SPAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.

Cortez was still captain-general when Cabeza de Vaca came into the Spanish settlements from his eight years’ wandering, with news of strange countries to the north; but Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy of Mexico, and Cortez’ superior, and between him and the traitorous conqueror was endless dissension. Cortez was working for himself, Mendoza for Spain.

As Mexico became more and more thickly dotted with Spanish settlements, the attention of the restless world-finders began to wander toward the mysteries of the vast and unknown country to the north. The strange things Vaca had seen, and the stranger ones he had heard, could not fail to excite the dauntless rovers to whom he told them. Indeed, within a year after the arrival in Mexico of the first transcontinental traveller, two more of our present States were found by his countrymen as the direct result of his narratives. And now we come to one of the best-slandered men of them all, Fray Marcos de Nizza, the discoverer of Arizona and New Mexico.

Fray (brother) Marcos was a native of the province of Nizza, then a part of Savoy, and must have come to America in 1531. He accompanied Pizarro to Peru, and thence finally returned to Mexico. He was the first to explore the unknown lands of which Vaca had heard such wonderful reports from the Indians, though he had never seen them himself, “the Seven Cities of Cibola, full of gold,” and countless other marvels. Fray Marcos started on foot from Culiacan (in Sinaloa, on the western edge of Mexico) in the spring of 1539, with the negro Estevanico, who had been one of Vaca’s companions, and a few Indians. A lay brother, Onorato, who started with him, fell sick at once and went no farther. Now, here was a genuine Spanish exploration, a fair sample of hundreds, this fearless priest, unarmed, with a score of unreliable men, starting on a year’s walk through a desert where even in this day of railroads and highways and trails and developed water men yearly lose their lives by thirst, to say nothing of the thousands who have been killed there by Indians. But trifles like these only whetted the appetite of the Spaniard; and Fray Marcos kept his footsore way, until early in June, 1539, he actually came to the Seven Cities of Cibola. These were in the extreme west of New Mexico, around the present strange Indian pueblo of Zuni, which is all that is left of those famous cities, and is itself to-day very much as the hero-priest saw it three hundred and fifty years ago. At the foot of the wonderful cliff of Toyallahnah, the sacred thunder mountain of Zuni, the negro Estevanico was killed by the Indians, and Fray Marcos escaped a similar fate only by a hasty retreat. He learned what he could of the strange terraced towns of which he got a glimpse, and returned to Mexico with great news. He has been accused of misrepresentation and exaggeration in his reports; but if his critics had not been so ignorant of the locality, of the Indians and of their traditions, they never would have spoken. Fray Marcos’s statements were absolutely truthful.

When the good priest told his story, we may be sure that there was a pricking-up of ears throughout New Spain (the general Spanish name then for Mexico); and as soon as ever an armed expedition could be fitted out, it started for the Seven Cities of Cibola, with Fray Marcos himself as guide. Of that expedition you shall hear in a moment. Fray Marcos accompanied it as far as Zuni, and then returned to Mexico, being sadly crippled by rheumatism, from which he never fully recovered. He died in the convent in the City of Mexico, March 25, 1558.

The man whom Fray Marcos led to the Seven Cities of Cibola was the greatest explorer that ever trod the northern continent, though his explorations brought to himself only disaster and bitterness, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. A native of Salamanca, Spain, Coronado was young, ambitious, and already renowned. He was governor of the Mexican province of New Galicia when the news of the Seven Cities came. Mendoza, against the strong opposition of Cortez, decided upon a move which would rid the country of a few hundred daring young Spanish blades with whom peace did not at all agree, and at the same time conquer new countries for the Crown. So he gave Coronado command of an expedition of about two hundred and fifty Spaniards to colonize the lands which Fray Marcos had discovered, with strict orders never to come back!

Coronado and his little army left Culiacan early in 1540. Guided by the tireless priest they reached Zuni in July, and took the pueblo after a sharp fight, which was the end of hostilities there. Thence Coronado sent small expeditions to the strange cliff-built pueblos of Moqui (in the northeastern part of Arizona), to the grand canyon of the Colorado, and to the pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mexico. That winter he moved his whole command to Tiguex, where is now the pretty New Mexican village of Bernalillo, on the Rio Grande, and there had a serious and discreditable war with the Tigua Pueblos.

