364 • POPULATION. 



the East, themselves contemplative and submissive races, whose character 

 and language was modified by the high spirited, liberty-loving aborigines 

 of Central and Western Europe, whom they absorbed or dispersed. A 

 remarkable fact in the economy of the Indians is, that they alone, of all 

 the peoples of the world, possessed and cultivated Indian corn, and that it 

 was their only cereal. That the most valuable of all the grains should 

 have been the exclusive possession of one people is sufficiently strange, 

 but becomes much more so, when it is considered that this people were 

 the least advanced of all in the arts of peace, that they were the poorest and 

 most thriftless of laborers, in fact, in no sense laborers at all, and yet that 

 they depended entirely for their bread on this grain, requiring more skill, 

 care, and labor in its culture than any other. 



Great discrepancies exis't as to the estimates of the condition and num- 

 bers of the Indians between the accounts of travelers in the 16th and in the 

 18th centuries. The latter, in explanation of the small number of frag- 

 mentary tribes they found, where great and powerful nations were reputed 

 to have dwelt, give the traditions of great wars, famines and epidemics, that 

 were said to have occurred. The prevailing opinion now is that these were 

 not exceptional occurrences among the aborigines, but that they had always 

 been subject to such disasters, which had kept in check their population and 

 their civilization. Bancroft and Draper think that, by the highest estimates 

 that can be placed upon their numbers, all the Indians east of the Missis- 

 sippi, from the Gulf of Mexico to the St. Lawrence, did not, 200 years ago, 

 exceed 180,000. As the great plains of the West were not habitable for man 

 before the introduction of guns and horses by the Europeans, the estimate 

 of these distinguished authorities may be considered as applying, with in- 

 considerable additions, to the whole area of the United States having its 

 drainage towards the Atlantic. This area contains now (Rep. Secretary 

 of Interior, 1881) 203,608 Indians, and the number of Indians in the 

 United States, exclusive of Alaska, is 255,938. 



Governor Drayton hazards the opinion that the Indians of South Caro- 

 lina may have numbered originally 30,000 or 40,000 souls, but gives no 

 data upon which it is founded. Adair says, that old traders stated that 

 about 1700, the Cherokees had 6,000 warriors. In 1752, he found only 

 some 2,300 warriors among them, and says, " so great a diminution, that 

 after a like revolution of time there will be few of them alive." A predic- 

 tion regarding the destructibility of a race, that, like many similar ones, 

 has fallen far wide of verification. i\Ir. Bancroft says that the " Chero- 

 kees are more numerous now than ever." 



The oldest reports from Georgia claim that there were only a few In- 

 dians within 400 miles of Savannah. John Lawson estimates very suc- 

 cinctly the Indian population of North Carolina as 4,780, men, women 



