they were beset by a horde of Indians, who fired the grass on all sides
of them. As the hazy record runs, only one Spaniard, Alonzo Sanchez, to-
gather with a half-breed Indian girl, escaped death — the two being made
prisoners. They were adopted by the attacking Indians, and Sanchez, from
whom the story of the massacre was said to have come, became a great
chieftain among his captors.

As the treasury of New Spain now had been closed against financial
aid to further expeditions into the disappointing northern wilds, Juan de
Oiiate, of Zacatecas, contracted late in the year 1595 with Viceroy Velasco
to plant a colony on the upper reaches of the Eio Grande at his own ex-
pense — a bargain that cost him eventually a sum exceeding a round million



HISTOEY OF COLOEADO r^

of our dollars. But as there was much delay in obtaining from hiolier
authority the necessary confirmation of the agreement, Oiiate did not set
forth upon his mission until nearly three years later. Leaving Zacatecas
early in January, 1598, with eight or ten Franciscan friars, two hundred
soldiers and about as many colonists with their families, together with
herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, Oiiate entered the Eio Grande Vallev,
proJjably at the site of El Paso, in the after-part of April. Here, on
April 30th, he formally took possession of the country in the name of the
King of Spain — the sixth performance of that ceremony since the year
1539. The company then moved up the valley by easy stages to a locality
about thirty miles above the site of Santa Fe. Here, about the close of
August, Oiiate founded the town of "San Gabriel de los Espailoles," at the
confluence of the Eio Chama with the Eio Grande. When the "Colonizer'
— as he l^ecame known in the early history of Xew Mexico — halted here,
Plymouth Eock was an unknown boulder, and there was no Jamestown,
nor even an English cabin in the Xew World. San Gabriel was the second
town established by white men in all the present area of the United States;
St. Augustine, Florida, having preceded it by thirty-three years. Seven
years later, Oiiate founded Santa Fe — the City of the Holy Faith of St.
Francis.

Three or four weeks after Onate had laid the foundation of San
Gabriel, he sent his nephew, the valiant Juan de Zaldivar (though some have
said it was Juan's brother, Vicente,) with fifty cavaliers, to explore
the country beyond the Sangre de Cristo Eauge. While but little certainly
is known of this exploit, it is believed that Zaldivar reached the plains
from our San Luis Valley, by way of the Sangre de Cristo Pass, and
went northward along the foot-hills as far as the locality of the city of
Denver.

It appears that at or near the end of his nortlung he came to a large
stream flowing out of the mountains, and to which he gave the name "Eio
de Chato" — "Flat Eiver," or "Flatfish Eiver ' ; an appellation having the
same meaning as the determinative word in the present name of the
South Platte Eiver, and which, as we shall see in the second chapter of
this volume, was applied to the lower, or main, Platte by Frenchmen nearly
one hundred and fifty years after Zaldivar's time. As it would seem that
the character of the Arkansas in its course adjacent to the foot-hills would
hardly have suggested the application of such a name to that stream,
and as there was none other of considerable width vmtil the South Platte
was reached, I believe it to be a fact that Zaldivar visited the locality
of Denver, and that his Eio de Chato was our South Platte, the shallowness
of which in proportion to its breadth prompted the Spanish explorer to
bestow that name upon it. This stream now is greatly attenuated by the
drains from it to meet requirements of irrigation, but in and before our
pioneer period it was truly a river, and in the ordinaiy stages of its
flow sprawled over a bed of far greater width than that which it occupies
at present.

Zaldivar returned to San Gabriel after an absence of about eight weeks.
He discovered traces of the Bonilla-Humafia expedition; and it is probable
that he had encountered serious trouble somewhere in the course of his
exploration, as he then had but thirty men in condition for immediate
further dutv.



14 HISTOEY OF COLORADO

In addition to tlie knowledge of the coimtrv to the northward of his
settlement that he derived from Zaldivar's expedition, Onate, in his frequent
rausackings here and there from San Gabriel, had become familiar with
our San Luis Valley by the close of that century; and meanwhile his
colony had been strengthened by several contingents of recruits from j\Iexico.
He and his people were credited with liaving found gold in the valley
at that time — a matter to which I shall return in another chapter.

