s a city-bred man, and no frontiersman; and being accustomed only to
Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California,
he knew nothing of, and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts
of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when
there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands,
that New Mexico was successfully colonized.

While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a
golden fable across their desolate plains, his countrymen had found and
were exploring another of our States,--our golden garden of California.
Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great
distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan
Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred
miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three
centuries later.

After the discouraging discoveries of Coronado, the Spaniards for many
years paid little attention to New Mexico. There was enough doing in
Mexico itself to keep even that indomitable Spanish energy busy for
awhile in the civilizing of their new empire. Fray Pedro de Gante had
founded in Mexico, in 1524, the first schools in the New World; and
thereafter every church and convent in Spanish America had always a
school for the Indians attached. In 1524 there was not a single Indian
in Mexico's countless thousands who knew what letters were; but twenty
years later such large numbers of them had learned to read and write
that Bishop Zumarraga had a book made for them in their own language. By
1543 there were even industrial schools for the Indians in Mexico. It
was this same good Bishop Zumarraga who brought the first printing-press
to the New World, in 1536. It was set up in the City of Mexico, and was
soon very actively at work. The oldest book printed in America that
remains to us came from that press in 1539. A majority of the first
books printed there were to make the Indian languages intelligible,--a
policy of humane scholarship which no other nation colonizing in the New
World ever copied. The first music printed in America came from this
press in 1584.

The most striking thing of all, as showing the scholarly attitude of the
Spaniards toward the new continents, was a result entirely unique. Not
only did their intellectual activity breed among themselves a galaxy of
eminent writers, but in a very few years there was a