Preliminary to the entradas of the padres, Don Antonio de Espejo, in 1583, went from the Rio Grande to Moki and westward to a mountain, probably one of the San Francisco group, but he did not see the Colorado.  Twenty-one years elapsed before a white man again ventured into this region.  In 1604, Don Juan de Onate, the wealthy governor of New Mexico, determined to cross from his headquarters at the village of San Juan on the Rio Grande, by this route to the South Sea, and, accompanied by thirty soldiers and two padres, he set forth, passing west by way of the pueblo of Zuni, and probably not seeing at that time the celebrated Inscription Rock,* for, though his name is said to be first of European marks, the date is 1606.  From Zuni he went to the Moki towns, then five in number, and possibly somewhat south of the present place.  Beyond Moki ten leagues, they crossed a stream flowing north-westerly, which was called Colorado from the colour of its water,—­the first use of the name so far traced.  This was what we now call the Little Colorado.  They understood it to discharge into the South Sea (Pacific), and probably Onate took it for the very headwaters of the Buena Guia which Alarcon had discovered over sixty years before.  As yet no white man had been north of Moki in the Basin of the Colorado, and the only source of information concerning the far northern region was the natives, who were not always understood, however honestly they might try to convey a knowledge of the country.

* This is a quadrangular mass of sandstone about a mile long, thirty-five miles east of Zuni.  On its base at the eastern end are a number of native and European inscriptions, the oldest, of the European dates according to Simpson, being 1606, recording a visit by Onate.  The rock, or, more properly, mesa, is also called the Morro.  Chas. F. Lummis has also written on this subject.

Skirting the southern edge of the beautiful San Francisco Mountain region, through the superb forest of pine trees, Onate finally descended from the Colorado Plateau to the headwaters of the Verde, where he met a tribe called Cruzados, because they wore little crosses from the hair of the forehead, a relic, no doubt, of the time when Alarcon had so freely distributed these emblems among the tribes he encountered on the Colorado, friends probably of these Cruzados.  The latter reported the sea twenty days distant by way of a small river running into a greater, which flowed to the salt water.  The small river was Bill Williams Fork, and on striking it Onate began to see the remarkable pitahaya adorning the landscape with its tall, stately columns; and all the strange lowland vegetation followed.  The San Andreas, as he called this stream, later named Santa Maria by Garces, he followed down to the large river into which it emptied, the Colorado, which he called the Rio Grande de Buena Esperanza, or River of Good Hope, evidently deciding that it merited a more distinguished title than had been awarded it