If I were to say the phrase “Gold Rush,” one undoubtedly will think of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion and, of course, the California Gold Rush, a 19th-century migration boom animated by gold fever. In fact there were numerous gold rushes in the 19th century in numerous regions of North America. But few, upon hearing someone talk of an American Gold Rush would think of the 16th-century Age of Exploration and Spanish conquests, even though, really, this was the first gold rush in the Americas. From the beginning, European exploration of the Americas was animated by a lust for riches and a search for wealthy civilizations that could be sacked and pillaged for their gold, their silver, and their pearls. Christopher Columbus, who sought a sea passage to the East as an alternative to Marco Polo’s overland route, dreamed of finding fabulous cities rich in minerals and precious stones. In particular, he hoped to find the island that Marco Polo had called Cipangu, which legend said was “covered in gold.” In reality, Cipangu was only the Chinese word for Japan, which was not exactly a mythical city of gold, and which Columbus would never reach. Landing in the Caribbean, Columbus focused on the riches of the inhabitants they encountered on each island, always asking about the source of the gold he observed native peoples wearing as ornaments. When his ship the Santa Maria ran aground at the island he would name Hispaniola and the natives greeted them with offers to trade gold items for brass bells, Columbus believed he had found it. He returned to Europe with exaggerated tales of the gold mines of Santo Domingo, and he returned there in 1493, forcing the native Taíno people to gather gold for him. Within thirty years, because of this forced labor as well as the diseases spread by the Europeans, almost the entirety of the Taíno population had died. Recently I had a listener of Taíno descent message me about my episode on Columbus and point out that the Taíno did not die out, and indeed there are descendant communities today, so on that listener’s request, I want to make that correction, but the fact of the survival of the Taíno in no way diminishes the fact that Columbus’s lust for gold drove him to nearly wipe out an entire culture. Meanwhile, his letter to the king and queen of Spain describing the gold of the New World was published in numerous languages, galvanizing conquistadors for the next century. Driving all of them, in some way, was the dream of gold. When it was clear that the Americas were not Asia, the dream came to be of the riches that might be earned with the discovery of an easier passage to the Pacific than the fearsome strait sailed by Magellan, or it came to be a dream of the riches that could be accumulated through the settlement of land on which they might cultivate a profitable crop, but preferable to all these prizes was the discovery of the source of native gold, the rich gold mine that Columbus failed to find on Hispaniola. When in 1519 Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and discovered the wealthy Aztec civilization, this original American gold rush changed. When Cortés marched on the Aztec capital, imprisoned their King Moctezuma, and seized all the gold in their treasury, the dreams of conquistadors turned principally to the discovery of hidden civilizations rich in gold that could be looted, melted down, and coined. Unsurprisingly, then, numerous rumors and legends began to arise among conquistadors and their armies about secret cities of gold in both South and North America, waiting to be discovered and plundered.

In this piece, I am once again exploring the historical context behind one of the Indiana Jones films. By the time this is posted, the new Indy film, The Dial of Destiny, has already released, and I’ve already seen it and am considering what topics I might tackle to finally wrap up this long-running series of standalone blog posts. In the meanwhile, although some may want to disavow its existence, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull actually offers more than one potential topic that I have long wanted to cover on this podcast, so for my purposes, it does exist. In fact, I feel that in many ways this fourth film is unfairly maligned, but in other ways, I entirely understand the disappointment in it. Not because of any far-fetched action sequences; in fact, rewatching the films, it’s hard to get more far-fetched than jumping from a plane in an inflatable raft, and even the beloved Last Crusade has all kinds of continuity errors in iconic action sequences that make them less than believable. Nuked fridges and Tarzan vine-swinging aside, the writing on the fourth one just doesn’t live up to the others. But this is not a film podcast, so I’m not talking about dialogue here. I’m talking about the object of Indy’s quest: the MacGuffin and the lore surrounding it. I understand that behind the scenes there was some push and pull between the filmmakers regarding what this one should be “about,” and it really shows. There was an effort to make this one about flying saucers simply because it was set in the 1950s, but there needed to be some archaeological angle, of course, considering Indy’s profession. Thus the notion of ancient aliens is featured, with that claim’s connections to the Nazca Lines in Peru and the elongated skulls of Peruvian native cultures folded in. But there was a need for an object, a physical MacGuffin, so they mashed these ideas together with the dubious crystal skull artifacts claimed in the 19th century to be pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts. I could, and probably will, devote an episode to talking about crystal skulls. And I most certainly will eventually devote an episode or series to the claims of ancient aliens made by Erich von Däniken and others, but it seems to me that the more compelling MacGuffin, the one really worthy of a quest by Indiana Jones, which should have been focused on without all the other trappings, was the city of the aliens—er, inter-dimensional beings—a place of great wealth, a lost city of gold, here fictionalized as Akator, but conflated in the film’s script with El Dorado. The idea of Indiana Jones seeking after a lost or hidden city of gold is rich in historical significance, so I took on the search myself, or rather, the research, and found that there was never just one city of gold.

