. With this advantage and in this manner this warrior
tribe had made what might be called a "conquest" over an enormous
country. The tribes found it cheaper at last to yield, and pay the Incas
to let them alone. The robbers built storehouses in each place, and put
there an official to receive the tribute exacted from the conquered
tribe. These tribes were never assimilated. They could not enter Cuzco,
nor did Incas come to live among them. It was not a nation, but a
country of Indian tribes held down together by fear of the one stronger
tribe.

The organization of the Incas was, broadly speaking, the same as that of
any other Indian tribe. The most prominent official in such a tribe of
land-pirates was naturally the official who had charge of the business
of fighting,--the war-captain. He was the commander in war; but in the
other branches of government he was far from being the only or the
highest man! And that is simply what Huayna Capac and all the other
fabulous Inca kings were,--Indian war-captains of the same influence as
several Indian war-captains I know in New Mexico.

Huayna Capac's sons were also Indian war-captains, and nothing
more,--moreover, war-captains of different tribes, rivals and enemies.
Atahualpa moved down from Quito with his savage warriors, and had
several fights, and finally captured Huascar and shut him up in the
Indian fort at Xauxa.[26]

That was the state of things when Pizarro began his march inland; and
lest you should be misled by assertions that the condition of things in
Peru was differently stated by the Spanish historians, it is needful to
say one thing more. The Spanish chroniclers were not liars nor
blunderers,--any more than our own later pioneers who wrote gravely of
the Indian _King_ Philip, and the Indian _King_ Powhatan, and the Indian
_Princess_ Pocahontas. Ethnology was an unknown science then. None of
those old writers comprehended the characteristic Indian organization.
They saw an ignorant, naked, superstitious man who commanded his
ignorant followers; he was a person in authority, and they called him a
king because they did not know what else to call him. The Spaniards did
the same thing. All the world in those days had but one little foot-rule
wherewith to measure governments or organizations; and ridiculous as
some of their measurements seem now, no one then could do better. No;
the mistakes of the Spanish chroniclers were as honest and as ignorant
as those which P