Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 257, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 October 1916 — Aztec Runners. [ARTICLE]

Aztec Runners.

Communication (among the Aztecs) was maintained with the remotest parts of the country by means of couriers. Posthouses were established on the great roads, about two leagues distant from each other. The courier, bearing his dispatches in the form of a hieroglyphical painting, ran with them to the first station, where they were taken by another messenger and carried forward to the next, and so on till they reached the capital. These couriers, trained from childhood, traveled with incredible swiftness; not four or five leagues an hour, as an old chronicler would make us believe, but with such speed that dispatches were carried from one hundred to two hundred miles a day. Fresh fish was frequently served at Montezuma’s table in 24 hours from the time it had been taken in the Gulf of Mexico, 200 miles from the capitaL In this way intelligence of the movements of the royal armies was rapidly brought to court; and the dress of the courier, denoting by its color that of his tidings, spreading joy or consternation in the towns through which he passed.—From Prescott’s “History of the Conquest of Mexico.