Artificially deformed Peruvian skulls, commonly and falsely attributed to alien contact, which feature minimally in the fourth Indiana Jones film.

Before the legend of El Dorado, there was the legend of the land of Meta, which originated with Diego de Ordás, formerly a captain under Cortés and in 1530 a governor of some islands in the estuary of the Amazon River. In those years, the source of the gold of the Americas remained a mystery. Conquistadors expected everywhere to find gold and silver mines to explain the ornaments that were traded by the cultures they encountered, and they could not believe that it was all taken from rivers, which most of it was. Instead, they believed it must have come from some hidden source. De Ordás believed, like many, that gold grew, like plant in the earth, and that because its color was associated with that of the sun, it must grow in greater abundance closer to the equator. Thus in 1530, he organized an expedition up the Orinoco River, seeking its source. He and his men traveled a thousand miles, both relying on the natives they encountered along the way and making war on them. Eventually, he reached the river’s confluence with the river Meta, where some native prisoners, shown a gold ring and asked whether their land contained such metal, told de Ordás that beyond a mountain range on the side of the Meta there was a city rich in gold, ruled by a one-eyed king, and that the conquistadors did not have enough men to conquer it, but if they did, they could “fill their boats with that metal.” De Ordás’s expedition ended in abject failure, with the loss of most of his men and the only thing he had to show for his efforts a rumor of a rich land that may have just been a lie told by a prisoner. But the search for the land of Meta would animate other conquistadors as well. During the next few years, numerous expeditions were undertaken into the South American wilderness, and a kind of standard operating procedure was developed. Conquistadors sought out native peoples, not only to trade for gold, but also because they relied on them for food and to carry their luggage. Whenever they encountered a group of indigenous people, they traded with them and pressed them into service, and if they did not comply, they attacked them by surprise and slaughtered them and pressed them into slavery regardless. But to maintain the veneer of Christian respectability, they first read out a document called the Requirement, often without any translation, which explained that the native population was required to accept the Spanish authority and Christian conversion, on the threat of rape and pillaging, and stated, absurdly, that “any death or losses that result from this are your fault.” The expeditions of conquistadors like the German Nicolaus Federmann and Ambrosius Dalfinger cut a violent scar through Venezuela. Many of the native inhabitants they massacred they believed were cannibals, but ironically, members of their own expedition turned to cannibalism when lost and without food. Some of these expeditions did successfully seize and bring back gold, but never discovered the source of it. The notion that hidden civilizations were still out there, full of vast wealth to be stolen, grew in the minds of conquistadors and their cut-throat adventurers when Francisco Pizarro discovered the Inca in Peru, and in 1532 took their ruler, Atahualpa, hostage, demanding a literal king’s ransom. The great wealth stripped from the Incas just further fired the imaginations of other adventurers, many of whom believed the source of Incan gold must be elsewhere, beyond the Andes Mountains. One Spanish governor, Jerónimo de Ortal, believed that the source of Peruvian gold was the rumored land of Meta, and in another effort to find this golden kingdom of the one-eyed king, he sent conquistador Alonso de Herrera up the Orinoco to find it, but the expedition was repelled by natives. Governor de Ortál then led his own expedition overland, but when they believed they were nearing the fabled land of Meta, his men mutinied, intending to seize the gold for themselves. They found nothing, however, as with later expeditions for Meta, but in those later years, it was the legend of a different city of gold that animated the conquistadors, one that it has been suggested was the source of the rumors of the rich land of Meta all along: the story of El Dorado.

