The total number of the original Indian population of
the continent can be a matter of conjecture only. There
is every reason, however, to think that it was far less
than the absurdly exaggerated figures given by early
European writers. Whenever the first explorers found a
considerable body of savages they concluded that the
people they saw were only a fraction of some large nation.
The result was that the Spaniards estimated the inhabitants
of Peru at thirty millions. Las Casas, the Spanish
historian, said that Hispaniola, the present Hayti, had
a population of three millions; a more exact estimate,
made about twenty years after the discovery of the island,
brought the population down to fourteen thousand! In the
same way Montezuma was said to have commanded three
million Mexican warriors--an obvious absurdity. The early
Jesuits reckoned the numbers of the Iroquois at about a
hundred thousand; in reality there seem to have been, in
the days of Wolfe and Montcalm, about twelve thousand.
At the opening of the twentieth century there were in
America north of Mexico about 403,000 Indians, of whom
108,000 were in Canada. Some writers go so far as to say
that the numbers of the natives were probably never much
greater than they are to-day. But even if we accept the
more general opinion that the Indian population has
declined, there is no evidence to show that the population
was ever more than a thin scattering of wanderers over
the face of a vast country. Mooney estimates that at the
coming of the white man there were only about 846,000
aborigines in the United States, 220,000 in British
America, 72,000 in Alaska, and 10,000 in Greenland, a