29 



AZTEC WHIRLWIND 0E CONQUEST 



swept into Mexico from the Northwest about the twelfth cen- 

 tury. The sanguinary horde partly destroyed and partly seized 

 for its own use the civilization of the Toltecans. We have 

 specially to do with an Aztec wave that seems to have surged 

 up the valley of the Mississippi. As the great conquering 

 people captured one region, they would settle upon it, and send 

 off a new hive of marauders. Indian tribes, numerous but of 

 the same savage type, ar marked by the old Geographers as 

 occupying the Mississippi valley. It was when one part of the 

 northern horde came up the valley of the Ohio, as the Savage 

 Iroquois, and another up the head waters of the Mississippi 

 as the Sioux, the tigers of the plains, that we became familiar 

 in the sixteenth century with this race. The French recognized 

 the Sioux as the same race as the Iroquois and called them 

 " Iroquets " or little Iroquois. The two nations were confed- 

 erate in their form of government ; they had all the fury of 

 the Aztecs, and resemblances of a sufficiently marked kind are 

 found between Sioux or Dakota and the Iroquis dialect, while 

 their skulls follow the Dolichocephalic type of cranium. With 

 fire and sword the invaders swept away the Toltecs ; their 

 mines were deserted and filled up with debris; their arts of 

 agriculture, metal working and pottery making were lost ; and 

 up to the extreme limits of our country of the Takawgamis, 

 only the mounds and their contents were left. 



OUR HISTORIC ERA 



saw the expiring blaze of this tremendous conflagration just 

 as the French arrived in Canada. Cartier saw a race in 1535 

 in Hochelaga who are believed to have had Brachycephalic 

 crania, who were agriculturists, used at least implements of 

 metal, dwelt in large houses, made pottery and were construc- 

 tive in tendency. In 1608 when Champlain visited the same 

 spot, there were none of the Hochelagans remaining. This 

 remnant of the Toltecans had been swept out of existence be- 

 tween the Algonquin wave from the east and the Iroquois 

 from the southwest. The French heard of a similar race called 

 the Eries and of another the Neutrals, who had the same habits 

 and customs as the vanished Hochelagans, but who had been 

 visited by the scourge of the Iroquois on the Ohio as they 

 ascended it, and had perished. Thus from the twelfth century, 

 the time set for the irruption of the savage tribes from New 

 Mexico, two or three centuries would probably suffice to sweep 

 away the last even of the farthest north Takawgamis. This, 



