An extremely interesting paper[1] on the subject, just published, by Lieutenant-Colonel Mallery, enters into the question of the former and present number of the Indians in so thorough a manner as to give confidence in the conclusions come to. Colonel Mallery, from his position on the United States Survey, has had every opportunity of acquiring a knowledge of the present condition and number of the Indians, and he has taken great pains to become acquainted with whatever records exist as to their past numbers. Colonel Mallery shows that the estimates of earlier writers are so varied as to be untrustworthy. Early travellers had no opportunity whatever of acquiring a knowledge of the Indian population of the North American continent, but naturally would exaggerate the number of those with whom they came into contact. Naturally, also, the natives from a wide district would crowd to the shores of the sea, river, or lake, which were the first visitors' only highways, and thus the latter would be led to form an exaggerated notion of the extent of the whole population. Colonel Mallery shows that before and long after the advent of the whites, the only regions where the Indians could find support were along the shores of the great rivers and lakes. If the successive waves of continental migration did originate on the Pacific coast, it is scarcely to be supposed that they crossed the arid plains only lately explored, or even the more eastern prairies, where, with all then existing facilities the support of life would have been most difficult. The savages relied at first mainly on fish, secondarily and later on the chase, and only in their last stages of development on agriculture, which, though a greater resource among some tribes than is generally understood, became so after their long-continued occupancy of regions near the Atlantic and great lakes. They could neither, before obtaining the horse, pursue to great advantage the large game of the open prairie necessary for their subsistence while passing it, nor transport stores before collected, and moved probably (as one route, others being also contended for) via the headwaters of the Mississippi and the outlet of Lake Superior, resting on long lines and with little lateral spread, near rivers, lakes, and the ocean. The greater part of the districts east of the Rocky Mountains and some to their west, where the Indians are now, or in recent years have been found, and much of which was until recently charted as the "Great American Desert," was, in fact, a solitude when America was discovered, the population being then confined to the wooded borders of the traversing streams. Colonel Mallery adduces irrefutable evidence to prove that many Indian tribes now classed as prairie Indians were, when first met with and for long after, lake and river Indians. Early voyagers on the Mississippi and Lake Michigan met Indians only after many days', and even weeks', travel. Vermont and western Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire were left unoccupied. On early maps the low country from the Mobile River to Florida was marked vacant, and the oldest reports from Georgia assert with gratulation that there were scarcely any savages within four hundred miles of Savannah. Colonel Mallery adduces many other facts which, when grouped together, show how insignificant was the territory actually occupied by the natives before the European immigrants could possibly have affected their numbers or distribution, and how silly are any estimates obviously influenced by a calculation of the product of their number on some one square mile, multiplied by the figures expressing all the square miles embraced between the Atlantic and Pacific and certain degrees of latitude. The mounds of the Mississippi Valley certainly prove that at some time it held a large population; but the origin and period, connections, and fate of these so-called "mound-builders" are still sub judice. It is, however, conceded that they were agricultural, had several arts unknown to the historic tribes, and had passed away before the latter had come within our knowledge. The ethnologists and philologists, though so widely disagreeing in other respects, both admit that the actual distribution of the natives at the time of, and shortly after, their discovery, was as represented by Colonel Mallery, and the immediate practical inquiry concerns the tribes then and still known to us, rather than ancient inhabitants, whether or not the ancestors of these tribes.
This distribution rendered misconception of their numbers by the early whites almost unavoidable. The latter, using the natural and only readily available highways
- ↑ Two papers are in fact quoted from in this editorial, the titles of which are: "The Former and Present Number of our Indians," published in the "Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science," Nashville Meeting, and "Some Common Errors Respecting the North American Indians," in the Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington, both by Brevet Lieut.-Col. Garrick Mallery, Captain 1st Infantry, U. S. Army, detailed with the U. S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region in charge of Maj. J. W. Powell.
