by the priests who were wandering among the outlying Indian *bes.

One of these priests was Fray Marcos de Niza, a brother already well esteemed in the Franciscan order. He had come over from Savoy or from Spain some years before this, and went first to Peru, where he saw Atahualpa garroted at the command of Pizarro. He came up to Panama soon after that, and from the Isthmus he had walked through Central America, barefooted, as was his custom. Passing through Mexico he went into the northern provinces, where he engaged in the work of converting some of the Indians and half civilizing more of them. In the early spring of 1539 Friar Marcos offered to go and find the Seven Cities. Mendoza readily accepted his proposition and gave him the negro Estevan and some Indians who had been educated in Mexico to act as interpreters. By the end of August the friar had returned and had sworn to the truth of his formal report. He had seen the first of the cities from a distant hillock, whence it appeared to him to be as large or larger than Mexico City. The disobedience and indiscretion of the negro, ignorant of Indian antipathies, had resulted in his own death and had made it impossible for the friar to approach or enter the cities. But Friar Marcos had seen one of these, and his report of it is probably not such an exaggeration as it appears at first thought. Visitors to the pueblo region of the southwestern United States all tell us of the great size which every feature of the country appears to have when seen through the clear desert atmosphere. Besides, as Mr. Bandelier has shown with a somewhat naive use of figures, Mexico City was not very large or imposing in 1539.

But the friar could report some things vastly more interesting than anything he had seen. Everywhere along the route which he had followed the natives had told him about the wonderful cities of Cibola. Many of the people had visited these cities and had seen the houses, many stories high, surrounded by lofty walls of stone, with doorways studded with precious stones-turquoises-specimens of which, brought from the country of the Seven Cities, were shown to the friar. This is all that he had heard about the Seven Cities

The report of Friar Marcos is in the Pacheco y Cardenas Coleccion, Vol. III, p. 325. Parts of it are translated in Mr. Bandelier's Contributions. In this volume Mr. Bandelier has collected all that he could find in regard to Friar Marcos.

which he embodied in his official report to the viceroy, but he included in the report, very properly, another story which he had heard concerning a valley situated a little way off from the direct road to the cities, where the people had golden vessels for their daily use, and where they used golden scrapers to remove the sweat from their bodies, just as the athletic youths in the old Roman baths used to do.

The report of Friar Marcos was scrupulously exact and truthful. He related what he had seen and also what had been told him by the natives. As it stood the report was certainly encouraging, and it probably afforded reason enough for organizing an expedition to conquer the Seven Cities. Just at this time the office of provincial of the Franciscan order in New Spain became vacant, and, as a reward for the friar's services, Mendoza arranged with the brethren of the order to put Friar Marcos at their head. "Instantly," says Castañeda, "all the pulpits of the order resounded with the stories of such wonderful marvels discovered by the new father provincial that in a very few days 300 Spaniards had gathered to go on the expedition to this new world."

The stories which were repeated about these discoveries created a great deal of excitement throughout New Spain. Suarez de Peralta, who was a boy at the time, tells us that the country was so stirred up by the news which the friar had brought that nobody, in truth, thought of anything else—

ures.

For the friar said that the city of Cibola-so the first of these seven cities was called-was large enough to contain within it two Sevilles and over, and the other cities were not much smaller. The houses there were very fine edifices, built with terraces and four stories high. There were also many wild cows in that country, and sheep and goats and rich treasSuch was the impression they had of it that everybody was for going there straightway and leaving Mexico depopulated. People not only bought and sold the licenses to go there as soldiers, but everybody who had one of these thought that it was as good as a title of nobility at the very least. For the friar, who had come from there, exaggerated everything, saying that this was the best place there was in the world; the people in that country very prosperous, all the Indians there wearing clothes, and the possessors of large herds. The mountains and also the climate were like those of Spain. According to the way the friar described it this ought to have been the terrestrial paradise.

And then Suarez adds, writing half a century later

In all this he told the truth, for there are mountains in that country, as he said, and herds, especially of cows, although not like those we have

here. [The Spanish explorers always spoke of the buffaloes as cows.] And the birds and the animals, as well as the climate, are doubtless like those of Spain.1

But there is better evidence than that of these individuals, whose recollections of the excitement which followed the return of Friar Marcos may have been affected by what they afterwards learned about the real character of the cities of Cibola. As soon as Mendoza had heard the report of the friar he issued a decree with all the formality of his vice-regal authority that every vessel sailing from the ports of New Spain should proceed straight home to Spain without touching at any other colony in the New World. The viceroy evidently intended to prevent the knowledge of the friar's discovery from reaching anyone who might endeavor to anticipate him in the conquest of these regions. The adelantado, Hernando de Soto, was the most probable rival of Mendoza. De Soto was now, in the fall of 1539, in the interior of the Gulf region of the mainland, but Mendoza, in Mexico, did not know that he had sailed from Havana. So the secretaries of the viceroy read the explicit and peremptory orders to each departing shipmaster, but, in spite of all the precautions, a vessel which left Vera Cruz the 1st of November proceeded almost directly to Havana. At this latter point the master declared under oath that sickness had broken out on board his ship almost as soon as he was out of sight of land, and that besides this he had found that his supply of provisions and water was not sufficient for the voyage to Spain. Hence he was obliged to put in at Havana. Curiously enough one of the men aboard the ship, possibly one whom the sickness had attacked, had some dispatches which he had been asked to deliver to the adelantado De Soto, who was supposed by his friends in New Spain to be still on the island of Cuba. As if to remove any possibility of doubt as to why all this happened just as it did various members of the crew were summoned before a justice, and there deposed on oath what they knew in regard to the news which a certain friar had brought to New Spain from the north. Their testimony is full and explicit and shows that by November, 1539,

