were swarming in the cradle of the giant that should ultimately rule from sea to sea, annihilating the desert.  But even the desert has its charms.  One seems to inhale fresh vitality from its unpeopled immensity.  I never could understand why a desert is not generally considered beautiful; the kind, at least, we have in the South-west, with all the cacti, the yucca, and the other flowering plants unfamiliar to European or Eastern eyes, and the lines of coloured cliffs and the deep canyons.  There is far more beauty and variety of colour than in the summer meadow-stretches and hills of the Atlantic States.  So the good Padre Kino, after all, was perhaps to be congratulated on having those thirty years, interesting years, before the wilds could be made commonplace.

Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; indeed, it was like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable.  The padres crossed it and recrossed it on the southwestern corner, but they made no impression.  After Kino’s death in 1711 there was a lull in the entradas to the Colorado, though Ugarte, coming up along the eastern coast of Lower California, sailed to the mouth of the river in July, 1721.  Twenty-four years later (1744) Padre Jacobo Sedelmair went down the Gila from Casa Grande to the great bend, and from there cut across to the Colorado at about the mouth of Bill Williams Fork, but his journey was no more fruitful than those of his predecessors in the last two centuries.  It seems extraordinary in these days that men could traverse a country, even so infrequently, during two whole centuries and yet know almost nothing about it.  Two years after Sedelmair touched the Colorado, Fernando Consag, looking for mission sites, came up the gulf to its mouth, and when he had sailed away there was another long interval before the river was again visited by Europeans.  This time it was over a quarter of a century, but the activity then begun was far greater than ever before, and the two padres who now became the foremost characters in the drama that so slowly moved upon the mighty and diversified stage of the South-west, were quite the equals in tireless energy of the Jesuit Kino.  These two padres were Garces and Escalante, more closely associated with the history of the Basin of the Colorado than any one who had gone before.  Francisco Garces, as well as Escalante, was of the Franciscan order, and this order, superseding the Jesuit, was making settlements, 1769-70, at San Diego and Monterey, as well as taking a prominent part in those already long established on the Rio Grande.  There was no overland connection between the California missions and those of Sonora and the Rio Grande, and the desire to explore routes for such communication was one of the incentives of both Garces and Escalante, in their long entradas.  But it seemed to be the habit of those days, either never to seek information as to what had previously been accomplished, or to forget it, for the expedition