PERU AS IT WAS.

Now that we have followed Pizarro to Peru, and he is about to conquer the wonderful land to find which he has gone through such unparalleled discouragements and sufferings, we must stop for a moment to get an understanding of the country. This is the more necessary because such false and foolish tales of “the Empire of Peru” and “the reign of the Incas,” and all that sort of trash, have been so widely circulated. To comprehend the Conquest at all, we must understand what there was to conquer; and that makes it necessary that I should sketch in a few words the picture of Peru that was so long accepted on the authority of grotesquely mistaken historians, and also Peru as it really was, and as more scholarly history has fully proved it to have been.

We were told that Peru was a great, rich, populous, civilized empire, ruled by a long line of kings who were called Incas; that it had dynasties and noblemen, throne and crown and court; that its kings conquered vast territories, and civilized their conquered savage neighbors by wonderful laws and schools and other tools of the highest political economy; that they had military roads finer than those built by the Romans, and a thousand miles in length, with wonderful pavement and bridges; that this wonderful race believed in one Supreme Being; that the king and all of the royal blood were immeasurably above the common people, but mild, just, paternal, and enlightened; that there were royal palaces everywhere; that they had canals four or five hundred miles long, and county fairs, and theatrical representations of tragedy and comedy; that they carved emeralds with bronze tools the making of which is now a lost art; that the government took the census, and had the populace educated; and that while the policy of the remarkable aborigines of Mexico was the policy of hate, that of the Inca kings was the policy of love and mildness. Above all, we were told much of the long line of Inca monarchs, the royal family, whose last great king, Huayna Capac, had died not a great while before the coming of the Spaniards. He was represented as dividing the throne between his sons Atahualpa and Huascar, who soon quarrelled and began a wicked and merciless fratricidal war with armies and other civilized arrangements. Then, we were told, came Pizarro and took advantage of this unfraternal war, arrayed one brother against the other, and thus was enabled at last to conquer the empire.

All this, with a thousand other things as ridiculous, as untrue, and as impossible, is part of one of the most fascinating but misleading historical romances ever written. It never could have been written if the beautiful and accurate science of ethnology had then been known. The whole idea of Peru so long prevalent was based upon utter ignorance of the country, and, above all, of Indians everywhere. For you must remember that these wonderful beings, whose pictured government puts to shame any civilized nation now on earth, were nothing but Indians. I do not mean that Indians are not men, with all the emotions and feelings and rights of men, rights which I only wish we had protected with as honorable care as Spain did. But the North and South American Indians are very like each other in their social, religious, and political organization, and very unlike us. The Peruvians had indeed advanced somewhat further than any other Indians in America, but they were still Indians. They had no adequate idea of a Supreme Being, but worshipped a bewildering multitude of gods and idols. There was no king, no throne, no dynasty, no royal blood, nor anything else royal. Anything of that sort was even more impossible among the Indians than it would be now in our own republic. There was not, and could not be, even a nation. Indian life is essentially tribal. Not only can there be no king nor anything resembling a king, but there is no such thing as heredity, except as something to be guarded against. The chief (and there cannot be even one supreme chief) cannot hand down his authority to his son, nor to any one else. The successor is elected by the council of officials who have such things in charge. Where there are no kings there can be no palaces, and there were neither in Peru. As for fairs and schools and all those things, they were as untrue as impossible. There was no court, nor crown, nor nobility, nor census, nor theatres, nor anything remotely suggesting any of them; and as for the Incas, they were not kings nor even rulers, but a tribe of Indians. They were the only Indians in the Americas who had the smelter; and that enabled them to make rude gold and silver ornaments and images; so their country was the richest in the New World, and they certainly had a remarkable though barbaric splendor. The temples of their blind gods were bright with gold, and the Indians wore precious metals in profusion, just as our own Navajos and Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona wear pounds and pounds of silver ornaments to-day. They made bronze tools too, some of which had a very good temper; but it was not an art, only an accident. Two of those tools were never found of the same alloy; the Indian smith simply guessed at it, and had to throw away many a tool for every one he accidentally made.

