the present place. Beyond Moki ten leagues, they crossed a stream
flowing north-westerly, which was called Colorado from the colour of
its water,--the first use of the name so far traced. This was what we
now call the Little Colorado. They understood it to discharge into
the South Sea (Pacific), and probably Onate took it for the very
headwaters of the Buena Guia which Alarcon had discovered over sixty
years before. As yet no white man had been north of Moki in the Basin
of the Colorado, and the only source of information concerning the
far northern region was the natives, who were not always understood,
however honestly they might try to convey a knowledge of the country.

* This is a quadrangular mass of sandstone about a mile long,
thirty-five miles east of Zuni. On its base at the eastern end are a
number of native and European inscriptions, the oldest, of the
European dates according to Simpson, being 1606, recording a visit by
Onate. The rock, or, more properly, mesa, is also called the Morro.
Chas. F. Lummis has also written on this subject.


Skirting the southern edge of the beautiful San Francisco Mountain
region, through the superb forest of pine trees, Onate finally
descended from the Colorado Plateau to the headwaters of the Verde,
where he met a tribe called Cruzados, because they wore little
crosses from the hair of the forehead, a relic, no doubt, of the time
when Alarcon had so freely distributed these emblems among the tribes
he encountered on the Colorado, friends probably of these Cruzados.
The latter reported the sea twenty days distant by way of a small
river running into a greater, which flowed to the salt water. The
small river was Bill Williams Fork, and on striking it Onate began to
see the remarkable pitahaya adorning the landscape with its tall,