Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (; 1510 – 22 September 1554) was a Spanish conquistador and explorer who led a large expedition from what is now Mexico to present-day Kansas through parts of the southwestern United States between 1540 and 1542. Vázquez de Coronado had hoped to reach the Cities of Cíbola, often referred to now as the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. His expedition marked the first European sightings of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, among other landmarks. His name is often Anglicized as Vasquez de Coronado or just Coronado. Early life Vázquez de Coronado was born into a noble family in Salamanca, in 1510 as the second son of Juan Vázquez de Coronado and Isabel de Luján. Juan Vázquez held various positions in the administration of the recently captured Emirate of Granada under Íñigo López de Mendoza, its first Christian governor. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado went to New Spain (present-day Mexico) in 1535 at about age 25, in the entourage of its first Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, the son of his father's patron and Vázquez de Coronado's personal friend. In New Spain, he married twelve-year-old Beatriz de Estrada, called "the Saint" (la Santa), sister of Leonor de Estrada, ancestor of the de Alvarado family and daughter of Treasurer and Governor Alonso de Estrada y Hidalgo, Lord of Picón, and his wife Marina Flores Gutiérrez de la Caballería, from a converso Jewish family. Vázquez de Coronado inherited a large portion of a Mexican encomendero estate through Beatriz and had eight children by her. Expedition Preparation Vázquez de Coronado was the Governor of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia (New Galicia), a province of New Spain located northwest of Mexico and comprising the contemporary Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Nayarit. In 1539, he dispatched Friar Marcos de Niza and Estevanico (more properly known as Estevan), a survivor of the Narváez expedition, on an expedition north from Compostela toward present-day New Mexico. When de Niza returned, he told of a city of vast wealth, a golden city called Cíbola, whose Zuni residents were assumed to have murdered Estevan. Though he did not claim to have entered the city of Cíbola, he mentioned that it stood on a high hill and that it appeared wealthy and as large as Mexico City. Vázquez de Coronado assembled an expedition with two components. One component carried the bulk of the expedition's supplies, traveling via