of ocean and river, met the Indians precisely where they were most numerous and stationary, and could not thoroughly explore the endless tracts where they only occasionally roamed, or which they entirely avoided; while the enormous distances of separation prevented any one traveller from actually seeing, and thereby distinguishing between, but a limited number of tribes. Even if an expedition through the wilderness were risked, the very presence of the explorers from obvious motives of curiosity, barter, or defence, would, as we have said, attract all the bands over many miles. Cunning and vanity, moreover, would induce every tribe to exaggerate its own importance, which there was at first no evidence to contradict. So late as 1829 Naw-Kaw, a Winnebago chief, attending a balloon ascent in the Battery in New York, where there was an immense crowd, and being asked if he had ever seen so many people together, replied haughtily, "We have more in our smallest villages." Considering that his whole tribe only mustered then about three thousand souls, this may pass as a creditable specimen of aboriginal brag, which, if government officials had not already become familiar through systematic fraud with the actual count of the Winnebagoes, would doubtless have been adopted as a faithful comparison to influence statistics, as has actually occurred with other chiefs, who, likening their few score warriors to "the leaves of the forest," have been seriously quoted. The early travellers received such tales with alacrity to enhance their own adventures, repeating them with the fabled reproductiveness of the three black crows, even when they did not imitate Falstaff in the multiplication of his men in buckram. Another potent cause of error in the enumeration of the Indians, extending even to modern times, and from which we are scarcely yet free, necessarily arose from the utterly confused synonyms. Not only had each of the tribes a variety of names among themselves, but the various English, French, and Dutch immigrants added to these names of their own coining so that one tribe might have a dozen different names, and each name has often been mistakenly held to apply to a different tribe.
The main explanations of the lately unquestioned law dooming all the American Indians to speedy death have been in their constant wars and the strange diseases introduced. As regards the latter small-pox has been the most fatal; but Colonel Mallery shows that its ravages have been no greater among the Indians than among other races and other lands which recovered from it. Moreover, these ravages have been greatly exaggerated often, as may be seen from the report of the Canadian minister of the interior for 1876. In 1868 it was stated the Indians of Vancouver's Island had been nearly exterminated from small-pox, and that "hundreds of bodies lay unburied." After a full inquiry it was found that only eighty-eight Indians had died from the disease in the whole district throughout the entire year. The fact is that many Indians have died of smallpox, as did many Europeans before the days of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Jenner, and also that those who could ran away from the danger, as more enlightened people do now, with the difference that the latter are brought back by the ties of real and personal property, which, not troubling the former, they ever after avoided a locality that in their theory of disease was the scene of demoniac wrath. It may be noted that this particular disease has ceased to be a scourge to the tribes, the reports of fifty-six agents in recent years not including any fatal case.
As to the destructive element of war, that was the normal condition of the Indians before the advent of the whites, who only added to the number of the combatants. The whites did not introduce extermination and dispossession, which were systematically carried out before they came by one or two of the most powerful tribes. The whites were never more systematic or successful in subjugation by force of arms than were several of the Indian leagues, and all we know of the prevailing customs of the continent tells us that war was with its natives a necessity for the assertion of manhood, if not a religious duty. Perhaps since the power of the white race has been established with restraining effect, there have been fewer and less bloody wars than were frequent for centuries before, and certainly for years past no whole tribe, and but a minority of individuals among very few of the tribes, have been on the war path against any other in the United States. No such conversion, then, from less to greater combativeness is apparent as would account for any important change in the Indian population. If warfare has been a chief cause of their decrease, they were on the wane long prior to their discovery. Of this, however, there is no evidence. Taking the Iroquois as a representative body of Indians, Colonel Mallery shows that they now number 13,668 souls, as against 11,650, thirteen years be-
