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Show COMMENTARY ON CORONADO. 513 the Salado or Salt river; but that would not be ten days off, nor inhabited in 1538 by numerous people in walled pueblos, etc. Again, supposing the friar on either the Gila or the Salt, and the larger river beyond to be the Colorado, it could not be reached in going ten days northward, nor on it would be found the required populace. Turn and twist the data as we may, we find insuperable difficulties in adjusting them with known facts of geography and ethnology. I believe Juan de la Asumpcion to have entered Arizona in 1558; I suppose him to have reached the Gila; and the rest of the Relacion seems simply a confused account of the Colorado and of the Zuni or Moqui pueblos, thus erroneously brought together. 11 Coronado's march from Culiacan to Kansas is a singular climax of fame and futility. Perhaps no other expedition of equal extent, which discovered so much, was ever so barren of immediate results. It led to nothing but chagrin in Coronado's own time, and speedily lapsed from effect upon current affairs. Years afterward, all that it had accomplished acquired the aspect of a feverish dream, and needed to be done over again by different men, under different circumstances, and in a new light, to be carried into any actual effect. By the time that this was done, the actual annals of Coronado's exploitation had been thrown out of sober historical focus into the blurred chromatics of tradition, and become incrusted with myth- hardly anything was too fabulous to be acceptable as fact in the legends of Coronado's cometary orbit. Time passed; three centuries had their day during Coronado's aphelion, so to speak, and the whole subject acquired a shroud of mystery, which antiquarian curiosity inspected to little real purpose; for where Coronado went and what he did became the worn- out toys of would- be commentators, who juggled as they pleased with the actual sources of information on the subject. It is only within the last half century that Coronado's march has swung |