The Peak of Gold by Charles Fletcher Lummis

The most remarkable myths that appear in American history are those which were so eagerly listened to by the early Spanish conquerors, who overran two-thirds of the two Americas long before the Saxons so much as attempted a foot-hold in the New World. There was the famous myth of El Dorado in South America-a living man covered from head to foot with pure gold dust and nuggets. In Mexico was the fable of Montezuma's untold tons of gold and bushels of precious stones, and many other impossible things. Ponce de Leon, the gallant conqueror of Puerto Rico, paid with his life for the credulity which led him to the first of our states ever entered by a European, in quest of an alleged fountain of perpetual youth-a butterfly which some of the world's learned doctors are still chasing under another form.

And all across the arid Southwest the hot winds have scattered the dust of brave but too-believing men who fell in the desert through which they pursued some glittering shape of the American golden fleece. When Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveler, walked across this continent from ocean to ocean, over three hundred and fifty years ago, he heard from the Indians many gilded myths, and chief of them were those concerning the famous Seven Cities of Cíbola. So enormously abundant was gold said to be in these Indian cities, that it was put to the meanest uses. When Vaca got to the Spanish settlements in Mexico and told this wonderful report it made a great commotion, and soon afterward that great explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, came to the Seven Cities of Cíbola-which surrounded the site of the present Pueblo Indian town of Zuñi in the extreme west of New Mexico.