In Vicinity of Coronado's Camp

The ride north that followed the captains' council was a small one. The Handbook of Texas says Coronado took thirty men on horses and six on foot and steered "by the needle," reaching what was probably the Arkansas River on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 1541. The rest of the army went back to Tiguex on the Rio Grande. Coronado rejoined it there for the winter of 1541-42, when he was hurt in a fall from his horse, and in the spring of 1542 the whole expedition returned to Mexico by the way it had come.

What the plaque says

In 1541, the Spanish explorer Coronado is thought to have passed this way en route from New Mexico to the fabled Indian villages of "Quivira", though his path across vast Texas plains is now difficult to determine. Upon finding that his Indian guide, "The Turk", had taken him too far south, Coronado halted at a small canyon or barranca. Here he conferred with his captains and decided to follow the compass directly north. When they reached "Quivira" (possibly in Kansas), no gold was found - only the poor, grass huts of a Wichita village. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Abilene State Park — 5.4 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 9.6 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Frontier Texas! — 20 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 20 mi
  A free museum in a Winters optometrist's office, a 1909 railroad hotel and a 1927 implement dealership, with Rogers Hornsby's hometown memorabilia and a 1912 horse-drawn cotton picker.

More markers nearby

• Near Site of Indian Battle — 6.2 mi
• Mountain Pass Station — 6.2 mi
• The Civilian Conservation Corps at Abilene State Park — 6.2 mi
• Buffalo Gap College — 9.5 mi