I have little
doubt they were written down; but here, again, I have failed of success
in my inquiries.
This is a poor showing of native literature for all the tribes in the
vast area of the United States. But, except some orations and poems,
hereafter to be mentioned, it is almost all that I can name. Passing
southward the harvest becomes richer. When Bishop Landa, in Yucatan, and
Bishop Zumarraga, in Mexico, made bonfires, in the public squares of
Mani and Tlaltilulco, of the priceless literary treasures of the Mayas
and Aztecs, their maps, their parchment rolls, their calendars on wood,
their painted paper books, their inscribed histories, it is recorded
that the natives bewailed bitterly this obliteration of their sciences
and their archives.[21] Some of them set to work to recover the memories
thus doomed to oblivion, and to write them out, as best they could.
Most fertile of these were those who wrote in the Nahuatl tongue,
otherwise known as the Aztec or Mexican, this being most widely spoken
in Mexico, and the first cultivated by the missionaries. Many of these
memoirs were short descriptions of towns or tribes, with their
traditional histories. Others narrated the customs and mythologies of
the race before the arrival of the whites.
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