Evidently a Hopi Stratagem. The Hopis of to-day, with whom I have talked, insist upon it that Cardenas was taken to the barren and desolate point near the junction of Marble Canyon, the Little Colorado Canyon and the Grand Canyon. Here, the river may be said to come from the northeast and turn toward the south-southwest, and the conditions are not at all like those described by the historian. But if one accepts this modern statement of the Hopis, he is met with the questions: Why make Cardenas travel fifty leagues to see an inaccessible river that could be reached in three or four days? Did Cardenas really travel fifty leagues? I do not know, but I hazard the conjecture that the Hopis gave Cardenas as much wandering about as they could, took him to this terribly bleak and barren spot where even to-day one can scarcely prevail upon a Hopi or Navaho to guide him, in order that he might be discouraged from making further explorations in the neighborhood. The Hopis had no use for explorers or strangers. They had suffered too much from foes, for too many decades, to welcome any one who seemed eager to possess anything of theirs, and, in my judgment, their treatment of Cardenas was a deliberate ruse to get rid of him. They had a trail over which they habitually traveled, that brought them to Huetha-wa-li, the White Rock Mountain,--opposite Bass Camp,--and on to the Havasupai villages. Several times a year they went to and fro over this trail. It crosses the Little Colorado where it would have been easy to show the Spaniards the Salt Spring, to which Castaneda later refers. There is another point on the river, some miles beyond Bass Camp, where the Hopis used to visit the Havasupais, and that is just beyond the Great Curve, where the river may be said to flow from the northeast to the southsouthwest. But both at Bass Camp and at this point, the Havasupais had made trails down to the river, of the existence of which the Hopis may, or may not, have known. So I freely confess that, as yet, I have not settled in my own mind at what point Cardenas and the Spaniards gazed into the depths of the Great Canyon.
Alarcon's Discovery of Colorado River. While the main portion of Coronado's army had been advancing eastward, a sea force sent out to cooperate with Coronado, under Alarcon, had sailed up the Gulf of California, and had entered the Colorado River, thus solving the problem of its exit into the Gulf. To Alarcon, belongs the discovery of the Colorado River, which he named the Buena Guia. He went up the river twice in boats, the second time ascending possibly as high as a hundred miles above the mouth of the Gila.
Finally he entered "between certain very high mountains, through which this river passeth with a straight channel, and the boats went up against the stream very hardly for want of men to draw the same." He claims to have passed above this place undoubtedly one of the lesser canyons of the Colorado found below the Needles, where the Santa Fe Railway crosses the river--and here magicians tried to destroy him and his party by setting magic reeds in the water on both sides. Of course this failed, but Alarcon decided to go no further. Here he erected a very high cross, on which was carved a statement to the effect that he had reached this spot, so that if Coronado's men should find it, they would know he had ascended the river thus far.
Town of San Hieronimo is Established. In the mean time, a small force of seventy or eighty of the weakest and least reliable of the men of Coronado's army was left in September, 1540, at a town which Cabeza de Vaca had named Corazones, or hearts, because the people there fed him on the hearts of animals. Coronado's plan was to establish a town here, which he or his lieutenant in charge of this portion of the army called San Hieronimo de los Corazones. These men and the care of the new settlement were left to Melchior Diaz, with orders to protect the road between Cibola and New Spain, and also to attempt to find some means of communicating with the vessels under Alarcon. Diaz, with twenty-five selected men, started for the seacoast, went to the Gulf, across to the coast, back again up the river, where he found Alarcon's cross, and eventually returned to San Hieronimo, there to meet with death by an accident. Owing to the habit of the Indians at the lower portion of the river of warming themselves in cold weather with a burning stick, Diaz called the river El Rio del Tizon --the River of the Firebrand.
Disaster Comes to the Spaniards. Disappointed at what he had found at Cibola and Tiguex, Coronado now decided to go with his whole army to a place which had been described to him in most glowing terms by an Indian.
He told of a place of fabulous wealth named Quivera, and, says the ancient historian: "He gave such a clear account of what he told, as if it was true and he had seen it, that it seemed plain afterward that the devil was speaking in him." Carried away by these glowing visions of wealth, Coronado sent Tovar back to San Hieronimo. Melchior Diaz was dead, and the little settlement was in an excitement, because one of the soldiers had just been killed by a poisoned arrow, shot by one of the natives. In trying to punish this offence, owing to the folly of the officer sent by Tovar in charge of the primitive force, seventeen more soldiers were killed by poisoned arrows, so that the ensign hastily abandoned the place, and moved with his sadly reduced force forty leagues toward Cibola, into a valley called Suya.
From this point, he ultimately collected the best of his men, and marched on to Tiguex, to find Coronado already gone on his heartbreaking expedition to Quivera.
Coronado Returns to New Spain. After long and fruitless search, Coronado returned to New Spain, a disappointed man, disgraced and discarded. Tovar returned with him, but doubtless later found congenial work in other fields.
