[1] Dubbed "the Great Settlement" by Spanish explorers who visited the site, Etzanoa may have housed 20,000 Wichita people.

[3] When Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition visited central Kansas in 1541, he dubbed the Wichita settlements "Quivira".

In April 2017, the location of Etzanoa was finally discovered when a local teen found a cannonball linked to a battle near present-day Arkansas City that took place in the year 1601.

[5] Donald Blakeslee, an archaeologist at the Wichita State University, has led recent research on Etzanoa.

In 2013, historians at the University of California, Berkeley, retranslated the early Spanish accounts of expeditions to Kansas.

Perhaps they moved a few miles south to Kay County, Oklahoma, where two 18th-century archaeological sites, Deer Creek and Bryson Paddock, of the Wichita are known.

[7] They appear to have been much reduced in numbers by then, possibly as a result of European diseases, warfare, and the slave trade in Indians.

[14] The fact that the Rayados abandoned their settlement on the arrival of Oñate's expedition may be an indication that they had had previous, unfavorable dealings with the Spanish.

Leaving New Mexico and traveling east and north for more than a month, Jusepe said that they found a "very large settlement."

The Indians were numerous, but "received the Spanish peacefully and furnished them with abundant supplies of food" The expedition encountered a "multitude" of bison in the region.

In 1601, Juan de Oñate, founder and governor of New Mexico, led an expedition that followed in the footsteps of Leyba and Umana.

It contained "more than twelve hundred houses, all established along the bank of another good-sized river which flowed into the large one [probably the Arkansas]."

The homesteads were dispersed; the houses round, thatched with grass and surrounded by large granaries to store the corn, beans, and squash that they grew in their fields.

"[17] Limited private tours of the site can be arranged through the Cherokee Strip Land Run Museum in Arkansas City.