Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/235

Rh crossed only as it might have been by war-parties on their raids beyond its bounds. Enormous reaches of Upper Canada, and large parts of the present States bordering on the south of the great lakes, had no human tenants; one might roam in them for weeks and find no trace of man. It has been intelligently affirmed that just before our Revolutionary War the number of Indian warriors between the ocean and the Mississippi, and between Lake Superior and the Ohio, did not exceed ten thousand. If the theories drawn from the examination of the Western earth-mounds have good reasons to support them, an unmeasured length of time had passed since their disuse and desertion. However populous the regions around them may once have been, they had long been lonely and tenantless. These theories, in connection with others of the archæologists, trace successive conquests from north to south and from south to north, sweeping over these midland territories, causing them at last to be turned to solitudes. Epidemic diseases also may have ravaged over those long reaches of the interior, and nearly or entirely depopulated them. Never in a single case within the last century, when white men have first come to the knowledge of remote tribes, have they been found to be very numerous. As successively the tribes have moved back from our frontiers into farther spaces, they have, till quite recent years, always found sufficient wild territory for their own habits, where they could go undisturbed; or, if meeting with any already roaming there, found them to be so few that there was no crowding. The traditions of many tribes also preserve relations of voluntary migrations made by them, independently of any catastrophes of war, and merely for bettering their condition. The abundance of the game in former centuries, when compared with its rapidly increasing scarcity in recent years, would indicate that it was not of old drawn upon for any vast number of consumers. In the lack, therefore, of the more positive knowledge which is out of our reach, there