PREFACE. FOR several reasons, the history of Arizona and New Mexico, particularly in the early times, is not surpassed in interest by that of any portion of the Pacific United States, or perhaps of the whole republic. Notable among these reasons are the antiquity of these territories as Spanish provinces-for they were the first to be occupied by Europeans, and ten years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a Historia de la Nueva Mexico was published; the peculiar Pueblo civilization, second only to that of the Aztecs and Mayas in the south, found among the aborigines of this land, and maintaining itself more nearly in its original conditions than elsewhere down to the present day; the air of romance pervading the country's early annals in connection with the Northern Mystery, quaint cosmographic theories, and the search for fabulous empires in Cíbola, Teguayo, and Quivira; the ancient belief in the existence of immense mineral treasures as supplemented by the actual discovery of such treasures in modern times; the long and bloody struggle against raiding Apaches, the Ishmaelites of American aborigines; the peculiar circumstances under which this broad region fell into the hands of the United States; the fact that the eastern portion, unlike any other territory of the republic, is still inhabited mainly by a Spanish-speaking people; its position on the national frontier; its peculiarities of physical configuration and climate; and finally, the marvelous strides towards prosperity in the last decade, of a country formerly regarded as an unpromising section of the Great American Desert. That the annals of these countries, so extensive both chronologically and territorially, are compressed into one volume of this History of the Pacific States, while seven volumes are devoted to the record of a sister province, California, is a fact that may seem to require a word of explanation, though it is in accordance with a plan deliberately formed and announced at the outset. All Spanish-American provinces are in certain respects so similar in their annals one to another that it was and is believed sufficient and best in a comprehensive work like this to present the minutiae of local and personal happenings of but one. California was chosen for this purpose, not only because of its modern prominence, but because its records are remarkably perfect, and because its position on the coast, facilitating intercourse with Mexico and foreign nations, its mission system, its trading and smuggling experience, its Russian complications, its political vicissitudes, and its immigrant and other foreign elements gave to its history, as compared with that of interior provinces, a notable variety, tending greatly to mitigate the inevitable monotony of all provincial annals, even before the knowledge of its golden treasure came to startle the world. The history of New Mexico written on the same scale as that of the Pacific province would not only fill many volumes, but from the lack of continuous archive evidence, and from the fact that the |