The Lost cities of Gold

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, governor of New Spain in 1541 decided to explore in a hunt for Cibola, the 7 cities of gold.  He took 1100 men, 1000 horses, herds of cattle, sheep and hogs, and set off north.  Raping and plundering across Arizona and New Mexico, they found nothing, but captured a slave, nicknamed Turk. Turk knew nothing of Cibola but he knew a city of gold, Quivira.  Everyone lived wonderfully and drank from gold cups.  Coronado headed east across the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma then north until they found what Turk was telling them about.  It was a system of villages of the Wichita Indians (Spanish called them Rayados) from Great Bend to Arkansas City.  Indeed their pottery was beautiful, people were living well, and they grew golden corn.  Furious, Coronado ordered Turk’s death and demanded the people there use a language they could not comprehend (Spanish) to swear allegiance to a leader they could not conceive (King of Spain). After 2 years Coronado had this to write, “What I am sure of is that there is not any gold.”

            Juan de Padilla, a friar who had been on the expedition, returned with 2 Indian converts and a Portugese soldier, Andres de Campo.  That marked the first Christian mission effort of a people north of Mexico. Soon the Kaws invaded their ill-fated mission and killed Padilla, and enslaved the others.  Those 3 eventually escaped, but it took them 5 years to travel to the Gulf of Mexico.  The reason was that to do penance, they carried a large wooden cross the entire route.  60 years later, Juan de Onate became governor of Northern New Spain and returned to Quivira in hopes of uncovering hidden riches.  His soldiers battled the Wichitas there in 1601—still no gold.  Then a few years ago, a kid from Arkansas City found a cannonball in the Walnut Valley bottoms east of the city. It came to the attention of Donald Blakeslee of WSU who studied all manner of artifacts found when KDOT built the 77 highway bypass across the bottoms.  Coronado and Onate’s old reports had just been re-translated and were more illuminating.  The Arkansas City site, Etzanoa, was a dead ringer for the location of Quivira (had been disputed for years), a settlement of 20,000 people. There are 4 miles of Indian settlements along the bottoms, more downriver, and then more “cities” all the way up the Arkansas to Great Bend. 

            Prior to horse culture, the Great Plains were almost uninhabited.  Wichitas were ancient plains people who learned 3-Sisters agriculture—corn, beans, and pumpkins grown together.  No potatoes. Those were wild plants.  Topeka is the Kanza word for “a good place to dig potatoes”.  The Wichitas also cultivated tobacco, pecans and hunted bison.  Evidently, their farming kept them fed when buffalo hunting was poor.  The villages were totally unguarded as there were few enemies across miles of empty prairie.  Kaws and Osages were an exception.  Wichita language is Caddoan, a common root language of many Great Plains dwellers including the Pawnee of northern Kansas and Nebraska.  Rayados means “striped” in Spanish.  Wichitas tattooed their faces in stripes and often around the eyes.  Thus they named themselves Kitikiti’sh meaning “racoon-eyed”. Some spoke a dialect called Kee-chi which is how the suburb of the city of Wichita, Kechi, is pronounced (ending in long “I”).  They traded widely, were more advanced in corn agriculture, and lived in permanent houses of grass thatch bound together by ribs that glowed golden in the sun.  Turk, it turned out, had actually told the truth.

            With numbers in the tens of thousands, they much outnumbered the semi-nomadic groups like Comanches, Kaws, Osages and Apaches but were often on the losing end of their raids. With much diminished numbers from disease and harassment, they retreated south in the 1700s along the Arkansas River into Kay county, OK and to Wichita Falls, TX. When Spain took over the Louisiana Purchase area, 1763, they targeted and destroyed Wichita settlements to destroy Indian trade and subjugate the plains people. By 1868, the population was recorded as being just 572. By the time of the census of 1937, there were only 100 Wichita officially left—the tribe that almost disappeared. After 1890 many joined the Ghost Religion, a mix of Christianity and their traditional beliefs in spiritual experience.  Today, about 2000 descendants farm and ranch on allotted land in Delaware Country, OK and just about everyone you meet seems to be a Methodist. A fellow Republican from Jay, OK, told this author, “When we have our church’s Thanksgiving it’s a real thanks to God that a remnant of us survived.” Meanwhile, Etzanoa is rapidly becoming one of the most important archeological digs in N. America, as of 2020, undiscovered by tourists and the media.