338 THE COLORADO DESERT 



The discovery of the Colorado is one of the romances in the histor^^ 

 of the discovery of this continent. In August, 1")40, only 48 years 

 after the first voyage of Columbus, the three small ships of Captain 

 Hernando de Alarcon, sent up the Gulf of California to cooperate with 

 the land expedition of Coronado, arrived at the shallow, treacherous 

 head of the great estuary, and, in the language of the chronicle, " it 

 pleased God that after tiiis sort they should come to tiie very bottom 

 of the bay, where they found a mighty river, which ran with so great 

 a fury of a stream that they could hardly sail against it. So they 

 entered into two boats, which men towed along with ro{)es from the 

 shore." Up this river, which he named the '• Buena Guia," cultivat- 

 ing friendly relations with its numerous Indian peoples, Alarcon went 

 as far, it is believed, as the junction of Williams Fork, So leagues, 

 according to the Relacion, "to where the river forms a straight chan- 

 nel between high mountains." 



In the same months that Alarcon was dragging his boats up the 

 turgid current, Coronado, now at the Pueblo of Zuni, heard of the 

 Moki Pueblos of Tusayan. Pedro de Tol)ar, with 20 men and a 

 priest, made the expedition from Zufii into that desolate corner of 

 Arizona, where high on their mesas are still standing, as they stood 

 then, the cliff villages of Hualpai and its companions. From these 

 Indians Tobar heard of a gi'eat river flowing across the western desert, 

 and returning with this information to Coronado, the chief dispatched 

 Garcia Lopez de Cardenas to search for it. His little band, returning 

 to the Moki villages, struck boldly out across the desolate plain of 

 the " Painted Desert," and after days of travel stood on the brink of 

 that chasm of chasms, the Grand Canon of the Colorado. They gazed 

 northward across the apparently unending buttes and gorges of the 

 Avonderful SA^stem, but were unable to reach the great river that looked 

 like a slend.er rivulet far beneath them. "Its banks were so high," 

 says the Relacion, " that they seemed to be raised three or four leagues 

 into the air. The country is covered with little, stunted fir-trees, is 

 exposed to the north, and is so cold that, although it was summer, 

 we could hardly bear it." 



Thus from sea and by land in the same year did the men of Spain 

 discover the noble river of the Colorado at its most stuj^endous ap- 

 proaches. Almost at the same time a third little band, under Mel- 

 chor Diaz, starting from the settlement of San Hieronymo, on the 

 Rio Sonora, traversed Arizona from east to Avest and reached the 

 banks of the Colorado which Alarcon had recently trodden. " In the 



