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Show COMMENTARY ON JUAN DE LA ASUNCION. 505 only weapons of those apostates and gentiles, who spared only the women. Of all of which will be given a better account in due time ( quando se hable de pr o posit o). [ Signed] MIGUEL VALERO OLEA. This 4 of August of 1785. " Mention of this Franciscan friar, Fray Juan de la Asump-cion, raises a notable question which never has been and perhaps never will be answered satisfactorily. The person in mention, also known as Juan de la Asuncion, or Juan de Ol-meda, is said to have entered Arizona in 1538, before September of that year, with another friar named Pedro Nadal. If this be the fact, they were the discoverers of Arizona, about a year before the negro Estevan and Friar Marcos de Niza made their celebrated entrada of 1559. The whole question will be found exhaustively discussed, in the light of all known original documents bearing upon it, by A. F. Bandelier, in his Contributions to the History of the Southwestern Portion of the United States, published in connection with the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, in Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, American Series, vol. v, 8vo, Cambridge, 1890, pp. 84- 105. Some of the testimony that Bandelier presents may be here summarized. After showing that the reports of the viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, contain nothing to the point about Friar Juan's supposed operations of 1558, though much about Friar Marcos, Bandelier first adduces the evidence of Fray Toribio de Paredes, better known as Moto-linia, regarding explorations made in 1538. It appears in his Historia de los Indios de la Nueva Espafia ( Coll. Doc. para Hist Mex., by J. G. Icazbalceta, 1858, vol. i, tratado iii, cap. v. p. 171), that in 1538 the Provincial Fray Antonio de Ciudad Rod-rigo sent two friars, names not given, on a journey, some de- |