In the year 1601, Onate, with two Franciscan friars and a mounted
company of eighty men, left San Gabriel to explore the northeastward region
farther than Zaldivar had gone. Having found at the Pueblo of Picuvis
the Mexican Indian, Jose, who had been with Humaiia's ill-starred expedi-
tion, Onate took him along as a guide. It has been said that one of the
Colonizer's purposes in this enterprise was to learn certainly the fate of
Humaiia and his men. In one of the Spanish accounts it is stated that
Oiiate, in his five months of absence from San Gabriel, went to the ''River
of the North" and to the great "Lake of Conibas," on the bank of which
was seen "afarre off a citty 7 leagues long and above 2 leagues broad," the
market-place being so strongly fortified that the Spaniards dare not attack.
Some modern writers have it that Oiiate marched northward to the South
Platte River and followed it into the present State of Nebraska, whence
he proceeded eastward to the land of Quivira, in which he saw evidence of
an a.mndance of gold. It was also told that he brought away from that
country an Indian who possessed much knowledge of the yellow metal and of
methods of mining and refining it. This savage metallurgist afterward was
sent to the City of Mexico, where he excited great interest. As the story
further runs, Oiiate discovered the scene of the destruction of Humana and
his company. Somewhere on his route — no one pretends to know where — he
came to a place which was strewn with pieces of armor, scraps of iron,
horseshoes, and bones of horses. The presence of these relics is said to
have convinced the Colonizer that tliis was the spot whereon the unlucky
Humana and his band had been annihilated.

Six years later, Oiiate, who in the meantime had been to the head of
the Gulf of California with a squad of his heroic followers, again ex-
plored the Great Plains. But of this adventure nothing is known beyond
the fact that he and his cavaliers rode far into the Northeast and re-
turned. This remarkable man passed from public view in 1608, when he
was superseded by Pedro de Peralto, the second Governor of the Spanish
colonies on the Eio Grande.

Through the seventeenth century, down to 1675, expeditions frequently
were made by small parties of Spaniards in almost eveiy direction from
the settlements in the Eio Grande Valley, and Pike's Peak became a familiar
landmark to many of these rovers, who usually prowled on horseback,
but sometimes on foot. Most of them were inspired partly by hope
of finding gold and partly by sheer love of adventure. However, some went
forth to trade with the Indians. When the two noted Frenchmen, Louis
Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette, descended the Mississippi River to
the mouth of the Arkansas, in 1673, they found the Acansea Indians, who
were lodged at that point, in possession of European hatchets, knives, and
trinkets. While these weapons and ornaments might have come from
English or French sources, it is far more probable that they had been
derived from Spaniards of New Mexico.



HISTORY OF COLORADO 15

But after Onate's second expedition, no far-distant exi^loration of the
Northeast was undertaken until 1G62, when Don Diego Dionisio de Pefialosa,
haunted by the Quivira myth, is said to have marched into the country
in which Coronado had expected to find it a reality. According to the tale
that lias come down. Penalosa. who had l)een appointed fiovernor of New
Mexico two years before, left Santa Fe early in iMarch with four Spanish
officers and eighty soldiers. 1,000 Pueblo Indians, 800 horses, 300 mules,
six small cannon, and thirty-six wagons and carts carrying ammunition and
other supplies. He was also accompanied by two Franciscan friars, one of
whom. Nicholas de Freytas, became the historian of the expedition.
Nicholas" l)ombastic account of it is sucli a mess of extravagant exaggera-
tions and absurdities that it has but little, if any, historical value. At first,
he says the army pi'oceeded east from Santa Fe for about five hundred
miles, "to a large river which they called 'Mischipi,' "' but afterward speaks
of Quivira as being northeast of New Mexico's capital. Penalosa entered
the Quivira country about the middle of June, and the first of its villages
seen by the army is magnified by Father Nicholas into the "great City of
Quivira ... so large and of so great a population that we could not
reach the end in two days ; . . . the shape of the buildings for the
most part is round, two. three, and four stories."' The friar says nothing
of the return route. There are some weighty reasons for doubting whether
any such expedition ever was undertaken by Penalosa; and also for believing
that Father Nicholas" narrative is entirely a fabrication, based upon Oiiate's
advance to the Quivira country in 1601.

