[Illustration: Routes of the Explorers]
The first Spanish expeditions into the northern borderlands of New
Spain sampled the continent’s wondrous diversity. De Soto made his
great march across a luxuriant country so stunning and productive that
the expedition’s journals are full of admiring description. He
encountered complex native societies, which were often organized into
powerful chiefdoms—generous in peace but formidable in war. Centuries
of settlement has greatly altered this landscape. Not so Coronado’s
country. A traveler to the Southwest can still see places evocative of
the first Spanish encounters with Indians of the pueblos and Plains. A
sailor retracing Cabrillo’s route up the California coast runs past
mountains that, in the words of the chronicler, “seem to reach the
heavens ... [and are] covered with snow”—mountains he called the
Sierra Nevada. They are today’s Santa Lucia range. Cabrillo’s voyage
is now best followed in the imagination.