CHAPTER I—MEXICO: TRIBAL HISTORY
AT the time of the conquest by the Spaniards of the province of Mexico, the dominant people was the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan (Mexico city), inhabiting a town built on an island in the lake of Tezcoco, or rather that portion of it known as the lake of Mexico. The Aztec were confessedly immigrants, who had wandered south less than five hundred years before the conquest; by their superiority as fighting-men they had won the hegemony over the kindred tribes which they found settled in the valley of Mexico, and had extended their power to both oceans and as far at least as the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Both they and their immediate predecessors spoke the same language, called Nahua (strictly, Nahuatl), and they appear to be a branch of the great Shoshonean family which reaches as far north as the state of Montana. Beyond this, their ethnography and language would seem to connect them rather with the coastal tribes of the far north-west than with those to the east of the Rockies, but on this point little can be said at present. Immediately to the north and north-west of the settled peoples of the valley, the steppe country was inhabited by tribes who lived mainly by hunting, called Chichimec and Otomi, the former being almost purely nomadic, the latter to some extent settled. The Chichimec spoke for the most part a language which was essentially Nahua, but the name itself possessed for the Mexicans rather a cultural than a linguistic significance, and meant little more than "nomadic hunters." The Otomi tongue was different, and extended down
