Late in November 1597, a colonizing expedition headed by Don Juan de Oñate left Santa Barbara in northern Chihuahua for what is now New Mexico with four hundred men, including one hundred thirty with wives and children, several priests, eighty-three wagons and carts, and seven thousand head of stock, intending to stay. After reaching the Río Conchos and resting, the party set out again on February 7 and marched northward for several weeks across the barren desert of Chihuahua, including four final days without water, before reaching El Río del Norte near present-day San Elizario on April 26, 1598. Gasper Pérez de Villagrá, the poet-chronicler of the march, recalled the river as a most welcome sight, with horses rushing into the stream, some drinking so much that they died and others being caught in the current and drowned, while some of the people were nearly as overcome. Their arrival was a happy and joyous occasion, and in gratitude for completing a perilous part of the journey, finding abundant water, and seeing plenty of wild game along the river, the expedition prepared a great celebration held on April 30, 1598, identified as the first Thanksgiving in what is now the United States of America. Oñate, called the Great Colonizer, thus brought Spanish culture, and ultimately that of Mexico, into what would become the Great Southwest, shaping the region's growth and development for generations, and these events came several years before the English colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard, the French colonization of Canada, and the Dutch settlements in the Hudson River area.