a, particularly Mexico, was being rapidly settled by
Spaniards. The growth of the colonies was very remarkable for those
times,--that is, where there were any resources to support a growing
population. The city of Puebla, for instance, in the Mexican State of
the same name, was founded in 1532 and began with thirty-three settlers.
In 1678 it had eighty thousand people, which is twenty thousand more
than New York city had one hundred and twenty-two years later.

VII.

SPAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.

Cortez was still captain-general when Cabeza de Vaca came into the
Spanish settlements from his eight years' wandering, with news of
strange countries to the north; but Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy of
Mexico, and Cortez' superior, and between him and the traitorous
conqueror was endless dissension. Cortez was working for himself,
Mendoza for Spain.

As Mexico became more and more thickly dotted with Spanish settlements,
the attention of the restless world-finders began to wander toward the
mysteries of the vast and unknown country to the north. The strange
things Vaca had seen, and the stranger ones he had heard, could not fail
to excite the dauntless rovers to whom he told them. Indeed, within a
year after the arrival in Mexico of the first transcontinental
traveller, two more of our present States were found by his countrymen
as the direct result of his narratives. And now we come to one of the
best-slandered men of them all,--Fray Marcos de Nizza, the discoverer of
Arizona and New Mexico.

Fray (brother) Marcos was a native of the province of Nizza, then a part
of Savoy, and must have come to America in 1531. He accompanied Pizarro
to Peru, and thence finally returned to Mexico. He was the first to
explore the unknown lands of which Vaca had heard such wonderful reports
from the Indians, though he had never seen them himself,--"the Seven
Cities of Cibola, full of gold," and countless other marvels. Fray
Marcos started on foot from Culiacan (in Sinaloa, on the western edge of
Mexico) in the spring of 1539, with the negro Estevanico, who had been
one of Vaca's companions, and a few Indians. A lay brother, Onorato, who
started with him, fell sick at once and went no farther. Now, here was a
genuine Spanish exploration, a fair sample of hundreds,--this fearless
priest, unarmed, with a score of unreliable men, starting on a year's
walk through a desert where even in this day of railroads and highways
and trails and