The zealous Franciscan left San Miguel de Culiacan on Friday, March 7, 1539. Besides Estévanico and several Indians, a brother of the order, Fray Onorato, accompanied him. Their route was northward, toward the present state of Sonora. The Indians who went with them belonged to the southern branch of the great Pima tribe. They had, as we have already said, followed Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Maldonado, and Dorantes from central and southern Sonora to Sinaloa, and a part of them had remained there and founded a village on the Rio Petatlan. Probably in this village, certainly on that river, Fray Onorato became so ill that it was necessary, after three days’ delay, to leave him. The party kept as nearly as possible to the coast of the Pacific Ocean, leaving the villages on the Yaqui to their right. A halt was made at Bacapa, and the monk sent the negro forward, with directions to go fifty or sixty leagues (from 135 to 162 miles) north, and send him from time to time news of whatever he saw and heard. The more favorable the reports the larger should be the cross on the piece of white wood which the negro was to send with each despatch of an Indian messenger.

Bacapa appears on the map that Father Joseph Stöcklein, S. J., published in the Neuen Weltblatt in 1728, which is based on the journey of the famous Jesuit missionary P. Eusebius Kühne (Eusebio Kino), as St. Ludovicus de Bacapa, and is located in Arizona, west of Tucson—Fray Marcos himself gives the distance from the coast as forty leagues, or 108 miles. He arrived there before Easter of 1539. Bacapa could not therefore have lain so far north as Father Kühne’s map represents it, but must at farthest have been in the northern part of the southern half of Sonora, near the present Matape. In this case it was probably a Pima settlement, as the name denotes.[67] Four days after the negro departed the monk received a first message from him through Indians, who brought a cross the height of a man. The Indians told “such wonderful things of his discoveries,” Fray Marcos says, “that I would not believe them unless I saw the things myself.... The Indian told me that it was thirty days’ journey from the place where Estévanico was to the first city of the country, which was called Cibola.... He affirmed and maintained that this first province contained seven very large cities which were all subject to one lord. In them were large houses of stone and mortar, the smallest of which were one story high with a terrace, and there were besides two-and three-storied buildings. The chief’s house was of four stories. There were many decorations at the entrance of the principal houses, and turquoises, which were very plentiful in the country. The people of these cities were very well clothed.” Notwithstanding these reports, Fray Marcos was in no hurry to go away from Bacapa. He seems not to have placed an absolute trust in the negro, and waited for the return of the Indians who had gone by his command to the coast (of the Gulf of California). They came back bringing with them natives of the seashore. These belonged, no doubt, to the Seris, a wild tribe who still live on the islands of the Gulf of California. On the same day men came into Bacapa from the east, Indians whose faces, breasts, and arms were painted. They confirmed the stories that the negro’s messengers had brought. Fray Marcos de Nizza hesitated no longer. He started away two days after Easter, following the track of his dark-skinned guide, in search of the “seven cities of Cibola.”

The name of Cibola was thus known away in the interior of Sonora. Whence was it derived? From what Indian language was it borrowed? These are questions with which till recently only my eminent friend F. H. Cushing, and, to a small extent, I myself have been engaged. How far our investigations are of definite value can hardly be determined as yet, for the languages of Sonora are still very little known. They are reduced, if we exclude the Apache idiom, to three large groups. In the south is the Cahita or Yaqui language, which includes the Mayo; in the west the Seri; and in the centre, north, and east the Pima-Opata, which is divided into two principal branches—the Pima and the Joyl-raua or Opata. The Eudeve and Jova appear to be dialects of the Opata. At Bacapa Fray Marcos was among the Pimas; Estévanico, a few days’ journey north, was either among the Pimas, the Seris, or the Opatas, for those three tribes met in the vicinity of Ures. The word Cibola might therefore belong to one of the languages or dialects of northern Sonora and the districts north and northeast of it. Its home need not be sought south of there.

