"there trod
The whitest of the saints of God,"
and "The True City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis" (La Ciudad Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco) is forever consecrated by the memory of these holy men, and vital with the tragic interest, the heroic and pathetic story of their lives. As early as 1539 Friar Marcos de Nizza and other Fathers of the Church pressed on into this country—then an unknown wilderness—to extend the domain of the Holy Cross and carry onward "the true faith of St. Francis." They encountered every hardship possible to a savage land; sacrifice and martyrdom were their reward. They left a land of learning and refinement to carry the light into regions of barbarism. They gave their lives to teaching and prayer, and they sowed without reaping their harvest. Yet who shall dare think of their brilliant, consecrated lives as wasted? for the lesson they taught of absolute faith in God is the most important in life. Faith provides the atmosphere through which alone the divine aid can be manifested, and the divine aid is sent through and by means of our friends and helpers and counsellors in the unseen world. It is man's business, his chief business, now and here, to co-operate with God in the carrying out of His plans and purposes. It was this literal and practical faith in divine aid that the Franciscan Fathers taught in the wilderness through all hardship and disaster.
"Say not the struggle naught availeth."
It must always avail.
"Yet do thy work; it shall succeed
In thine or in another's day,
And if denied the victor's meed
Thou shalt not lack the toiler's pay."
This Spanish mission work planted itself over the entire vast region which is now known as New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California. The friars set out on long, lonely journeys, wholly without ways and means to reach a given destination save as they were guided by unseen hands and companioned by unseen guides. The cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night led them on. They went forth to meet desolation and sacrifice and often martyrdom; yet their gentle zeal and cheerful courage never failed. They traversed hundreds of miles of desert wastes; they encountered the cruel treatment of the Apaches and the Navajos; but these experiences were simply to them the incidents of the hour, and had no relation to the ultimate issue of their work. In 1598 the first church was founded, by a band of ten missionaries who accompanied Juan de Oñate, the colonizer, and was called the chapel of San Gabriel de los Españoles, but it was deserted when, in 1605, the city of Santa Fé was founded by Oñate, and in 1630 the church of San Miguel was built. The original wall was partly destroyed in the rebellion of a half-century later, but it was restored in 1710, and the new cathedral was built on the site where the present one now stands. As early as 1617 there were eleven Spanish mission churches within the limits of what is now New Mexico,—at Pecos, Jemez, and Taos; at Santa Clara, San Felipe, and other places, mostly within the valley of the Rio Grande. In six of the historic "seven cities of Cibola," all Zuñi towns, these missions were established; and in the ancient pueblo of San Antonio de Senecú, Antonio de Arteaga founded a church in 1629; in Picuries, in 1632, Friar Ascencion de Zárate established the mission, and in 1635 one also in Isleta. In passing Glorieta, from the train windows, to-day, can be seen the ruins of the early mission church established there. Before the close of the seventeenth century the churches in Acoma, Alameda, Santa Cruz, Cuaray, and Tabirá had been founded, the ruins of all of which are still standing. These Franciscan Fathers penetrated the desert and made their habitations in solitary wastes so desolate that no colonizers would follow; but to the Indians they preached and taught them the elements of civilized life.