﻿4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



present inquiry ; nor does the much debated problem of the semi- 

 civilizations, extending in a long line from central Mexico to Chile 

 down the uplands of that front of our double continent which looks 

 ever toward the primal Asian centers of human culture. 



Excepting at or near its narrowest part, the two sea-shores of 

 North America were as two different worlds. There was never 

 anything even semi-civilized along either of these shores in the 

 Wineland latitudes ; nothing much above stark savagery near that 

 portion of the Atlantic shore, even with a liberal inclusion of territory 

 to the southward. Population was indeed almost unbelievably scanty. 

 No other part of that region was quite so bountifully supplied by 

 Nature as Powhatan's domain near the Chesapeake, yet Strachey's * 

 miniature census, river by river and town by town, has a really 

 ridiculous, though pathetic, look. The best recent estimate 2 gives 

 not more than seventeen thousand Indian inhabitants to all Virginia 

 at that time, with 8,500 for the Powhatan Confederacy; and there 

 may be a thousand of mixed blood there now — Chickahominys, Nanse- 

 monds, Pamunkeys, Mattaponies and other remnants — hardly noticed 

 at all. The City of Washington, with its present population of 

 350,000, was prefigured by an important Indian town, which in an 

 emergency could muster eighty fighting men for the defense of the 

 finest shad and herring fisheries to be found anywhere. 



The League of the Five Nations (central New York) could hardly 

 put two thousand men into the field ; yet this active little force imposed 

 terror on most of the settlements between Hudson Bay and Georgia 

 and between New England and the Mississippi. Along Narragansett 

 Bay and slightly beyond, the density of population may have been 

 somewhat greater ; but King Philip in his most formidable estate 

 could never assemble any imposing array. A few Englishmen sufficed 

 to storm and ruin the fortified chief towns of the Pequots and 

 Narragansets, the most powerful tribes about them. The upper 

 New England coast was far more scantily peopled, as clearly appears 

 from the slightly earlier notes of Champlain. 



We have no trustworthy ground for assuming a substantially dif- 

 ferent state of affairs for the year 1000 A. D. along the Atlantic coast, 

 although at that time there seems to have been a relatively large and 



1 W. Strachey : The Historie of Travaile into Virginia, pp. 40 et seq. 

 2 J. Mooney: The Powhatan Confederacy. Amer. Anthrop. (1907), pp. 

 130, 132. 



