Our Little Aztec Cousin of Long Ago - C. V. Winlow |
![]() The story of an Aztec boy named Coyotl, who lived a few years before the Spanish conquered Mexico. He was educated by the temple-priests, but later sold into slavery. While traveling with a merchant he had many adventures and helped put down a rebellion against the Aztec empire. |
Long ago, before Columbus discovered America, and before the Spanish came to conquer the New World, there was a great civilized empire in Mexico. The Indians of Mexico were more advanced than the Indians who roamed the country to the North, which was later to become the United States. The Indians of Mexico had a system of writing; they had schools and hospitals; they had cities built of cut stone pieced together with great skill and art; they had industries and agriculture; and they had an emperor and a system of government, and their own courts and laws.
In the seventh century after Christ, a great stone-building people, called the Toltecs, came into the land we now know as central Mexico, and set up a kingdom. They left the country—whether because of a lost war or a migration to richer fields, we don't know—in the twelfth century, and a people called the Acolhuans moved into their abandoned land. Then came a strong, intelligent, organizing, and war-like people called the Aztecs, in the year 1196, and they began a conquest. In 1325, in the midst of a swampy land between high purple mountains, they founded the city of Tenochtitlan, which we call Mexico, after their war-god Mexitli. And from then until early in the sixteenth century, when the Spanish soldiers under Hernan Cortes conquered them, the Mexicans lived and developed their civilization, and spread their religion and the strength of their arms until they were lords of a great allied group of states extending straight through the central part of what we now know as Mexico.
So it is that our story about Coyotl, an Aztec boy, begins about 1450. Coyotl was then eleven years old.