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Show 506 COMMENTARY ON JUAN DE LA ASUNCION. tails of which seem to indicate the entrada we have now in question, while others recall Fray Marcos' of 1539. " But in the very year Motolinia wrote," says Bandelier, " Fray Marcos was Provincial of the order, consequently his immediate superior, and Fray Toribio would not have failed to state that his provincial had made the discovery, provided he meant to allude to the journey of Fray Marcos, and not to another expedition previous to it executed by another less prominent monk of Saint Francis," etc. Fifty- six years later, Fray Ge-ronimo de Mendieta gives in his Historia Ecclesiastica Indiana an account which, Bandelier thinks, for the most part looks suspiciously like a copy of Motolinia, but with certain additional data, " so that all tends to indicate that the journey of 1538, if performed by some monk whose position was rather inferior at the time, succeeded in reaching Southern Arizona. We should then have a discovery of Arizona one year previous to that of New Mexico by Fray Marcos of Nizza " ( p. 91). Bandelier finds no more to the point regarding this supposed expedition of 1538 in any one of the official documents at his command, from the sixteenth century until the eighteenth; in writers of which last there " are not only detailed references to the problematical journey of 1538, but many details not revealed by writers of the sixteenth, and, lastly, the names of the two friars who made the journey. The first such author whom Bandelier cites is Captain Juan Mateo Mange ( the same whom we have seen as the companion and itinerist of Father Kino's entradas), in a document of date 1720, entitled Luz de Tierra Incognita, etc. Here Mange states distinctly that in 1538 Friar Marcos dispatched " Fray Juan de la Asumpcion and a lay brother," who passed through Culiacan, etc.; that the lay brother was taken sick, and left behind; that the other friar continued his journey 600 leagues to the northwest of Mexico, etc.- in fine, giving an account of a journey quite like that which Garc6s is about to signalize in his text, p. 479. The duration of the journey is put at nine months by Mange; and as we are told |