with its quota of that great pioneer army which is carrying civilization
over the length and breadth of our land. Three hundred and forty years
ago, as legend hath it, Coronado here stopped his northward march, and
on the spot where Pueblo now stands established the farthermost outpost
of New Spain.

The average traveller who journeys westward from the Missouri River
imagines that he is coming to a new country. "The New West" is a
favorite term with the agents of land--companies and the writers of
alluring railway-guides. These enterprising advocates sometimes indulge
in flights of rhetoric that scorn the trammels of grammar and
dictionary. Witness the following impassioned utterances concerning the
lands of a certain Western railroad: "They comprise a section of country
whose possibilities are simply _infinitesimal_, and whose developments
will be revealed in glorious realization through the horoscope of the
near future." This verbal architect builded wiser than he knew, for what
more fitting word could the imagination suggest wherewith to crown the
possibilities of alkali wastes and barren, sun-scorched plains?

A considerable part of the New West of to-day was explored by the
Spaniards more than three centuries ago. Before the English had landed
at Plymouth Rock or made a settlement at Jamestown they had penetrated
to the Rocky Mountains and given to peak and river their characteristic
names. Southern Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona have been the theatres
wherein were enacted deeds of daring and bravery perhaps unsurpassed by
any people and any age; and that, too, centuries before they became a
part of our American Union. The whole country is strewn over with the
ruins of a civilization in comparison with which our own of to-day seems
feeble. And he who journeys across the Plains till he reaches the Sangre
del Cristo Mountains or the blue Sierra Mojadas enters a land made