Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast, undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zuni, near the modern Gallup, he was met with the warning "Go back; or you will be put to death." His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zuni people promptly killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the lay brothers. Zuni was called "_cibola_" owing to the great number of buffalo skins (_cibolas_) in camp. Fray Marcos' report encouraged the Emperor of Spain to go on with Coronado's expedition. That trip need not be told here. It has been told and retold in half the languages of the world. The Spaniards set out from Old Mexico 300 strong, with 800 Indian escorts and four priests including Marcos and a lay brother. What did they expect? Probably a second Peru, temples with walls of gold and images draped in jewels of priceless worth. What did they find? In Zuni and the Three Mesas and Taos, small, sun-baked clay houses built tier on tier on top of each other like a child's block house, with neither precious stones, nor metals of any sort, but only an abundance of hides and woven cloth. When the soldiers saw Zuni, they broke out in jeers and curses at the priest. Poor Fray Marcos was thinking more of souls saved from perdition than of loot, and returned in shamed embarrassment to New Spain.