From 1540 to 1542, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led the first organized European exploration of the southwest in search of the fabled "cities of gold." With a company of more than a thousand men and women and thousands of horses and mules, cattle and sheep, Coronado trekked north from Culiacan, Mexico, through land that became Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. The exact route their Indian guides led between Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico and the Arkansas River in Kansas has long been debated because surviving documents are brief, vague and sometimes contradictory. Twice in the spring of 1541, the company camped long enough to leave detectable archeological evidence, first at the site of a Teya Indian camp, where a hailstorm destroyed most if not all of their pottery, and then for two weeks in a canyon described as being a league wide. In the 1950s and 1960s, local ranchers discovered two pieces of chain mail in and near Blanco Canyon, and since 1993 other European objects and items from other parts of the southwest have been found there, including projectile points like those used on crossbow arrows. Because crossbows were obsolete after this expedition and are unlikely to have been used by any other group of significant size, archeologists in the late 1990s began confirming the area as the site of one of Coronado's camps, and recovered evidence and artifacts supported the conclusion that Coronado passed through Blanco Canyon.