The legend of El Dorado was given birth among the conquistadors and Spanish adventurers who sacked the Incan Empire in Peru. Interestingly, it was not originally a rumor of a city of gold, but of a golden man, as the name indicates. In Spanish, “gold” is oro, as in “ore”; thus if something were made of gold, it would be de oro, which as an adjective would be dorada in the feminine, or dorado in the masculine. If it actually referred to a city or land, it would be formed in the feminine and would need the further noun, la ciudad dorada or la tierra dorada. We can better understand the name El Dorado when we find its first use. After Francisco Pizarro accepted the Incan ruler Atahualpa’s ransom, which was literally his weight in gold, he had the king executed anyway and marched on the capital city, Cusco, pillaging the treasury of all its gold and silver, and smelting it into bullion. By one contemporaneous report, they coined more than 1.3 million gold pesos, yet Pizarro and others would never shake the uneasy feeling that the Incas had escaped Peru with a great deal of their gold. Indeed, hearing that one of Atahualpa’s generals had mustered an army at the northern Incan capital Quito, the Spanish marched on, not only to stamp out any further resistance, but also because they suspected to find more gold there. To their disappointment, they did not, and though they tortured captured Incan leaders to death, they were unable to discover the whereabouts of any further treasure, leading to a long-lived legend of lost Incan gold. During the scramble to capture the leaders, there were reports of native chief from the north called el indio dorado, the Golden Indian, whose gold-rich tribe had allied with the Incas. This was 1534, and not much was made of this chief or his tribe at the time. But as rumors spread, they change. Seven years later, as recorded by soldier and historian Fernandez de Oviedo, the Spanish in Quito were still talking about the Golden Chief, and now the story was that he was a king who was daily anointed with oil and a fine powdered gold. Natives of the region were known to paint themselves with resins and ground plants, so the notion was in keeping with extant cultural practices, while hinting at a great wealth of gold. The earliest accounts say that the Spanish learned of this Golden Chief from an “itinerant Indian” that they captured and interrogated, giving the story an even shakier foundation. Over time, the legend evolved further, such that this king, El Dorado, was said to cover himself daily in gold and then bathe in a lake, and all his people made regular offerings of gold which were also deposited in this sacred lake’s waters, such that this lake, it was thought, must contain vast quantities of sunken treasure. And eventually, the story, as such legends do, became simplified, such that this king, ruled over a city near that lake, a city equally rich in gold, nay, covered in gold—built of gold!—a city also, for ease of memory, called El Dorado.

Diego de Ordas, originator of the first city of gold legend: the Land of Meta.

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a conquistador who quested after El Dorado and failed, and the soldier and poet Juan de Castellanos, came to believe that El Dorado was none other than their own province of New Granada, or more specifically the area around the city of Bogotá in what is today Colombia, and this notion is actually accepted by many today as the most likely case. First of all, the area is north of Quito, where the first rumors of the Golden Chief said his kingdom resided, and more than that it was beyond a mountain range on a bank of the Meta River, further identifying it with the fabled land of Meta. The Muisca or Chingcha people that lived and were conquered there had previously been a well-established and populous kingdom that has been compared with the Aztecs and the Incas. And, they worshipped and made offerings at a nearby sacred lake, the Guatavita, a peculiar, perfectly round lake, which actually appears to be a crater lake. Indeed, since Guatavita was identified with the lake of the El Dorado legend, numerous attempts were made, in the 16th century and the 19th century, to drain it and obtain the gold said to have been deposited in its depths. In 1580, a businessman from Bogotá actually excavated the rim of the lake, cutting a notch in it to let its waters out. Though he did supposedly discover some gold ornaments as the water receded, the earthen walls of his excavation collapsed and ended up killing many of his workers. The next major attempt to drain the lake was made in 1898, by a British contractor who actually succeeded in draining the lake entirely by means of a tunnel. What he was left with was only a pit of mud that his company had difficulty finding anything in, especially when it dried as hard as concrete in the sun. Now the lake has been declared a protected area for conservation and has been restored. Thus whatever may be hidden in the sediment on its floor will remain a mystery. But even if Guatavita and the Muisca lands of Bogotá provide a tidy solution to the mystery of El Dorado, this does not mean the legend was real. In fact, the Muisca were not at all rich in gold, for they did not produce it themselves, but rather acquired it through trade with other tribes like the Incas. As there was no golden kingdom in Bogotá to conquer, the legend of El Dorado shifted elsewhere, to be associated with other lakes. Indeed, examining 16th-century maps of South America, we find Eldorado on the shores of lakes that seem to always be in different unexplored reaches of the Amazon. Funny enough, the name of the lake is always the word for lake in some native language. El Dorado came to be associated with a lake called Manoa, which was actually just the word for lake in Arawak; and Lake Parime, which meant simply “big lake” in Carib. Thus we get the sense that, just as native peoples being attacked and interrogated by conquistadors simply waved them on to the next tribe’s territory, assuring them that they’d find the gold they looked for elsewhere, so too when the conquistadors started asking about lakes, they just told them what they wanted to hear about a lake and gold off thataway somewhere.

