REMARKS UPON THE EXISTENCE OF QUIVIRA. 
127 
because it so happened that those they had seen, or of whom they had heard, were deficient in 
that respect. Although this certainly is correct in the greater number of instances, neverthe¬ 
less it is true that some Indians have more beard than others; and now we perceive that there 
are nations that possess it as heavy and as long as it exists in any of the countries of Europe 
where man is most remarkable for this peculiarity of physiognomy. 
5. The same may be said of the existence of Quivira, with the grandeur and populousness of 
which many have been deceived, notwithstanding that no one has been able to point out where 
it was, or to find any account describing this civilized people of the regions of North America. 
Nor is this all; for on many maps that I have had in my hands, the famous city occupies a 
determinate point on the globe, but the makers of them have omitted to put down the well- 
peopled places in the midst of those provinces which we have ruled from the earliest time of the 
conquest. I do not leave this question among the doubts of the celebrated Binaspore of India; 
but, with less casuistry, I venture to deny the existence of such a city, its having been seen, or 
there being the accounts of it that are said to have been written. Let the minute diaries be 
examined and read with care, that treat of the arduous journeys that for thirty years have been 
prosecuted into those parts by the reverend fathers Friar Francisco Gfarces, Friar Francisco 
Atanasio Dominguez, Friar Francisco Silvestre Valez Escalante, and several other religious 
men besides, and by military heads, who have penetrated into those remote countries; and 
examine also the itinerary made by the Rev. Father Friar Juan de la Asuncion, in his enter¬ 
prise among them of the year 1538, and the account of the march of the Captain Francisco 
Yasquez Coronado made in the year 1540, and that of Don Juan de Ohate of the year 1604— 
those early travellers who may be supposed to have made known the great city of Quivira; and 
after reading their accounts of the rivers they discovered, the distances between them, and the 
directions in which they went, we shall come to understand that the river Balsas, they speak 
of, is the Colorado of California; and that the information they received of another river was of 
that which we since know by the name of San Felipe, and the other is the Rio Grande, of which 
the Noche Indians and the other nations of that quarter speak. We recognise the same nu¬ 
merous bands now living, as then, in those regions, dressed in skins and buckskin; and doubt¬ 
less the populous and walled Quivira must have been some town like those of the Moqui, 
that has been destroyed with the facility that many of the domicils of those Indians are now 
overthrown, or it may have been reconstructed as others in the same manner are, and whereby 
the seven towns of that territory still endure. 
