The Land of Quivira

Quivira was a real place, a province of the ancestral Wichita near the Great Bend of the Arkansas. Archaeologists have found the remains of several communities near Lyons, along Cow Creek and the Little Arkansas, with articles of Spanish manufacture from Coronado's time. At Tabas, on Quivira's border with the neighboring nation of Harahey, Coronado met the Lord of Harahey, who came with a retinue of nearly 200. In 1724 the French explorer Etienne de Bourgmont, with Kaw companions, reached a large village near Lyons, where Quivira had been almost 200 years earlier.

What the plaque says

The Land of Quivira The Wichitas once populated southern Kansas. They lived in villages of cone-shaped grass lodges, growing crops for food and trade. In the fall and winter they headed west to hunt buffalo. By the 16th century, they were actively trading with tribes in the Southwest. This gave them experience with people in other cultures. By 1720 the Wichita had migrated South. When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado rode into a Wichita village in 1541, the Wichita numbered around 200,000. Coronado was searching for Quivira, but he had begun to doubt the stories of this mythical city of gold. He had been told of a land where the king slept each night beneath a tree of golden bells that made soft music in the wind, and the people ate from plates of silver and gold. The allure of finding Quivira was so strong that when he encountered the Wichita, he assumed he had found it. Coronado spent 25 days in Kansas before returning to Mexico. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Coronado Quivira Museum — 3.9 mi
  Lyons's museum of Quivira, the country of grass-lodge towns where the Wichita people's ancestors lived when Coronado arrived in 1541, and of the Rice County newspapermen who connected the two.
• Ellinwood Underground — 17 mi
  The basement storefronts under the sidewalks of an 1880s German railroad town on US-56, where a harness maker padlocked his shop in 1920 and left everything behind.
• Cheyenne Bottoms and the Kansas Wetlands Education Center — 20 mi
  A 41,000-acre natural sink northeast of Great Bend, diked into shallow pools where a large share of the continent's migrating shorebirds stop to feed on the mudflats each spring and fall.
• Quivira National Wildlife Refuge — 22 mi
  A rare inland salt marsh on Rattlesnake Creek, fed by salty groundwater, where whooping cranes stop on migration and the refuge's senior water right keeps coming up short.

More markers nearby

• Fort Zarah — 24 mi