o all trouble
with the Pueblos,--who remain with us to this day practically
undiminished in numbers, though they have fewer towns, a quiet,
peaceful, Christianized race of industrious farmers, living monuments
to the humanity and the moral teaching of their conquerors.

Then came the last century, a dismal hundred years of ceaseless
harassment by the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, and occasionally by
the Utes,--a harassment which had hardly ceased a decade ago. The Indian
wars were so constant, the explorations (like that wonderful attempt to
open a road from San Antonio de Bejar, Texas, to Monterey, California)
so innumerable, that their individual heroism is lost in their own
bewildering multitude.

More than two centuries ago the Spaniards explored Texas, and settlement
soon followed. There were several minor expeditions; but the first of
magnitude was that of Alonzo de Leon, governor of the Mexican State of
Coahuila, who made extensive explorations of Texas in 1689. By the
beginning of the last century there were several Spanish settlements and
_presidios_ (garrisons) in what was to become, more than a hundred years
later, the largest of the United States.

The Spanish colonization of Colorado was not extensive, and they had no
towns north of the Arkansas River; but even in settling our Centennial
State they were half a century ahead of us, as they were some centuries
ahead in finding it.

In California the Spaniards were very active. For a long time there were
minor expeditions which were unsuccessful. Then the Franciscans came in
1769 to San Diego Bay, landed on the bare sands where a million-dollar
American hotel stands to-day, and at once began to teach the Indians, to
plant olive-orchards and vineyards, and to rear the noble stone churches
so beautifully described by the author of "Ramona," which shall remain
as monuments of a sublime faith long after the race that built them has
gone from off the face of the earth.

California had a long line of Spanish governors--the last of whom,
brave, courtly, lovable old Pio Pico, has just died--before our
acquisition of that garden-State of States. The Spaniards discovered
gold there centuries, and were mining it a decade, before an "American"
dreamed of the precious deposit which was to make such a mark on
civilization, and had found the rich placer-fields of New Mexico a
decade earlier yet.

In Arizona, Father Franciscus Eusebius Kuehne,[8] a Jesuit of Austria