By the year 1680, there was a strand of Spanish settlements along the
Rio Grande stretching from the Taos Yalley in the North to Socorro in the
South, a distance of some two hundred miles by the river's flow. The
rearing of cattle and sheep was the principal industry of most of the
people, but mining for the precious metals had attained a fair develop-
ment, although its results doubtless have been much overestimated by some
modern writers. The heavier part of the labor in the mines was done by
Pueblo Indians in a state of slavery. In August of that year came the or-
ganized and bloody uprising of the Pueblo communities, confederated to
drive the foreigners out of their country. _ The Spaniards were unprepared
for the revolt, and within two weeks all who had not been massacred were
in flight afoot — men, women, and children — down the valley toward El
Paso. By the first day of September not a Spaniard was left alive on the
upper Rio Grande, while the towns had been wrecked and the torch applied
to their ruins.

But the Spaniards of that age were not men who gave up. After two
failures by others to reconquer the land with scarcely more soldiers than our
average militia company numbers, Don Diego de Vargas, with about one
hundred and fifty men of war and some colonists, succeeded in 1693-94, but
not without fighting as desperate as ever occurred upon this continent.
So the seventeenth century went out leaving the Spanish flag flying over
the northern parts of historic New Spain.

In the dawn of the eighteenth century a graver menace to Spanish au-
thority in that immense domain arose. French settlers, who had landed on
the Gulf Coast, near where the city of New Orleans stands, in 1699, now
were being strengthened by additions to their number and obtaining a
strong foothold upon the southwestern border of Spanish Florida. In the



16 HISTOBY OF COLOEADO

North, upon the eastern bank of the Great 'River, in what is now the
sonthem part of the State of Illinois, other French commnnities had been
established. The Sienr de la S" ' . with a band of his coantrj-men,
had canoed his way down the '.'. ./i to its mouth in the spring of

1682, and then and there claimed for his conntr>- all the lands drained by
that noble stream and it? rast network of tributaries, had come from
France in the winter of 16i*4-85 with some ship-loads of colonists and made
the banning of a settlement upon the Gulf Coast at a place about one
hundred miles southwest of the site of the present city of Galveston. That
venture had cfrnie i/j grief and was abandon wl within three 3'ears, but the
later settlements gave every promise of becoming permanent, and of result^
ing in French control of the eas>' highways into the interior of the continent
afforded by the Mississippi and its affluents.

With the incoming of the new centurj-, Spanish traders and other ad-
venturers from the coUiuies on the upj>er Kio Grande appear to have in-
creased in number and to have extended the field of their operations. For
reasons which I shall mention in another chapter, the probabilitiea that
s/jme of these rovers discovered copf^er in Montana, hifore the year 170-5,
are almost the equivalents of a certainty; and it is known that Spanish
traders were among the red people dwelling on the upper Arkansas Eiver, in
the plains countr>', as early as 1710. Before 1715, the Kaskaskia tribe of
Illinois Indians had come into possession of Spani.sh horses, which had lx«n
passed to thern from Indians of the great prairies in the West; and soon
afterward a report was brought to the French settlement of Kaskaskia by
French explorers of the Missouri Biver that a tribe living ".500 leagues" up
that stream lately had Ijeen fighting a band of Spanish adventurers. About
that time, some silver-W;aring ore, which was understoo<l to have been
carried into the neighborhood of the Missouri Biver by Spanish traders
^as used by French sharpers to "salt" an alleged mine of that metal in
Illinois. A year or two later, Spanish traffickers who had been in eastern
Kansas reportwl to Antonio Valverde y Cossio, who was then ad interim
Governor and Captain-General of New Mexico, that they had crossed French
tracks. It had been told in the French settlements on the Mississippi, in
the year 1714, that some Frenchmen who had gone from Biloxi, near the
mouth of that river, two years before, had ascendwl the Arkansas Biver
to its source.

