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256 learned from the annals of the church and in Spanish books and manuscripts. But instead of studying these, men have peopled the ruins with fanciful figures, and have entered them cautiously and timidly in superstitious treasure-hunting. Numerous excavations attest the stay there of persons who have searched for the golden cups, the candlesticks of solid silver, and all that the fables ascribed to the poor missionaries of the sixteenth century. Had the gold-hunters, and, in later times, the water-hunters, considered the history of the Gran Quivira, they might have spared themselves trouble, labor, much money, and much suffering.

What is true on a small scale of Quivira is true in far greater measure of New Mexico and its metallic wealth in general. Historical writers have dealt superficially with that country by taking only a few authorities (Espejo, for example), and those without adequate criticism, as the basis of their sketches. Practical life demands of research in the historical field that it make it acquainted with the experiences of the past for the use and advantage of the present. Had those experiences been represented as they are clearly and truthfully laid down in the Spanish documents, much useless expenditure of capital would have been spared in New Mexico alone. It cannot be said that those documents were inaccessible, for the reports of Fray Marcos and of Coronado were printed in Italy and in England in the sixteenth century, and the works of Gomara, Herrera, and Torquemada contained the truth in abstracts. A Spanish officer wrote as early as 1601 that New Mexico was not so bad as it was occasionally drawn,