Suarez de Peralta's Tratado del Descubrimiento de las Indias y su Conquista has been admirably edited by Señor Zaragoza. It is a very useful work for students of the early Spanish history of Central America. The passages which I translate, somewhat freely, are found on pages 144 and 148.

there was a great deal of common talk about the wealth and magnificence of the cities which the friar had seen among all classes of people in Mexico City, Vera Cruz, Puebla de los Angeles, and the other settlements in all parts of New Spain. The friar had reported, so people said, that the country he had found was rich in gold and silver and other treasures; that the houses were built of stone, high and imposing, and terraced like those of Mexico. "The people there are shrewd and only marry one wife at a time and wear coarse woolen clothes," was what one witness had heard. Another had been told that "the country was very populous, with many great cities all surrounded by walls." This is enough for most of the witnesses, but the evidence of one of them must be quoted more at length, as it was written out by the royal scribe at Havana three and a half centuries ago. Andrés Garcia was the witness who stated that while he was in the City of Mexico, a couple of months before, one Francisco de Bollegas had given him some letters to deliver to Don Hernando de Soto in this city of Havana, or to be taken to the agent of the adelantado in Spain if de Soto was not in Cuba. Continuing his testimony, Garcia stated that he had "a son-in-law who was a barber, who had shaved the friar who came from the said country of the Seven Cities, and that his said son-in-law told this witness that the friar, while he was being shaved, had related how there were many cities and towns situated along a river beyond the mountains, and that these cities were surrounded by walls with their gates well guarded, and that they were very rich and had silversmiths, and that the women wore strings of gold beads and the men wore girdles of gold and white woolen dresses, and that they had sheep and cows and partridges and slaughterhouses and iron forges."

I would not hold even a Franciscan friar responsible for all that he might say while in a barber's chair. My only point is that the reason why the expedition which Vasquez Coronado led to the conquest of the Seven Cities started with greater

The "Informacion habida ante la justicia de la villa de San Christóbal de la Habana de la Isla Fernandina, 12 Noviembre de 1539," was among the documents deposited with the royal referee who decided the contest between Pedro de Alvarado, de Soto, Nuño de Guzman, Cortéz, and Mendoza for the right of conquering the country discovered by Friar Marcos. It is printed, with the rest of these documents, in Pacheco y Cardenas, Vol. XV, pp. 392-398. The authority for many of the general statements in this paper will be found among the material printed in the same volume.

hopes than any other similar expedition in all the colonial history of America, if I am well informed, was that the Spanish settlers of that time and place did not realize the terrible potency of common report, of gossip, or of misunderstandings, which is much the same thing. For nearly everything which Friar Marcos reported, even to the son-in-law of Andrés Garcia, was founded on fact. There were populous settlements at Cibola-Zuñi, at Tusayan, and along the Rio Grande, when Coronado's officers visited these regions within ten months of the date of the depositions at Havana. The people whom they found there lived in houses-not at all unlike our modern city flats or tenement houses-perched one above the other, four and five and even seven stories high. Each village settlement, or city, was well protected by its strong, high outer walls of stone and adobe brick, which were an ample defense against the assaults of their native foes, the Apaches and Navajoes from the Arizona Desert or the surrounding mountains, and the wandering tribes from the more distant prairies of the Mississippi Valley. The Spanish soldiers of Coronado's army, used to the massive fortresses of Europe and practiced in all the arts of later medieval warfare, felt that they had good reason to be proud of their success in scaling the walls and in forcing their way through the narrow, well-guarded entrances into the first of the Cibola villages, which these practical soldiers named Granada, because it reminded them of the birthplace of their viceroy. A few months later these same soldiers recoiled again and again from the assault against another of these cities, which was only captured at last when thirst put an end to the resistance of the Indians.

These pueblo Indians were very wealthy-well housed, well fed, well clothed, well educated-in comparison with the poor Sobaypuris and other natives of the provinces between Mexico and Cibola, from whom Friar Marcos obtained most of his information in regard to the Seven Cities. They wore woolen or cotton gowns, which were sometimes white when they were

Their necklaces and girdles were very precious to them. The neighboring Apaches and Navajoes often feasted on the mountain sheep, which so astonished the soldiers who followed Coronado. The Indians who came each winter from the Great Plains for shelter under the walls of the pueblo villages brought many buffalo skins for barter, and surely if these were