Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/115

Rh to the present Hayti, or St. Domingo, has as before stated an area of about thirty thousand square miles, — or more than half the area of England and Wales. When first discovered, Las Casas says that it sustained three million Indians; he afterwards sets the number at 1,200,000. The Licentiate Zuazo, however, estimated them at 1,130,000. In 1508, when Passamonte came, he put them at seventy thousand. The Governor, Diego Columbus, estimated the number at forty thousand. Albuquerque, in 1514, counted them as between thirteen and fourteen thousand. This was a vast deduction from three millions in a score of years. We can give the Spaniards the benefit of our charity in denying their own statement, that in less than forty years they had destroyed fifteen millions of the natives, while we also distrust the story that Montezuma led three million warriors. We know the claim of the Jesuits to have converted nine millions of natives in Mexico, in a score of years, to be a pure fiction. Such random counts as these have no value, inasmuch as the evident exaggeration is characteristic of the extravagant spirit of all the Spanish expectations and accounts of their experience.

The practical matter of interest in the estimate of the probable number of Indians on this continent, on the arrival of the Europeans, concerns us as it bears on the current belief, universally held till within a few years, substantially covering these three assumptions: (1) That there was then a vast number of Indians here, to be counted in millions; (2) That this original population has been steadily and rapidly wasting away; and (3) That this decay is the result of the destroying influence coming from the whites, either in demoralization or by war. These three assumptions are now largely, if not universally, discredited. In direct denial of them, it is now affirmed, with evidence offered in proof, that the number of the Indians here was quite below the old estimates; that there are substantially as many on the continent now as there were on the arrival