Garces had a good understanding of the topography, for he says when he reached the Rio Jaquesila de San Pedro, as he called the Little Colorado, that it joined the main stream just above his Puerto de Bucareli.  Coues thought it probable that Cardenas on his way to the Grand Canyon, followed from Moki the same trail Garces is now taking to reach that place, and that therefore the first view Cardenas had of the canyon was from near the same place as that of Garces—­that is, he saw the Puerto de Bucareli.  This is hardly probable, as Garces was only five days reaching Moki from here, and Cardenas travelled twenty from Tusayan to the canyon.  As I pointed out on a previous page, so far as the data go, Cardenas reached the Grand Canyon opposite the east side of the Shewits plateau.

Of the Little Colorado Garces said:  “The bed of this river as far as the confluence is a trough of solid rock, very profound, and wide about a stone’s throw.”  That this was an accurate statement the view on page 95 amply proves.  Indeed, the accuracy of most of these early Spaniards, as to topography, direction, etc., is extraordinary.  As a rule where they are apparently wrong it is ourselves who are mistaken, and if we fully understand their meaning we find them to be correct.  Garces found his way down to the Little Colorado by means of a side canyon and got out again on the other side in the same way.  Finally, on July 2nd, he arrived at the pueblo of Oraibi, his objective point, and when he and his tired mule had climbed up on the mesa which bears the town, the women and children lined the housetops to get a glimpse of the singular stranger.

Spaniards were something of a novelty, though by no means unheard of, just as even I was something of a novelty when I visited Oraibi one hundred years after the Padre Garces, because the Oraibis never encouraged white visitors.* The first missions were established among the Moki in 1629, when Benavides was custodian of the Rio Grande district, and included Zuni and Moki in his field.  Three padres were then installed at Awatuwi, one of the towns, on the mesa east of what is now called the “East” Mesa.  Four were at work amongst the various towns at the time of the Pueblo uprising in 1680, and as one began his labours at Oraibi as early as 1650, a priest was not an unknown object to the older people.  All the missionaries having been killed in 1680, and Awatuwi, where a fresh installation was made, having been annihilated in 1700 by the Moki, for three-quarters of a century they had seen few if any Spaniards.  Therefore the women and children were full of curiosity.  Padre Escalante had been here from Zuni the year before, looking over the situation with a view to bringing all the Moki once more within the fold.  At that time Escalante also tried to go on to what he called the Rio de los Cosninos, the Colorado, but he was unable to accomplish his purpose.  Had he once had a view of the Grand Canyon it would undoubtedly have saved him a good many miles of weary travel in his northern entrada of this same year that Garces reached Oraibi.