1610, Santa Fe | Strait of Anián

Preface: Welcome to this quick recap of the history of immigration of US. It's a good time reflect on that now, isn't it?

The story of New Mexico's founding starts with a rumor, and not even a Spanish one. In 1536, a survivor named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca walked into Mexico City after years lost wandering the continent following a failed Florida expedition. He brought with him stories of great cities to the north, places called the Seven Cities of Cíbola, filled with houses of impossible size and wealth. The story was secondhand from the start, gathered from years of desperate wandering, not from anything Cabeza de Vaca had actually seen with his own eyes. Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, intrigued, sent a Franciscan friar named Marcos de Niza north in 1539 to check. Niza came back and confirmed the story. On the strength of that confirmation, Mendoza authorized a full military expedition.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led that expedition, and the gap between promise and reality showed itself almost immediately. When his forces reached the Zuni village that Niza had described as one of the golden cities, Coronado found something closer to an ordinary pueblo — and wrote back to Mendoza, furious, that the friar "has not told the truth in a single thing he said." There was no gold. There was a fortified Indigenous town of considerable sophistication, which the Spanish then attacked anyway. The village was stormed and taken in July 1540. Coronado's men went to a second pueblo, called Tiguex, and forced the residents of the village of Alcanfor out of their own homes and used the buildings as Spanish winter quarters. When the people of the region eventually resisted that occupation, the response was brutal: a months-long campaign that, by some accounts, ended with dozens of surrendered people burned alive and hundreds more killed while fleeing.

Coronado spent the following year chasing a second myth, this time a province called Quivira, supposedly rich in gold, somewhere out on the plains to the east. He marched as far as the area that is now Wichita, Kansas, on the word of a captive guide, and found nothing but grassland. He had the guide executed for misleading him, then turned back. By October 1542 his expedition limped into Mexico City, in the words of one account, "exhausted," "tattered," and "defeated." He had spent two years, lost men, burned a village, and found no gold at all. For more than half a century afterward, Spain simply walked away from what is now New Mexico. Some accounts put the gap at forty years, others at fifty-six — the records aren't fully consistent, but the shape of the story is the same either way: Coronado's failure was so total that nobody in Mexico City wanted to try again for an entire generation.

1598, San Juan de los Caballeros

When Spain finally returned, the man leading the expedition followed Coronado's playbook almost exactly, just with a different outcome. Juan de Oñate came from a family that already owned one of New Spain's largest silver mines, and his colonization contract required him to pay for the expedition largely out of his own pocket, in exchange for the right to govern whatever he found and extract whatever wealth it produced. By 1598, New Spain was no longer a thing being built. It had existed as a functioning government for sixty-three years, run from Mexico City since 1535, and already stretched from the Caribbean to the Philippines — Cuba, Hispaniola, Central America, Florida, an ocean crossing's worth of trade routes binding it all together. New Mexico was not yet part of any of this. Oñate's expedition was the act that finally tacked it on — the newest, smallest, and most remote edge of an empire that had already been running smoothly without it for over six decades.

Oñate crossed into the territory in the spring of 1598 with roughly six hundred people: soldiers, families, Franciscan friars, and thousands of head of livestock. On April 30, he stopped beneath a grove of trees and performed a formal ceremony declaring the entire territory the possession of the king of Spain — the same kind of legal ritual Coronado's men had once read aloud to the Zuni before attacking them. Then, in July, Oñate's group reached the village of Ohkay Owingeh, at the meeting point of the Rio Grande and the Rio Chama. He renamed it San Juan de los Caballeros and declared it the first Spanish capital of New Mexico — not a town built by Spanish hands, but an existing Pueblo village simply renamed and occupied.

The Franciscans who traveled north with Oñate were heirs to an order built on the opposite of conquest. Francis of Assisi, an Italian who gave up his family's wealth in the early 1200s, founded a movement on total poverty — no money, no property, support drawn only from charity and labor. By the time Spain reached the Americas three centuries later, that same order had become the crown's primary instrument for converting Indigenous populations, traveling alongside conquistadors rather than away from them. The men who begged for bread in Assisi had become, by 1598, the religious arm of an empire. In New Mexico, "the Franciscans" meant the priests running the church side of the colony — baptizing and preaching to the Pueblo — operating in a separate chain of command from the governor and soldiers who ran everything secular.

A few months later, the colonists moved again, this time across the river to the village of Yunque. Oñate renamed it San Gabriel and either forced or persuaded the people already living there to relocate into the village he had just left. The Spanish then moved into roughly four hundred existing Pueblo apartments and called the result the new capital of the province. San Gabriel held that role for the next eleven years, complete with a plaza, government offices, and a working town council — but none of it had been built from the ground up. The wealth Oñate's contract promised him never appeared, just as it never had for Coronado.

1610, Santa Fe

Santa Fe is usually introduced as the oldest state capital in the United States, founded in 1610. Pedro de Peralta, appointed governor of New Mexico by the viceroy in Mexico City in March 1609, organized his expedition north over the following months. The viceroy who appointed Peralta was Luis de Velasco the Younger (1538–1617), born in Carrión de los Condes, Spain, who first went to Mexico in 1560 to join his father — the second viceroy of New Spain. He had already served one term as viceroy of Mexico from 1589 to 1595, then became viceroy of Peru from 1595 to 1604, retired to his Mexico estates in 1604, and was re-appointed viceroy of Mexico again in 1607.

