In 1540 a dozen or so towns of the Southern Tiwa stood along both banks of the Rio Grande near present-day Bernalillo, a farming province the Spanish came to call Tiguex. Their corn was watered from the river, and their people had traded with neighbors in every direction for centuries. That summer, scouts from Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's expedition, hunting golden cities that did not exist, reached the valley and recommended it as a place to spend the winter.
The winter camp
The expedition was several hundred Spanish soldiers and many more Native allies from Mexico, with horses and livestock, and it needed shelter and food. Its officer García López de Cárdenas took over one of the largest towns, Ghufoor, which the Spanish called Alcanfor, and its people were turned out. The army demanded clothing and food from the other towns and took more when they would not give it, and its animals grazed the harvested fields and ate the dry cornstalks the Tiwa needed for fuel through the winter.
Fire and blood
In December the Tiwa struck back, killing dozens of the army's horses and mules. Coronado answered with a war of fire and blood. Cárdenas led a force against the town the Spanish called Arenal; its defenders were all killed, and some thirty men were burned alive at the stake. The people of the other towns left the river for a stronghold on a mesa the Spanish called Moho and held it through a siege of about eighty days, from January into March 1541. When their water ran out they tried to slip away at night, and many were killed in the attempt. Dozens of Tiwa women and children were taken captive.
Neighbors
The war shook the whole region. By the expedition's own account, the people of Cicuye, the great pueblo whose ruins stand at Pecos, offered to join the Spanish against the Tiwa if they were given one of the Tiwa towns to settle and farm.
What remained
Coronado marched east that spring in search of Quivira, came back empty-handed, wintered again in the valley, and went home to Mexico in 1542. He was afterward investigated over the army's conduct and cleared; Cárdenas was tried in Spain and convicted. The Spanish did not come back for almost forty years, but the Tiguex towns never recovered. Within a century of Coronado most had been abandoned, and today Sandia Pueblo is the only Tiwa community left in the stretch of the valley his army attacked, with Isleta to the south.
The ruins of Kuaua, the northernmost of the Tiwa towns, lie on the west bank at Bernalillo, with a kiva whose painted walls survived beneath the earth. The state site that protects them is named for Coronado.