The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542, by George Parker Winship, is the first collection and translation of the essential documents of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s search for gold and glory in the Spanish Southwest and Kansas. This collection, first published as part of the Fourteenth Annual Report of the United States Bureau of Ethnology in 1896, remained as the basic documentary work in English on Coronado until the appearance of George P. Hammond’s and Agapito Rey’s Narratives of the Coronado Expedition 1540-1542 in 1940.
Winship was a relatively young man—twenty-five years old—when his Coronado Expedition appeared. He began his work on Coronado, at the suggestion of Professor Edward Channing, as an undergraduate at Harvard College. Encouraged by the assistance and advice of such renowned scholars as Justin Winsor, Henry W. Haynes, J. Walter Fewkes, F. W. Hodge, Adolph F. Bandelier, and Joaquín García Icazbalceta, he completed his study shortly after receiving the M.A. degree in 1894. Both Winship’s scholarship and the assistance given by these scholars are evident in the printed edition, especially when it is compared with the M.A. or Ph.D. theses of the period.
Judged by today’s scholarly standards, Winship’s Coronado Expedition, like every pioneer work, contained some weaknesses. Its annotation, particularly in regard to geographical locations and cross-references, was limited because of the lack of studies on the Spanish Southwest and because of subsequent reliance on Matías de la Mota Padilla and Henri Ternaux-Compans. The translation, like many original contributions, lacked grace and fluidity.
Despite these drawbacks, the Coronado Expedition merited reprinting for various reasons. As Professor Donald Cutter pointed out in his succinct introduction to this Rio Grande Classic reprint, The Coronado Expedition was published because the “work was the initial endeavor in English in its field; because of its continuing usefulness to students of Southwestern history; because of the very nature of the important documents translated. . ..” To this reviewer, the most cogent reason for reprinting this work is that it alone contains “Castañeda’s Narrative,” by far the most important Coronado material, in both English and in the original Spanish.
Although the Rio Grande Press is to be complimented for the fine reproduction of Winship’s classic, it is this reviewer’s opinion that the historical value of the volume could be augmented—as it was by the addition of Professor Cutter’s introduction—by the inclusion of a map delineating Coronado’s travels and stopping places.
