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Show NOTE ON GRAN QUIVIRA. 497 which is now beginning to be done; I cannot do less than thank God. The first Espanoles commenced to catechise in Sinaloa, and made discoveries unto the coast of the sea at the Canal, in connection with the settlements that they called Quevira47- those which some of their successors held to be supposititious ( por supuestas) but which in these times seem to us proba-measures, for his much- desired Coloradan missions and presidio - in fact, he wished them to take precedence over those already established at San Diego, for the reasons that he gives, among which was the avoidance of friction between the commanding officers of the two establishments. He would make San Diego a mere entrepot, tributary to the foundations upon the Colorado, and for this among other reasons favored the supplying of the latter by way of the seacoast. We have already seen, in the Biography of Garces with which this work opens, how the Colorado missions were established overland from Sonora; how brief, precarious, and finally disastrous was their existence; and how the relief that was sent to them from the seacoast failed of its purpose, appearing upon the scene only to increase the number of victims of the massacre. * The actual Quivira of Coronado, as we see on p. 520, was somewhere in central Kansas; but with the lapse of time it shifted in myths and on maps all over western and southwestern United States, even to the Pacific coast of California- its position in the mind of Garces when he penned the above. The most definite and persistent of all these traditions or legends was that which malidentified Coronado's Quivira with the Piro pueblo of Tabira, in New Mexico, east of the Rio Grande. This was a pueblo abandoned on account of Apache depredations about 1675, whose ruins long bore and still bear the name of Gran Quivira. How the mythical Quivira " has- |