Francisco Vásquez de Coronado

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was the governor of a Spanish frontier province in Mexico when rumors of Cíbola, a legendary cluster of cities paved in gold, drew him north in 1540 at the head of an expedition of several hundred Spanish soldiers and well over a thousand Native allies and servants. What Coronado's party actually found when it reached the Zuni pueblos of present-day New Mexico was a cluster of adobe towns with no gold at all, defended fiercely enough that the Spanish had to storm one by force in their first encounter.

Undeterred, Coronado spent two more years pushing his search across the Southwest, sending detachments that became the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon and marching the main column as far as present-day Kansas chasing a second rumored golden city called Quivira, which also turned out not to exist. The expedition left a trail of violence against Pueblo and Plains nations along the way, including the brutal suppression of a Tiguex pueblo revolt provoked by Spanish demands for food, shelter, and tribute during the winter of 1540 to 1541.

Coronado returned to Mexico in 1542 having found no gold, and a subsequent royal investigation into his conduct toward the Native peoples he had encountered damaged his reputation for the rest of his life; he died in Mexico City in 1554, his name remembered less for any city he founded than for the two geographic landmarks his men stumbled onto while looking for something that never existed.