Book Review

The region studied by John Miller Morris in El Llano Estacado has fascinated explorers and scholars for years. Indeed, as Morris notes, "the beauty, mystery, and compelling magic of this legendary land still touch the heart and mind."	1
The region is an extensive, thirty-five thou-sand-square-mile mesa stretching from the Canadian River south to the Edwards Plateau, bounded by the Pecos River on the west and the tributaries of the Red, Pease, Brazos, and Colorado rivers on the east. The semiarid terrain makes the region almost uninhabitable, but its scant demarcations make it, awkwardly enough, beguilingly fascinating. The attraction gives these plains the role of an indecipherable frontier.	2
The lack of Indian sources prevented Morris, a cultural/historical geographer, from beginning at the beginning. He tackles instead the crossing of the Plains by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in the 1530s and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado a decade later. Because of his larger quest for the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola, Coronado has received immense attention from scholars. Morris mercifully summarizes their variant findings about Coronado's route and settles for a "Coronado Corridor."	. . .