202 J. H. Lefroy onthe Indian Population of British America. 
Among whom appear to be included some of those frequenting 
the British trading posts, and previously reckoned. It is scarcely 
possible that the Indians of the Lower Missouri, Texas, and Mex- 
ico, can make up even an approximation to the 330,000 of the 
Baptist Committee. (Religion in America, p. 56.) Putting the 
whole together, it would scarcely seem that the present aggregate 
ean be placed so high as 250,000, instead of the two millions of 
Catlin. 
To this remnant, then, has been reduced a race supposed to 
have numbered from ten to twenty millions, not more than three 
centuries ago. ‘ War, death, or sickness hath laid seige to it,” 
and is still laying seige at a rate in no degree less rapid than at 
any former period. Not to mention the cruel destruction effected 
by the American fur traders and trappers in the South; by utter 
lawlessness and wanton disregard of humanity ; by Florida wars 
and wholesale deportations ; we find that even in regions where 
the more obviously depopulating agencies have been held in 
great restraint, the process goes on. ‘The Indians themselves are 
fully aware of it, and fully conscious also that the whites cannot 
always be directly charged with it. Sir John Richardson has 
given us a curious mythological tradition which serves to account — 
for it to the Kutchin, (p. 239.) A friend of mine, who conferred 
on the subject with a sage old native of New Caledonia, found 
that his only theory was that the white men’s tobacco poison 
h he white’s fire water in this case, and throughout the 
Hudson’s Bay territory, is happily guiltless, for none enters the 
country.* If we charge it, in the case of the Carrier, to the un- 
bounded licentiousness which prevails among them, we have to 
account for the same causes not having had the same eflect at 
earlier periods; for, with the sole exception of the Indians of 
Virginia, boundless licentiousness appears to have been the rule 
century ago, fully corroborate the accounts of all travellers of the 
seventeenth century in Canada and the more Eastern regions, in 
respect to this characteristic. 
Doubtless, some causes can be assigned, which tend to reduce 
the physical stamina of the race—such as the substitution of 1n- 
* I cannot avoid referring Temperance advocates to the amusing Essay, “Sur 
PYvrognerie des Sauvages,” in the Histoire dé Veau-de-vie en Canada, 1705; re- 
printed by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. It is well to 
that, i] n'y a quwune mesure Pyvresse quils appellent Ganontiouaratonseri, cest & 
dire, Yurognerie pleine! + 
