The following is an excerpt from the July 5 issue of The Kansas City Star. Don Blakeslee, anthropology professor at Wichita State University, contributed to the article. (Subscription may be required to view full story.)
Don Juan de Oñate never found the fabled city of gold he desperately sought in his 1601 expedition in the southern Plains.
But in southern Kansas, the Spanish governor of New Mexico and his soldiers stumbled upon what might have been the largest Native American settlement in what is now the United States.Notes from Oñate’s expedition described a “great settlement,” known as Etzanoa, that stretched for 5 miles and housed 20,000 ancestors of the Wichita tribe near the confluence of two rivers.
Donald Blakeslee, an archaeologist and anthropology professor at Wichita State University, said evidence uncovered in a study he led in early June confirmed that Etzanoa once straddled the banks of the Walnut River in modern Arkansas City, Kan.
He was poring over a Spanish soldier’s account of an ambush by the Wichita when it hit him. The Spanish had been outnumbered, but the superior firepower of their muskets and cannon eventually forced the Wichita to retreat behind large rocks near the junction of two rivers.
Reading that, Blakeslee recalled visiting the area near where the Walnut and Arkansas rivers met and seeing a rock-lined gully near the Walnut River’s edge.
“They talk about rocks beside a little creek that feeds into the river,” he said. “I thought, ‘There’s only one place that could be, and I’ve been there.’”
He was right.