Customer Reviews

Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Reading a book twice is a rarity for me. But this book was worth both the investment (I bought one for myself, one for a friend) and the time. Having lived in and explored most of Arizona through backpacking, hiking, and horse trekking, I found Douglas Preston's recounting of his adventure to be both a delight and a thoughtful read.

Anyone who has experienced the difficulties and beauty of nature first hand, will benefit from this book. All horse lovers will find themselves and their fleet-footed friends well depicted in Preston's travails. And those who simply want to learn more about the Southwest, its original inhabitants, the Spanish conquest and the impact of civilization on this fragile landscape and doomed people will want to explore Preston's sensitive, well-documented exposition. His final observations on our future are prescient and a warning: we, too, may go the way of the Zuni, Navajo, conquistadores and ranchers.

This book is SO much more than a travel log. The journey that the author and a friend took through the desert on horseback, by all rights, should have produced on dead author and one dead friend, but, instead, produced and extremely rich book. Its not often that an author can bring to bear such a breadth of knowledge and skill: historical knowledge, great research, wise understanding of political/ecological issues, thoughtful good judgment in observing cultures, gutsy explorer-courage, and great writing skills - each like extra icing within a tasty adventure-story layer cake.

The book is high quality information gathered in one spot covering so many areas: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo, and Apache history; early Spanish/Mexican culture; the Spanish/Mexican invasion under Coronado; Anglo history in the southwest; southwest ecology, geography, climate, flora, fauna, and horse psychology 101. Best of all, the words are written by a person of heart who feels and shares the magic of meeting people of other cultures, both present day and ancestral (via those tantalizing archeological sites, through native oral tradition, and from the European perspective). I've read my old hard copy edition of this book twice, and loan it out often - whenever I spot someone showing early signs of becoming fascinated with the Southwest.

This is one of the most well written, expansive stories about the settling of America I have ever read. It takes you back to the time of Cortez and before, but the author's adventures are current and often funny. It is filled with courage; of the writer, the various Pueblo Indian tribes, the Spanish and some Americans. The Zuni philosophy and understanding of the competative needs of the white man are truely enlightening. This is a book I will read again and again. Preston's books about the southwest are both educational and exciting. Sometimes you can hear the wind and taste the dust.

What a wonderful read! From the first page I was gripped with not only the snippets of history of the region, but also the adventure of the author and his companions, riding horseback from Arizona's Mexican border to Santa Fe, retracing Coronado's sesarch for the Seven Cities of Cibola.

The tale is a wonderful one, as the author rides through present day Arizona and finds that the Old West is not dead after all. At considerable risk to life and limb, the adventurers ride the trail which they, and scholars, believe was Coronado's own, and in doing so meet ranchers and cowboys who relate their own histories and adventures in this wild but exciting land.

An incredible travel tale, and a must-read for those who enjoy history mixed with a good adventure.

This is a book that keeps your attention.. a present-day journey of the unexpected...just as Coronado's excursion was only 5 centuries ago. I learned more about Arizona's early early history (even before it was Arizona) and more recent history than I ever knew. I believe students here in Arizona should be required to read it! Not necessarily as the bible of truth, but it would go a loooong way towards putting their own homeland in perspective.

I give my dog-eared copy to friends and acquaintances from "back East"...they read it before they visit, and immediately have a context for their visit and what they see here.

I sometimes watch the sunset over the Sierra Madres from a quiet peak near the border that is part of the Coronado National Monument. It's impossible to see any signs of civilization there in the southern panorama...easier to imagine Coronado's entry ...with the help of this book.

Douglas Preston and his friend Walter Nelson are apparently a pair of adventurers. Preston, a writer for various magazines, got the idea to ride across the Southwest and follow in the footsteps of Coronado, the conquistador who passed through those lands in the 1540s. The two men bought horses, saddles and gear, hired a wrangler they thought knew something about horses, and set off on a journey of close to a thousand miles across the American desert.

The path they took wanders somewhat, and they learned some interesting things. In some spots, the route that Coronado took, as far as the history books are concerned, is completely impossible. They met Indians from various tribes, cowboys, and other interesting inhabitants of the countryside, and had numerous difficulties, all recounted with Preston's self-deprecating wit. The wrangler left them a third of the way through the journey, they had repeated problems with their horses (on one occasion they lost them all, no laughing matter in the middle of the desert), and had to deal with every sort of problem from lack of water to getting across the city of Albequerque with a pair of horses.

Preston's a reasonably skilled writer. The narrative wanders a bit, as did the course of the author's journey. At times, the digressions seem a bit forced and annoying, or alternatively you want to hear more about this or that tribe or family of cowboys or ghost town or whatever. This back and forth effect can be somewhat disconcerting. Even so, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.

