It had become necessary to tame the hostile Nayares Indians, who had caused the Spaniards great trouble in the province of Jalisco; and in this campaign Alvarado joined Mendoza. The Indians retreated to the top of the huge and apparently impregnable cliff of the Mixton, and they must be dislodged at any cost. The storming of that rock ranks with the storming of Acoma as one of the most desperate and brilliant ever recorded. The viceroy commanded in person, but the real achievement was by Alvarado and a fellow officer. In the scaling of the cliff Alvarado was hit on the head by a rock rolled down by the savages, and died from the wound,—but not until he saw his followers win that brilliant day.
The man who, next to Alvarado, deserves the credit of the Mixton was Cristobal de Oñate, a man of distinction for several reasons. He was a valued officer, a good executive, and one of the first millionnaires in North America. He was, too, the father of the colonizer of New Mexico, Juan de Oñate. June 11, 1548, several years after the battle of the Mixton, the elder Oñate discovered the richest silver mines on the continent,—the mines of Zacatecas, in the barren and desolate plateau where now stands the Mexican city of that name. These huge veins of "ruby," "black," arsenate, and virgin silver made the first millionnaires in North America, as the conquest of Peru made the first on the southern continent. The mines of Zacatecas were not so vast as those developed at Potosi, in Bolivia, which produced between 1541 and 1664 the inconceivable sum of $641,250,000 in silver; but the Zacatecas mines were also enormously productive. Their silver stream was the first realization of the dreams of vast wealth on the northern continent, and made a startling commercial change in this part of the New World. Locally, the discovery reduced the price of the staples of life about ninety per cent! Mexico was never a great gold country, but for more than three centuries has remained one of the chief silver producers. It is so to-day, though its output is not nearly so large as that of the United States.
Cristobal de Oñate was, therefore, a very important man in the working out of destiny. His "bonanza" made Mexico a new country, commercially, and his millions were put to a better use than is always the case nowadays, for they had the honor of building two of the first towns in our own United States.
IX.
THE AMERICAN GOLDEN FLEECE.
We all know of that strange yellow ramskin which hung dragon-guarded in the dark groves of Colchis; and how Jason and his Argonauts won the prize after so many wanderings and besetments. But in our own New World we have had a far more dazzling golden fleece than that mythical pupil of old Cheiron ever chased, and one that no man ever captured,—though braver men than Jason tried it. Indeed, there were hundreds of more than Jasons, who fought harder and suffered tenfold deadlier fortunes and never clutched the prize after all. For the dragon which guarded the American Golden Fleece was no such lap-dog of a chimera as Jason's, to swallow a pretty potion and go to sleep. It was a monster bigger than all the land the Argonauts lived in and all the lands they roamed; a monster which not man nor mankind has yet done away with,—the mortal monster of the tropics.
The myth of Jason is one of the prettiest in antiquity, and it is more than pretty. We are beginning to see what an important bearing a fairy tale may have on sober knowledge. The myth has always somewhere some foundation of truth; and that hidden truth may be of enduring value. To study history, indeed, without paying any attention to the related myths, is to shut off a precious side light. Human progress, in almost every phase, has been influenced by this quaint but potent factor. Where do you fancy chemistry would be if the philosopher's stone and other myths had not lured the old alchemists to pry into mysteries where they found never what they sought, but truths of utmost value to mankind? Geography in particular has owed almost more of its growth into a science to myths than to scholarly invention; and the gold myth, throughout the world, has been the prophet and inspiration of discovery, and a moulder of history.
We have been rather too much in the habit of classing the Spaniards as the gold-hunters, with an intimation that gold-hunting is a sort of sin, and that they were monumentally prone to it. But it is not a Spanish copyright,—the trait is common to all mankind. The only difference was that the Spaniards found gold; and that is offence enough to "historians" too narrow to consider "what would the English have done had they found gold in America at the outset."