In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an "entrada" from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where, among other activities, they strangled their principal Indian guide, a man they called El Turco. The author focuses on the events leading up to and including the execution of this Indian guide. Although Coronado, his chroniclers, and modern historians have tended to take the killing of this guide for granted, the violence was far from straightforward. Indeed, the expeditionaries' actions were embedded in sixteenth-century Spanish culture, a milieu that can still reward study by historians of the Great Plains. Working within this context, the author explores the ways in which Aesop, the classical master of the fable, may have informed the Spaniards' actions on the Kansas plains.