Page 128 - La Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique - Rapport 1961

124 . WIBCONSIN HISTORICAL COLLECTIONB.

and me are shut up to the conclusion that their progenitors were
either created on the north-west coast of America, or were the
off-spring of some warlike Pacific lobster, (which they resemble
in color,) or were landed on the coast ready made, from some
other country.
Nor do me lose all traces of their origin when we reach the
shores of the Pacific.
MCKENZIE, in his voyages among the Arctic
Sir ALEXANDER
tribes, assures us that some of them have a tradition that they
had come from another country and had traversed a great lake
which was full of islands, and of having suffered great hardships
in the voyage.
The Showanoes, an Algonquin tribe, have a tradition of a
foreign origin, or landing from a sea voyage; and nearly as late
as 1819, kept up yearly sacrifices for their safe arrival in this
country. *
Rlontezuma told Cortes of a connection between the Aztec
race and the nations of the Old World. His erroneous claim
that they were of XpanisA origin, does not vitiate the tradition
of a foreign origin, since the latter fact would be much more
Lkely to be preserved, than a knowledge of the particular stock
from which they sprung; and yet, as we shall see, by and by,
this error of the Aztec monarch was not wholly without founda-
tion in truth. The general facts of their foreign origin, their
migration by water and subsequent journeyings southward along
the shores of the Pacific are well established by their pictorial
writings and charts, which, by the aid of Aztec instructors, the
Spanish conquerors learned to decipher. The Aztecs also kept
chronological records by tying sticks in bundles, by cycles, and
by these it has been ascertained, with a reasonable degree of
certainty, that they landed on the continent betweeu the years
1038 and 1064. But the Aztecs were by no means the original
inhabitants, and hence have been denied the title of Aborigines.
They were preceded by the Toltecs and they by the Olmecs, the

* Schoolcraft's Nat. and Tribal Hist. p. 19.