Page:Young Folks History Of Mexico.pdf/32

 26 believed that they lived here in Mexico. They were good-natured men, but very lazy, and when the strangers arrived among them from the south they enslaved them. Tired at last of the disgusting habits of the giants, the Indians turned upon them and slew them, first having put them to sleep by drugging their wine. Thus Mexico was freed from these worthless giants; but another monster was to stride over the land for many hundred years and make its fair valleys to be desolate more than once, this was the demon war.

[596-1050.] Our first certain knowledge is of the race known as the Toltecs,—Toltecas, artificers, or architects,—who were really quite civilized when they first appeared in the pages of history. They understood and practised agriculture and many arts. Being driven from a country in which they had been long settled, by invading savages, they commenced a journey southward, halting at intervals long enough to plant corn and cotton and gather the crops.

[596.] Their annals tell us that they began their migration in the year "1 Tecpatl," or 596 of our Christian era. The country they left, supposed to be in the north, they called Huehue Tlapaltan, or the old Tlapaltan.

Here again enters speculation, upon the location of that country of the Toltecs. No one knows certainly where it was, but everything points to its having been in the north.

If you are acquainted with the early history of the United States, you will remember that the oldest remains of civilization there are those of the Mound Builders. You will recall the descriptions given of the great earthworks lying in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys; works so vast that it must have taken many generations to complete them, and