In the beginning, wandering tribes may have settled on the borders of the lake for the mere casual advantages of satisfying their hunger, for the lake abounds with fish, and feathered game frequent its shores from time immemorial. The first have been supposed to be Chichimecs, either before or after their dealings with the Toltecs. The region was too attractive for one tribe to possess it unmolested. Other men, perhaps fresh from the same mysterious North, perhaps driven out by force or discontent from former homes upon Anahuac, came to dispute the fruitful territory. Such contests were decided by the triumph of the stronger; intermarriages healed the wound, and brief peace settled on the shore of the lake, to be broken by and by with similar incursions, followed by similar results. Out of such sequence, a name and date emerge as pegs to hang some facts on, in the hitherto accepted story. Iré-Titatacamé was this first chief of this first people with a name which could last. He made friends with a neighboring chief, and married his daughter, the Princess of Naranjan. We may imagine her, like her remote descendants, a dusky maiden, rather small, with straight black hair, which she knew how to braid in two long tresses to hang along her back. Did her grandmother learn the art from the same coiffeur that prepared the mother of Ramses for her morning care? Her eyes were intelligent, piercing, but soft, two rows of brilliant white teeth lighted her face when she smiled, as she gathered herself poppies for a wreath on the borders of the Lake of Delights. This princess became the mother of Sicuiracha, who was born in 1202, they say, about the time that the little English prince, Arthur, was being murdered at Rouen by the order of his wicked uncle. The little prince of Naranjan-Chichimeca was not ten years old when a tribe of Tarascans assaulted his father's city, and slew that monarch. He grew up to console his mother, avenge the deed, and to control his own subjects and the conquered tribe, which however impressed its language and dialect upon the nation, so that in that region, Tarascan survived. Sicuiracha lived to a good old age, and in peace. He died at the close of the thirteenth century, leaving two sons. One of these married an island woman of the lake, and her son preserved the royal line; for his father and uncle were put to death by a chieftain of the neighborhood who desired the fair Place of Delights for his own. But Tixiacurí was hidden by priests, who taught him the great art of war, so that in due time he came forth at the head of armies, destroyed his enemies, took to himself all the territory of the king who slew his father, and extended his own even beyond these, thus first really governing the wide kingdom of Michoacan, which goes down to the sea.