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.

Thus Quivera was forsaken;
And the world forgot the place
Through the lapse of time and space.
Then the blue-eyed Saxon race
Came and bade the desert waken."

In Colorado, El Moro, Las Animas, and Buena Vista are credentials of
Spanish occupancy, the last-named place being, so far as I have been
able to trace, the farthest camp marked by a name in the Colorado
district. They all sought gold, and having failed to find the thing
for which they made their quest, ran back, like a retiring wave.
Coronado and Eldorado are suffused with Spanish life, like a woman's
cheek with blushes when her lover comes. Over scorching d