tivity, the great forerunner among the pathfinders across the continent inspired the three others with his own marvellous fortitude, and, naked and ignorant of the way, without so much as a single bit of iron, they planned their escape. Cabeza has left an artless account of his recollections of the journey; but his memory sometimes called up incidents out of their place, so that his narrative is confused. He pointed his course far inland, partly because the nations away from the sea were more numerous and more mild; partly that, if he should again come among Christians, he might describe the land and its inhabitants. Continuing his pilgrimage through more than twenty months, sheltered from cold first by deerskins, then by buffalo robes, he and his companions passed through Texas as far north as the Canadian river, then along Indian paths crossed the water-shed to the valley of the Rio Grande del Norte; and, borne up by cheerful courage against hunger, want of water on the plains, cold and weariness, perils from beasts and perils from red men, the voyagers went from town to town in New Mexico, westward and still to the west, till in May, 1536, they drew near the Pacific Ocean at the village of San Miguel in Sonora. From that place they were escorted by Spanish soldiers to Compostella; and all the way to the city of Mexico they were entertained as public guests.

In 1530 an Indian slave had told wonders of the seven cities of Cibola, the Land of Buffaloes, that lay at the north between the oceans and beyond the desert, and abounded in silver and gold. The rumor had stimulated Nuño de Guzman, when president of New Spain, to advance colonization as far as Compostella and Guadalaxara: but the Indian story-teller died; Guzman was superseded; and the seven rich cities remained hid.

To the government of New Galicia, Mendoza, the new viceroy of Mexico, had named Francisco Vasquez Coronado. On the arrival of the four pioneers, he hastened to Culiacan, taking with him Estevanico and Franciscan friars, one of whom was Marcus de Niza; and on the seventh of March, 1539, he despatched them under special instructions from Mendoza to find Cibola. The negro, having rapidly hurried on before the party, provoked the natives by insolent demands,

and was killed. On the twenty-second of the following September, Niza was again at Mexico, where he boasted that he had been as far as Cibola, though he had not dared to enter within its walls; that, with its terraced stone houses of many stories, it was larger and richer than Mexico; that his Indian guides gave him accounts of still more opulent towns. The priests promulgated in their sermons his dazzling report; the Spaniards in New Spain, trusting implicitly in its truth, burned to subdue the vaunted provinces; the wise and prudent Coronado, parting from his lovely young wife and vast possessions, took command of the explorers; more young men of the proudest families in Spain rallied under his banner than had ever acted together in America; and the viceroy himself, sending Pedro de Alarcon up the coast with two ships and a tender to aid the land party, early in 1540 went in person to Compostella to review the expedition before its departure; to distinguish the officers by his cheering attention; and to make the troops swear, on a missal containing the gospels, to maintain implicit obedience and never to abandon their chief. The army of three hundred Spaniards, part of whom were mounted, beginning its march with flying colors and boundless expectations, which the more trusty information collected by Melchior Diaz could not repress, was escorted by the viceroy for two days on its way. Never had so chivalrous adventurers gone forth to hunt the wilderness for kingdoms; every one of the officers seemed fitted to lead wherever danger threatened or hope allured. From Culiacan, the general, accompanied by fifty horsemen, a few foot soldiers, and his nearest friends, went in advance to Sonora, and so to the north.

No sooner had the main body, with lance on the shoulder, carrying provisions, and using the chargers for pack-horses, followed Coronado from Sonora, than Melchior Diaz, selecting five-and-twenty men from the garrison left at that place, set off toward the west to meet Alarcon, who in the mean time had discovered the Colorado of the west, or, as he named it, the river of "Our Lady of Good Guidance." Its rapid stream could with difficulty be stemmed; but hauled by ropes, or favored by southerly winds, he ascended the river twice in boats

before the end of September; the second time for a distance of four degrees, or eighty-five leagues, nearly a hundred miles, therefore, above the present boundary of the United States. His course was impeded by sand-bars; once, at least, it lay between rocky cliffs. His movements were watched by hundreds of natives, who were an exceedingly tall race, almost naked, the men bearing banners and armed with bows and arrows, the women cinctured with a woof of painted feathers or a deerskin apron; having for their food pumpkins, beans, flat cakes of maize baked in ashes, and bread made of the pods of the mezquite-tree. Ornaments hung from their ears and pierced noses; and the warriors, smeared with bright colors, wore crests cut out of deerskin. Alarcon, who called himself the messenger of the sun, distributed among them crosses; took formal possession of the country for Charles V.; collected stories of remoter tribes that were said to speak more than twenty different languages; but, hearing nothing of Coronado, he sailed back to New Spain, having ascertained that lower California is not an island, and having in part explored the great river of the west. Fifteen leagues above its mouth, Melchior Diaz found a letter which Alarcon had deposited under a tree, announcing his discoveries and his return. Failing of a junction, Diaz went up the stream for five or six days, then crossed it on rafts, and examined the country that stretched toward the Pacific. An accidental wound cost him his life; his party returned to Sonora.

