Dorados de Chihuahua

94

I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees a name like los Dorados de Chihuahua and immediately thinks of the legends of El Dorado. But odds are you don't know much about precisely what El Dorado was. Was it a person or a place? Did this person or place have a lot of gold specifically, or a lot of riches in general? And where the hell was El Dorado, anyway?

None of this is easy to answer, of course, because we're dealing with a myth, and myths are under no obligation to be consistent. The answer to most of the questions above is basically "Yes". Yes, the myth (or at least some versions of it) said that El Dorado was a person. And yes, other versions said it was a place. Yes, some versions said the place specifically had a lot of gold, and yes, other versions said it had jewels to boot. Where was it? Well, "yes" doesn't precisely work here, but there were so many places it was said to be that it doesn't really not work, either. But more about that in a bit.

I'm not going to get into discussing precisely how the myth got started. For one thing, we're dealing with Europeans outside of Europe. Europeans were constantly getting this idea into their heads that there were great riches to be found in other parts of the world. And I'm not talking California Gold Rush levels of wealth. I'm talking If This Much Gold Actually Existed It Would Cease To Be Valuable Because There'd Just Be So Damn Much Of It levels of wealth. Europeans thought such riches could be found in Africa and they also thought such riches could be found in Asia. It's no wonder they got it into their heads that such riches could be found in the Americas. Hell, listen to tech bros today talking about mining asteroids. Why do they want to do this? Because there's untold wealth to be found in asteroids, of course! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In any case, by the 1530s Europeans, particularly but not only the Spanish, were convinced that somewhere in the New World was either a king who was so rich that he would periodically cover himself in gold dust and take a raft into the middle of a lake and just throw a bunch of gold into the lake, or that there was a city with temples filled with gold (or maybe gold and jewels), or maybe even a city whose streets were literally paved in gold. Like I said, consistency isn't a common feature of myths. Depending on who you believed, this person or city might be on the banks of the Orinoco River, by a lake in the mountains of what is now Colombia, on a lake on the border of present-day Guyana and Brazil, in the mountains of modern-day Peru, and probably half a dozen other places.

I did a little reading about the various attempts to find this person/place, and suffice it to say that it would all be pretty funny were the people on these expeditions just fictional characters in a story and not, you know, actual people who actually suffered all kinds of mishaps. The phrase "dark comedy of errors" comes to mind. As an example, let me tell you about Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to find it.

Sir Walter Raleigh, as you may know, is the guy who founded the first English colony in the New World, a colony that is now known as The Lost Colony because all the people that were part of it vanished without a trace. So right off the bat you can see that maybe this isn't the best guy to be giving this assignment to. Not that anyone gave him the assignment, mind you. Raleigh caught wind of the legends when he captured a Spanish governor in New Spain during the Anglo-Spanish War. And this is another thing to keep in mind as you read this: Raleigh is supposed to be fighting a war, not looking for gold. He apparently rationalized his gold-seeking adventures by saying that in the process he would establish a colony in South America (again, this is not a guy you want founding colonies!), and of course that all this gold could really help the war effort, which would probably be true if it didn't turn out to be so much that it crashed the European economy. And let us be clear, the amount he thought he would find would be so much it would crash the European economy. Not that this thought ever occurred to him.

So off Wally Raleigh goes traipsing into various rivers in modern-day Guyana. Of course, Spain claimed this land as their own, so there were bound to be run-ins with the Spanish. Which there were. There were also run-ins with the natives, although oddly enough they generally went a lot better than the run-ins with the Spanish. And why did they go so much better? Well, basically, the natives absolutely fucking hated the Spanish because the Spanish were acting like a bunch of typical colonizing tyrants. Raleigh basically made it clear to the natives that he also absolutely fucking hated the Spanish, and the natives apparently did the whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing and decided this Walter guy must be all right. So that's one thing he did right. Anyway, when they weren't having run-ins with people of either Spanish or American descent, Raleigh and his companions were also having run-ins with crocodiles, which went about as well as you'd expect. I won't go into the details because the details are pretty grisly.

