The fabulous stories told by the Indians were only equaled by the Spaniard's contempt of truth in relating his exploits in the new world. The fables of the Indian became a jack-o'lantern to the chivalrous Spaniard, which he followed from place to place. Not to be outdone when he found himself duped, he often reported as veritable great adventures which he had undertaken, in a vast empire filled with magnificent cities, and inhabited by a powerful, rich and brave people, and who at last were subdued by his valor. It is indeed pleasant for the honest searcher after historic truth to get down from the dizzy heights of story to which Irving and Prescott have led him, and to tread the solid and stubborn ground of fact with such a student as R. A. Wilson, and other historic and scientific workers in our own practical age.

NOTE 4.

It cannot be denied that the soldiers of Coronado's army, though principally of high birth, were sadly disappointed at the disgusting spectacle of Pueblo women living in their unparalleled filth and brutality; for in all the expeditions of adventure by the conquering Spaniard in New Spain the soldier looked forward with lustful hope, as much to share the captured Indian damsel, as to the precious metals or brilliant stones of the earth. The leaders themselves shared and set the example of this primitive lustful luxury. Don Pedro d'Alvarado had under Cortes, at the fall of the Tlascan republic, received an Indian beauty, Donna Louisa, the daughter of a chief; and five other Indian girls were apportioned to other officers, says Prescott, "after they had been cleansed from the stains of infidelity by the waters of baptism," Cortes himself lived in the constant companionship of Donna Marina, who, "beautiful as a goddess," served him as mistress and interpreter, from the time he captured her at Tobasco, till after the conquest. While threading his way through the everglades of Honduras, and contemplating his return to Spain, he gave this faithful friend to Don Juan Xamorillo, a Castilian knight. As soon as her Services become no longer profitable she is with trifling ceremony discarded, and her name disappears from history.

In connection with this Spanish brutality and lust, Diaz, (vol. 1, p. 368,) says: "After peace had been restored to the old province, and the inhabitants had submitted to his majesty, Cortes, finding there was nothing to be done at present, determined with the crown officers to mark all the slaves with the iron. On the night preceding, the finest of the Indian females had been secretly set apart, so that when it came to a division among the soldiers, we find none left but old and ugly A soldier asked Cortes if the division of gold in Mexico was not a sufficient imposition; and now he was going to deprive the poor soldiers, who had undergone so many hardships, and suffered from innumerable wounds, of this small remuneration, and not even allow him a pretty Indian female for a companion.

women.

NOTE 5.

"Il Turco," (the Turk,) says Castañeda, the historian of Coronado's march, "was an Indian slave, a native of the country on the side of Florida." Florida was that undefined country which extended from Canada to the Rio del Norte, and included the great basin of the Mississippi. The Turk told Coronado that in his country there was a river two leagues broad, and that it was beyond the province of Quivira. This was undoubtedly the Mississippi. The story he told to induce the Spaniard to leave the Pueblo country was a mixture of fact and fiction; and would impose on no one but the most credulous. It was this: "That in his country there was a river two leagues broad, in which were fish as large as horses; that there were canoes with twenty oarsmen on each side and which were also propelled by sails; that the lords of the land were seated in their sterns upon a dais, while a large golden eagle was affixed to the prows; that the sovereign of the land took his siesta beneath a huge tree, to whose branches golden bells were hung, which were rung by the agitation of the summer breeze; that the commonest vessels were of sculptured silver, and that the bowls, plates and dishes were of gold." Coronado says he was told that the king of Quivira had a long beard, was hoary-headed and rich. In his report to Mendoça, on his return, he says: "The

tale they (the guides) told me then, that Quivira was a city of extraordinary buildings and full of gold, was false. In inducing me to part with all my army to come to this country, the Indians thought that the country being desert and without water they would conduct us into places where our horses and ourselves would die of hunger; that is what the guides confessed. They told that they had acted by the advice of the natives of these countries." In all probability, "Il Turco" was neither a slave of the Pueblos nor an inhabitant of the Mississippi, but one of their wisest and bravest men. In him we witness the unconquerable spirit, that self abnegation and abandon, which is so prominent in the Indian character, and was so many times exhibited in their dealings with the Spanish conquerers. This action of the Turk was neither new nor strange; it had often been enacted before. The false story he told, the crafty duplicity with which he entered into all the minutiae of the plot, the religious zeal with which it was undertaken, the masterly skill with which it was executed, the frankness with which he avowed the object and cause of the deception when the journey was completed, and that firmness and fearlessness with which he met death, portray one of the grandest attributes of the Indian character. We see the same story told and the same acts performed in the wilds of Panama, when the cacique Uracca betrayed d'Avila; and in the everglades of Florida, when "Pedro" led De Soto after the vain illusion of gold into the pathless and almost impenetrable wilderness.

