h strict orders never to come back!

Coronado and his little army left Culiacan early in 1540. Guided by the
tireless priest they reached Zuni in July, and took the pueblo after a
sharp fight, which was the end of hostilities there. Thence Coronado
sent small expeditions to the strange cliff-built pueblos of Moqui (in
the northeastern part of Arizona), to the grand canyon of the Colorado,
and to the pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mexico. That winter he moved
his whole command to Tiguex, where is now the pretty New Mexican village
of Bernalillo, on the Rio Grande, and there had a serious and
discreditable war with the Tigua Pueblos.

It was here that he heard that golden myth which lured him to frightful
hardships, and hundreds since to death,--the fable of the Quivira. This,
so Indians from the vast plains assured him, was an Indian city where
all was pure gold. In the spring of 1541 Coronado and his men started in
quest of the Quivira, and marched as far across those awful plains as
the centre of our present Indian territory. Here, seeing that he had
been deceived, Coronado sent back his army to Tiguex, and himself with
thirty men pushed on across the Arkansas River, and as far as
northeastern Kansas,--that is, three-fourths of the way from the Gulf of
California to New York, and by his circuitous route much farther.

There he found the tribe of the Quiviras,--roaming savages who chased
the buffalo,--but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado
got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of
incessant marching and awful hardships. Soon after his return, he was so
seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great
danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked; and
disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of
the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of
colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with
his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into
disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative
obscurity.

This was a sad end for the remarkable man who had found out so many
thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries
before any of our blood saw any of it,--a well-born, college-bred,
ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an
explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He
wa