Quivira
Quivira was a province of the ancestral Wichita people,[1] located near the Great Bend of the Arkansas River in central Kansas,[1] The exact site may be near present-day Lyons extending northeast to Salina.
[1] The remains of several Indigenous communities have been found near Lyons along Cow Creek and the Little Arkansas River along with articles of Spanish manufacture dating from Coronado's time.
The nation of Harahey that Coronado found on the borders of Quivira may have been located on the Smoky Hill River near the present city of Salina, Kansas.
[citation needed] The next confirmed European visitor to the Great Bend region after Coronado was Étienne de Bourgmont.
[8] In 1540, Spaniard Francisco Vásquez de Coronado commanded a large expedition north from Mexico to search for wealth and the Seven Cities of Cibola.
As Coronado arrived at the Rio Grande, he was disappointed by the lack of wealth among the Pueblo people, but he heard from a Plains Indian informant dubbed “The Turk” of a wealthy nation named Quivira far to the east, whose chieftain supposedly drank from golden cups hanging from the trees.
It appears the Turk was luring the Spaniards away from New Mexico with tales of wealth in Quivira, hoping perhaps that they would get lost in the vastness of the Great Plains.
With 30 mounted Spaniards, Indigenous persons, priests, the Turk and Teya captives forced into service, Coronado changed course northward in search of Quivira.
After a march of more than 30 days, he found a large river, probably the Arkansas, and soon met several Indigenous bison hunters, who guided him to Quivira.
The friar and most of his companions were soon killed by people from Quivira, apparently because he wished to leave their country to visit their enemies, the Guas.
[13] In 1594, Francisco Leyba (Leyva) Bonilla and Antonio de Humana (Umana) made another attempt to find the Quivira of Coronado, though it was denounced as unauthorized by Spanish officials.
In his 1634 expedition, Captain Alonzo Vaca found Quivira 300 leagues east of New Mexico (this suggests more than 1,200 km (750 mi)).
Another reputed expedition was undertaken in 1662 by Diego Dionisio de Penalosa, who allegedly found a large settlement he called a city, but a modern re-examination of his account concluded that the story is fanciful.
[15] On early 16th- and 17th-century maps of North America, a large region including what is now Kansas, Oklahoma, southeastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle was named "Quivira".
From the days of Coronado the name of "Quivira" had been associated with the idea of a great unknown city, of wealth and splendor, situated somewhere on the Eastern Plains; and it is not at all unlikely that when some party from the Rio Grande Valley, in search of game or gold, crossed the mountains and the wilderness lying to the east, and was suddenly amazed by the apparition of a dead city, silent and tenantless, but bearing the evidences of large population, of vast resources, of architectural knowledge, mechanical skill, and wonderful energy, they should have associated with it the stories heard from childhood of the mythical center of riches and power, and called the new-found wonder the Gran Quivira.
