Tobar, who recently had paid them a visit, and incidentally shot a
few of them to invite submission. Cardenas was kindly received by the
people of Tusayan, who readily supplied him with guides. Having lived
in the country for centuries, they of course knew it and the many
trails very well. They knew the highway down the Gila to the
Colorado, and they told Cardenas about the tall natives living in the
lower part of it, the same whom Alarcon and Diaz had met. In the
direction in which Cardenas was to go they said it was twenty days'
journey through an unpopulated country, when people would again be
met with. After the party had travelled for twenty days they arrived
at a great canyon of the Colorado River, apparently not having met
with the people mentioned. If Cardenas started from the Moki towns,
as has generally been believed, where would he have arrived by a
journey of twenty days, when an able-bodied man can easily walk to
the brink of Marble Canyon from there in three or four days? Why did
the guides, if they belonged in the Moki towns, conduct Cardenas so
far to show him a river which was so near? The solution seems to be
that he started from some locality other than the present Moki towns.
That is to say, there has been an error, and these Moki towns are not
Tusayan. Where Cardenas reached the great canyon the river came from
the NORTH-EAST and turned to the SOUTH-SOUTH-WEST. There are but two
places where the canyoned river in Arizona conforms to this course,
one at Lee's Ferry, and the other the stretch from Diamond Creek to
the Kanab Canyon. The walls being low at Lee's Ferry, that locality
may be excluded, for where Cardenas first looked into the canyon it
was so deep that the river appeared like a brook, though the natives
declared it to be half a league wide. Three of the most agile men,
after the party had followed along the rim for three days hunting for
a favourable place, tried to descend to the water, but were unable to
go more than one-third of the way. Yet from the place they reached,