Page:The Story of Mexico.djvu/217

Rh a remote land almost fabulous for its riches and precious stones.

The first natives Columbus encountered in the Western World, he therefore naturally called Indios, and this name attaches to all the indigenous tribes of America. So the first settlers farther north, on the shores of the Atlantic, called the red men who came to meet them Indians. But the Red Men of the north are a distinctive race from the Indios of Anahuac. If allied at all, they are but distant relatives. Their color, their skulls, their brains, their manners and customs are all different. As we have seen, the Nahuatl tribes that migrated from Aztlan belonged, with scarce a doubt, to a people antecedent to the Red Indians of North America.

Nevertheless, the word Indian is so fixed in the minds of most of the people of the United States, as belonging to the savage of the tomahawk and warwhoop, that it is rather common to fancy the Mexican Indios to be of the same stock. Many a reader of Prescott's "Conquest" has been surprised to find that the natives who were terrified at the approach of Cortés on his war-horse, were not first cousins to the Mohawks and Algonquins whom Parkman has described.

It is necessary to dwell on this, in order that any fair opinion should be formed of the native races of Anahuac, belonging to the different tribes of Indios, descendants of Tarascans, Otomies, Zapotecs, Mextecs, Mazahuans, Popolocs, Zotzils, Mayas, etc., which now form a large part of the population of Mexico.