Page:Vol 2 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/677

Rh The plan finally adopted proved partially effective, though expensive. Strong houses were erected at convenient distances, where travellers and their stock and goods could rest securely. A military escort was furnished to each train, and each party, armed with a few arquebuses, was provided with a fortified wagon, or small movable block-house, to which the women and children retreated in case of attack. Even this mode of protection was insufficient in some instances. There was one case which deserves mention. A train of sixty wagons carrying $30,000 worth of cloth was attacked and the escort defeated. A Spanish girl, pretending to be pleased with her capture, told the Indians that there was another wagon behind containing more cloth. No sooner had they turned to go in search of it than she sprang into a movable fort which belonged to the train, and in which were two arquebuses and a sick man, and after starting the team she managed the guns so effectually as to escape.

The chief difficulty in the way of a satisfactory arrangement with the Chichimecs, and a serious one, lay in their division into so many bands, without a general leader. A religious writer. Ribas, assures us that recourse was had at last to the missionaries to reduce some of them to friendship.

The valley of Anáhuac was not to be spared for any length of time from one calamity or another. Within a few years pestilence, floods, and famine had visited it, and again, from 1575 to 1580, the evils continued. The relentless matlalzahuatl, the greatest scourge that ever assailed any community, broke out in the first-named year, for the fourth time since the Spanish conquest, in the city of Mexico, whence it spread over the whole kingdom of New Spain. The Indians were the only direct victims; priests and nurses succumbed from fatigue and other causes. The general