Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/21

Rh of nature and art, and reports of conditions and events in single countries, are alike carried to great distances through war and trade.

Although languages and dialects were separated from one another by uninhabited neutral regions, prisoners of war could tell of what was going on at their homes; the booty would include a variety of strange objects; and traders traversed the country in the face of numerous dangers, visited the enemy's markets, and carried their goods to them, with many novelties. This process was repeated from tribe to tribe; and in that way the products of one half of the continent passed, often in single objects, to the other half, and with them accounts of far-off regions, though changed and distorted by time and distance, into remote quarters.

The centers of this primitive trade were among those tribes which, being the most civilized, had the largest number of wants and the most abundant productions. They were the agricultural tribes, the "village Indians" of the higher races. These, although in America they never lived in a gold-bearing country, accumulated the metallic treasures of the lands around them, acquiring them by means of successful wars, or through an active and extensive trade. But the Spaniards, who had no taste for work, preferring chivalrous robbery, sought first the centres of trade and the treasure already laid up in them. The conquest of Mexico gave them evidence of the existence of such a centre in the central part of the Western Continent; but concerning South America there were only rumors and vague guesses.

Excepting the colonies on the Isthmus of Darien