42 Singing Valleys 



the Aztecs had a premonition of this, else they had not made 

 the earth goddess horrible. 



The cities of Montezuma fell, and the smoke of their burn- 

 ing spread over the trampled cornfields. The Spaniards rode 

 north across the Rio Grande. Coronado marched over one 

 thousand miles of desert in search of the wealth of the Seven 

 Cities of Cibola. What he found were the pueblos of Zufii, 

 and the maize-fields spreading into Kansas. 



Castaneda, who rode with him, counted no fewer than 

 eighty inhabited towns in that particular section of the Ameri- 

 can southwest. Their inhabitants were corn-planters, for in 

 front of the Spaniards the maize had already moved into the 

 north. 



Cabeza de Vaca, who crossed from Florida to the Rio 

 Grande in 1527, commented on the maize-fields he saw. 

 Cartier saw great fields of it on the site of Montreal in 1604. 

 Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Hennepin reported it as the chief 

 food of the tribes in the Mississippi Valley. 



Through the passes of the Rockies, across the plains of 

 Nebraska, to the forested headwaters of the Mississippi and 

 the Missouri, to the shores of the Great Lakes and the St. 

 Lawrence; over the Alleghenies to the Chesapeake and the 

 Potomac; through the valley of the Hudson and across the 

 Mohawk Trail to the Connecticut and the Merrimac, the corn 

 had traveled. 



Those who carried it knew the value of the grains. They 

 kept the legend of its divine birth. The Senecas and the 

 Iroquois added new tales of their own devising. But each of 

 those who received it called it by a name which meant "She 

 Who Feeds Us." 



Cinteotl still lived. 