At this point I should address the fact that there is a clearly defined historical myth representing the Spanish as pillagers of the New World lusting only after gold and committing all sorts of atrocities to get what they wanted. This is known as the Black Legend of the Spanish, and it was widely employed by the English as a propaganda tool during the two empires’ colonial wars. I want to be clear here. I think some may look at my episode on Columbus and this episode and think that I am promoting this Black Legend. Well… in a way I am, because I reject the notion that we should overlook Spanish atrocities, which certainly and commonly occurred, in order to appreciate accomplishments like their taming of wilderness, building of infrastructure, and advancement of agriculture. I reject this because those things were accomplished on the backs of the native cultures they subjugated. But I do acknowledge that there is a Black Legend of the Spanish insofar as the English were no better and engaged in all the same inhumanities. I’ve been careful in this episode to refer to Europeans or conquistadors, rather than just the Spanish, and I’ve already pointed out two German conquistadors, Federmann and Dalfinger. Now it should be pointed out that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the English became the more prominent seekers after El Dorado. Having heard the somewhat famous story of one Spanish soldier who claimed, very dubiously, to have been abducted by natives and taken to the lost city of gold in a blindfold, Sir Walter Raleigh became preoccupied with finding El Dorado himself. Since they did not have a presence in South America or as much knowledge of its inhabitants and geography as the Spanish, he descended on Trinidad, captured the Spanish colony’s governor, Antonio de Berrío, who had undertaken several El Dorado expeditions himself, and interrogated him to discover all he knew about the gold city’s supposed whereabouts. Raleigh would mount more than one expedition into the interior of the continent to search for El Dorado, all of them failures of course, and he would eventually be beheaded by King James for his failure to obey orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish. Such expeditions continued sporadically, sponsored by the English and the Dutch, as well as the Spanish, into the 18th century, none of them succeeding since El Dorado is a myth, and all of them resulting in some loss of life. Thus the legend of El Dorado drove European exploration and exploitation of Latin America for around 250 years.

Lake Guatavita, long thought to hold the treasures of El Dorado. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

The way that European mapmakers haphazardly placed El Dorado on maps of the continent, thereby fueling belief in it as a physical place, recalls the treatment of some myths of antiquity, like that of Atlantis. Indeed, even the name of the Amazon referenced the legendary homeland of the Amazon warrior women. Likewise, the name given to the Caribbean archipelago on which Columbus first landed, the Antilles, references another old legend that also transformed into a modern myth and drove further expeditions into North America searching for lost cities of gold. The name connects the islands to the Iberian legend of Antillia, an island of seven cities said to be a kind of utopia. This legend partakes of a long tradition depicting paradisal islands in the Atlantic Ocean, including that of Atlantis and the Fortunate Isles of Homer. This legend was of later origin than those, though, telling of seven bishops who fled Spain with numerous parishioners during its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the year 711 CE. It was said they sailed westward, into the Atlantic, and landed at a bountiful island, on which each bishop built a city. So that the inhabitants of their seven cities would not risk the peace they had established, they were said to have burned all their ships. It’s not at all clear when this legend was born, however, as the first record of it is in maps of the late Middle Ages, one which Antillia appeared as one of many such phantom islands, drawn in different locations depending on the whims of the cartographer. In 1530, when a captive native in New Spain, or Spanish-occupied Mexico, told the Spanish of a land to the north with seven large settlements rich in gold that he remembered visiting as a child, some believed the fabled Seven Cities of Antillia had been located. Years later, in 1536, four survivors of a failed expedition to Florida, led by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, told a similar story. Their expedition had failed to find gold during their northward march in Florida, and facing stiff opposition from natives, decided to build rafts and sail westward up the Gulf Coast, where they were mostly drowned in a storm at Galveston Bay. The survivors lived as castaways on Galveston Island then were captured by natives and remained in captivity for several years before the four survivors escaped. They traveled across modern-day Texas and northeastern Mexico, and arrived with a rumor, told to them by the Sonora tribe about populous and wealthy native lands to the north. Specifically, Cabeza de Vaca mentioned riches of gold, silver, and turquoise, and thus the legend of an Island of Seven Cities was transformed into a legend of Seven Cities of Gold somewhere in North America.

