"With vivid detail and infectious energy, Peter Stark is a uniquely gifted storyteller who makes history feel immediate and alive." - DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Leadership: In Turbulent Times "More than two and a half centuries before Lewis and Clark embarked on their famous trek, another exploring party, less well-known today but in many ways more ambitious and consequential, headed into terra incognita to unlock the secrets of the American West. In Peter Stark's fresh and dramatic telling, Coronado's epic expedition comes alive in a narrative that deftly alternates between European and Indigenous perspectives, giving us a thoroughly modern take on one of history's classic sagas of adventure and first contact." - HAMPTON SIDES, author of The Wide Wide Sea, In the Kingdom of Ice, and Blood and Thunder "Chronicles Coronado's expedition and the Native American resistance to the Spanish incursion. Stark smoothly alternates between Spanish and Native American perspectives as he brings to life his cast of characters along with their aspirations and conflicts. Fascinating." - PETER COZZENS, Wall Street Journal "A gripping, engrossing story of the American Southwest in the 1540s, when the dreams of would-be conquistadors riding north from New Spain crashed into the spectacular landscape and a resourceful Native culture which, together, undid them. History's pivot balanced on Francisco de Coronado's strivings, cruelty, sufferings, and ultimate failure of vision.

In Stark's place-sensitive prose you can smell the desert heat and the Great Plains dust." - IAN FRAZIER, author of Great Plains "A richly detailed history of Coronado's ill-fated journey." - The Denver Post "[A] vivid history of the famed Spanish quest for fabled cities of gold. Native resistance, Stark notes, soon pushed the Spanish back into Mexico. If it had not, he adds provocatively, the Spanish Empire might well have extended all the way to the Mississippi, containing the United States on the opposite shore and creating a culture 'of Indigenous and European, something like today's Brazil.' It makes for a fine thought experiment to close a highly readable historical yarn. A welcome addition to the literature of Hispanic America and the American West." - Kirkus "A fresh telling of the 1540 Coronado Expedition in which Spanish conquistadors traversed 2,500 miles seeking fabled cities of gold in present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico and Kansas.

Stark provides a vivid account of the Spaniards' blunderings and atrocities, and the many ways that Native nations resisted and finally repelled the invaders. As a former Outside magazine writer, Stark's prose shines when describing the formidable and beautiful terrain of what is now the American Southwest." - Seattle Times.