It was here that he heard that golden myth which lured him to frightful hardships, and hundreds since to death, the fable of the Quivira. This, so Indians from the vast plains assured him, was an Indian city where all was pure gold. In the spring of 1541 Coronado and his men started in quest of the Quivira, and marched as far across those awful plains as the centre of our present Indian territory. Here, seeing that he had been deceived, Coronado sent back his army to Tiguex, and himself with thirty men pushed on across the Arkansas River, and as far as northeastern Kansas, that is, three-fourths of the way from the Gulf of California to New York, and by his circuitous route much farther.

There he found the tribe of the Quiviras, roaming savages who chased the buffalo, but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of incessant marching and awful hardships. Soon after his return, he was so seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked; and disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative obscurity.

This was a sad end for the remarkable man who had found out so many thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries before any of our blood saw any of it, a well-born, college-bred, ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He was a city-bred man, and no frontiersman; and being accustomed only to Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California, he knew nothing of, and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands, that New Mexico was successfully colonized.

While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a golden fable across their desolate plains, his countrymen had found and were exploring another of our States, our golden garden of California. Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three centuries later.

After the discouraging discoveries of Coronado, the Spaniards for many years paid little attention to New Mexico. There was enough doing in Mexico itself to keep even that indomitable Spanish energy busy for awhile in the civilizing of their new empire. Fray Pedro de Gante had founded in Mexico, in 1524, the first schools in the New World; and thereafter every church and convent in Spanish America had always a school for the Indians attached. In 1524 there was not a single Indian in Mexico’s countless thousands who knew what letters were; but twenty years later such large numbers of them had learned to read and write that Bishop Zumarraga had a book made for them in their own language. By 1543 there were even industrial schools for the Indians in Mexico. It was this same good Bishop Zumarraga who brought the first printing-press to the New World, in 1536. It was set up in the City of Mexico, and was soon very actively at work. The oldest book printed in America that remains to us came from that press in 1539. A majority of the first books printed there were to make the Indian languages intelligible, a policy of humane scholarship which no other nation colonizing in the New World ever copied. The first music printed in America came from this press in 1584.

The most striking thing of all, as showing the scholarly attitude of the Spaniards toward the new continents, was a result entirely unique. Not only did their intellectual activity breed among themselves a galaxy of eminent writers, but in a very few years there was a school of important Indian authors. It would be an irreparable loss to knowledge of the true history of America if we were to lose the chronicles of such Indian writers as Tezozomoc, Camargo, and Pomar, in Mexico; Juan de Santa Cruz, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, in Peru; and many others. And what a gain to science if we had taken pains to raise up our own aborigines to such helpfulness to themselves and to human knowledge!

In all other enlightened pursuits which the world then knew, Spain’s sons were making remarkable progress here. In geography, natural history, natural philosophy, and other sciences they were as truly the pioneers of America as they had been in discovery. It is a startling fact that so early as 1579 a public autopsy on the body of an Indian was held at the University of Mexico, to determine the nature of an epidemic which was then devastating New Spain. It is doubtful if by that time they had got so far in London itself. And in still extant books of the same period we find plans for repeating firearms, and a plain hint of the telephone! The first printing-press did not reach the English colonies of America until 1638, nearly one hundred years behind Mexico. The whole world came very slowly to newspapers; and the first authentic newspaper in its history was published in Germany in 1615. The first one in England began in 1622; and the American colonies never had one until 1704. The “Mercurio Volante” (Flying Mercury), a pamphlet which printed news, was running in the City of Mexico before 1693.

When the ill reports of Coronado had largely been forgotten, there began another Spanish movement into New Mexico and Arizona. In the mean time there had been very important doings in Florida. The many failures in that unlucky land had not deterred the Spaniards from further attempts to colonize it. At last, in 1560, the first permanent foothold was effected there by Aviles de Menendez, a brutal Spaniard, who nevertheless had the honor of founding and naming the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine, 1560. Menendez found there a little colony of French-Huguenots, who had wandered thither the year before under Ribault; and those whom he captured he hanged, with a placard saying that they were executed “not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” Two years later, the French expedition of Dominique de Gourges captured the three Spanish forts which had been built there, and hanged the colonists “not as Spaniards, but as assassins,” which was a very neat revenge in rhetoric, if an unpraiseworthy one in deed. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake, whose piratical proclivities have already been alluded to, destroyed the friendly colony of St. Augustine; but it was at once rebuilt. In 1763 Florida was ceded to Great Britain by Spain, in exchange for Havana, which Albemarle had captured the year before.

