“Most of them were tall, strong, and active, with a complexion of light, reddish brown, sometimes approaching white. They had a copious language, cooked their food, made bread and brewed a dozen kinds of spirituous liquors. Cities, in the Peruvian sense, they had none, but lived in patriarchal hamlets, ruled by _ulmens_, who were in turn subject to a _cacique_ of the tribe. Each farmer was master of his own field; there was none of that land ownership by the state that obtained in Peru.... They made cloth garments, which their women adorned with embroidery and dyed with vegetable or animal extracts. They manufactured a kind of soap, and their utensils were of well-fashioned pottery, wood and marble.... They went to sea in canoes and fished with fish hooks. They knew something of astronomy and physics and had some rather crude notions of drawing and carving. They called themselves Children of the Sun, and are supposed to have worshiped the sun and moon; they had the red man’s vision of happy hunting grounds after death, and believed that those who died fighting in battle were certain of a happy immortality.... Cleanly they were in the extreme, in this respect offering a sharp contrast to their invaders.... They took particular pains to keep their magnificent teeth white and clean, and were careful to remove all hairs from their faces and bodies. The women were dressed in woolen garments of a green color, with a cloak and girdle; the men wore shirts and breeches, woolen caps and footgear, and over all capacious woolen _ponchos_ (capes). The military system was efficiently organized.”
Having learned that the Araucanians and Promaucians were hereditary enemies, Valdivia’s first step toward the conquest of the former’s country was to form an alliance with the latter and to establish a base of supplies at the mouth of the Bio-bio, where he founded the city of Concepcion, and, during the year 1551, occupied himself in fortifying it and making preparations for the invasion. On the arrival of reinforcements he had sent for, he advanced a hundred and fifty miles south, and, encountering but little opposition, founded the city of Imperial, and from that point pushed on a hundred miles farther and founded the city to which he gave his name. On the way back in 1553 he built several forts and at Santiago found awaiting him a fresh body of troops and horses. Two hundred of the men, with an Indian contingent, he sent across the Andes to begin the conquest of what is now the Province of Mendoza in Argentina; and then, as Hawthorne relates it—