Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/234

214 the sparse remnant left being adopted into the tribe of the conquerors. Such had been the state of things before the coming of the whites, and it has so continued to our own times.

It was not till more than a century after the whites had formed permanent settlements on the Atlantic and the Canadian borders of this continent that they knew anything positively about the extent and manner of its occupancy by native tribes in the interior. The natural inference, in the absence of knowledge, was that the interior was occupied very much as were the borders, — by the same sort of sparse and roaming tribes, each claiming the spaces and regions over which they hunted, or where they reared their lodges and planted their maize; so that in effect the rights of savagery, such as they were, covered substantially our whole present domain. This inference, too, was a part of the assumption that there were many millions of natives spread over the continent. Actual exploration, positive knowledge, and better-grounded inferences have greatly modified the views assumed when these vast realms were all shadowed by the mystery of the unknown. Those supposed millions in our native forests have been reduced by well-informed inquirers to only three, and again to only one million, and even to a much diminished estimate. The better we have become informed about the numbers and the conditions of life of existing savage tribes, the more unreasonable seems to us a large estimate of the numbers of their predecessors.

The fancy that our vast interior spaces, with their lakes and river-courses, their valleys, plains, and meadows, were all parcelled out and occupied, after their fashion, by our native tribes, has yielded to assured facts of proved inconsistency with it. Tribes vanquished near the seaboard and on our lake-shores were always able to find a refuge in unoccupied territory. The whole of Kentucky, when the white pioneers explored it, was tenantless, unclaimed,