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.
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