old, which cost thousands of lives and
hundreds of thousands of Spanish ducats, lives even to-day in remote
neighborhoods of the southwest.

Pizarro conquered Peru in 1526; by 1535, with the south looted, Spanish
eyes looked longingly northward. In 1539 Fray Marcos, a Franciscan, made
a reconnaissance from the Spanish settlements of Sonora into Arizona
with the particular purpose of locating the seven cities. The following
year Coronado, at his own expense, made the most romantic exploration in
human history. Spanish expectation may be measured by the cost of this
and its accompanying expedition by sea to the Gulf of California, the
combined equipment totalling a quarter million dollars of American money
of to-day. Coronado took two hundred and sixty horsemen, sixty
foot-soldiers, and more than a thousand Indians. Besides his
pack-animals he led a thousand spare horses to carry home the loot.

He sought the seven cities in Arizona and New Mexico, and found the
pueblo of Zuni, prosperous but lacking its expected hoard of gold; he
crossed Colorado in search of Quivira and found it in Kansas, a wretched
habitation of a shiftless tribe; their houses straw, he reported, their
clothes the hides of cows, meaning bison. He entered Nebraska in search
of the broad river whose shores were lined with gold--the identical
year, curiously, in which De Soto discovered the Mississippi. Many were
the pueblos he visited and many his adventures and perils; but the only
treasure he brought back was his record of exploration.

This was the first of more than two centuries of Spanish expeditions.
Fifty years after Coronado, the myth of Quivira was born again;
thereafter it wandered homeless, the inspiration of constant search, and
finally settled in the ruins of the ancient pueblo of Tabira, or, as
Bandelier has it, Teypana, New Mexico; the myth of the seven cities
never wholly perished.

It is not my purpose to follow the fascinating fortunes of Spanish
proselyting and conquest. I merely set the stage for the tableaux of the
national monuments.

I

The Spaniards found our semiarid southwest dotted thinly with the
pueblos and its canyons hung with the cliff-dwellings of a large and
fairly prosperous population of peace-loving Indians, who hunted the
deer and the antelope, fished the rivers, and dry-farmed the mesas and
valleys. Not so advanced in the arts of civilization as the people of
the Mesa Verde, in Colorado, nevertheless thei