Don Tristram de Luna sent expeditions into the interior, and finally led one in person. In these journeys the priest and the friar joined, and daily in a tabernacle of tree boughs the holy offices of the Catholic faith were performed, the morning chant and the evening hymn breaking the silence and awakening the echoes of the primeval forest. Where they actually went, and how far north, it is impossible to say, owing to our inability to identify the sites of villages, rivers, and other land marks mentioned in the narratives of their journeys. The presumption is strong, however, that they took, and followed northward the Indian trail, on the ridge beginning at Pensacola Bay, forming the water shed between the Perdido and Escambia rivers, and beyond their headwaters uniting with the elevated country which throws off its springs and creeks eastward to the Chattahoochee and westward to the Alabama and Tallapoosa rivers. It continued northerly to the Tennessee river; a lateral trail diverging to where the city of Montgomery now stands, and thence to the site of Wetumpka; and still another leading to what is now Grey’s Ferry on the Tallapoosa. That trail, according to tradition, was the one by which the Indians, from the earliest times, passed between the Coosa country and the sea, the one followed in later times by the Indian traders on their pack-ponies, and the line of march of General Jackson in his invasion of Florida in 1814. That it was regarded and used as their guiding thread by de Luna’s expeditions in penetrating the unknown country north of Santa Maria they sought to explore, is evidenced by two facts. They came to a large river which, instead of crossing, they followed its course, undoubtedly by the ridge, and, therefore, not far from the trail. They also came to or crossed the line of de Soto’s march, which he had made ten years previously, as following the trail they would be compelled to do and found amongst the Indians a vivid recollection of the destruction and rapine of their people by white men, which they assigned as the cause of the then sparsity of population, and the abandonment of clearings formerly under cultivation. So impressed was de Luna with the fertility and other attractive features of the beautiful region of Central Alabama, which he explored, that he determined to plant a colony there. But in that design he was eventually thwarted by the discontent and insubordination of his followers, the most of whom, from the first, seem to have had no other object in view than to break up the settlement, and to terminate their insupportable exile by returning to Mexico.