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From the present let us turn to the past long before Lewis and Clark’s day.

It will jolt Eastern feeling of aged experience a bit to realize that Nebraska and Wyoming are two of the oldest sections in the United States. As Alfred Sorenson says in his admirable narrative of Omaha: eighty years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, sixty years before Hudson came poking into New York harbor, three years before Shakespeare was born, when Queen Elizabeth of England was yet a toddling baby—Nebraska and Wyoming had been discovered by Coronado with his three hundred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians seeking the Seven Mythical Cities of Indian lore. Proof? Coronado’s own record and the fact that an antique Spanish stirrup of that date was dug up on the very streets of Omaha.

We may hate to shatter some illusions here but truth compels it. From paintings and drawings on this Spanish period, one’s mental picture is of soldiers clad in mail from helmet to leg greaves and metal boot, with a flag held high aloft and a holy padre with cross upraised in one hand. Far different was the real scene. The soldiers were for the most part ragamuffin convicts wearing little but canvas shirts belted at the waist, broad hats of Indian weave and such foot-gear as would protect from cactus spines. They were—as we know from priest annals—both lawless and evil in all their relations with the Indians; but they were armed, heavily armed with bayonets and pistols and swords. They raided Indian camps for food for themselves and forage for their poor scrubs of starveling horses. This probably explains the perpetual enmity between Spaniards and all Indian tribes. The Indians had at first regarded the Spanish as gods. Too often the gods acted like evil demons of untellable cruelty; and the young Spanish officers could not control their mutinous convict troops.