Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/300

286 millennial jubilee" of 1883—furnishes a most emphatic proof of the want of thought and of scientific care with which the history of Spanish colonization is still written. After his return Espejo made a proposition to the Crown concerning the settlement of New Mexico (April 23, 1584), but he died in 1585, before the government had examined his plan.

The first Spanish settlement in New Mexico was founded in the year 1598 by Juan de Oñate. It was not, however, where Santa Fé now stands, but thirty miles north of that place, on the tongue of land formed by the junction of the Rio Grande with the Rio Chama, opposite the present Indian village of San Juan de los Caballeros. It was therefore very near the station Chamita, on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Oñate marched from San Marcos to San Ildefonso on the Rio Grande, barely touching the southwest corner of the Santa Fé plateaus, and paid no attention whatever to the little village of Cua-Pooge. The well-watered, highly fertile valley near San Juan, on the contrary, attracted him at once, and he began the building, opposite that pueblo, of a chapel and a Spanish headquarters, which he called "San Francisco de los Españoles," on the 23d of August, 1598. The chapel was consecrated on the 8th of September of the same year. This first colony was called San Gabriel in 1599, and that has continued till now to be the name given to the place by the Mexicans, although every trace of the buildings disappeared long ago. Ruins were still visible about 1694.

San Gabriel remained the only settlement of Europeans in New Mexico till 1608. In that year the