be altogether optional. The friars, however, had other views.
In the sixteenth century there is no record of any definite communication with Nayarit; but we are told that in the first years of the seventeenth. Captain Gerónimo de Arciniega penetrated to Guainamota, took thence two thousand Indians, and with them founded four settlements.[1] Then we have a vague narrative of the expedition in 1616 to 1618 of Captain Miguel Caldera with several companions. They are said to have set forth from Compostela and to have spent some time about the entrance to the forbidden realms, meeting the king and his attendants, receiving four children as a gift, and making so favorable an impression that some of the Nayarits came to Tepic and even submitted to baptism. About the same time a band of rebellious Tepehuanes from Durango sought refuge in the southern sierra, and Captain Bartolomé Arisbaba, pursuing them, met Caldera and the Indians at Guazamota. Here was a chance for the great chief to give a practical demonstration of his new friendship, as in fact he is said to have done, by offering to join in the pursuit. Of the result we only know that Arisbaba left on a stone preserved in the church at Guazamota as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, an inscription reciting that in 1618 he conquered the province of San José del Gran Nayar. His conquest however cannot have been a very effectual one, probably consisting of certain ceremonies of formal submission, of which the wily natives were ever prodigal outside of their own territory; and Guazamota was on the frontier and
- ↑ Mota-Padilla, Conq. N. Gal., 458-9. Other Indians were added in 1603, and in 1605 the king thanked Arciniega for his services. The same author relates that in 1613 father Miguel de Aranzu walked barefoot up the Sierra de los Coras, meeting many natives under a one-eyed chieftain who said his name was Nayarit, thus originating a name for the province and for the people. It is probable that the name did come from a native niler. According to Apostólicos Afanes, 2, 9, it was from El Naye, the first who attained to regal power. El Gran Nayar is another and, according to this author, more vulgar form. He however calls the chief ruler in 1616 El Gran Nayarit.
