Cortez undertook, at his own charge, several of these expensive
exploring expeditions to discover the strait of which Montezuma had
spoken, and one of them he conducted in person. In 1528--the year he
visited Spain to meet his accusers--we find him dispatching Maldonado
northward along the Pacific coast for three hundred miles; and five
years later Grijalva and Jimenez were claiming for Spain the southern
portion of Lower California. A full hundred years before Jean Nicolet
related to the French authorities at their feeble outpost on the rock
of Quebec the story of his daring progress into the wilds of the upper
Mississippi Valley, and the rumors he had there heard of the great
river which flowed into the South Sea, Spanish officials in the halls
of Montezuma were receiving the tales of their adventurers, who had
penetrated to strange lands laved by the waters of this selfsame
ocean.

It was about the year 1530 when the Spaniards in Mexico first received
word, through an itinerant monk, Marcos de Niza, of certain powerful
semi-civilized tribes dwelling some six hundred miles north of the
capital of the Aztecs. These strange people were said to possess in
great store domestic utensils and ornaments made of gold and silver;
to be massed in seven large cities composed of houses built with
stone; and to be proficient in many of the arts of the Europeans. The
search for "the seven cities of Cibola," as these reputed communities
came to be called by the Spaniards, was at once begun.

Guzman, just then at the head of affairs in New Spain, zealously set
forth at the head of four hundred Spanish soldiers, and a large
following of Indians, to search for this marvelous country. But the
farther north the army marched the more distant became Cibola in the
report of the natives whom they met on the way; until at last the