Battle of Hawikuh

The Battle of Hawikuh marks the expedition’s first major encounter with a settled community since Compostela: a brief, violent Spanish assault on a Zuni city whose material spoils proved meager. Its immediate outcome was military defeat and flight, but Hawikuh also became a staging point for reconnaissance—and, for Bando, the route toward a place he recognized from another life.

Causes and approach

Weeks of northward travel had carried the expedition through river valleys and mountain passes. Juan and Bando rode among the scouts, days ahead of the main force, searching for landmarks and watching the country from difficult ridgelines. Their work was part of a larger search for settlements and whatever value the expedition hoped to find there.

The encounter began when Captain Hernando de Alvarado reported a city beyond the horizon, describing it as a city built on top of a city. It had neither temples nor battlements, and it was the first substantial settlement the expedition had found since Compostela. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado ordered the force to advance the next morning. That night, anticipation circulated through the ranks; speculation about gold and jewels accompanied the ordinary sounds of men working metal.

The assault on the city

By mid-morning, the Spaniards could see Hawikuh: a multistoried settlement of mud walls, linked by crude ladders. The approaching force judged it to offer little resistance and little gold. Yet its inhabitants were already moving urgently within the compound. Two men came from a ground-floor room and laid a narrow circle of ground corn flour around the city, an improvised defensive boundary that the Spaniards treated as its only fortification.

Coronado dismounted at the edge of the flour line with four officers. Together with priests, they crossed it and approached the earthen walls. A group of five Zuni men met them partway. The two parties gestured and shouted, but the encounter turned suddenly violent when a defender on the wall threw an egg-sized stone. It struck Coronado’s white-plumed helmet and knocked him down. His officers pulled their dazed commander back across the boundary; the Spaniards then charged the walls.

Zuni defenders shot arrows at the horses and threw stones into the main body of the Spanish force. The attackers answered with crossbows and muskets. The fighting lasted less than ten minutes. The surviving defenders, along with women and children, fled toward the surrounding hills. The city fell, but its capture did not produce the riches the expedition had anticipated.

Spoils and the route beyond Hawikuh

Inside the settlement, the victors found limited grain stores, two small emeralds, and pieces of garnet and agate. The modest haul stands in sharp contrast to the previous night’s talk of gold and jewels. Juan sat down with his notebook and sketched the fallen city, attending to its aftermath as a recordable scene. Bando, meanwhile, rode around the corn-flour perimeter and scanned the horizon.

Bando then hurried back to Juan and urged him to follow. Their ride ended at a small lake edged with a white ring of salt. Dark footprints marked the crust along the bank. Bando plunged into the water, laughing and shouting as he recognized the place: he had come there with his father to gather salt, and said that everyone came there for salt. He remembered having been there before and insisted that they were close. Asked which way to go, he pointed toward the northwestern mountains beyond Hawikuh.

Juan understood the force of the recognition. The narrator frames it as the moment when remembered experience vindicates what might otherwise appear madness: a person steps back in time by recognizing who he has been. Juan reckoned that only fourteen people had experienced such a moment before; Bando made fifteen. In this aftermath, the expedition’s search for valuable territory gives way to a more intimate discovery: the landscape is not new to Bando, even though his present life has brought him there as a scout in a Spanish army.

Consequences and significance

Coronado established headquarters in the vacated city and planned reconnaissance into the neighboring country. Two traveled routes led out of Hawikuh, one east and one northwest—the latter the way Bando recognized as home. Juan and Bando volunteered for the northwestern party and were ordered to leave four days before Captain Tovar and the main body of that group. The battle thus places them at the point from which the remembered journey can continue.

As they prepared to depart, Juan considered the possibility that he would not see Coronado again. If he found gold, he believed he would have to return south alone or with Bando, not with the main force; if he wanted to keep the discovery for himself, he would have to return alone. Bando, for his part, said long goodbyes to friends among the ranks. These plans leave the battle’s consequences unresolved: Hawikuh has been taken, reconnaissance is expanding, and Juan and Bando are setting out along separate-minded paths whose destination may also divide them from the expedition. The assault’s importance therefore lies not in its brief duration or scant spoils alone, but in the altered geography it creates—an occupied city becomes both a military base and the threshold to Bando’s remembered past.