26
Anthropologist Henry Dobyns (1983) found that when small-
pox, measles, or tuberculosis struck some Indian villages, nine-
teen out of twenty Indians died. He thought this ratio
characteristic of populations that lacked immunity to such dis-
eases. He therefore multiplied the earlier population figures by
twenty. After a few adjustments he calculated the Indian pop-
ulation of the United States and Canada at 10–12 million, and
of the entire Western Hemisphere at over 100 million.
Dobyns’s methodology came under fire, but Thornton
(1987) and others devised pre-contact estimates ranging
from 4 to 8 million. Since then, mathematicians have con-
cluded that the data are so riddled with guesswork that no
numerical estimates are reliable. But it is probably safe to
conclude that Indian losses north of the Rio Grande num-
bered in the millions, and in the remainder of the Western
Hemisphere, tens of millions.
Source: James Mooney,The Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico
(1928, although Mooney died in 1921); Henry Dobyns, Their Number Became
Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America(1983);
Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History
Since 1492(1987).I
n 1518 smallpox, long a scourge in Europe, ravaged the
native peoples of the New World. This drawing shows
Aztec victims being attended by a medicine man.“Those
who did survive,” reported Cortés’s secretary,“having
scratched themselves, were left in such a condition that they
frightened the others with the many deep pits on their
faces, hands, and bodies.”
To calculate the magnitude of Indian losses, scholars
had to determine the population at first contact with
Europeans, a difficult task in the absence of Indian records.
Early in the twentieth century, James Mooney, an ethnologist
for the Smithsonian, gathered fragmentary population statis-
tics as compiled by Catholic priests, Spanish officials, travel-
ers, and soldiers. By tabulating this data, including guesses
for tribes for which no data was available, he concluded that
the Indian population in the continent north of Mexico was a
little more than 1 million.
By the 1960s and 1970s, some thought this estimate far
too low. They complained that it minimized both the achieve-
ments of Indian civilizations as well as the extent of the
destruction wrought by European diseases and guns.
DEBATING THE PAST
How Many Indians Perished
with European Settlement?