visiting one another and helping in many ways, besides taking the sick something good to eat.

Father Damian Manzanet distinctly says "that at no time was it necessary to send to the Tejas any soldiers for the safety of the priests; for from the day that the holy fathers first came among them they did everything they could for their welfare, receiving them with unbounded love and kindness." That other feelings arose, was alas, too true; but that was plainly the fault of the Spanish soldiery, who abused the kindly natives, interfered with their wives, and made themselves generally obnoxious. Then jealousies developed between the military and the clergy, and as a consequence the innocent Tejas Indian suffered.

While the Aztec and Pueblo Indians have been fully studied and diffusely discoursed upon by many writers, this record of the Tejas nation and its customs is, I believe, the very first which has ever been put into a connected narrative. That its people will compare favorably with the Aztecs in their form of government and with the Pueblos in their industry will be shown, I think, by even this necessarily restricted relation.

VIII.-WHY CORONADO WENT TO NEW MEXICO IN 1540.

By GEORGE PARKER WINSHIP, assistant in American history in Harvard University, 1893-1895.

While Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, the survivors of the brilliant array with which Panfilo de Narvaez had landed on the coast of Florida seven years before, were walking along the banks of the Rio Grande in southern Texas, in the early winter of 1535, their Indian friends told them that if they should ascend this stream far enough they would find some large and populous towns. Cabeza de Vaca already possessed a "copper bell, figured with a face," which had come, so the natives from whom he obtained it said, from the distant north, where there were large plates of this metal buried in the ground, and populous settlements. The Spanish wanderers were only anxious to reach their fellow-countrymen in New Spain, the present Mexico, and refused to turn from their due westward route in search of new realms of wealth. They crossed the Rio Grande, and as they were traveling across the present Chihuahua the natives gave to the strangers presents of "fine turquoises, which came from the north," and of "fine emeralds made into arrowheads," which had been brought, the Indians said, from some lofty mountains toward the north, where they were "populous towns and very large houses."1

Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico late the next spring, and there he related all these things which he had learned during

These details are from Cabeza de Vaca's narrative of his journey, which is best consulted in Buckingham Smith's admirable translation. Mr. Ad. F. Bandelier has discussed Cabeza de Vaca's route, with considerable extracts from the various narratives, in his Contributions to the History of the Southwest, published by the Archæological Institute of America and the Hemenway Southwestern Archæological Expedition conjointly. This volume is the most convenient source of information in regard to most of the events touched upon in this paper.

his travels. Some of his hearers had seen the wealth of the Montezumas gathered by Cortes, and all of them had heard the tales of the hoarded gold of the Incas, over which Pizarro and Almagro were still quarreling. As the Spanish settlers listened to these fresh reports from the north, some of them recalled stories which had been told by their Indian neighbors and servants about people and cities and wealth beyond the mountains which shut in New Spain on the north. Pedro Castañeda has preserved one of these stories, which was told by a slave belonging to Nuño de Guzman, the predecessor of the Viceroy Mendoza. This Indian had traveled with his father into the northern country, so he said, and there he had seen some villages so large that they might be compared to the City of Mexico and its environs. There were seven of these villages, and they contained whole streets occupied by gold workers. The father, who was a trader in feathers and plumes, had brought back a large amount of gold and silver, metals which were, according to him, very plentiful in that country.1 The clew which Cabeza de Vaca brought to Mexico seemed to be worth following. The viceroy purchased the negro Estevan, who had been one of the companions of Cabeza de Vaca, and he also persuaded another of these wanderers, the Spaniard Dorantes, to remain in the New World and conduct an expedition which should find these seven populous cities, with their wealth of buried precious metal. The expedition was organized, but it never started, "though why," writes Mendoza to his Emperor, Charles V, "I never could find out."8 During the year or two which followed, 1537 and 1538, three or four attempts were made to enter the country beyond the

I quote from my own translation of Castañeda's Relacion de la Jornada de Francisco Vasquez Coronado, made from the Spanish text, which the trustees of the Lenox Library in New York City kindly allowed me to copy. The only available form of this narrative until now has been the French version made by Henri Ternaux-Compans. My edition of the Spanish text, with an English version and some supplementary narratives, will be in print in a few months in the Annual Report of the United States Bureau of Ethnology.

