There he found the tribe of the Quiviras,--roaming savages who chased the buffalo,--but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of incessant marching and awful hardships. Soon after his return, he was so seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked; and disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative obscurity. This was a sad end for the remarkable man who had found out so many thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries before any of our blood saw any of it,--a well-born, college-bred, ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He was a city-bred man, and no frontiersman; and being accustomed only to Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California, he knew nothing of, and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands, that New Mexico was successfully colonized. While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a golden fable across their desolate plains, his countrymen had found and were exploring another of our States,--our golden garden of California. Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three centuries later.