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Show CHAPTER XXX. THE CENTENNIAL STATE. DON FRANCISCO VASQUEZ CORONADO, ( the chronicle does not give his other name,) was the first Pike's Peaker. In 1541 he. set out from the City of Mexico to find and conquer the " Seven Cities of Cibola," where, according to the reports of reliable gentlemen and the common belief of all New Spain, gold was so plentiful that the Cibolans used it for the manufacture of common utensils, while their houses were lighted with precious stones, and silver was not accounted of. His command consisted of some seven hundred cavaliers and gentlemen of the New Spain nobility, who gladly sold all they had to outfit, as-suring the reporters of Mexico City that " neither themselves nor their families would ever need more gold than they should bring back from the Seven Cities." They marched and fought, and fought and marched : up the Colorado to the mouth of the Gila, up the Gila to the Casas Grandes and northward across Arizona to the Rio San Juan. They penetrated what is now Colorado, then turned south- east to where Santa Fe now stands, and still their Indian guides assured them the golden Cibola of their hopes was a little further on. After a brief rest, having destroyed a few Pueblo towns and temples, and burnt their idols for the truth's sake, they crossed the mountains and marched down nearly to the center of the present Indian Territory, and still found no Cibola, no gold, and no rich kingdom. Then the inevitable quarrel arose, the expedition broke up, and the cavaliers re-turned to Mexico, seven years older, considerably poorer, and some-what wiser than they left it. But they added to Spanish territory, by the apostolical right of discovery, an area twelve times the size of Ohio; the same since added to our free Republic by the slaveholder's right of conquest, and payment of ten million dollars. A fas-cinating account of Coronado's expedition was written by a Span-ish gentleman in the party, a Mr. Castenada, who was born three centuries too soon. He should have lived in our day and been a " Washington correspondent; he had the requisite fancy and power of romantic embellishment, and was pious to a fault. He would have consented to the death of all the heathen in the new ter- ( 470) |