In 1719 Go.'ii/ioi Valverde drew the sword against such inroads upon
the domain of his sovereign. A force of one hundred and five of his coun-
trymen and thirty Pueblo warriors, with Father Juan Piiio as chaplain,
was sent from Santa Fe in Septeml>er to deal first with the unruly Coman-
ches and then to hunt for French intrudens and compel them to withdraw
from Spanish tenator}'. After crossing the Sangre de Cristo Mountains
at some point not far from Santa Fe, the route taken by the expedition was
northward along the eastern base of the range. At the "Bio Napestle,"
evidently the Arkansas, the command was joined by a party of Apache allies,
several memVicrs of which bore unhealed gun-shot wounrls received from
Frenchmen and some of the latter's Pawnee partisans. Valverde believed
that his little army advanced farther north than any previous Spanish
organization harl gone. .Tiiftin Winsor, in hi.- recently-published Mufiiniippi
Jj'mn, says it moved on northward U) the South Platte, in Colorado, and,
following the course of that stream eastward, "went as far as any Spaniards




UOVERXOR A. t. lIlAi



HISTORY OF COLORADO 17

yet had been." But the enterprise was barren of important resnlts, and it
appears that if there were any Frenchmen then in the region which Val-
verde's army patrolled they managed to keep well out of sight.

As French explorers and traders continued to prowl in the valleys of
the Missouri, Platte, and Arkansas rivers, another military force, of about
two hundred cavaliers, and which, according to French accounts, was
accompanied by a large concourse of colonists, set out from Santa Fe in
the year 1720, under the command of Captain Pedro Villasur, to establish
an outpost upon the Spanish frontier in the Northeast. The French in
Illinois, whose traders had given them timely warning of the movement,
thought the ultimate destination of this bold enterprise to be their Fort
Chartres, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, about sixty miles, by the
river's course, below the site of the city of St. Louis. Du Mont de Montigny,
who relates in his Memoires Historiqaes sur La Louisiane many particulars
of the tragic fate that befell this undertaking, says "their caravan was
composed of 1,500 people — men, women, and soldiers — having with them a
Jacobin for a chaplain, and bringing also a great number of horses and
cattle, according to the custom of that nation to forget nothing that might
be necessary for a settlement. Their design was to destroy the Missouris
[the Missouri tribe of Indians, who were friendly to the French] and seize
upon their country." This is the first Spanish expedition that is certainly
known to have traversed the entire distance from Santa Fe to the Missouri
River.

The Spanish plan was to form an alliance with the Pawnees, who were
then at war with the Missouris, and have them join Villasur in an exter-
minating attack upon the latter. But bj some mischance, or through
ignor-ance of the country, the Spaniards - encountered . lie Missouris first;
and, as the story runs, supposing them to be the Pawnees, began negotiations
with them for their cooperation in a scheme that. was jjatended to work their
destruction. Quickly realizing the SpamaTds'_ mistake, .'flle jlirewd Missouri
chieftains assented, and Villasur's people fell into the trap. Three days
later, the Missouris, who had now been joined by many other Indians, sud-
denly raised the war-cry and annihilated their stranger-enemies. It has
been surmised that the whole affair was instigated and arranged by the
French in Illinois, and that the Missouris deceived the Spaniards by pre-
tending to be Pawnees. Du Mont tells that the attack was made at daybreak
by "two thousand savages, divided into several bands," and that "in less
than a quarter of an hour all the caravan was murdered ; no one escaping
the massacre except the chaplain, whom the barbarians saved because of his
dress; at the same time they took possession of all the merchandise and
other effects which they found in their camp." The same writer says that
about six months later the priest, mounted upon a fleet horse, made his
escape and "took the road to Mexico, where doubtless he arrived." Father
Charlevoix, in a letter written from Kaskaskia in June, 1731, says that of
the Spaniards "almost all were drunk and fast asleep" when the attack
was made, and that "it is certain that the greater part of them were killed,"
but mentions the escape of the chaplain in the manner related by Du Mont.

It is probable that Villasur's expedition followed from Santa Fe to
the Arkansas River the route taken by Valverde's raiders, and went east-
ward along the course of that historic stream to the apex of its great
bend, and thence marched northeasterly across eastern Kansas. His appears

Vol. 1—2



IS HISTOEY OF COLOEADO

to have been the last Si^anish military movement against tlie French in the
northeastern border of New Spain, and it seems that French explorers and
traders for j-ears thereafter were permitted to continue tlieir operations
upon Spanish territory in that quarter without opposition more serious than
occasional official protests.

