Description
The Querechos were a Native American people. In 1541 the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his army journeyed east from the Rio Grande Valley in search of a rich land called Quivira. Passing through what would later be the panhandle of Texas he met a people he called the Querechos. This was the first known venture of Europeans across the Great Plains of the United States. Contact with Europeans beginning in the 16th century brought diseases that greatly reduced the population of the Plains Indians, and their numbers were reduced further by military campaigns by the United States Army, especially during the 19th century.
Language
Southern Athabaskan
Culture
Coronado and his chroniclers were the first Europeans to describe the buffalo-hunting nomads of the Plains. The earliest people of the Great Plains mixed hunting and gathering wild plants. The cultures developed horticulture, then agriculture, as they settled in sedentary villages and towns. Maize, originally from Mesoamerica and spread north from the Southwest, became widespread in the south of the Great Plains around 700 CE. Although people of the Plains hunted other animals, such as elk or pronghorn, buffalo was the primary game food source. Before horses were introduced, hunting was a more complicated process.