Quivira and Cíbola are two of the fantastic SevenCities of Gold existing only in a myth that originated around the year 1150 when the Moors conquered Mérida, Spain.
The myth of the sevencities of gold drew the Conquistadors northward through the Jornada del Muerto, the Llano Estacado (Staked Plains), in which they encountered a "Sea of Grass", and finally, the French colonists, who successfully resisted their further northward advance.
He claimed that they had seen a city very far away and greater than the great Tenochtitlan; in this city, the people used dishes of gold and silver, decorated their houses with turquoise, and had gigantic pearls, emeralds, and other beautiful gems.
In 1513, a hundred and seven years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Balboa scaled the continental backbone at Darien and unfurled the flag of Spain by the waters of the Pacific.
Thus, we see plainly how the Cibola myth arose and grew; and why most official Spanish reports of the conquest of the Aztecs were so distorted by false conceptions of the conquered people as in some particulars to be of light value as material for history.
The Cibolacities were found to be but mud pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico, with the aspect of which we are to-day familiar; while the mild-tempered inhabitants, destitute of wealth, peacefully practising their crude industries and tilling their irrigated field, were foemen hardly worthy of Castilian steel.
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