rsary of its founding twenty years before it was three centuries
old.

In 1606 Onate made another expedition to the far Northeast, about which
expedition we know almost nothing; and in 1608 he was superseded by
Pedro de Peralta, the second governor of New Mexico.

Onate was of middle age when he made this very striking record. Born on
the frontier, used to the deserts, endowed with great tenacity,
coolness, and knowledge of frontier warfare, he was the very man to
succeed in planting the first considerable colonies in the United States
at their most dangerous and difficult points.

VIII.

TWO CONTINENTS MASTERED.

This, then, was the situation in the New World at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Spain, having found the Americas, had, in a little
over a hundred years of ceaseless exploration and conquest, settled and
was civilizing them. She had in the New World hundreds of towns, whose
extremes were over five thousand miles apart, with all the then
advantages of civilization, and two towns in what is now the United
States, a score of whose States her sons had penetrated. France had made
a few gingerly expeditions, which bore no substantial fruit; and
Portugal had founded a few comparatively unimportant towns in South
America. England had passed the century in masterly inactivity,--and
there was not so much as an English hut or an English man between Cape
Horn and the North Pole.

That later times have reversed the situation; that Spain (largely
because she was drained of her best blood by a conquest so enormous that
no nation even now could give the men or the money to keep the
enterprise abreast with the world's progress) has never regained her old
strength, and is now a drone beside the young giant of nations that has
grown, since her day, in the empire she opened,--has nothing to do with
the obligation of American history to give her justice for the past. Had
there been no Spain four hundred years ago, there would be no United
States to-day. It is a most fascinating story to every genuine
American,--for every one worthy of the name admires heroism and loves
fairplay everywhere, and is first of all interested in the truth about
his own country.

By 1680 the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico was beaded with Spanish
settlements from Santa Cruz to below Socorro, two hundred miles; and
there were also colonies in the Taos valley, the extreme north of the
Territory. From 1600 to 1680 there had been