The Origin of the Mound Builders

We know that the Mound-builders had a knowledge of Mexico before their southwestern migration, because obsidian was found in their mounds, and this mineral is found only in Mexico.

No links are so conclusive in connecting the Mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley with those of Mexico, as the truncated, pyramidal mounds. True to the historical traditions that all great centers of civilization have been along the great river basins, we would naturally turn to the water-courses of Mexico to resume the trend of our narrative, and we are not disappointed.

On the Panuca River, near the Gulf of Tampico, Mr. Norman found twenty-five mounds, some of them covering two acres, and built of earth as those in the Mississippi Valley, though some were faced with stones. According to the Smithsonian Report of 1873, across the river from Vera Cruz occurs a locality of mounds covering three square leagues. The pyramids of Papantla and Tuscapan are of solid masonry with steps on the outside. The pyramid of Cholula is truncated, its base being one thousand four hundred and twenty-three feet long, covering forty-four acres. Its perpendicular height is one hundred and seventy-two feet, and its truncated summit contains more than one acre; this was the Mecca of the valley of Anahuac. The hanging gardens of Tezcuco had a summit reached by five hundred and twenty steps and crowned by a fountain. Nezahualeoyotl built a pyramidal temple nine stories high, dedicated to “The Unknown God, the Cause of Causes.” In the ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca, Guingola, and numerous others, we have numerous ruins of different construction; but to say that they are the works of different races of people is saying too much. All the inhabitants of Nahuac were kindred tribes, and spoke the Nahuatl language, though entering the valley at different times in different clans. Winchell states that the Mongoloids entered North America by Behring’s Strait and spread east and southward; that the beginning of this wave is lost in obscurity, but in due succession the Nahuas moved forward. The Toltecs followed and crowded the Nahuas through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec into Yucatan and Central America. The Astecs followed the Toltecs in occupancy. While the Astecs crowded on the Toltecs, these pushed farther the Nahuas, and the Nahuas pressed on the rear of their unknown and mysterious predecessors, and so forth to the borders of Chili. Also another branch of Mongoloids entered South America by the Polynesian route, crossed the Andes, ascended the Atlantic Slope to the Caribbean Sea, crossed to the Antilles and entered North America by the Tortugas and Florida, ascended the Atlantic Slope and began war on the peaceful inhabitants of the Pacific Slope, when the white man arrived and interrupted this symmetrical rotation and sequence of invasion. I beg leave differ with regard to a part of this plan, on grounds adduced further on.

The Toltec clan was among the first to enter the Valley of Mexico or Nahua, followed by the Chichimecs, who were succeeded by the seven clans or tribes who dwelt in the valley at the same time, and who probably are connected with “the seven mysterious cities of Cibola” in New Mexico.

These tribes were the Xochimilcos, Cholcos, Tepanecos, Acolhuas, Tezcucans, Tlascaltecas and Astecs. For political strength the Astecs, Tezcucans and Tlascans formed a triumvirate, and each had their capital city, viz.: Tezcuco, Tlasca, and Tenochtitlan. The Astec clan in its peregrinations had kept the name Astec, in honor of their ancient home, Aztlan or Atlantis, but their priest, Aacatl, decreed that they should be called Mexicatls, in honor of their war god, Mexitli, because he had enabled them to conquer their brethren.

In the midst of the beautiful Lake Tezcuco, on an island, they built their national capital, Tenochtitlan, which the Spaniards called “the most beautiful spot on earth.” Cortez destroyed this beautiful city and built the modern city of Mexico on its ruins. It was here that the ill-starred “Moteuczoma”—whom the Spaniards have misspelled Montezuma—poured the wealth of his kingdom into the coffers of Cortez, and in return suffered the most humiliating degradation and death recorded on the pages of history.

Tenochtitlan was a great city. Two thousand temples, one hundred palaces and a thousand sumptuous dwellings have melted before the desecrating Spaniards as a mirage before a thirsty traveler.

The priests, in their too zealous zeal to uproot polytheism, wreaked their holy vengeance upon temples and idols; and history can produce no parallel to the vandalism that would sack the temples of all the written documents and ideographic paintings and make a bonfire of them on the public plaza, on the plea that they were from the devil!