By 1608, Juan de Oñate's eleven-year governorship had collapsed under its own promises. Juan de Oñate y Salazar (1550–1626) was born around 1550 in Zacatecas, son of Cristóbal de Oñate, a prominent silver mine owner and encomendero in his own right, he came from the family that ran one of New Spain's major silver operations and was extending the same encomienda system north. Oñate's wife had famous ancestors on both sides of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Her grandfather was Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror. Her great-grandfather was Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor Cortés defeated. Through his marriage, Oñate was personally connected to both the conqueror and the conquered — the two opposing sides of that whole story were sitting in his own family tree. Juan de Oñate's request to conquer and govern New Mexico was approved in 1595, but his expedition of settlers didn't actually depart until January 1598. He set out with 600 to 700 people, crossed the Rio Grande near El Paso in May 1598, and established his headquarters at San Juan Pueblo.

Oñate had been granted New Mexico as a personal commercial venture, financed on the expectation of mines to rival the silver of Zacatecas, and a passage to the wealth of Asia besides. Neither materialized. Broke, and facing a faction within his own colony pushing for his arrest, Oñate was already finished by the time Peralta's appointment came through. That same faction — the settlers who wanted San Gabriel abandoned — had petitioned the viceroy in 1608 for a new villa. King Philip III's reply, sent north in early 1609, simply acknowledged that "the Spaniards and the friars residing there were planning to establish a villa." Peralta did not conceive of Santa Fe. He was sent to execute a decision New Mexico's own colonists and clergy had already made, and to lend it the appearance of crown authority.

Strait of Anián

When Peralta took over New Mexico from Juan de Oñate, he brought north with him twelve soldiers, eight Franciscan friars, and instructions to search for the Strait of Anián, the imagined inland water passage to the Pacific that Spanish officials, English explorers, and Dutch merchants were all chasing at the same historical moment. The strait probably took its name from "Ania," a Chinese province mentioned in a 1559 edition of Marco Polo's book, and it first appeared on a map by the Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi around 1562.

The whole thing starts as a mapmaker's guess, built on a centuries-old travel account, with no actual exploration behind it at all. Its source is genuinely unknown — historians can't pin down why cartographers settled on this particular idea beyond the Marco Polo connection. It then spread fast across the most prestigious mapmakers of the era — Abraham Ortelius in 1564, Bolognini Zaltieri in 1567, Gerardus Mercator in 1567 — meaning within five years of its invention, it was already treated as established geography by Europe's leading cartographers, none of whom had any more evidence for it than the first guy.

European sailors had dreamed of a shorter sea route to the silk, porcelain, jewels, and spices of Asia, and a passage through North America would let any single nation skip the entire trip around Africa or South America. The myth intensified the Anglo-Spanish rivalry directly: Spain's claimed dominance over Pacific approaches, formalized in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, meant a northern passage was England's best hope of bypassing Spanish control of Asian trade entirely. English merchants and politicians like Humphrey Gilbert saw the search as a deliberate strategy to break Spain's hold on the New World's riches, and Queen Elizabeth I eventually backed the search as a matter of state policy. In 1542–43, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed the Pacific coast — the sole significant European contact with California for the entire 16th century — and his second-in-command Bartolomé Ferrelo continued north afterward, all of it driven by the same hunt.

When Peralta's 1609 orders told him to search for the Strait of Anián, he was chasing a myth that was already half a century old. It would outlive him by more than a hundred years and consume the careers of Spanish, English, French, and Russian explorers alike before anyone admitted it was never there. The real strait — what we now call the Bering Strait — wasn't found until 1728. Belief lingered even after that. It took until 1771 for Samuel Hearne to walk overland and prove, once and for all, that no such passage existed through mainland Canada. The strait still shows up in fiction as late as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in 1726, over a century after Peralta set out.

Peralta never found it, of course. No one ever would. What he found instead, a few months into his journey north, was a stretch of land at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with good water and a defensible position — not a passage to anywhere, just a place to stop. He named it Santa Fe. The colony that would outlast Oñate, outlast the myth of Cíbola, and eventually outlast Spain's claim to the territory altogether did not begin as a destination. It began as a layover on the way to somewhere that was never going to exist. 🇺🇸

Timeline for "Chasing A Far-fetched Dream"

• 1536 — Cabeza de Vaca's secondhand rumor of the Seven Cities of Cíbola reaches Mexico City

• 1539 — Friar Marcos de Niza sent to verify, falsely confirms it

• 1540 — Coronado's expedition takes the Zuni village, then Tiguex, by force

• 1541 — Coronado's failed Quivira expedition to Kansas

• 1542 — Coronado returns to Mexico City defeated

• 1542–1598 — the long gap, 40–56 years

• 1598 — Oñate's expedition, founding of San Juan de los Caballeros, then San Gabriel

• 1609 — Peralta appointed governor by Viceroy Velasco

• 1610 — Peralta's instructions include the Strait of Anián search