In April, 1528, three hundred enthusiastic young nobles and gentlemen from Spain landed at Tampa Bay, under the leadership of Narvaez, whom Cortez supplanted in the conquest of Mexico.  Narvaez had been given a commission to hold Florida, with its supposed wealth of mines and precious stones, and to become its governor.  Led by the customary fables of the natives, who told only such tales as they supposed their Spanish tormentors wished most to hear, the brilliant company wandered hither and thither through the vast swamps and forests, wasted by fatigue, famine, disease, and frequent assaults of savages.  At last, after many distressing adventures, but four men were left—­Cabeza de Vaca, treasurer of the expedition, and three others.  For eight long years did these bruised and ragged Spaniards wearily roam across the region now divided into Texas, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona—­through tangled forests, across broad rivers, morasses, and desert stretches beset by wild beasts and men; but ever spurred on by vague reports of a colony of their countrymen to the southwest.  At last (May, 1536), the miserable wanderers, first to make the transcontinental trip in northern latitudes, reached the Gulf of California, where they met some of their fellow countrymen, who bore them in triumph to the City of Mexico, as the guests of the province....

In that golden age of romance travelers were expected to gild their tales, and in this respect seldom failed to meet the popular demand.  The Spanish conquistadores, in particular, lived in an atmosphere of fancy.  They looked at American savages and their ways through Spanish spectacles; and knowing nothing of the modern science of ethnology, quite misunderstood the import of what they saw.  Beset by the national vice of flowery embellishment, they were also pardonably ignorant of savage life, and had an indiscriminating thirst for the marvelous.  Thus, we see plainly how the Cibola myth arose and grew; and why most official Spanish reports of the conquest of the Aztecs were so distorted by false conceptions of the conquered people as in some particulars to be of light value as material for history.  It was, then, small wonder that Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow adventurers, in the midst of the hero worship of which they were now recipients, should claim themselves to have seen the mysterious seven cities, and to have enlarged upon the previous stories.

Coronado, governor of the northern province of New Galicia, was accordingly sent to conquer this wonderful country, which the adventurers had seen, but Guzman failed to find.  In 1540, the years when Cortez again returned to meet ungrateful neglect at the bands of the Spanish court, Coronado set out with a well—­equipped following of three hundred whites and eight hundred Indians.  The Cibola cities were found to be but mud pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico, with the aspect of which we are to—­day familiar; while the mild—­tempered inhabitants, destitute of wealth, peacefully practising their crude industries and tilling their irrigated field, were foemen hardly worthy of Castilian steel.