padilla says, by an extremely rough way, to the Sinaloa River. The configuration of the country made it necessary to follow the river valley until he could find a passage across the mountains to the course of the Yaqui River. He traveled alongside this stream for some distance, then crossed to the Rio Sonora, which he followed nearly to its source before a pass (now known as Montezuma Pass) was discovered. On the southern side of the Huachuca Mountains he found a stream he called the Nexpa, which may have been either the Santa Cruz or the San Pedro in modern Arizona of modern maps, most likely the northward-flowing San Pedro River. The party followed this river valley until they reached the edge of the wilderness, where, as Friar Marcos had described it to them, they found Chichilticalli. Chichilticalli is in southern Arizona in the Sulphur Springs Valley, within the bend of the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains. This fits the chronicle of Laus Deo description, which reports that "at Chichilticalli the country changes its character again and the spiky vegetation ceases. The reason is that ... the mountain chain changes its direction at the same time that the coast does. Here they had to cross and pass the mountains in order to get into the level country." There Vázquez de Coronado met a crushing disappointment: Cíbola was nothing like the great golden city that de Niza had described. Instead, it wa.... Discover the J D Riley Isabel C Mendoza popular books. Find the top 100 most popular J D Riley Isabel C Mendoza books.