s,--the single province of New Mexico. There were many
fields which presented even greater obstacles, and cost more lives of
uncomplaining martyrs and more generations of discouraging toil; but it
is safe to take a modest example, as well as one which so much concerns
our own national history.

New Mexico and Arizona--the real wonderland of the United States--were
discovered in 1539, as you know, by that Spanish missionary whom every
young American should remember with honor,--Fray Marcos, of Nizza. You
have had glimpses, too, of the achievements of Fray Ramirez, Fray
Padilla, and other missionaries in that forbidding land, and have gained
some idea of the hardships which were common to all their brethren; for
the wonderful journeys, the lonely self-sacrifice, the gentle zeal, and
too often the cruel deaths of these men were not exceptions, but fair
types of what the apostle to the Southwest must expect.

There have been missionaries elsewhere whose flocks were as long
ungrateful and murderous, but few if any who were more out of the world.
New Mexico has been for three hundred and fifty years, and is to-day,
largely a wilderness, threaded with a few slender oases. To people of
the Eastern States a desert seems very far off; but there are hundreds
of thousands of square miles in our own Southwest to this day where the
traveller is very likely to die of thirst, and where poor wretches every
year do perish by that most awful of deaths. Even now there is no
trouble in finding hardship and danger in New Mexico; and once it was
one of the cruellest wildernesses conceivable. Scarce a decade has gone
by since an end was put to the Indian wars and harassments, which had
lasted continuously for more than three centuries. When Spanish colonist
or Spanish missionary turned his back on Old Mexico to traverse the
thousand-mile, roadless desert to New Mexico, he took his life in his
hands; and every day in that savage province he was in equal danger. If
he escaped death by thirst or starvation by the way, if the party was
not wiped out by the merciless Apache, then he settled in the wilderness
as far from any other home of white men as Chicago is from Boston. If a
missionary, he was generally alone with a flock of hundreds of cruel
savages; if a soldier or a farmer, he had from two hundred to fifteen
hundred friends in an area as big as New England, New York,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio combined, in the very midst of a hundred thousand
s