This ancient people, whose remains indicate unity and civilization, must
have been organized as a nation, with a central administration which all
recognized. They must have had a national name, but nobody can tell
certainly what it was. No record or tradition has preserved it, unless
discovery of it can be made in a national designation found, without
clear explanation, in the old books and traditions of Central America,
and applied to some country situated at a distance from that part of the
continent in the northeast. These old books and traditions mention
"Huehue-Tlapalan" as a distant northeastern country, from which the
Nahuas or Toltecs came to Mexico; and Brasseur de Bourbourg, who has
translated one of the old books and given much attention to others,
supposes the Toltecs and the Mound-Builders to be the same people, or
did suppose this previous to the appearance of his "Atlantic theory."
But this point will be more fully considered when we come to the Central
American antiquities.
Some antiquaries suggest that the Mound-Builders were the people called
"Allighewi" in old traditions of the Iroquois, but we have nothing to
make this very probable. The Iroquois were somewhat superior to the
other great family of barbarous Indians in organization for the business
of fighting. There are some reasons for believing they came to the lake
regions and the Ohio Valley much earlier than the Algonquin branch of
the wild Indian race. It is permissible, at least, to conjecture, if one
feels inclined to do so, that it was the Iroquois migration from the
northwest, or that of the great family to which the Iroquois family
belonged, which expelled the Mound-Builders from their border
settlements, cut them off from the copper mines, and finally pushed them
down the Mississippi; but nothing more than conjecture is possible in
this case, and the supposition gives the Iroquois migration a greater
antiquity than may be allowable. Moreover, the traditionary lore of the
wild Indians had nothing to say of the Mound-Builders, who appear to
have been as unknown and mysterious to these Indians as they are to us.