Mexico and Its Religion With Incidents of Travel in That Country During Parts of the Years 1851-52-53-54, and Historical Notices of Events Connected With Places Visited

Produced by Julia Miller and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






[Illustration: SANTA ANNA.]



MEXICO AND ITS RELIGION;

WITH

INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL IN THAT COUNTRY
DURING PARTS OF THE YEARS 1851-52-53-54,

AND

HISTORICAL NOTICES OF EVENTS
CONNECTED WITH PLACES VISITED.



BY

ROBERT A. WILSON.



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.


NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1855.



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year
one thousand eight hundred and fifty-five, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

In the Clerk's Office for the Southern District of New York.




TO

THE AMERICAN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES,

THE FOLLOWING PAGES

Are Respectfully Dedicated.




PREFACE.


The custom of mingling together historical events with the incidents of
travel, of amusement with instruction, is rather a Spanish than
American practice; and in adopting it, I must crave the indulgence of
those of my readers who read only for instruction, as well as of those
who read only for amusement.

The evidence that I have adduced to prove that the yellow fever is not
an American, but an African disease, imported in slave-ships, and
periodically renewed from those cargoes of human rottenness and
putrefaction, I hope will be duly considered.

The picture of inner convent life, and the inimitable gambling scene in
the convent of San Francis, I have not dared to present on my own
responsibility, nor even that of the old English black-letter edition
of Friar Thomas, but I have reproduced it from the expurgated Spanish
edition, which has passed the censors, and must therefore be considered
official.

I have presumed to follow the great Las Casas, who called all the
historians of the Conquest of Mexico liars; and though his labored
refutation of their fictions has disappeared, yet, fortunately, the
natural evidences of their untruth still remain. Having before me the
surveys and the levels of our own engineers, I have presumed to doubt
that water ever ran up hill, that navigable canals were ever fed by
"back water," that pyramids (_teocalli_) could rest on a foundation of
soft earth, that a canal twelve feet broad by twelve feet deep, mostly
below the water level, was ever dug by Indians with their rude
implements, that gardens ever floated in mud, or that brigantines ever
sailed in a salt marsh, or even that 100,000 men ever entered the
mud-built city of Mexico by a narrow causeway in the morning, and after
fighting all day returned by the same path at night to their camp, or
that so large a besieging army as 150,000 men could be supported in a
salt-marsh valley, surrounded by high mountains.

In answer to the question why such fables have so long passed for
history, I have the ready answer, that the Inquisition controlled every
printing-office in Spain and her colonies, and its censors took good
care that nothing should be printed against the fair fame of so good a
Christian as Cortez, who had painted upon his banner an image of the
Immaculate Virgin, and had bestowed upon her a large portion of his
robbery; who had gratified the national taste for holy wars by writing
one of the finest of Spanish romances of history; who had induced the
Emperor to overlook his crime of levying war without a royal license by
the bestowal of rich presents and rich provinces; so that, by the favor
of the Emperor and the favor of the Inquisition, a _filibustero_,
whose atrocities surpassed those of every other on record, has come
down to us as a Christian hero.

The innumerable little things about their Indian mounds force the
conviction on the experienced eye of an American traveler that the
Aztecs were a horde of North American savages, who had precipitated
themselves first upon the table-land, and afterward, like the Goths
from the table-lands of Spain, extended their conquests over the
expiring civilization of the coast country; and this idea is confirmed
by the fact that the magnificent Toltec monuments of a remote
antiquity, discovered in the tropical forests, were apparently unknown
to the Aztecs. The conquest of Mexico, like our conquest of California,
was in itself a small affair; but both being immediately followed by
extensive discoveries of the precious metals, Mexico rose as rapidly
into opulence as San Francisco has in our day.

The evidence that I have presented of the inexhaustible supplies of
silver in Northern Mexico, near the route of our proposed Pacific
Railroad, may be interesting to legislators. These masses of silver lie
as undisturbed by their present owners as did the Mexican discoveries
of gold in California before the American conquest, from the inertness
of the local population, and the want of facilities of communication
with the city of Mexico.

The notion that the Mormons are destined to overrun Mexico is, of
course, only an inference drawn from the exact pa