We have now a sadder tale to tell; one that philanthropists have grieved over so often. Gold-washings are soon exhausted, but they frequently lead to the discovery of silver mines, which become so profitable as to drive away the very memory of the gold-washings. Thus the fact that gold-washings ever existed in Mexico, or even in Brazil, is almost forgotten, and the places where those washings were rests in vague tradition.
But while gold is procured by the most simple process, to extract silver requires science, and an immense expenditure of labor and machinery, in delving to the very bowels of the earth, and in separating the slight percentage of pure silver from the mass of ore.
In this exhausting labor, which is often assigned to convicts, Indians were employed until they gave up the ghost.
The conquerors had appropriated to themselves the best-looking of the Indian females, while their husbands—for Indians marry very early in life—were consigned to the mines as laborers and carriers in the bowels of the mountain.
From this promiscuous intercourse, so early introduced, has arisen the present mixed-blood population of Mexico.
The offspring of sin, they are a nation of sinners.
The pure Indians are the descendants chiefly of the unenslaved tribes, like the Tlascalans and Tezcucans, who carried on the subsequent wars of Cortéz, and the whites are mostly descendants of later immigrations.
In a former chapter we have seen that the evils which California suffered in the first years of its existence afflicted Mexico down to the time of the great inundation of 1629; and from the pen of an eye-witness we have given a picture of the state of society at that time.