The aboriginal population of this country at the
landing of the white man was astonishingly sparse and
thinly scattered, and is estimated by Farrand at not
to exceed 500,000 north of Mexico, where to-day the
censuses of both Governments show more than400,000,
although this includes many mixed bloods. The second
fact on which there is substantial agreement is that our
worst campaigns against the Indian tribes — so far from
rising to the dignity of even a partial extermination,
— were little more than healthy gymnastic exercises
for the noble savage; even when, as sometimes hap-
pened, women and children were included in the attack
or perished of cold and starvation, as a result of defeat.
However much at times we may have let our thirst for
vengeance get the better of our humanity and our self-
control, our wars against the Indians were Sunday-
school picnics by comparison with the savage wars to
the knife, and the knife to the hilt, which they were
constantly waging against one another before our com-
ing, and still continued until the combination of the
white man became sufficiently far-reaching to put a
stop to them. The Huron-Iroquois alone are believed
to have been responsible for the extermination of some
fifteen or twenty tribes and the depopulation of an
area equal to a small empire. The deadly rifle of the
white man has saved at least five times as many In-
dian lives as it ever took, by putting a stop to this per-
petual intertribal warfare. Even the rapacity and the
injustice which have often marred our commercial and



LO, THE POOR INDIAN 85

economic relations with the Indian have been marked
in the main by a rude fairness and humanity which he
never even dreamed of practicing with his fellows.
