swept into Mexico from the Northwest about the twelfth century. The
sanguinary horde partly destroyed and partly seized for its own use
the civilization of the Toltecans. We have specially to do with an
Aztec wave that seems to have surged up the valley of the Mississippi.
As the great conquering people captured one region, they would settle
upon it, and send off a new hive of marauders. Indian tribes, numerous
but of the same savage type, are marked by the old Geographers as
occupying the Mississippi valley. It was when one part of the northern
horde came up the valley of the Ohio, as the Savage Iroquois, and
another up the head waters of the Mississippi as the Sioux, the tigers
of the plains, that we became familiar in the sixteenth century with
this race. The French recognized the Sioux as the same race as the
Iroquois and called them "Iroquets" or little Iroquois. The two
nations were confederate in their form of government; they had all the
fury of Aztecs, and resemblances of a sufficiently marked kind are
found between Sioux or Dakota and the Iroquois dialect, while their
skulls follow the Dolichocephalic type of cranium. With fire and sword
the invaders swept away the Toltecs; their mines were deserted and
filled up with debris; their arts of agriculture, metal working and
pottery making were lost; and up to the extreme limits of our country
of the Takawgamis, only the mounds and their contents were left.