In 1989, Douglas Preston and a friend, Walter Nelson, set out on horseback across one thousand miles of Arizona and New Mexico, retracing the Spanish explorer Coronado’s search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.

They rode cross country, not following modern roads or trails, sleeping ‘in the saddle’ and enduring some of the harshest deserts and roughest mountain terrain in the United States. Forced to battle extremes of heat and cold, impenetrable mesquite thickets, bad water, rattlesnakes, flash floods and paralyzing drought, they nonetheless found the country awesome in its scale and beauty, with much of it so untouched that it was still recognizable from descriptions in Coronado’s reports.

At the heart of the book is Preston’s search for a new understanding of that moment when Europeans first fought Indians in the borders of what would become America—and the fatal consequences that resulted. For what Preston finds when he rediscovers the actual ruins of the Seven Cities of Gold—the mud pueblos of the Zuni Indians—is not a tale of the winning of the West, but a frightening story of loss.

Cities of Gold includes unforgettable portraits of such Indian leaders as Geronimo, Cochise, and the Zuni leader Palowahtiwa, along with stories of gun battles and feuds, and old memories of cattle drives, dust, and the open range.

In the end, Cities of Gold leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of the Southwest—as it was when Europeans first saw it and as it is today. Since the book’s publication fifteen years ago, it has become a classic.