May not the fair and beautiful Princess at Pimo have belonged to the outcast Mexican royal family? May not her idolized child have inherited titles absurdly out of place among the deserts of Arizona? And may not all the elements in our later Yankee nation have been represented in the pale-faced people that found refuge among the canyons and cliffs of the Colorado? If so, their remote or ancestral fathers and mothers were likewise no less our own.
The curtain of history rises and shows the young Queen of the Builders on a hill top at Pimo. The structures there, according to aboriginal testimony were reared about the year 1100,—the very time when the Toltecs disappeared from the Vale of Mexico. And now the ruins are yielding up forms of the females who once tenanted those cliffs and contrived to get plaster and paint with which to adorn the now desolate and trembling walls. And the yellow, brown, or silky black hair on the heads of those women who sought to make their bleak and dreary homes attractive, shows unfailingly their race. Even an ostrich might see it!
Mons. Charney declares that the Toltecs expelled from Mexico in the 11th century were scholars, artists, astronomers, and philosophers. And their sisters were certainly no less cultured and refined.
Now, the Shan Hai King states that in "the region beyond the Eastern Sea" there is (or was) a "Country of Refined Gentlemen."
And Charney argues that "a gentle race were the Toltecs, preferring the arts to war."
Refined and Gentle—men, says Charney.
Refined Gentlemen, says the Shan Hai King.
Certain comments collected by Jin Chin Ngan, and unnoticed in Mr. Vining's translation (p. 657), connect the Refined Gentlemen with pyramids (k'iu) and even declare that their dwellings were on mounds (ling).
And Charney says: "Now, the first thing that we find at the houses of Tula is an example of a mode of building entirely new and curious. The prevailing tendency of the Toltec is to place his dwellings and his temples likewise upon eminences and pyramids."
They lived upon Mounds, says Charney.