ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT LV 



and to their environment were obscured to scientific observa- 

 tion. For this and other reasons it has been found peculiarly 

 advantageous to scrutinize the accounts of the discoverers and 

 earliest explorers of different portions of the continent. Some 

 of the explorers were illiterate or indifferent and left no record; 

 others recorded the events in their journeys, usually giving 

 much space to the strange and striking race found in posses- 

 sion of the soil. Most of these early records have been lost; 

 a few have fallen into the hands of scholars and have been 

 published in this country and abroad; it is probable that others 

 lie buried in state and mission archives scattered throughout 

 this country, Canada, and Mexico. 



There were no keener observers of the Indian than the 

 early Spanish explorers and missionaries who penetrated the 

 unknown land stretching tar north of Mexico in the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries. The narratives of De Soto, Ayllon, 

 Ponce de Leon, Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, and many others 

 who with cross and sword explored the wilds now composing 

 the southern half of the United States, are stories of marvelous 

 intrepidity and suffering; yet they seemed never to lack cour- 

 age, and only rarely were they too closely pursued by hunger 

 or by the Indian to record with surprising- fidelity whatsoever 

 came under their observation. 



It is to one of these expeditions that the memoir by Mi- 

 George Parker Winship is devoted. Mainly to the naiTative 

 of Pedro de Castaneda, a subordinate follower of Coronado's 

 expedition, are we indebted for an account of the natives 

 thr< mgh whose country the army passed during its two years' 

 journey from Culiacan in western Mexico to the buffalo plains 

 of Kansas, and back to the lakes of Tezcuco. 



The original manuscript of Castaneda's relation, prepared 

 at Culiacan about twenty years after the events which it nar- 

 rates, is not known to exist, the Spanish archives at Simancas, 

 Seville, and Madrid having been searched for it in vain. The 

 copy from which was prepared the Spanish text, now for the 

 first time published, was made at Seville in 1596, and is in 

 possession of the Lenox Library, New York City, through the 

 courtesy of whose trustees and librarian the present publication 



