It was in 1530 that specific reports first came, through native slaves, of seven great cities of stone-built houses a few hundred miles north of the capital of the Aztecs, where the inhabitants had such a profusion of gold and silver that their household utensils were made of those metals. |The "Seven Cities of Cibola."| The search for "the seven cities of Cibola," as these alleged communities came to be called by the Spaniards, was at once begun. Guzman, just then at the head of affairs in New Spain, led northward a considerable expedition of Spanish soldiers and Indians, which suffered great hardships, but failed to discover Cibola.
Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow-adventurers claimed, upon their arrival, to have themselves seen the seven cities; and they enlarged on the previous stories. |Coronado's march.| Coronado, governor of the northern province of New Gallicia, was accordingly sent to conquer this wonderful country which Guzman had failed to find. Early in 1540 he set out with a well-equipped following of three hundred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians. The Cibola cities were found to be but pueblos in Arizona or New Mexico, like the communal dwellings of the Hopis and Zuñis, with the aspect of which we are so familiar to-day; while the mild inhabitants destitute of wealth, peacefully practising their crude industries and tilling their irrigated fields, were foemen hardly worthy of Castilian steel. Disappointed, but still hoping to find the country of gold, Coronado's gallant little army, frequently thinned by death and desertion, beat for three years up and down the southwestern wilderness,—now thirsting in the deserts, now penned up in gloomy cañons, now crawling over pathless mountains, suffering the horrors of starvation and of despair, but following this will-o'-the-wisp with a melancholy perseverance seldom seen in man save when searching for some mysterious treasure. Coronado apparently crossed the State of Kansas twice; "through mighty plains and sandy heaths, smooth and wearisome and bare of wood.... All that way the plains are as full of crookback oxen as the mountain Serena in Spain is of sheep.... They were a great succor for the hunger and want of bread which our people stood in. One day it rained in that plain a great shower of hail as big as oranges, which caused many tears, weaknesses, and vows." The wanderer ventured as far as the Missouri, and would have gone still farther eastward but for his inability to cross the swollen river. Co-operating parties explored the upper valleys of the Rio Grande and Gila, ascended the Colorado for two hundred and forty miles above its mouth, and visited the Grand Cañon of the same river. Coronado at last returned, satisfied that he had been made the victim of travellers' idle tales. He was rewarded with contumely and lost his place as governor of New Gallicia; but his romantic march stands in history as one of the most remarkable exploring expeditions of modern times.
De Soto follows Narvaez.
Early in the summer of 1539 Hernando de Soto, the favorite of Pizarro in the conquest of Peru (1532), anchored his fleet in the bay of Espiritu Santo, Florida, determined to gain independent renown as the conqueror of the North American wilds. His was a much larger and better-equipped party than had subjugated either Mexico or Peru. But he met the fate of Narvaez. False Indian guides led him hither and thither through the swamps and moss-grown jungles of the Gulf region, and the survivors formed a sorry company indeed when the Mississippi River was reached (April, 1541),—probably at the lowest Chickasaw Bluff,—after two years of fruitless wandering. The next winter, still betrayed by his savage guides and harassed by attacks from other natives, he spent upon the Washita, but despairing of reaching Mexico by land, he returned to the Mississippi, where he died of swamp-fever (May 21, 1542). The great river he had discovered was his tomb. His wretched followers, by this time much reduced in numbers, descended the stream, and after great hardships finally reached the Mexican coast-settlements in September.
10. Spanish Colonies (1492-1687).
A half century had now passed since the advent of Columbus in the Bahamas; yet upon the mainland to the north, Spain as yet held neither harbor, fort, nor settlement. In the southwest, the proximity of Mexico and the milder character of the natives made it easier to maintain a settlement in what is now United States territory. |Spanish friars in the southwest.| In 1582, forty years after Coronado's march, Franciscan friars opened missions in the valleys of the Rio Grande and the Gila,—the Cibola of old. Sixteen years later (1598) Santa Fé was established as the seat of Spanish power in the north; by 1630 this power was at its highest in New Mexico and Arizona, fifty missions administering religious instruction to ninety Pueblo towns. In 1687 the chain of missions had reached the Gulf of California, and then slowly extended northward along the Pacific coast till San Francisco, with its system of Indian vassalage, was established in 1776. In Florida, after the extermination of the French Huguenot colony in 1564, Spain made wholesale claims to all that region; but De Gourgues dealt her settlements a staggering blow, and she seemed thereafter incapable of further colonizing the province. |Spain's American possessions at close of sixteenth century.| At the close of the sixteenth century Spain held but few points in what is now the United States,—Santa Fé in New Mexico, a few scattering missions along the Gila and Rio Grande, and St. Augustine in Florida.
11. The French in North America (1524-1550).
The French enter the field.
The French were not far behind the Spanish in their attempts to colonize North America. In 1524 John Verrazano, a Florentine in the employ of Francis I., while seeking the supposed water passage through America to China, explored the coast from about Wilmington, N. C., to Newfoundland. Ten years later (1534) Jacques Cartier, a St. Malo seaman, sailed up the north shore of the estuary of the St. Lawrence "until land could be seen on either side." |Cartier at Montreal;| The next year he was back again, and ascended to the first rapids at La Chine, naming the island mountain there, Mont-Réal. Having spent the winter in this inhospitable region, his reports were such as to discourage for a time further attempts at colonization in America by the French, who were just now engaged at home in serious difficulties with Spain.
A truce being at last declared between France and Spain, Cartier was made captain-general and chief pilot of an American colonizing expedition which Francis allowed the lord of Roberval to undertake. But this conflict of authority was distasteful to both Cartier and Roberval, and the former started off before his chief in May, 1541. |and Quebec.| He built a fort near Quebec, but a year later returned to France, just before Roberval arrived with reinforcements for the colony. The latter remained for a year in America before returning home, and it is thought that he visited Massachusetts Bay in his voyages alongshore. France was now ablaze with civil war, and the Huguenots, with their independent notions, were engaging all the resources of the royal power, so that further American discoveries were for the time postponed. The Newfoundland industry, however, grew apace, for the Church prescribed a fish diet on certain days and at certain seasons, and the consumption of salted fish in Europe had grown to be enormous. Breton vessels were from the first prominent in the traffic.