Vaca, as a
guide, to spy out the land.

Fray Marcos penetrated as far as Zuni, and found there the seven cities,
wonderful and strange; though he did not enter them, as the uncurbed
amorous demands of Stephen had led to his death, and Marcos feared lest
a like fate befall himself, but he returned and gave a fairly accurate
account of what he saw. His story was not untruthful, but there are
those who think it was misleading in its pauses and in what he did not
tell. Those pauses and eloquent silences were construed by the vivid
imaginations of his listeners to indicate what the _Conquistadores_
desired, so a grand and glorious expedition was planned, to go forth
with great sound of trumpets, in glad acclaim and glowing colors, led by
his Superior Excellency and Most Nobly Glorious Potentate, Senyor Don
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a native of Salamanca, Spain, and now
governor of the Mexican province of New Galicia.

It was a gay throng that started on that wonderful expedition from
Culiacan early in 1540. Their hopes were high, their expectations keen.
Many of them little dreamed of what was before them. Alarcon was sent to
sail up the Sea of Cortes (now the Gulf of California) to keep in touch
with the land expedition, and Melchior Diaz, of that sea party, forced
his way up what is now the Colorado River to the arid sands of the
Colorado Desert in Southern California, before death and disaster
overtook him.

Coronado himself crossed Arizona to Zuni--the pueblo of the Indians that
Fray Marcos had gazed upon from a hill, but had not dared approach--and
took it by storm, receiving a wound in the conflict which laid him up
for a while and made it necessary to send his lieutenant, the Ensign
Pedro de Tobar, to further conquests to the north and west. Hence it was
that Tobar, and not Coronado, discovered the pueblos of the Hopi
Indians. He also sent his sergeant, Cardenas, to report on the stories
told him of a mighty river also to the north, and this explains why
Cardenas was the first white man to behold that eloquent abyss since
known as the Grand Canyon. And because Cardenas was Tobar's subordinate
officer, the high authorities of the Santa Fe Railway--who have yielded
to a common-sense suggestion in the Mission architecture of their
railway stations, and romantic, historic naming of their hotels--have
called their Grand Canyon hotel, _El Tovar_, their hotel at Las Vegas,
_Cardenas_, and the one at Williams (the ju