Ysopete, who seems to have developed an acute antipathy for the Turk and who was anxious to reach his home in Kansas, warned Coronado he was being misled. Alvarado voiced suspicions. Coronado, however, clung to his necessary faith in the Turk until they reached a point where the abrupt eastern escarpment of the Staked Plains drops into almost impassable badlands. There at last he put the Turk in irons and turned the piloting over to Ysopete, assisted by some local Teyas Indians.
All this had taken precious time. To speed things along and to make food easier to procure, Coronado ordered the main army to return to Tiguex while he and 30 picked riders, 6 foot soldiers, Juan de Padilla, and a few mule packers scouted out Quivira.[4]
Traveling light and sparing their mounts, Coronado’s group rode northeast for a month. They reached the River of Quivira (now the Arkansas) not far below present-day Dodge City, Kansas, and followed it, still northeast, to its Great Bend, where they left it. A little farther on they found the first Quivira (Wichita) village, a cluster of domed huts built of stout frameworks of logs overlaid with grass, so that they looked like haystacks. The surrounding land, rolling and fertile, produced fine corn, pumpkins, and tobacco. But no gold.
There were another 24 or so similar villages in the kingdom of Quivira. The Spaniards spent nearly a month riding disconsolately among them, gradually absorbing the truth that riches of the kind they wanted lay neither here nor, as far as they could learn, further east. (During the same period., De Soto was arriving at the same opinion while wandering through parts of Arkansas.) Angry questions were inevitable. Why had the Turk sought to mislead them both with his tales and his guidance? Under pressure he said the people of Cicuyé had put him up to it on the supposition he could lure the invaders to their doom. Perhaps they had. Or perhaps El Turco was simply trying, in his extremity, to shift blame.
The last straw came when Ysopete, El Turco’s enemy, said the Pawnee was trying to stir up the Quivirans against the Spaniards. Acting on Coronado’s orders, a party of executioners strangled and buried him, secretly at night lest the Quivirans be aroused.