winship] CORONADO TO MENDOZA, AUGUST 3, 1540 553 



corn was lost. And since I send Your Lordship a drawing of this route, 

 I will say no more about it here. 



Thirty leagues before reaching the place which the father provincial 

 spoke so well of in his report, 1 I sent Melchior Diaz forward with fifteen 

 horsemen, ordering him to make but one day's journey out of two, so 

 that he could examine everything there before I arrived. He traveled 

 through some very rough mountains for four days, and did not find any- 

 thing to live on, nor people, nor information about anything, except that 

 he found two or three poor villages, with twenty or thirty huts apiece. 

 From the people here he learned that there was nothing to be found in 

 the country beyond except the mountains, which continued very rough, 

 entirely uninhabited by people. And, because this was labor lost, I did 

 not want to send Your Lordship an account of it. The whole company 

 felt disturbed at this, that a thing so much praised, and about which 

 the father had said so many things, should be found so very different; 

 and they began to think that all the rest would be of the same sort. 

 When I noticed this, I tried to encourage them as well as I could, tell- 

 ing them that Your Lordship had always thought that this part of the 

 trip would be a waste of effort, and that we ought to devote our atten- 

 tion to those Seven Cities and the other provinces about which we had 

 information — that these should be the end of our enterprise. With this 

 resolution and purpose, we all inarched cheerfully along a very bad way, 

 where it was impossible to pass without making a new road or repair- 

 ing the one that was there, which troubled the soldiers not a little, con- 

 sidering that everything which the friar had said was found to be quite 

 the reverse; because, among other things which the father had said and 

 declared, he said that the way would be plain and good, and that there 

 would be only one small hill of about half a league. And the truth is, 

 that there are mountains where, however well the path might be fixed, 

 they could not be crossed without there being great danger of the horses 

 falling over them. And it was so bad that a large number of the ani- 

 mals which Your Lordship sent as provision for the army were lost along 

 this part of the way, on account of the roughness of the rocks. The 

 lambs and wethers lost their hoofs along the way, and I left the greater 

 part of those which I brought from Culiacau at the river of Lachimi,' 2 

 because they were unable to travel, and so that they might proceed more 

 slowly. Four horsemen remained with them, who have just arrived. 

 They have not brought more than 24 lambs and 4 wethers ; the rest died 

 from the toil, although they did not travel more than two leagues daily. 

 I reached the Valley of Hearts at last, on the 26th day of the month of 

 May, and rested there a number of days. Between Culiacau and this 

 place I could sustain myself ouly by means of a large supply of corn 

 bread, because I had to leave all the corn, as it was not yet ripe. In this 

 Valley of Hearts we found more people than in any part of the country 



'The valley into wlnrli Friar Marcos did not dare to enter. See the Historical Introduction, p. 362. 

 -Donhtless the Faquimi or Yaqui river. 



