A week and some ago, I got an email from the UNM Library letting me know that the books I had checked out were due for return.

I thought, hey, I think this script deal is a long haul project- might as well see if any of them are available as used books out there on the interwebs.

I hopped online and looked first for a specific title called “Spanish Government in New Mexico” by Marc Simmons, a guy I recognize as a good readable historian on old New Mexico stuff. I ended up finding that book for pretty cheap- and three other on subjects I thought were good deals and good resources on colonial New Mexico, including another book by Simmons which was a commissioned project for the national bicentennial celebrations, and became perhaps his most popular work- “New Mexico: An Interpretive History”.

Simmons cites another historian by the name of John Kessell as an esteemed New Mexico expert, and by chance I ended up also getting a book by him called “Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico”.

The fourth book I had ordered in the bunch as also by Simmons: “The Last Conquistador: Juan de Onate and the Settling of the Far Southwest”.

At this point, I am trying to find anything that is readable- not too heavy scholastically- that provides some background information on early New Mexico. It’s all a big marsh of disconnected facts for me at the moment, but I know Simmons will help me to sort a fair amount of it into shape.

Each of the books sold for $7 or less, and each were in very good condition, as stated by the sellers. I received the first one, Simmons’ “New Mexico”, yesterday, and Kessell’s book showed up in the mail today.

I am excited to read them.

And I started on the Simmons book this morning, and the preface and the introduction to it alone- 12 pages- helped me to understand more about what this region was when the Spanish entered it.

Ultimately, in the beginning, as is commonly known, the Spaniards came north for gold.

Once Cortez sieged Tenochtitlan and made the Aztec’s opulent capital city Spain’s, any hearsay report about other possible gold villas in the New World got men stirring locally and back in Europe.

It was four survivors of an expedition that set out from Cuba to Florida, and that somehow ended up wrecking on the Texas coastline in the Gulf of Mexico, that made a survey into New Mexico by Spanish explorers requisite. The survivors somehow, through the help of local natives, found their way west and south back to the capital of New Spain, where they told about golden villages set on high vistas. These stories intrigued the Viceroy of the new Spanish territory, and he appointed a curious Franciscan to explore north with one of the shipwreck survivors.

They went north, indeed, assisted by natives and a fledgling crew. Their route went largely up the west side of Mexico and then crossed over into Mexico, and then into New Mexico, where they wandered into Zuni country. The friar’s accomplice, acting as a forward scout, went to a Zuni town and got himself killed. His colleagues who were with him and survived the incident returned to the friar and told him about the incident.

The friar decided to approach the Zuni town, but not enter it.

Seeing it also high on a hill in light that made it shimmer golden, he formulated his report from a distance. His report was embellished by the musing of some natives familiar with the region. “There are other cities like that one, but they go on forever and are full of people.”

The friar finished his expedition there and turned around and returned to Mexico City, where he gave the Viceroy his findings.

So began the belief among the Spaniards in the New World’s northern frontier cities of gold.