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Show 482 COMMENTARY ON MARK OF NICE, 1539. ( this was no doubt the Colorado- interpolation of the scholiast); and he ( or it- the relation) continues, say-him the discoverer of the Casa Grande of that river, and then spirited him to Cibola as best they could: see for example Niza's alleged but impossible route, on the map facing p. 42 of Bancroft's Hist. Ariz, and N. M. Friar Marcos stayed some days at Bacapa, whence he dispatched Stephen ahead to reconnoiter, telling him to go north some 50 or 60 leagues and send back word of what he found. The second day after Easter Sunday he followed after, and in three days reached the Rio S, onora in the vicinity of modern Babiacora. Here was a village of Opatas, who had given Stephen his first reports of Cibola, duly sent back to the friar; Cibola was said to be 30 days' journey thence, to be the first one of seven cities; and other provinces called Marata, Acus, and Totonteac were reported. Friar Marcos followed up the Rio Sonora for a week in the wake of the negro, who appears to have been meanwhile hurrying on ahead to Cibola, thus to secure for himself the glory of discovering that kingdom of which so many wonders had been narrated- and in fact he did acquire that glory, meeting death at the same time. The friar took formal possession of the Sonora valley, and on the seventh day reached the last settlement, somewhere in the vicinity of modern Bacuachi, a little north of the better known Arizpe. Then for four days he traveled northward " en el despoblado." This term " despoblado," translated " desert," has been a fruitful source of misunderstanding regarding the route of Coronado as well as of Friar Marcos. It does not mean a desert, in a physiographic sense, but simply a deserted, depopulated, or an uninhabited place- in fine, a wilderness; the traverse of which, still northward, took the friar over from headwaters of Rio Sonora to sources of Rio Nexpa or the modern San Pedro river, on the confines of Arizona. I regard this identification as assured; those who have sent Marcos down the modern Rio |