Both the Pima and the Opata languages have names of places which somewhat resemble the word Cibola. East of the little village of Huachinera, at the western foot of the Sierra Madre, the Yaqui River emerges from a dark gorge and turns thence to the northwest, to irrigate the narrow, fertile valley of Baserac and Babispe. At the place where the river leaves the gorge, to turn a little later upon its northern course, lie some ruins of former villages of the Opatas, concerning the fate of which definite traditions exist. Not far from the mouth of the gorge is Batesopa; farther west are Baquigopa, then Cobora, and lastly Quitamac. When in April, 1884, I passed through this wilderness with my intelligent guide, Spiridion Lucero, to explore the ruins, exposed to constant danger of our lives from the swarms of Apaches around us, we came, after twice fording the Yaqui, to a rock around which led an extremely perilous, dizzy path, fully a hundred feet above the raging stream. The Opata Indians call this critical spot “Ci-vo-ná-ro-co,” or the rock which one goes around. A distant resemblance can be recognized between this name and Cibola, or, as it was sometimes written in the sixteenth century, “Cevola” and “Civona”; and the ruins of Batesopa opposite the dangerous cliff, as well as those of Baquigopa west of it, point to the former existence of villages of considerable extent.[68]

The language of the Pimas is divided into several dialects. Besides the southern and northern Pima, there are the Pápago and the now extinct Sobaypuri dialects. In the idiom of the northern Pimas, the ruins on the southern bank of the Rio Gila in Arizona, generally known as Casa Grande (in distinction from Casas Grandes in Chihuahua), are called “Civano-qi,” the house of the Civano. The traditions as I heard them on the spot relate that in the times before the coming of the Spaniards the Pimas lived on the banks of the middle Gila, between Riverside and Phenix, in Arizona, in permanent houses, which were grouped into small villages. No common bond connected the different villages, except in those cases where small settlements gathered around a larger neighboring one. Such tribe centers existed at Florence, Casa Grande, Zacaton, and Casa Blanca on the Gila, and at Mesa City and Tempe on the lower Rio Salada. The best known of these is the ruin of Casa Grande.

Thirty days’ journey north of Ures carries the pedestrian to the other side of the Gila River. In ten days he can easily reach the present southern boundary of Arizona, and following the course of the little Rio San Pedro, he can in five or six days more be at San Carlos on the Gila. But the old Pima villages around Casa Grande lie a hundred miles in a straight line west of San Carlos, and it would be hard to keep in this straight line, for the mountains south of the Gila as far as Riverside are high, wild, broken, and poorly watered. The estimate of thirty days’ journey might therefore possibly fit Casa Grande. The first description of Cibola which Estévanico’s Indians gave the monk is, however, more important. It does not apply to the stairlike style of building of the pueblos, but to such architecture as I found at Casa Grande, and everywhere in the ruins on the Gila, Salado, and Rio Verde. The principal building at Casa Grande, still standing, is indeed not of stone, but of coarse adobe; but three stories are still plainly visible, while smaller, one-storied houses are scattered around it. The supposition is therefore not to be absolutely rejected, that the accounts concerning Cibola current in Sinaloa were a recollection of the former Pima settlement of Civano-qi, eighty miles northwest of Tucson, on the Gila River, the ruins of which are now known by the name of Casa Grande—the great house.

Settlements of similar architectural character existed in Sonora in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and belonged likewise to the Pima, or, as it was sometimes called, the Névome tribe. The Jesuit missionary Padre Andrés Pérez de Ribas wrote of them in 1645: “Their houses were better and more solidly built than those of the other nations, for the walls consisted of large air-dried brick of clay, with flat roofs and balconies. They built some [of these houses] much larger, and with loop-holes, in order to take refuge in them as in a fortress in case of a hostile attack, and to defend themselves with bows and arrows.” The principal building of Casa Grande seems to have been a place of refuge of this kind.

