The old waste towns of the Chikkasah lie to the west and south-west, from where they have lived since the time we first opened a trade with them; on which course they formerly went to war over the Missisippi, because they knew it best, and had disputes with the natives of those parts, when they first came from thence. Wisdom directed them then to connive at some injuries on account of their itinerant camp of women and children; for their tradition says, it consisted of ten thousand men, besides women and children, when they came from the west, and passed over the Missisippi. The fine breed of running wood horses they brought with them, were the present Mexican or Spanish barbs. They also aver, that their ancestors cut off, and despoiled the greatest part of a caravan, loaded with gold and silver; but the carriage of it proved so troublesome to them, that they threw it into a river where it could not benefit the enemy. If we join together these circumstances, it utterly destroys the fine Peruvian and Mexican temples of the sun, &c.—which the Spaniards have lavishly painted from their own fruitful imaginations, to shew their own capacity of writing, though at the expence of truth; and to amuse the gazing distant world, and lessen our surprise at the sea of reputed heathenish blood, which their avaricious tempers, and flaming superstitious zeal, prompted them to spill. If any English reader have patience to search the extraordinary volumes of the Spanish writers, or even those of his catholic majesty’s chief historiographer, he will not only find a wild portrait, but a striking resemblance and unity of the civil and martial customs, the religious rites, and traditions, of the {196} ancient Peruvians and Mexicans, and the North-Americans, according to the manner of their moresque paintings: likewise, the very national name of the primitive Chikkasah, which they stile Chichemicas, and whom they repute to have been the first inhabitants of Mexico. However, I lay little stress upon Spanish testimonies, for time and ocular proof have convinced us of the laboured falshood of almost all their historical narrations concerning every curious thing relative to South America. They, were so divested of those principles inherent to honest enquirers after truth, that they have recorded themselves to be a tribe of prejudiced bigots, striving to aggrandise the Mahometan valour of about nine hundred spurious catholic christians, under the patronage of their favourite saint, as persons by whom heaven designed to extirpate those two great nominal empires of pretended cannibals. They found it convenient to blacken the natives with ill names, and report them to their demi-god the mufti of Rome, as sacrificing every day, a prodigious multitude of human victims to numerous idol-gods.