spectacles; and knowing nothing of the modern science of ethnology,
quite misunderstood the import of what they saw. Beset by the national
vice of flowery embellishment, they were also pardonably ignorant of
savage life, and had an indiscriminating thirst for the marvelous.
Thus, we see plainly how the Cibola myth arose and grew; and why most
official Spanish reports of the conquest of the Aztecs were so
distorted by false conceptions of the conquered people as in some
particulars to be of light value as material for history. It was,
then, small wonder that Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow adventurers, in
the midst of the hero worship of which they were now recipients,
should claim themselves to have seen the mysterious seven cities, and
to have enlarged upon the previous stories.

Coronado, governor of the northern province of New Galicia, was
accordingly sent to conquer this wonderful country, which the
adventurers had seen, but Guzman failed to find. In 1540, the years
when Cortez again returned to meet ungrateful neglect at the bands of
the Spanish court, Coronado set out with a well--equipped following of
three hundred whites and eight hundred Indians. The Cibola cities were
found to be but mud pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico, with the aspect
of which we are to--day familiar; while the mild--tempered
inhabitants, destitute of wealth, peacefully practising their crude
industries and tilling their irrigated field, were foemen hardly
worthy of Castilian steel.

[1] From Mr. Thwaites' "Rocky Mountain Explorations." By
permission of the publishers, D. Appleton & Co. Copyright 1904.
Cabeza de Vaca was born at Jeraz de la Frontera, in Spain, about
1490, and died at Seville some time after 1560. In 1528 he was
made treasurer of an expedition under Narvaez to Florida. From