Whilst it appears probable and even certain that these “permanent houses” of the Pimas in Sonora, and not the great communal structures of the New Mexican pueblos, were what Cabeza de Vaca had seen in his wanderings, it is still doubtful to what extent an indefinite recollection of their former settlement of Civano-qi may have made the southern Pimas the originators of the story of Cibola. It is to be remarked, however, that according to the reports which Estévanico sent to the priest, Cibola designated a still existing Indian settlement, and not a ruin, as Casa Grande undoubtedly was at that time. I have taken much pains to determine on the spot which of the numerous settlements of the Opatas, Sobaypuris, and Pimas, of which the ruins are still visible, may have been inhabited and relatively prosperous in the sixteenth century, and have found that (except the villages of the southern Pimas already mentioned, which are not, however, in question here) not one of these so-called pueblos corresponds to what is known to us of Cibola. It therefore seems useless to look for Cibola anywhere south of the Rio Gila or on that stream; but only north of it, either in the present Arizona or the present New Mexico, can we expect to find such a clue in language and tradition as shall lead with any certainty to a definite locality.

There is no doubt that the whole extensive region between the course of the Gila in the south, its sources in the east and the present San Carlos in the west, with the northern half of New Mexico and Arizona, was controlled in the sixteenth century by a single linguistic stock—that of what are called the “Apaches.” I say controlled, for the Apaches had no fixed abodes then more than they have now, and they roamed through the whole wild chaos of mountains, by their incursions excluding other tribes from the country. Most of their little huts of branches, sometimes plastered with mud, were set up along the streams, but they only stayed in one place so long as no occasion, however frivolous, prompted them to move their camp to some safer or more favorable place. The Apaches therefore furnish nothing to support us in localizing Cibola among them, and I know of no place-name in their language that can be connected with it. Farther east, along the course of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, are the pueblos of the Piros; these, too, aside from their distant situation, give no clue. The region, clothed with magnificent fir-trees, between the Gila and the Rio Colorado Chiquito (the Little Colorado) in western Arizona, the noble mountain landscape of the Sierra Blanca, the wild and precipitous rocks of the Escudilla and Sierra del Dátil, the still sparsely populated hunting-grounds between the Rio Grande and the Rito Quemado—were uninhabited, and only the Apaches and their northern relatives, the present Navajos, swept through them from time to time on hunting and predatory expeditions.

An undulating, often bare, highland begins in the northern part of the Escudilla, the average height of which is 6000 feet above the sea. One may wander for days at a time on the mesas, as if in a large garden of low, spreading junipers. At rare intervals a valley cuts through the uniform level, the borders of which sometimes present picturesque rocks of inconsiderable height. This region is bounded on the north by the valley of the western Rio Puerco. In the east it passes through the continental watershed of what is called the “Atlantic and Pacific Divide” into the more broken heights of San Estévan de Acoma to the Cerros Mohinos, not far from the Rio Grande. In the west it flattens out, without losing in height, into the treeless district of the Little Colorado. This desert country, visited by the summer’s heat and the winter’s cold, situated in New Mexico and on the borders of Arizona, is penetrated by a small river which rises in the Atlantic and Pacific Divide, flows generally from east to west, and unites in Arizona with the Rio Puerco. This stream flows at first through a narrow and exceedingly fertile valley. About thirty miles from the borders of Arizona it widens into a sandy and treeless but productive intervale. This intervale, which is hardly fifteen miles long and nowhere more than twelve miles wide, is watered only by the muddy brook. An isolated table-mountain rises on the southeast side over the edge of the intervale to a perpendicular height of 1026 feet above its level. The rocks everywhere hang wall-like over the valley, or swell out at the foot over the river; and only a few dizzy paths lead to the summit. Similar colossal rocks tower upon the north side, far above the rest of the valley’s edge. This plain, with the little sand-burdened river that bears its name, is the plain of Zuñi.