y far cause as much bloodshed as the final reduction of
the Indian tribes of Virginia. It counted scarcely as many Indian
victims as King Philip's War, and was much less bloody, because more
straightforward and honorable, than any of the British conquests in East
India. The most bloody events in Peru came after the conquest was over,
when the Spaniards fell to fighting one another; and in this Pizarro
was not the aggressor but the victim. It was the treachery of his own
allies,--the men whose fames and fortunes he had made. His conquest
covered a land as big as California, Oregon, and most of Washington,--or
as our whole seaboard from Nova Scotia to Port Royal and two hundred
miles inland,--swarming with the best organized and most advanced
Indians in the Western Hemisphere; and he did it all with less than
three hundred gaunt and tattered men. He was one of the great captains
of all time, and almost as remarkable as organizer and executive of a
new empire, the first on the Pacific shore of the southern continent. To
this greatness rose the friendless, penniless, ignorant swineherd of
Truxillo!

Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, subdued that vast area of the
deadly Araucanians with an "army" of two hundred men. He established the
first colony in Chile in 1540, and in the following February founded the
present city of Santiago de Chile. Of his long and deadly wars with the
Araucanians there is not space to speak here. He was killed by the
savages Dec. 3, 1553, with nearly all his men, after an indescribably
desperate struggle.

There is not space to tell here of the wondrous doings in the southern
continent or the lower point of this,--the conquest of Nicaragua by Gil
Gonzales Davila in 1523; the conquest of Guatemala, by Pedro de
Alvarado, in 1524; that of Yucatan by Francisco de Montijo, beginning in
1526; that of New Granada by Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, in 1536; the
conquests and exploration of Bolivia, the Amazon, and the Orinoco (to
whose falls the Spaniards had penetrated by 1530, by almost superhuman
efforts); the unparalleled Indian wars with the Araucanians in Chile
(for two centuries), with the Tarrahumares in Chihuahua, the Tepehuanes
in Durango, the still untamed Yaquis in northwestern Mexico; the
exploits of Captain Martin de Hurdaide (the Daniel Boone of Sinaloa and
Sonora); and of hundreds of other unrecorded Spanish heroes, who would
have been world-renowned had they been more accessible to th