The Incas were one of the Peruvian tribes, at first weak and sadly mauled about by their neighbors. At last, driven from their old home, they stumbled upon a valley which was a natural fortress. Here they built their town of Cuzco, for they built towns as did our Pueblos, but better. Then when they had fortified the two or three passes by which alone that pocket in the Andes can be reached, they were safe. Their neighbors could no longer get in to kill and rob them. In time they grew to be numerous and confident, and like all other Indians (and some white peoples) at once began to sally out to kill and rob their neighbors. In this they succeeded very well, because they had a safe place to retreat to; and, above all, because they had their little camels, and could carry food enough to be gone long from home. They had domesticated the llama, which none of the neighbor tribes, except the Aymaros, had done; and this gave the Incas an enormous advantage. They could steal out from their safe valley in a large force, with provisions for a month or more, and surprise some village. If they were beaten off, they merely skulked in the mountains, living by their pack-train, constantly harassing and cutting off the villagers until the latter were simply worn out. We see what the little camel did for the Incas: it enabled them to make war in a manner no other Indians in America had then ever used. With this advantage and in this manner this warrior tribe had made what might be called a “conquest” over an enormous country. The tribes found it cheaper at last to yield, and pay the Incas to let them alone. The robbers built storehouses in each place, and put there an official to receive the tribute exacted from the conquered tribe. These tribes were never assimilated. They could not enter Cuzco, nor did Incas come to live among them. It was not a nation, but a country of Indian tribes held down together by fear of the one stronger tribe.

The organization of the Incas was, broadly speaking, the same as that of any other Indian tribe. The most prominent official in such a tribe of land-pirates was naturally the official who had charge of the business of fighting, the war-captain. He was the commander in war; but in the other branches of government he was far from being the only or the highest man! And that is simply what Huayna Capac and all the other fabulous Inca kings were, Indian war-captains of the same influence as several Indian war-captains I know in New Mexico.

Huayna Capac’s sons were also Indian war-captains, and nothing more, moreover, war-captains of different tribes, rivals and enemies. Atahualpa moved down from Quito with his savage warriors, and had several fights, and finally captured Huascar and shut him up in the Indian fort at Xauxa.

That was the state of things when Pizarro began his march inland; and lest you should be misled by assertions that the condition of things in Peru was differently stated by the Spanish historians, it is needful to say one thing more. The Spanish chroniclers were not liars nor blunderers, any more than our own later pioneers who wrote gravely of the Indian King Philip, and the Indian King Powhatan, and the Indian Princess Pocahontas. Ethnology was an unknown science then. None of those old writers comprehended the characteristic Indian organization. They saw an ignorant, naked, superstitious man who commanded his ignorant followers; he was a person in authority, and they called him a king because they did not know what else to call him. The Spaniards did the same thing. All the world in those days had but one little foot-rule wherewith to measure governments or organizations; and ridiculous as some of their measurements seem now, no one then could do better. No; the mistakes of the Spanish chroniclers were as honest and as ignorant as those which Prescott made three centuries later, and by no means so absurd.

Peru, however, was a very wonderful country to have been built up by simple Indians, without even that national organization or spirit which is the first step toward a nation. Its “cities” were substantial, and in their construction had considerable claim to skill; the farms were better than those of our Pueblos, because they had indigenous there the potato and other plant-foods unknown then in our southwest, and were watered by the same system of irrigation common to all the sedentary tribes. They were the only shepherd Indians, and their great flocks of llamas were a very considerable source of wealth; while the camel’s-hair cloths of their own weaving were not disdained by the proud ladies of Spain. And above all, their rude ovens for melting metal enabled them to supply a certain dazzling display, which was certainly not to be expected among American Indians: indeed, it would surprise us to enter churches anywhere and find them so bright with golden plates and images and dados as were some of their barbaric temples. We cannot say that they never made human sacrifices; but these hideous rites were rare, and not to be compared with the daily horrors in Mexico. For ordinary sacrifices, the llama was the victim.

It was into the strongholds of this piratical but uncommon Indian tribe that Pizarro was now leading his little band.