Spanish excursions in other directions from the settlements on the Eio
Grande continued to be made, and some went far into the Xorth. The Man-
dan Indians, on the Missouri Eiver, in the western part of what is now
the State of North Dakota, told the French explorer, Verendrye (the elder),
in 1738, that "at a day's journey off there were white men who always rode
horses, and wore clothes of metal when fighting." It is obvious that these
were armored Spaniards from the Eio Grande, who no doubt had traversed
the full extent of eastern Colorado from south to north.

The uncertainties as to the particulars of the various expeditions
from the Eio Grande into the farther parts of New Spain by Spanish
pioneers in the Southwest, and as to the outs and ins of the routes they
traveled, largely are due to the indifference of the Spanish people of
that age to geographical records. Unlike the French, the old-time Spaniards
had no fondness for mapmaking, and therefore Spanish maps of countries
in the New World produced in the period of discovery and exploration
were but few, and very inaccurate. The better charts of the New Spain
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the work of Italians, who
drew them partly from Spanish reports, partly from other sources of in-
formation, and partly from imagination. But these afford us no enlighten-
ment as to the particulars referred to above. Most French explorers care-
fully gathered data for maps of the regions they visited, including records
of latitudes and longitudes, but among the surviving Spanish accounts of
expeditions into the country west of the Mississippi by Spaniards we have
scarcely more than rambling narratives, in which we are told how many
leagues were believed to have been marched, and how long the adventurers
were absent, V'ct rarely containing anything concerning latitudes and longi-
tudes, or definite references to conspicuous landmarks or other landscape
features by which the courses taken might be identified.

Several of the early expeditions by Spaniards into the region north
and northeast of their settlements on the upper Eio Grande are known only
by later allusions to them. While it is not likely that a definite report
in detail was made of the course taken by any of these, it is probable that
some account of each was written, and that they would be of much historical
value now. But the records of pioneer Spanish operations in our South-
west have suffered great losses. When the Pueblo Indians revolted and
drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico, in 1680, they destroyed everything
that might remind them of their oppressors ; and the archives went with the
rest. The wear and tear, accidents, carelessness and neglect of after-times
doubtless made way with many important historical documents. Since New
Mexico became United States territory the work of American vandals has
added greatly to the losses, and in which two Governors of the Territory,
who were in authority soon after the close of our Civil War, made themselves
conspicuous. One of these has been charged with having shipped to Europe
several l)arrels filled with musty and time-worn written books and docu-
ments there to be sold to whomsoever cared to buy them, and to have been
responsible for the wanton destruction of many more. Of the otlier of this



HISTORY OF COLOKALO 19

pair of "officials," it lias been alleged by an authority of the first rank, that
"having despaired of disposing of the immense mass of old documents and
records by the slow process of using them to kindle fires, sold the entire
lot as junk — an invaluable collection of material bearing on the history of
the Southwest and its early European and native inhabitants." As no
thorough examination of the New Mexican archives by skilled students of
history yet had Ijoen made, no one knows how many valual^le records of the
past were lost by these astounding acts of vandalism.

In the middle years of the eighteenth eentuiy, there was developed at
Santa Fe much interest in the region that is now the San Juan section of
Colorado. As it was reported, or assumed, that the precious metals existed
there, some small parties of Spaniards, at the instance of Governor
Capuchin, went on prospecting expeditions into the locality of the Bio
San Juan's headcpiarters at that time. But the earliest known extended ex-
ploration of that quarter of Colorado for any purpose was made in 1761
by Juan Maria Rivera, in company with Joaquin Lain, Pedro Mora,
Gregorio Sandoval, and several others. These men spent three or four
months in prospecting that section for gold and silver and in seeking to
determine the value and general character of its mineral deposits. After
entering and examining the district drained by the upper reaches of the
Eio San Juan and its easterly affluents, and where, according to the common
understanding of the expedition's results, they found some of the more
precious of the two metals, the party moved on westward to the Eio la
Plata, on which the prospecting was continued. Leaving this stream,
Eivera and his companions went northward into the valley of the Gunnison
Eiver, down which they made their way to a place a short distance l)elow
the union of its main forks, from which locality they returned to Santa
Fe. So far as there is any known record, they were the first white men who
visited the Gunnison Valley.

Some twelve years later. Father Junipero Serra, then in general charge