This is not a book for non-Americans, except one has a special interest in the American Southwest. Because I visited some of these places and did myself a small scale horse trekking across the wilderness of the Wild West, I could not escape in buying the book. And I have sympathies for the ideas of the author.
What do you get? An adventurous journey sometimes close to Don Quixote, besides that strenuous, troublesome, disappointing to some respects but all the time exceedingly rewarding in many other respects. For the author, for the reader perhaps not so much. I found it not too illuminating to hear the 21st time how difficult it was with the horses. The book has its lengths!
The author and his companion deserve attention not alone for what they have achieved. More for the idea and the irresistible determination to make ends meet. The author planned to trace back the travels of the 16th century Spanish explorer Coronado. This meant a journey through a thousand miles across Arizona and New Mexico where they are most inaccessible, no roads, but fences, no water, but dust and heat, brutal deserts and mountain country, no more hostile Indians but thorny shrubs and sensible horses, no sleepless nights in the open due to the fatigue of a hard day.
A risky enterprise! Throughout the book the author flashes back to the expedition of Coronado who was searching for the seven cities of Gold, an exaggeration of an earlier report which transformed an assembly of the pueblos of the Zuni Indians, this highly civilized and refined culture, into a myth.
The greedy Spaniards did not appreciate the true cultural riches of the pueblo Indians, they were blind for the spiritual wealth which they thought to possess themselves in abundance in their Catholic faith. But their hearts were of a lesser quality than those of the Indians who offered them hospitality but earned the bloodthirsty disappointment of the Spaniards. The West was not civilized, this is also what the author has to learn. The West was just changed!
The author underwent a development in his thinking. He recognized that the anglo-american culture was established at the cost of the Indian culture. I cannot share his opinion that destruction of the Indian culture was inevitable. He says: "Our wealth derives from our land and our natural resources, both of which we took from the native inhabitants of this continent. We would have nothing had we not destroyed what came before".
Some sort of a cheap excuse? I am no American, I see it more critical. But he is not so sure if the fabulous America of the late 20th century was truly a better world than the world of the Indians before the advent of the whites. But I suppose this is what the Americans wanted to have.
Their trip had taken place within the borders of the USA, but they had also seen the ghosts of an alien world that preceded this one. They had seen "worlds glimpsed behind rubbled walls, worlds chiselled in petroglyphs and lying scattered among broken postherds, worlds blowing across vast deserts; worlds buried in memories of cattle, dust, and grass; worlds laughing in dry saltbushes, muttering and whispering to us from a thousand dry arroyos, worlds flying up into the night sky at that moment between sleeping and waking".
They had not found a triumphant America in the dusts of the deserts. Rather layers of loss. The best thing about the West was that it was made possession. Too many destroyed pueblos and vanished Indian tribes, including the peoples of the biggest pueblo (Pecos) to hail about the process! The Indians, the cowboys, the wilderness, the great cattle drives, the unfenced ranges, the homestead families, all these things had been lost, not won.
"We had witnessed the last dying glimmer of that peculiar, eccentric, ugly, violent, free, and peaceful place known as the American West. As the Old West had died a new one was born."
The trails had to be replaced by wagon roads and these had to be buried under railroads or interstates, the range had to be fenced, the prairies had to be busted and planted and the rivers diverted. But the conclusion is: "There is no death, only a change of worlds."

A thoroughly engrossing book summarizing Preston's journey following Coronado's route to the New World. I couldn't put it down! I fell in love with the people he met and the places he went. I had my map out beside me as I read the book. The history, geography,and geology were incredible. The accounts from Coronado and others of his time were engrossing. The fate of the Indians they encountered was troubling. Does it not foreshadow our own fate?

Douglas Preston wrote an engagingly funny but also historical account of his adventures and misadventures following Coronado's trail by horseback from the Mexican border in SE Arizona northeast to Pecos, NM. His anecdotes are entertaining and his historical accounts describe the region and peoples past and present accurately.It's a must read for people interested in southwestern history.

Very minor spoiler alert:

A great book, and I would actually give it 4.5 stars. I won't repeat what other reviewers and the description say to describe the book. It's great, and I would only say that: 1) Preston, and therefore the story, was never quite sure what it was going to be about and therefore it meanders a bit. For the most part this is what makes the book worth reading, but I wish Preston ended with more of a reflection upon his journey and how it impacted him (and Walter) in contrast to when he set out (rather the story ends a little abruptly on the subject of the loss of the culture and the treatment of the native Americans). But this is sort of a minor complaint for a work of non-fiction. 2) There are no photos (save the amazing cover photo), despite the fact that the other guy, Walter, took the trip in large part for the photo opportunities and brought along special equipment for this purpose. So I am not sure why this is, but Preston does have some photos from the trip on his web site.

Overall this is a great read that brings the reader a bit closer to understanding the native American history and culture, as well as a lot of the culture and history of the old and modern west. This comes from the book's amazing sense of authenticity. Although you can't quite tell because Preston integrates everything so well, a lot of research clearly went into this book, and the rest is of course first hand experience. Despite being a pretty long book, I wish it could have gone on a lot longer, and it leaves you craving more.