The Oldest Gun Ever Found in America Was Left Behind on a Failed Gold Hunt

In the mid-1500s, a Spanish explorer named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado went looking for the Seven Cities of Gold, a mythical stretch of blinged-out cities somewhere in the American Southwest that didn’t exist, as you could’ve guessed. You might remember hearing the name Coronado as the original owner of the jewel-encrusted golden crucifix on a chain that a teenage Indiana Jones is trying to snatch away from bandits at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

While Coronado failed to find gold and had to settle for being a MacGuffin in the second-best Indiana Jones movie, he did leave behind something almost as valuable to archaeologists: a 40-pound, 42-inch bronze wall gun, the oldest firearm ever discovered in the continental U.S.

Unearthed in 2020 from the remains of a Sp