NOTE 6.

The place where the red pipe stone is found, or the pipe stone from which the pipe of peace is made, is now definitely located in the southwestern county of Minnesota. This pipe stone was an article of commerce with the North American Indians from time immemorial. It was held sacred by them, and the place where it was obtained was holy ground. Pipes of this stone have been found in graves which were made by men at a time contemporaneous with the extinct mastodon. (Smithsonian Report, 1882, pp. 690-713.)

Charles Rau, in his essay on "Ancient Aboriginal Trade in North America," says: "The celebrated red pipe stone, that highly-valued material, employed by the Indians of past and present times in the manufacture of their calumets, occurs in situ on the Coteau de Prairies, an elevation extending between the Missouri and the headwaters of the Mississippi. This is the classical ground of the surrounding tribes, and many legends lend a romantic interest to that region. It was here that the Great Spirit assembled the various Indian nations and instructed them in the art of making pipes of peace, as related by Longfellow in his charming "Song of Hiawatha." Even hostile tribes met here in peace, for this district was by common consent regarded as neutral ground, where strife and feuds were suspended, that all might resort unmolested to the quarry and supply themselves with the much-prized stone. This material, though compact, is not hard, and therefore easily worked, and, moreover, capable of a high polish. It consists chiefly of silica and alumina, with an admixture of iron which produces the red color. American, and probably also European mineralogists, call this stone catlinite, in honor of the zealous ethnologist and painter, Catlin, who was first to give an accurate account of its place of occurrence, and to relate the traditions connected with the red pipe stone quarry. This locality is the only one in North America where this peculiar stone is found, and it is doubtful indeed whether in any other place on both hemispheres a mineral substance is met which corresponds in every respect to the one in question."

NOTE 7.

"A wide and extensive commerce was carried on between the different nations of this continent, dating back into prehistoric times. We find in a single locality, at Naples, Illinois, “a shell from Florida, obsidian from Mexico, lead ore from Wisconsin or Missouri, copper from Lake Superior, and mica from the Alleghanies;" and this at a time so distant that all computation is out of the question. The Santa Fé trail may be ten thousand years old. Within historic times the Indians of

New York have given battle to their foes on the banks of the Mississippi, and the tribes of Wisconsin have gone to war with their ancient enemies at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico, and returned home before the summer was over." (Charles Rau, Smithsonian Report, 1872.)

NOTE 8.

The Spanish historian Gomara describes the buffalo as seen by Coronado thus: "These oxen are of the color and bigness of our bulls, but their horns are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore shoulders, and more hair upon their fore part than on their hinder part, and it is like wool. They have, as it were, a horse mane upon their back bone, and much hair and very long from the knees downward. They have great tufts of hair hanging down from their foreheads, and it seemeth they have beards, because of the great store of hair hanging down at their chins and throats. The males have very long tails, and a great knob or flock at the end, so that in some respects they resemble lions, and in some others the camel. They push with their horns, they run, they overtake and kill a horse when they are in their rage and anger. Finally, it is a fierce beast of countenance and form of body. The horses fled from them, either because of their deformed shape, or else because they had never seen them. Their masters have no other riches nor substance; of them they eat, they drink, they apparel, they shoe themselves; and of their hides they make many things, as houses, shoes, apparel and ropes; of their bones they make bodkins; of their sinews and hair, thread; of their horns, maws and bladders, vessels; of their dung, fire; of their calf skins, buckets, wherein they draw and keep water. To be short, they make so many things of them as they have need of, or as may suffice in the use of this life." As to the antiquity of the buffalo, we find him at home with the extinct mastodon of the age of the mound builders, in Dakota and Wisconsin, and his teeth have been found in the drift of Maine. (Smithsonian Rep. 1871, p. 394; Lapham's Antiq. of Wis., and Amer. Naturalist, vol. 1, p. 268, note.) But it must