Coronado’s despairing report in the 1540s that no gold and no fabulous cities of wealth existed to the north of New Spain led to the first realistic image the Spanish had of the Greater Southwest. Coronado and subsequent Spanish travelers to what would later become New Mexico described a land of village-dwelling agricultural Indians. These villages were surrounded by nomadic hunting and raiding Indians whose domain covered a vast area from present-day Texas to Arizona. By all Spanish accounts, it was a harsh, arid land which provided only limited means of subsistence for those living there.

Such reports discouraged the Spanish authorities from formally occupying any lands north of the present-day United States–Mexico border until 1598, when Juan de Ofiate received a royal patent to settle New Mexico. Nevertheless, scores of Spanish prospectors periodically penetrated the region, hoping to find the Eldorado that Cortez had chanced upon in central Mexico and Pizarro had discovered in Peru. This dream was kept alive by the very real discovery of rich silver deposits in Zacatecas far to the north of Mexico City in 1546.

Accompanying and often preceding this mining frontier were Catholic missionaries who engaged in the ambitious task of converting and “civilizing” Native Americans. Missionaries not only sought to change native beliefs, but also gathered Indians into villages around the missions where they were urged to live, to some degree, as Spaniards. Other settlers saw New Spain’s northern frontier as the site of future farms and ranches on which local Indians would serve as laborers. Likewise, the dream of mineral wealth which first brought Spanish to the north was based on the assumption that Indians would work, as they had farther south, to extract that wealth. Even though most Spanish saw Indians as inferior, often treating them as actual or near slaves, these Europeans generally sought to include Indians, if possible, in the wider scheme of things.

Early Spanish-Indian relations in America were in some ways fundamentally different from later Anglo-Indian relations. In most instances Spanish Indian policy was not genocidal, nor did it require complete cultural assimilation. As a result, many Indian groups of the Greater Southwest survived centuries of European encroachment before the United States gained control over the Southwest in the 1850s. To the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers, the Native Southwest presented an astonishing variety of lifestyles, cultures, and languages.