Quivira, the city Coronado crossed Kansas for

A real expedition to a real place, chasing gold that never existed

Quivira was a real province of the ancestral Wichita people near the Great Bend of the Arkansas River in central Kansas, probably around present-day Lyons and stretching northeast toward Salina. For the Spanish it was also a mirage of gold.

In 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led a large expedition north from Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola and found farming towns of the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos, but no wealth. On the Rio Grande a Plains captive the Spaniards called the Turk told of a rich nation far to the east, Quivira, ruled by a bearded king named Tartarrax who wore a golden bracemate and worshipped a cross of gold and an image of the Queen of Heaven. In 1541 Coronado took more than a thousand Spanish and Indigenous people onto the Great Plains, with the Turk as guide. Out on the Llano Estacado, Teya people warned that the Turk was leading him the wrong way. Coronado sent most of his army back to New Mexico and, with 30 horsemen, priests and captive guides, turned north. After more than 30 days he reached a great river, probably the Arkansas, and bison hunters led him in.

He found the country well settled, the soil fat and black and well watered, with plums, nuts, grapes and mulberries, the best land he had seen since Mexico. In 25 days he travelled about 25 leagues across Quivira and found only straw-thatched villages of up to 200 houses, fields of corn, beans and squash, and tall, healthy people, many men over six feet. Tartarrax existed, but he was naked and wore a copper necklace. Apart from one small piece, there was no gold. The Turk confessed that he had told his stories to lure the Spaniards away from the pueblos, perhaps hoping they would be lost on the plains, and Coronado had him garroted before turning back.

The legend outlived the trip. Friar Juan de Padilla went back to Quivira as a missionary and was killed there. The unauthorized expedition of Leyva de Bonilla and Gutiérrez de Humaña in 1594 or 1595 and Juan de Oñate's in 1601 went looking again, with the same result. Historians long argued over where Quivira lay; some placed it in the Texas or Oklahoma panhandles. But the remains of several communities near Lyons, on Cow Creek and the Little Arkansas River, have turned up alongside Spanish articles from Coronado's time, and the Wichita city of Etzanoa, which flourished between 1450 and 1700, is likely part of it. Coronado's Quivira probably held at least 10,000 people.