with their names, as understood at the time. The
letter of Fray Francisco de San Miguel, first priest of Pecos, given in
print by Torquemada, is of considerable interest. Torquemada himself was
never in New Mexico, but he stood high in the Franciscan Order and had
full access to the correspondence and to all other papers submitted from
outside missions during his time. It is much to be regretted that the
three manuscript pamphlets by Fray Roque Figueredo, bearing the titles
_Relacion del Viage al Nuevo Mexico_, _Libro de las Fundaciones del
Nuevo Mexico_, and _Vidas de los Varones Ilustres_, etc., appear to be
lost. Their author was first in New Mexico while Onate governed that
province, and his writings were at the great convent of Mexico. Whether
they disappeared during the ruthless dispersion of its archives in 1857
or were lost at an earlier date is not known.

After the recall of Onate from New Mexico, not only the colony but also
the missions in that distant land began to decline, owing to the bitter
contentions between the political and the ecclesiastical authorities.
The Franciscan Order, desirous of inspiring an interest in New Mexican
missions, fostered the literary efforts of its missionaries in order to
promote a propaganda for conversions. It also sent a special visitor to
New Mexico in the person of Fray Estevan de Perea, who gave expression
to what he saw and ascertained, in two brief printed but excessively
rare documents, a facsimile copy of which is owned by my friend Mr F. W.
Hodge, of the Bureau of American Ethnology. A third letter which I have
not been able to see is mentioned by Ternaux-Compans, also a "Relacion
de la Conversion de los Jumanos" by the same and dated 1640.

Much more extended than the brief pamphlets by Fray Perea is the
_Relaciones de todas las cosas acaecidas en el Nuevo Mexico hasta el Ano
de 1626_ (I abbreviate the very long title), by Fray Geronimo de Zarate
Salmeron, which was published in the third series of the first
_Coleccion de Documentos para la Historia de Mexico_, and also by Mr
Charles F. Lummis in _The Land of Sunshine_, with an English
translation. This work, while embodying chiefly a narrative most
valuable to the ethnography of western Arizona and eastern California,
of the journey of Onate to the Colorado river of the West, followed by
an extended report on De Soto's expedition to the Mississippi river,
contains data on the Rio Grande Pueblos and on those of Jem