He is sometimes called Estevanico. Mr. Fiske, in his Discovery of America, calls him "Little Stephen," but I fancy that the diminutive ending is rather a derogatory term than a suggestion of physical inferiority. 3The Spanish text of this letter is not known. It was translated by Ramusio, who neglected to give the date in his translation. It is usually quoted from Ternaux-Compans' Cibola volume, p. 287, where it is called "the première lettre" of Mendoza to the King.

northern mountains, but the height of these sierras and the difficulties of the passages prevented any serious undertaking.' Meanwhile Mendoza was busied with the many reforms, financial, administrative, agricultural, and social, which made him "the good viceroy" of Spanish America. He made the collection of the royal rents and revenues more regular and more profitable, imported stock to improve the breeds of sheep and cattle and horses, and provided wives for his colonistsalso by importation-but in all this work he was hampered by the fact, which became more serious with the arrival of every vessel coming from the home peninsula, that all these reform measures affected only a portion of those whom the viceroy had to rule. A majority of the immigrants to New Spain, I believe, settled down after a little while as traders and artisans in the towns, or as farmers and herdsmen in the country. The evidence which was taken in 1540 to prove that Coronado's expedition was not depopulating the country of New Spain was evidently ex parte, but the general truth seems clear, from these depositions, that only a very small proportion of the men who accompanied Coronado had ever been settled anywhere in New Spain. The wandering soldiers of fortune, of high and low estate, floated "like cork on the water," as Mota Padilla tells us in his Historia de la Nueva Galicia, upon the permanent settlers in town and country. A good many of these men happened to be in New Spain between 1535 and 1540. Some had stopped there on their way to join Pizarro, and as many had drifted back from Peru and from Central America, where they had helped Pedro de Alvarado to find that some of the wealth of the Incas was only bars of lead with a golden veneering. Just now there seemed to be nowhere in particular for them to go. They hung around Mexico City and the provincial towns, or wandered through the country, claiming a living on the score of a common nationality, or making one by fair means or foul. These were the common fellows. They were bad enough, but the young gen

2

Mr. Bandelier gives what details he has been able to find in regard to these futile efforts in the second chapter of his Contributions to the History of the Southwest.

This information is printed in Vol. XIV, pp. 373-384, of the Pacheco y Cardenas Coleccion de Documentos Inéditos relativos al Descubrimiento, Conquista y Colonizacion de las Indias. For the details of Mendoza's administration, see Icazbalceta's documentary Historia de México.

tlemen who had nothing to do seem to have been worse. least they appear to have caused the viceroy more anxi Most of these, probably, like the viceroy himself, were tu younger sons of noble Spanish stock. Many of them, among whom was Vasquez Coronado, had come over in the train of the new viceroy in 1535. Their number was increased each year by the arrival of those for whom the home estates and the imperial court had little to promise. There were seventy or eighty of these young gentlemen who eagerly accepted the invitation to accompany Coronado from New Spain in the spring of 1540. In action, these young caballeros were most efficient. In every part of the world of Spanish conquest they occupied positions of leadership and maintained their place by the force of personal valor and ability, among men who followed whom and when they chose and always chose the man who led them most successfully. When inactive, and life in Mexico seems to have been rather tame during the first few years of "the good viceroy's" rule, these same young gentlemen became a most trying annoyance. Armed with royal letters and comprehensive introductions, they had to be provided for by the viceroy. Masters of their own movements, they came as they liked and often did not go away. Lovers of excitement, they secured it regardless of other men's wives or property.

Mendoza had been concerned to find some means of utilizing these guests of his from the very first years of his residence in the New World. The opening up of the border territory to profitable settlement, or the exploration and conquest of new and unknown lands, was of course most desirable. But no mere work for work's sake, no wild-goose chase, would do. The young gentlemen had many friends near to Charles V who would have resented any abuse of privilege or of confidence. Besides, any suitable expedition would cost money, and unless this could all be made good to the accountants in Spain there was sure to be a complaint from those who were always ready to criticise the administration of even the best of viceroys. So Mendoza kept his guests as best he could, while they hung about his court or visited his stock farms to try his servants and his horses. Meanwhile the viceroy anxiously watched the reports sent to him by the new governor of Neuva Galicia, the northwestern province-Vasquez Coronado-and