It is also interesting to note that the Spaniards had been to Virginia nearly thirty years before Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to establish a colony there, and full half a century before Capt. John Smith’s visit. As early as 1556 Chesapeake Bay was known to the Spaniards as the Bay of Santa Maria; and an unsuccessful expedition had been sent to colonize the country.

In 1581 three Spanish missionaries Fray Agostin Rodriguez, Fray Francisco Lopez, and Fray Juan de Santa Maria started from Santa Barbara, Chihuahua (Mexico), with an escort of nine Spanish soldiers under command of Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado. They trudged up along the Rio Grande to where Bernalillo now is, a walk of a thousand miles. There the missionaries remained to teach the gospel, while the soldiers explored the country as far as Zuni, and then returned to Santa Barbara. Chamuscado died on the way. As for the brave missionaries who had been left behind in the wilderness, they soon became martyrs. Fray Santa Maria was slain by the Indians near San Pedro, while trudging back to Mexico alone that fall. Fray Rodriguez and Fray Lopez were assassinated by their treacherous flock at Puaray, in December, 1581.

In the following year Antonio de Espejo, a wealthy native of Cordova, started from Santa Barbara in Chihuahua, with fourteen men to face the deserts and the savages of New Mexico. He marched up the Rio Grande to some distance above where Albuquerque now stands, meeting no opposition from the Pueblo Indians. He visited their cities of Zia, Jemez, lofty Acoma, Zuni, and far-off Moqui, and travelled a long way out into northern Arizona. Returning to the Rio Grande, he visited the pueblo of Pecos, went down the Pecos River into Texas, and thence crossed back to Santa Barbara. He intended to return and colonize New Mexico, but his death (probably in 1585) ended these plans; and the only important result of his gigantic journey was an addition to the geographical and ethnological knowledge of the day.

In 1590 Gaspar Castano de Sosa, lieutenant-governor of New Leon, was so anxious to explore New Mexico that he made an expedition without leave from the viceroy. He came up the Pecos River and crossed to the Rio Grande; and at the pueblo of Santo Domingo was arrested by Captain Morlette, who had come all the way from Mexico on that sole errand, and carried home in irons.

Juan de Onate, the colonizer of New Mexico, and founder of the second town within the limits of the United States, as well as of the city which is now our next oldest, was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. His family (which came from Biscay) had discovered (in 1548) and now owned some of the richest mines in the world, those of Zacatecas. But despite the “golden spoon in his mouth,” Onate desired to be an explorer. The Crown refused to provide for further expeditions into the disappointing north; and about 1595 Onate made a contract with the viceroy of New Spain to colonize New Mexico at his own expense. He made all preparations, and fitted out his costly expedition. Just then a new viceroy was appointed, who kept him waiting in Mexico with all his men for over two years, ere the necessary permission was given him to start. At last, early in 1597, he set out with his expedition, which had cost him the equivalent of a million dollars, before it stirred a step. He took with him four hundred colonists, including two hundred soldiers, with women and children, and herds of sheep and cattle. Taking formal possession of New Mexico May 30, 1598, he moved up the Rio Grande to where the hamlet of Chamita now is (north of Santa Fe), and there founded, in September of that year, San Gabriel de los Espanoles (St. Gabriel of the Spaniards), the second town in the United States.

Onate was remarkable not only for his success in colonizing a country so forbidding as this then was, but also as an explorer. He ransacked all the country round about, travelled to Acoma and put down a revolt of its Indians, and in 1600 made an expedition clear up into Nebraska. In 1604, with thirty men, he marched from San Gabriel across that grim desert to the Gulf of California, and returned to San Gabriel in April, 1605. By that time the English had penetrated no farther into the interior of America than forty or fifty miles from the Atlantic coast.

In 1605 Onate founded Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis, about whose age a great many foolish fables have been written. The city actually celebrated the three hundred and thirty-third anniversary of its founding twenty years before it was three centuries old.

In 1606 Onate made another expedition to the far Northeast, about which expedition we know almost nothing; and in 1608 he was superseded by Pedro de Peralta, the second governor of New Mexico.

Onate was of middle age when he made this very striking record. Born on the frontier, used to the deserts, endowed with great tenacity, coolness, and knowledge of frontier warfare, he was the very man to succeed in planting the first considerable colonies in the United States at their most dangerous and difficult points.