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Coronado And Aesop Fable And Violence On The Sixteenth-Century Plains, Daryl W. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an entrada from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where, among other activities, they strangled their principal Indian guide, a man they called El Turco. In the pages that follow, I focus on the events leading up to and including the execution of this Indian guide. Although Coronado, his chroniclers, and modern historians have …