And what was the conclusion of all this traipsing? Well, eventually they reached the mountains, noticed that there was not in fact a bunch of gold and/or other riches lying around, and decided "Fuck it, we're out of here." (To be fair, the rainy season had begun, and we're talking about the rainy season in the Amazon, so the rainy season was very rainy.) Wally Raleigh decided to return to England, making a few stops along the way to plunder some Spanish cities because he suddenly remembered what he was actually supposed to be doing.

Upon his return to England he did what any self-respecting explorer would do and wrote an exaggerated account which made it sound like he had found far more riches than he had (remember, the actual amoount of riches he found was zero). The book proved to be quite popular, and so when he got out of pris— oh, I should probably mention this bit, since it's kinda relevant. Somewhere along the way Raleigh may (details are sketchy) have been involved in a plot to overthrow King James I, a plot which was apparently funded by the Spanish government that Raleigh had been fighting against (sometimes history feels no more obligation to make sense than mythology does). The semi-predictable result of this is that he got his ass thrown into prison; I say "semi-predictable" because honestly, I would have predicted he'd get beheaded for that sort of thing. Anyway, he spent thirteen years in prison, at which point James let him out and Wally decided it was time to go try to find El Dorado again. James said okay, but listen, we're not at war with Spain anymore, so don't go causing trouble with the Spanish.

This last sentence, by the way, is what it known as "foreshadowing".

Wally was actually rather sick by the time he got to the Caribbean, so rather than go himself he sent his son Watt and a trusted friend by the name of Lawrence Kemys while he stayed in Trinidad. Kemys apparently got it into his head that it would be a good idea to attack a Spanish outpost, and in the ensuing skirmish Watt was killed. Kemys then returned to Trinidad, informed Raleigh of what had happened, and begged for Raleigh's forgiveness. Raleigh refused, and Kemys committed suicide. Raleigh then returned to England, where King James reminded Raleigh that he (James) had specifically ordered Raleigh to leave the Spanish the hell alone, and had Raleigh beheaded.

See? I wasn't kidding about the "dark" part of "dark comedy of errors" earlier a few paragraphs ago.

Anyway, that's just one story of some Europeans whose lives were ruined by looking for El Dorado. I could have picked any number of other examples, too; lots of people who went off searching for it came back in a ruined state, if they came back at all.

Of course you may be wondering at this point why I didn't pick an example that was actually near Chihuahua, since I'm supposed to be reviewing the name and logo for a team called los Dorados that plays in Chihuahua. And the reason I didn't do that is simple:

There aren't any stories about El Dorado this far north.

That's not to say the name is inappropriate for the place. There are several gold mines in the area around Chihuahua, some of which may still be active (the info I could find wasn't clear on that point). But as you may have noticed if you know your Latin American geography and were paying close attention to previous paragraphs, every place I mentioned as a possible location for El Dorado is actually in South America. So using the name in Mexico — particularly northern Mexico — does seem like a bit of a reach. Not that anyone in Chihuahua seems to care. In fact, they love the name so much that not only is their entry in the Mexican League called los Dorados de Chihuahua, so is their entry in the National Professional Basketball League. And so is their entry in the Chihuahua State Baseball League. How all this doesn't cause confusion (particularly the two baseball teams) I don't know, but then again this is the first year with two baseball teams, so maybe it does.

If it helps any, the Chihuahua State Baseball League Dorados use a much simpler logo than the Mexican League Dorados do (although the two teams use the same colors, which I'm fairly certain doesn't help.). The CSBL Dorados logo is just a D in a circle; there's not even a baseball in the background. The Mexican League Dorados, on the other hand, have...

Okay, it may be that part of the reason I spent so much time talking about Wally Raleigh's expedition was that I wanted to put off talking about this logo as long as possible. Can you blame me? Okay, you can blame me for not finding something that involved less deaths, but don't blame me for putting off as long as possible talking about a baseball with a cowboy hat and a handlebar mustache. There, I said it. I'm done talking about it.

Do you want me to talk about something else? Maybe Pizarro's expedition?

No? You're bummed out enough as it is because of Watt Raleigh and Lawrence Kemys? You just want me to shut up already? Okay.

Final Score: 94 points.
Penalties: Equipment, 13 pts, Humanoid, 30 pts; Irrelevance, 39 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.