About Mexico - Past and Present/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
EARLY SETTLERS OF MEXICO.
AMONG the pictures carved on the ancient monuments in Mexico are those which represent Votan, whose history belongs to the earliest dawn of civilization in this Western world. He and his companions are said to have come from a foreign land in ships. They found the people, from the Isthmus to California, clothed in skins, dwelling in caves or rude huts and speaking one language. There are evidences that Votan brought with him to this continent a knowledge of the one true God, which he taught to the people. As we are further told in these traditions that no temples or altars were known in Votan's day, he must have lived before the Mexican pyramids were built, since these all seem to be designed for places of worship.
Votan and his friends married the women of the country, and after establishing a government they made several voyages to their native land. On his return from one of these trips Votan reported that he had been to see the ruins of a building erected by men who intended to climb up on it to heaven, and that the people who lived in its neighborhood said that it was the place where God gave to each family its own language.
Who were these aboriginal inhabitants of America whom Votan taught, and when was it that they emerged from their caves and huts to gaze on these first white men who came to this continent? At some time in their history they no doubt migrated from Central Asia, that cradle of the human race. As to when or by what road they found their way to America we cannot be so sure. A glance at the map of the world will show that away up among the icebergs of the polar circle the northwestern corner of America comes so near the north-eastern corner of Asia that their outlying islands seem like stepping-stones from one continent to the other. The Alaskan Indians, on our side, and their neighbors in Siberia, now find no difficulty in crossing Behring's Straits in their little kyacks, and it is more than probable that in the far-away past of which Mexican records tell, some of the wandering tribes of the Old World found their way to this continent by this northern road.
We hear now of small colonies of Japanese on our western coast who have come over by still another route, which can be seen on maps that give the direction of the ocean-currents. One of these great sea-rivers runs north through the Pacific Ocean quite near the eastern shore of Asia until it is opposite Japan; then, turning suddenly, it sweeps due east until it strikes the coast of California. The people of Asia occasionally drift over to America on this ocean-current. Uprooted trees of kinds which do not grow on this continent are found on the shore, and Japanese junks are stranded at the rate of about one every year, and sometimes, it is said, with some of their shipwrecked crew still alive.
It is probable that other civilized people succeeded Votan in the possession of Mexico, but until some time in the tenth century no one of them was described. At that period a new nation made its appearance among the shadowy races with which the land was peopled. Tradition says they were white men who came from the north-east in companies, some by sea and some by land; twenty thousand of these emigrants, led by a dignified old chief, are said to have come at once. They are described as a good-looking people, wearing long white tunics, sandals and straw hats. They were mostly farmers and skilled mechanics, and were peaceable, orderly and enterprising. They had left their own land, Huehue-Tlapallan, after a struggle of years with the barbarous tribes around them, and made their way south to Mexico—a country with which it is probable they had been familiar as traders. Many suppose that these immigrants were the same people as the Mound-Builders of our own country—that strange, nameless race whose earthworks astonish the archaeologist of today. Tools which these old workmen left behind them in the Ohio Valley and elsewhere are made of a kind of flint which is not found nearer than Mexico. Shells which must have come from the Gulf of Mexico have also been found buried in the graves of the Mound-Builders, showing that ages ago these people must have trafficked with those who lived along its shores. When war disturbed them in their home at the North, the more enterprising of them migrated to Mexico and built cities and temples on the same general plan as those erected by their forefathers, but of so much more substantial materials that many of them have outlasted the centuries which have come and gone since they appeared among the southern tribes. These people went by the name of "Toltecs" among their Mexican neighbors and successors. When the later tribes came to have a written history—as they did about four hundred years afterward—they ascribed all that they knew of civilization to those who preceded them.
The Toltecs filled the land with colossal masonry. Many of the temples, pyramids, castles and aqueducts which were in decay when Cortez arrived, in 1519, are supposed to have been built by these people. The half-buried ruins of Tula, or Tullan, one of their great cities, may still have been inhabited at the time of the conquest, but most of the places known to have been built by them were numbered among the antiquities of Mexico when Columbus was near that land, more than twenty years before.
In Xochimilco is found a great pyramid with five terraces, built on a platform of solid rock. This rock has been hollowed out, and long galleries with smooth glistening sides formed within it. The great pyramid of Cholula, built by the early race, covered forty-five acres of ground and was fourteen hundred feet square at the base. A winding road led to its top, which was flat, with small towers for worship. All these structures were built with their sides squared by the points of the compass. They are now found buried in the depths of vast forests, far away from the haunts of civilized men. As the Indians always seem unwilling to reveal the secret of their existence, many of these are no doubt yet unknown to the white race.
The temple of Papantla, fifty miles from Vera Cruz, was hidden in the dense woods west of that city for more than two hundred years after the Spaniards landed on the coast, having been discovered by a party of hunters in 1790. This building is so old that those who could decipher the picture-language of the Aztecs could not interpret the inscriptions on its terraced sides, though 
About four hundred years passed away, and the Toltecs disappeared from Mexico; war, pestilence and famine did their work among these interesting people. They left accounts of their nation and polity in carefully written or pictured histories, some of which were extant when Cortez came; none of them can now be found. One of the early Aztec chieftains made a bonfire of some of these books, and the Spaniards, in their fanatical zeal to blot out all traces of heathenism, destroyed libraries of these and other valuable records which would now be worth more to the world than all the monkish legends that ever were written.
But there was much that could not be blotted out. The Aztec measurement of time—more perfect than any known to the Greeks and the Romans—was taught to them by these old astrologers, who seem to have known the precise length of the tropical year. The ingenious system of picture-writing in use among all the tribes, the more enlightened of their laws and the most refined and humane part of their worship were a legacy from their Toltec predecessors.
Very strong light is often thrown on the past by the history of a single word; the name "Toltec" is an instance of this. While many other Mexicans were yet wandering tribes these people came to the valley and began to build the large edifices for which they have since become famous, and to carve the symbols of their faith on the solid rocks about them. Their rude neighbors looked on with wonder. They had no word of their own to express the new and strange character of a builder; and when they had need to speak of such a man, they called him a Toltec.