32 
The Colorado River 
ing many great dangers, and then be annihilated by a simple 
accident that would seem impossible. A dog belonging to the 
camp pursued the little flock of sheep that had been driven 
along to supply the men with meat, and Diaz on his horse 
dashed toward it, at the same time hurling a spear. The spear 
stuck up in the ground instead of striking the dog, and the 
butt penetrated the captain’s abdomen, inflicting, under the 
conditions, a mortal wound. The men could do nothing for 
him except to carry him along, which for twenty days they 
did, fighting hostile natives all the time. Then he died. On 
the 18th of January they arrived without their leader at the 
settlement from which they had started some three months 
before. 
Cardenas with twelve men had meanwhile gone from Cibola 
to a place called Tusayan, orTucano, situated some twenty or 
twenty-five leagues north-westerly from Cibola, from whence 
he was to strike out toward the great river these natives had 
described to Don Pedro de Tobar, who recently had paid them 
a visit, and incidentally shot a few of them to invite submis¬ 
sion. Cardenas was kindly received by the people of Tusayan, 
who readily supplied him with guides. Having lived in the 
country for centuries, they of course knew it and the many 
trails very well. They knew the highway down the Gila to the 
Colorado, and they told Cardenas about the tall natives living 
on the lower part of it, the same whom Alarcon and Diaz had 
met. In the direction in which Cardenas was to go they said 
it was twenty days’ journey through an unpopulated country, 
when people would again be met with. After the party had 
travelled for twenty days they arrived at a great canyon of the 
Colorado River, apparently not having met with the people 
mentioned. If Cardenas started from the Moki towns, as has 
generally been believed, where would he have arrived by a 
journey of twenty days, when an able-bodied man can easily 
walk to the brink of Marble Canyon from there in three or four 
days? Why did the guides, if they belonged in the Moki 
towns, conduct Cardenas so far to show him a river which was 
so near? The solution seems to be that he started from some 
locality other than the present Moki towns. That is to say, 
