Coronado's Children

Tales of Lost Mines and Buried Treasures of the Southwest

By: J. Frank Dobie, Frank H. Wardlaw - foreword

Narrated by: James Hutchings

Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Written in 1930, Coronado's Children was one of J. Frank Dobie's first books, and the one that helped gain him national prominence as a folklorist. In it, he recounts the tales and legends of those hardy souls who searched for buried treasure in the Southwest following in the footsteps of that earlier gold seeker, the Spaniard Coronado.

"These people," Dobie writes in his introduction, "no matter what language they speak, are truly Coronado's inheritors.... l have called them Coronado's children. They follow Spanish trails, buffalo trails, cow trails, they dig where there are no trails; but oftener than they dig or prospect they just sit and tell stories of lost mines, of buried bullion by the jack load...."

This is the tale-spinning Dobie at his best, dealing with subjects as irresistible as ghost stories and haunted houses.

©1930 The Southwest Press; copyright 1958 by J. Frank Dobie;copyright 1978 by the University of Texas Press (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

great stories, not the best narrator

these are quentessential Texas stories, and the language is meant to be quentessentially Texan. The Yankee narrator, however, who poorly feigns a texas accent in his performance, apparently couldn't be bothered to learn anything of that wonderful language. He can't pronounce anything, and seems to not even understand some of the words he reads. he reads 'live oak' for example, as an oak that's alive, rather than a Quercus fusiformis. Jim Bowie he pronounces like David Bowie, anathema to Texan ears. many other names and spanish words are similarly butchered, some beyond comprehension. George W Bush did a better job at sounding like a fake Texan than this narrator.

Fun, at first

Initially, I found these stories to be quite engaging and interesting from a historical perspective. However, they become very repetitive very quickly. The same outcome every time. Someone knows where treasure is, someone forgets where the treasure is, someone finds a map, someone can’t find the treasure, even though they know where the treasure is supposed to be. And so on…