For more than three centuries, a period extending from 1541 to 1851, historians believed, and so announced to the literary world, that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, the celebrated Spanish explorer, in his search for the Seven Cities of Cibola and the Kingdom of Quivira, was the first European to travel over the intra-continent region of North America. In the last year above referred to, however, Buckingham Smith, of Florida, an eminent Spanish scholar, and secretary of the American Legation at Madrid, discovered among the archives of State the _Narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeca de Vaca_, where for nearly three hundred years it had lain, musty and begrimed with the dust of ages, an unread and forgotten story of suffering that has no parallel in fiction. The distinguished antiquarian unearthed the valuable manuscript from its grave of oblivion, translated it into English, and gave it to the world of letters; conferring honour upon whom honour was due, and tearing the laurels from such grand voyageurs and discoverers as De Soto, La Salle, and Coronado, upon whose heads history had erroneously placed them, through no fault, or arrogance, however, of their own. Cabeca, beyond any question, travelled the Old Santa Fe Trail for many miles, crossed it where it intersects the Arkansas River, a little east of Fort William or Bent's Fort, and went thence on into New Mexico, following the famous highway as far, at least, as Las Vegas. Cabeca's march antedated that of Coronado by five years. To this intrepid Spanish voyageur we are indebted for the first description of the American bison, or buffalo as the animal is erroneously called. While not so quaint in its language as that of Coronado's historian, a lustrum later, the statement cannot be perverted into any other reference than to the great shaggy monsters of the plains:-- Cattle come as far as this. I have seen them three times and eaten of their meat. I think they are about the size of those of Spain. They have small horns like the cows of Morocco, and the hair very long and flocky, like that of the merino; some are light brown, others black. To my judgment the flesh is finer and fatter than that of this country. The Indians make blankets of the hides of those not full grown. They range over a district of more than four hundred leagues, and in the whole extent of plain over which they run the people that inhabit near there descend and live on them and scatter a vast many skins throughout the country.