In 1538, two Franciscan friars reached what is believed to be modern day Arizona, and reported on a vast and rich native civilization, probably the Pueblo peoples of the Southwestern U.S., and their report encouraged another expedition led by another monk of the same order, Fray Marcos de Niza, who ended up in modern-day New Mexico and likewise learned of a populous native civilization farther north, said to be rich, with magnificent two- and three-story houses. De Niza called this place Cíbola, and even though he only heard about it and did not visit it himself, he claimed to have seen it with his own eyes. Thus when the Spanish mustered a major expedition to find and exploit these rumored Seven Cities of Cíbola, headed by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Fray Marcos de Niza went along as a guide. When Coronado eventually arrived at the “seven cities,” which were actually seven adobe farming villages of the Zuñi people, devoid of any wealth, de Niza was roundly cursed for a liar and sent back to New Spain. The rest of the expedition stayed, though, exploring the southwestern U.S. and continuing their search for the Seven Cities. One native informant, whom they called The Turk, told the Spanish of a wealthy nation called Golden Quivira to the east, where the inhabitants were said to all eat from plates and bowls of gold. Thus Coronado went marching again after yet another city of gold, traveling all the way to Kansas to find only the grass huts of the Wichita people. Deceived yet again by his guide, Coronado had The Turk garroted and before long returned to Mexico. Today, The Turk is viewed by the Pueblo native culture as a hero and martyr who purposely fed the conquistador disinformation in order to lead the Spanish away from his beleaguered people.

Coronado’s expedition, depicted being led by a native guide.

Back in South America, the suspicion that the Incas had escaped with most of their gold would continue to haunt the Spanish and fuel further myths of lost cities of gold. Among the Incas themselves, there long existed a myth about the Inkarri, whose father was the sun itself, and who was king of the Incas. This myth evolved when Pizarro had King Atahualpa killed. It was said their ruler swore to return from the dead to exact vengeance, and it was claimed that the Spanish had dismembered Atahualpa and buried parts of his body in separate places to prevent his return, but that his head was growing toward his feet, and when at least he was whole again, he would be the Inkarri, he would destroy the Spanish, and he would restore the Incan civilization at the mythical city of Paititi. Through the years, this Paititi the Incas spoke of was taken to be the lost city to which it was always suspected they had escaped with their gold. While the term El Dorado has today become more of a metaphor than a literal place, expeditions to search for Paititi have become far more common. In 1925, the man some believe was an inspiration for Indiana Jones, Percy Fawcett, set out to find what he called the city of “Z,” which has been identified with Paititi legends by some, and he disappeared, his fate a mystery fit perhaps for another episode. In the 1950s, Nazi propagandist Hans Ertl claimed to have discovered the ruins of the city. In 1970, an American journalist went in search of Paititi and like Fawcett before him, disappeared in the jungle. Since then, journalists, researchers, pseudohistorians and amateur explorers of every stripe have mounted expeditions for Paititi, many just as fodder for travel shows and bad history television. Likewise, there are even in the 21st century continued efforts to locate the mythical Lake Parime associated with El Dorado. These modern efforts more and more rely on aerial photography, satellite imagery, and radar topography technology. It is hard to imagine a greater anachronism than this, wasting state of the art technology in search of places we have long understood to be figments of European minds addled by gold fever.

The Search for Cities of Gold

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