The zenith of New World civilization became a setting sun before a savage Christianity. The path of the Christian became a sirocco, the garden spot of the world became a holocaust.

Tenochtitlan, the city of palaces, the capital of the Valley of Anahuac, was razed to the ground, and the testimony of a thousand years of civilization was as completely lost to the modern world as the buried island of Atlantis, and by a Christian nation!

It matters little with which particular tribe of Anahuac the Mound-builders have become identified, since all the Nahuatl tribes were Mound-builders, and were forging a high civilization out of Nature herself.

The differentiation of the Mound-builders’ intellectuality, the gradual increments of their power of specialization, would naturally improve an earth mound by facing it with stone, and in turn to build it entirely of stone, and finally truncate a solid pyramid, crown its top with a palace or a temple, and its terraces with fountains and hanging gardens. It is but natural that the pottery of the Ohio mounds, with their rude images of animals and things, would suggest the association of several such images to record a thought, and, as civilization advanced, to resolve itself into the curious hieroglyphics of the Astecs. The effigy mounds of Wisconsin were but an inherent impulse to perpetuate their symbols of worship upon the most lasting monuments known to their rude art—earth mounds. What could be more natural than that, as soon as stone temples took the place of earth mounds, they should emblazon those same symbols on the lasting rock? That same perseverance that could raise Cahokia and Grave Creek Mound has intensified itself in chiseling beautiful facades and frescoes out of solid porphyry, with no other tools than obsidian chisels. The bas-reliefs are as delicate as those cut by steel, and the paintings on the temples of Mexico of human faces, are as identical with the shape of the skulls in the museum in Chicago, with their retreating foreheads and prominent superciliary ridges, as a painting can be like a skull.

The laws of the Astecs were written in blood by a Draco, and a historian who misrepresented facts was punished with death. Accepting the above as proof evident that the paintings are correct, the large nose of the statues will forever contradict the alliance of the Astecs or Mound-builders with the Mongoloids. Hereafter we shall use the word Mound-builders as a synonym for Astecs, since we believe we have established sufficiently the analogy.

You ask, Then why have not the records of the Astecs preserved their early history in the Mississippi Valley? Such in all probability was the case, but the Spaniards burned every record they could find, and whatever history we have is fragmentary, and only such as escaped the diligence of the priests. We may marvel at first that the cupidity of the Spaniards should thus outweigh every other consideration of right and justice, but we must consider that this was the age of chivalry, just succeeding the Crusades, when all Europe turned knight-errants and went to war against the Saracens of Asia. It was the war of the Cross against the Crescent, when each Christian thought it his duty to kill a Turk, in order to plant the Cross in heathen lands.

This fever struck chivalrous Spain, and no leader could have been found more imbued with the spirit than Hernando Cortez, and it was with this spirit that he entered Mexico—to win gold for his crown and the country for his church. Iconoclasm was his creed, gold his desire, and fire and the sword his argument. When he entered the sanctuaries of their temples, and offered the sacerdotal official the image of the Virgin, in an unknown tongue, as a substitute for their tutelary divinities, on their inability to comprehend his motives, he invariably overturned their altars, broke their idols, and, with the assumption of a man ordained by Jehovah, invoked the saints to let them be anathema maranatha. No cataclysm of nature since the destruction of Atlantis has been so blighting to the growth of a nation, or so completely annihilating to their past history, as the Spanish Conquest of the New World.

Tenochtitlan, the mistress who demanded tribute of all Mexico, has vanished, and the Modern Mexico, phœnix-like, soars aloft with outstretched wings, and hovers over the earth with her music, then sinks with the last sad notes of the dying swan, to immolate herself, that she may rise from her ashes, to rise higher and sing clearer.

A Catholic cathedral occupies the place of the Teocalli, but at what cost! Ten thousand souls without the knowledge of an Evangel; the canals of the New World Venice turned into a Golgotha; the beautiful lake of Tezcuco turned into a salt marsh, the hanging gardens and fountains of princes into cactus beds, and the history of a people blotted from the face of the earth!

The modern traveler, as he looks at the changed scenes in the Valley of Mexico, may truthfully say: