A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

Everybody has contributed to giving names to the States; therefore attention to them as a class is fitting. England gave name to Maryland, as suggested in another paragraph; to New York, named in honor of the Duke of York, afterward known as James II, of evil memory; Virginia, so styled by Sir Walter Raleigh, that pattern of chivalry, in honor of his queen, Elizabeth; New Jersey, after Jersey, the island; Rhode Island, after the Island of Rhodes; Delaware, after Lord de la Warre, early governor of Virginia; Pennsylvania, after William Penn, the good; New Hampshire, after Hampshire, in England, as New England was, in love, called after the motherland; Georgia, named for George II, by philanthropic General Oglethorpe, who brought hither his colony of debtors,—such the contributions of England to our commonwealth of names. America has supplied one State a name, Washington; and who more or so worthy to write his name upon a State as George Washington, first Commander-in-chief and President? Spain has christened these Commonwealths: Florida, the land of flowers; California; Colorado, colored; Nevada. We must thank France for these: Maine, for a province in France; Vermont, green mountains; the Carolinas; Louisiana, a name attached by the valorous La Salle, in fealty to his prince, calling this province, at the mouth of the river he had followed to its entrance into the ocean, after Louis XIV, the then darling of the French people. Mexico is remembered in two instances: New Mexico and Texas. Italy has a memorial, bestowed in gratitude by America. The District of Columbia, with its capital, Washington, reminds men forever that Columbus discovered and Washington saved America. Besides this, to Italy's credit, or discredit—I know not which—must be charged the giving title to two continents. Amerigo Vespucci has lent his name to one hemisphere of the world. Other States bear Indian captions. Those wandering hunters have lost their hunting-grounds; but we can not forget whose hunting-grounds they were so long as the Indian name clings to the Territory where he is not, but his name shall remain as his monument. Indiana is generic, the land of the Indian. With this exception, the States are called after tribes or by some Indian name: Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas (who will forget when Hiawatha passed to the land of the Dakotahs for his wooing?), Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and the like. With such names, we are once more sitting in the woodland, by the wigwam, as we did a century ago. The memory haunts us. Thus much for the racial element in cognomens of States.

Now again to set out on the journey on the trail of vanished peoples!

The Spanish invasion of America, now, as we recall its story, big with pathos and remorse, the pathos predominating, now that the last rag of a province has been torn from their feeble hands,—the evacuation of Havana, with its sorry pomp of exhuming Columbus's dust, is one of the saddest sights history has called men to look upon. Columbus, a foreigner, gave Spain a New World; and foreigners of still another blood have taken away what by right never belonged to Spanish sovereignty. Just as this fate is, we can but feel the immense pathos of the Spanish evacuation of the New World. French discoverers hugged the rivers, as by some deep affinity. Spaniards, conversely, made march without thought of riverways. They were accustomed to deserts in their own land, and feared them not in a remote hemisphere. They swarmed in the desert. Nothing daunted them. Spain's best blood poured into the New World, a fact which doubtless accounts, in part, for the devitalized energies and genius of this mother country of their birth and hopes and initiative. "Florida" is a Spanish tide-mark. "St. Augustine" is a gravestone of history, marking the mound where lies the dust of the first permanent colony planted in America. The Spaniard headed toward the southern provinces of America, as the Englishman to the east, and the Frenchman to the north and central provinces. Spain held southward. Though the colony of Florida was retained till, in the year 1819, the subtle diplomacy of John Quincy Adams added this peninsula of flowers to the Union of States, it had no aggressive value as a basis of discovery or colonization. The base of Spanish operations was Mexico, the fair land of their conquest. Spain exploited her energies in Mexico and Peru. She was mad with a lust for gold. Her galleons made these lands bankrupt. But Spaniards dared to lose themselves in desert or forests. The discovery and conquest of Peru is mad with turbulent courage and adventure. This we can not deny; and the discovery of the Amazon by a brother of Pizarro is a story to thrill a sluggard into a sleepless waking. We see these heroic days, and forgive much of Spanish misrule and avarice. De Soto, crowding through jungles of undergrowth and miasms, through tribes of hostile men, though stimulated by the wild lust for gold, is for all a brave chapter in the world's biography; and to see him buried in the massive river he discovered is to make other than the tender-hearted weep. To see on the map of the Union "Llano Estacado" is to give, as it were, the initials of heroic names. Spain, which staked these plains, will walk across them no more. They did this service for others. Were they fine-fibered enough to feel these losses, the sorrow we feel for their exit would be intensified; but their centuries of misrule have certified to their all but utter lack of any finer sentiment or sense of high responsibility. Give them what honor we may. Recall their departed glory, and let it light the sky, if only for a moment, like a flash of lightning. Spaniards were little less given to naming their settlements "Saint" than the French. From Mexico, up the long Pacific Coast, they affixed names which will remain perpetually as the sole memorial that once these banished dons held sway in the United States. These names cluster in the Southern United States, touching immediately on their chief dependency, Mexico; but are still in evidence farther away, though growing scanter, as footprints in a remote highway. Rio Grande, Del Norte, Andalusia, and the charming name affixed to a charming mountain range, Sierra Nevada,—how these names rehabilitate a past! Nevada and Andalusia! One needs little imagination to see the flush that gathered on the dusky cheek of the old Spanish discoverer when he calmed, in part, his homesickness by giving his wanderings the name of the dear home from which he came, and kindled his pride into a fire, like the conflagration of mountain pines, by telling the New World the names of his ancestral land. But his "San" and "Santa" are frequent as tents upon a battle-field when the battle is spent. "Corpus Christi"—how Spanish and Catholic that is! San Antonio, Santa Fe, Cape St. Lucas. In Florida: Rio San Juan, Ponce de Leon, Cape San Blas, Hernando, Punta Rosa, Cerro de Oro, are indicative of the growing communities in that peninsula after the invasion located at St. Augustine. But of all the parts of the United States, New Mexico is most honeycombed with Spanish locatives. Passing that way, one seems not to be in America, but in Spain. Spain is everywhere. Their names are here strewn thick as battle soldiers sleeping on the battle-field: Las Colonias, Arayo Salado, Don Carlos Hill, Cerillos, Dolores, San Pambo, Cañon Largo, Magdalene Mountains, San Pedro. Thence these names creep up into Utah, though there they are never numerous: Santa Clara, Escalante Desert, Sierra Abaja; and farther north, reaching to all but hand-clasp with the French Du Chasne River, is San Rafael River. St. Xavier, San Miguel, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Gabriel,—can you not in these names hear the Spanish languishing speech and see the Jesuit pioneer? Eldorado, Sacramento, El Paso, Los Angeles, are footprints of the Spanish discoverer. And Cape Blanco, in far-away Oregon, probably represents the farthest campfire of the Spanish march. In his area the don was indefatigable. De Soto marched like a conqueror. Coronado found his way into Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. La Junta, in Kansas, may mark the subsidence of the wave of Spanish invasion, and Kansas was part of the kingdom of "Quivera." Eugene Ware, the Kansas poet, who, under the nom de plume of "Ironquill," has written graceful and musical poems, has told of Coronado's excursion into this now populous and fertile region:

QUIVERA

"In that half-forgotten era,
With the avarice of old,
Seeking cities he was told
Had been paved with yellow gold,
In the kingdom of Quivera—

Came the restless Coronado
To the open Kansas plain,
With his knights from sunny Spain;
In an effort that, though vain,
Thrilled with boldness and bravado.

League by league, in aimless marching,
Knowing scarcely where or why,
Crossed they uplands drear and dry,
That an unprotected sky
Had for centuries been parching.

But their expectations, eager,
Found, instead of fruitful lands,
Shallow streams and shifting sands,
Where the buffalo in bands
Roamed o'er deserts dry and meager.

Back to scenes more trite, yet tragic,
Marched the knights with armor'd steeds;
Not for them the quiet deeds;
Not for them to sow the seeds
From which empires grow like magic.

Never land so hunger-stricken
Could a Latin race remold;
They could conquer heat or cold—
Die for glory or for gold—
But not make a desert quicken.