Nearly at the same time the Colorado was discovered at a point much farther to the north. The movements of the general and his companions were rapid and daring. Disappointment first awaited them at Chichilti-Calli, the village on the border of the desert, which was found to consist of one solitary house, built of red earth, without a roof and in ruins. Having in fifteen days toiled through the barren waste, they came upon a rivulet, which, from the reddish color of its turbid waters, they named Vermilion; and the next morning, about the eleventh of May, they reached the town of Cibola, which the natives called Zuñi. A single glance at the little village, built upon a rocky table, that rose precipitously over the sandy soil, revealed its poverty and the utter falsehood of

the Franciscan's report. The place, to which there was no access except by a narrow winding road, contained two hundred warriors; but in less than an hour it yielded to the impetuosity of the Spaniards. They found there provisions which were much wanted, but neither gold, nor precious stones, nor rich stuffs; and Niza, trembling for his life, stole back to New Spain with the first messenger to the viceroy.

As the other cities of Cibola were scarcely more considerable than Zuñi, Coronado despatched Pedro de Tobar with a party of horse to visit the province of Tusayan—that is, the seven towns of Moqui; and he soon returned with the account that they were feeble villages of poor Indians, who sought peace by presents of skins, mantles of cotton, and maize. On his return, Garci Lopez de Cardenas, with twelve others, was sent on the bolder enterprise of exploring the course of the rivers. It was the season of summer as they passed the Moqui villages, struck across the desert, and, winding for twenty days through volcanic ruins and arid wastes, dotted only with dwarf pines, reached an upland plain, through which the waters of the Colorado have cleft an abyss for their course. As they gazed down its interminable side, they computed it to outmeasure the loftiest mountain; the broad, surging torrent below appeared not more than a fathom wide. Two men attempted to descend into the terrible chasm, but, after toiling through a third of the way to the bottom, they climbed back, saying that a block, which from the summit seemed no taller than a man, was higher than the tower of the cathedral at Seville. The party, in returning to Zuñi, saw where the little Colorado at two leaps clears a vertical wall of a hundred and twenty feet.

Thus far, the streams found by the Spaniards flowed to the Gulf of California. In the summer of 1540, before the return of Cardenas, Indians appeared at Zuñi from a province called Cicuyé, seventy leagues toward the east, in the country of cattle whose hair was soft and curling like wool. A party under Hernando Alvarado went with the returning Indians. In five days they reached Acoma, which was built on a high cliff, to be reached only by steps cut in the rock, having on its top land enough to grow maize, and cisterns to catch the rain

and snow.

Here the Spaniards received gifts of game, deerskins, bread, and maize.

Three other days brought Alvarado to Tiguex, in the valley of the Rio del Norte, just below Albuquerque, perhaps not far from Isletta; and in five days more he reached Cicuyé, on the river Pecos. But he found there nothing of note, except an Indian who told of Quivira, a country to the northeast, the real land of the buffalo, abounding in gold and silver, and watered by tributaries of a river which was two leagues wide.

The Spanish camp for the winter was established near Tiguex; there Alvarado brought the Indian who professed to know the way to Quivira; there Coronado himself appeared, after a tour among eight more southern villages; and there his army, which had reached Zuñi without loss, arrived in December, suffering on its march from cold and storms of

snow.

The people who had thus far been discovered had a civilization intermediate between that of the Mexicans and the tribes of hunters. They dwelt in fixed places of abode, built, for security against roving hordes of savages, on tables of land that spread out upon steep natural castles of sandstone. Each house was large enough to contain three or four hundred persons, and consisted of one compact parallelogram, raised of mud, hardened in the sun, or of stones, cemented by a mixture of ashes, earth, and charcoal for lime; usually three or four stories high, with terraces, inner balconies, and a court, having no entrance on the ground floor; accessible from without only by ladders, which in case of alarm might be drawn inside. There was no king or chief exercising supreme authority, no caste of nobles or priests, no human sacrifices, no cruel rites of superstition, no serfs or class of laborers or slaves; they were not governed much; and that little government was in the hands of a council of old men. A subterranean heated room was the council-chamber. They had no hieroglyphics like the Mexicans, nor calendar, nor astronomical knowledge. Bows and arrows, clubs and stones, were their weapons of defence; they were not sanguinary, and they never feasted on their captives. Their women were chaste and modest; adul