his Superior Excellency and Most Nobly Glorious Potentate, Senyor Don
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a native of Salamanca, Spain, and now
governor of the Mexican province of New Galicia.

It was a gay throng that started on that wonderful expedition from
Culiacan early in 1540. Their hopes were high, their expectations keen.
Many of them little dreamed of what was before them. Alarcon was sent to
sail up the Sea of Cortés (now the Gulf of California) to keep in touch
with the land expedition, and Melchior Diaz, of that sea party, forced
his way up what is now the Colorado River to the arid sands of the
Colorado Desert in Southern California, before death and disaster
overtook him.

Coronado himself crossed Arizona to Zuni--the pueblo of the Indians that
Fray Marcos had gazed upon from a hill, but had not dared approach--and
took it by storm, receiving a wound in the conflict which laid him up
for a while and made it necessary to send his lieutenant, the Ensign
Pedro de Tobar, to further conquests to the north and west. Hence it was
that Tobar, and not Coronado, discovered the pueblos of the Hopi
Indians. He also sent his sergeant, Cardenas, to report on the stories
told him of a mighty river also to the north, and this explains why
Cardenas was the first white man to behold that eloquent abyss since
known as the Grand Canyon. And because Cardenas was Tobar's subordinate
officer, the high authorities of the Santa Fé Railway--who have yielded
to a common-sense suggestion in the Mission architecture of their
railway stations, and romantic, historic naming of their hotels--have
called their Grand Canyon hotel, _El Tovar_, their hotel at Las Vegas,
_Cardenas_, and the one at Williams (the junction point of the main line
with the Grand Canyon branch), _Fray Marcos._