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Four Corners and No Walls
By Ric Polansky
Dec 13, 2006, 06:48

FOUR CORNERS and NO WALLS!

                                      Ric Polansky ©

It’s the true Wild west. The one you’ve always read about in your youth. The southwest of America that borders Mexico. It is called the four corners simply because it’s the junction point of four different states: Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Sounds quaint—but it ain’t if you consider that the four states together are about the size of main land Europe.

 It is the wide open west replete with Hopi Indians, the painted desert, fearless Apache’s, docile wind talker Navajo, and almost all the tribes you’ve ever read about, because it is here that many have been condemned to live on their reservations. If you add the national parks and forests and air force bases then 75% of the borderland areas are not in the hands of private persons but state owned. That makes it one of the largest protected neighborhoods in the lower states with the exception of Alaska that has parks larger than England. Talking big, well, I’m trying to tell you …… it is.

Of course with so many injuns you must have cowboys and they are there too, the famed ones already six feet under like Billy the Kid, or Buffalo Bill.  Naturally here is the renowned Tombstone, down Arizonaway, famed for it’s cemetery’s epitaphs, you remember them: “here lies Lester Moore, four shots from a 44, no less no more”.

Wide open spaces chuck full of natural monuments, the kind you see in the slick car commercials on the box: platinum blondes motoring lickity split down a lonely desert hi-way bordered by tall wind carved figurines; pedal to the metal and let it ride. The region has it all mountains, lakes and you’ve probably heard of the Grand Canyon too. It is all so grand, almost whimsical, yet I am here for a serious purpose.

My journey surrounds a fable; actually a lie. The grandest fib ever bragged about by a priest since the resurrection. A tall tale concerning seven cities of gold that one Fray Marcos Nunez called Cibola.

Cortez got plenty of ORO from the Aztecs, and his distant cousin Pizarro boatloads of the lucre from the Incas. So if you were poor and wanted to get rich quick you most certainly would have jumped on the bank wagon and legged it north to fill your pockets. After two fabulous successes Cibola was a dead certain risk. After all, the priest had seen it with his own eyes! He knew, he had been with Pizarro in Peru.

So dreams and imagination and lose talk get modified and exaggerated, but it was the solemn word of the priest that caused it all.

The conquering adventurer sent to bring these realms under the order of the Spanish crown was one Francisco Vazquez de Coronado. He is known by almost all ardent readers and historians by the name of the village he derived from—Coronado.

The role call at muster in the Northern Mexican town of Compostela listed some 225 mounted men and 62 foot and 559 horses. Not mentioned were the wives, children of some of the men, several hundred Indians, servants, hostlers and herdsman all of which grew as the march progressed to “more than a thousand horses and mules for the baggage, arms, provisions, munitions and other things necessary for the journey…although it is believed that Casanedas’s number of 5000 is a probably exaggeration”. The equipment of  Coronado’s army was almost medieval.

Who wouldn’t jump at the chance of such an expedition? Back home in Spain the future was bleak, but sailing to the West Indies was the chance to earn a fortune overnight, to rise from rank poor man to a man of riches and rank. Mexico City was delighted to rid herself of the “trouble makers” as they had been “injuring citizens there”.

So they journeyed, over old trade trails they advanced at about 14 miles per day, herding pigs along with them was slow. The good Fray preached about how the devil made all good things slow and ponderous, as if entering the kingdom of heaven”.

Returning scouts didn’t have much to offer so Coronado decided to send an advance guard. The four priests jumped at the chance to carry the cross in the vanguard, leaving the trailing army without divine guidance. Strict orders had been given to treat the encountered natives as if Spaniards. As Coronado meanders forward he meets other travelers that confirm that the sea (sea of Cortez in the Baja de California is a 15 days journey, not the 15 miles as promised by Fray Marcos in his writings).

The good roads promised did not exist but rather a “gran despopulado” barren desert with little food and plenty of hardship. All armies travel on their stomachs so the grumbling started early.

Herbert E Bolton, renown professor from New Mexico summarized it best when the Spaniards caught a glimpse of the first of the seven heralded villages: “Perhaps in keeping with Spanish custom they shouted  albricias! Albricias!  Reward me! Reward me!…Then what a shock! For, instead of a great city sparkling with jewels, the weary treasure-seekers saw before them on an eminence a little pueblo “all crumpled together”! And when the soldiers beheld it, and realized what it was, “such were the curses which some of them hurled at Fray Marcos, wrote Castenada, “that I pray God to protect him from them.”

Somehow the bad friar made it back alive. Historically America was being discovered, transversed and mapped (at this exact same time another Pizarro Capitan was paddling up the Mississippi River). For topographers the mission was a complete success, the grand Canyon discovered and noted, such famed places as Pecos, Texas; Taos, New Mexico; and in a dashing trip north (following a lie told by an Indian that looked like a Turk) a mini army roamed into deepest Kansas (Quivira) looking for the elusive yellow metal, but none was to be found, none whatsoever.

The trip starts in a cowboy town called Durango, then on to some cliff dwellings and then a visit to Zuni (the place the good friar Nunez called Cibola). I hope to find an arrowhead or two, as it is in this four state area that the skeleton of a giant mastodon was found with elongated arrowheads sunk deep into the bones. Dated at 12,000 BC it wasn’t possible as man supposedly didn’t cross the Bering Straights until 10,000 BC. Something is wrong with history. What with lying priests and confused historians—I hope you will join me on this enigmatical journey--; it should be fun.