Indeed, the accuracy of most of these early Spaniards, as to topography, direction, etc., is extraordinary.

As a rule where they are apparently wrong it is ourselves who are mistaken, and if we fully understand their meaning we find them to be correct.

Garces found his way down to the Little Colorado by means of a side canyon and got out again on the other side in the same way.

Finally, on July 2nd, he arrived at the pueblo of Oraibi, his objective point, and when he and his tired mule had climbed up on the mesa which bears the town, the women and children lined the housetops to get a glimpse of the singular stranger.
Spaniards were something of a novelty, though by no means unheard of, just as even I was something of a novelty when I visited Oraibi one hundred years after the Padre Garces, because the Oraibis never encouraged white visitors.* The first missions were established among the Moki in 1629, when Benavides was custodian of the Rio Grande district, and included Zuni and Moki in his field.

Three padres were then installed at Awatuwi, one of the towns, on the mesa east of what is now called the "East" Mesa.