Reading and Understanding Sources.

Here is the QUIZ

Questions you need to answer:

How many native Americans were there in 1491.  Cite 3 of your sources.  Which number do you think was right?
example:
source #45, "9 billion", Larry Johnson


 What happened to the native Americans?  Cite 2 sources, and quote the relevant passage.
example:
source #99, "they got in their car and drove away," John Larryson


How fast did the number of native Americans change? Cite 2 sources.
same idea
source #, "text from source," author

The Sources. 

1.     “In the year 1626 or thereabouts, there was not a Neat Beast (cow Horse or sheep in the Country and a very few Goats or hogs, and now it is a wonder to see the great herds of Cattle belonging to every Town.” Samuel Maverick, 1626

2.     A Jesuit reported that the "Savages" were disgusted by handkerchiefs: "They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground."

3.     Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. It was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched by several thousand Indian warriors. Utterly without fear, Soto brushed past the Indian force into what is now eastern Arkansas, through thickly settled land—"very well peopled with large towns," one of his men later recalled, "two or three of which were to be seen from one town."

Charles Hudson, UGA Anthropologist  2002

4.     "The Indians of North America, were 16 millions in numbers, and sent that number of daily prayers to the Almighty."

George Caitlin, 19th Century Artist who travelled and painted 600 indian portraits, writing in approximately 1830

5.     Dobyns calculated (in 1966), the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Anthropologist Henry Dobyns, 1966

6.     "...and the bones and skulls upon several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into these parts, that, as I traveled in the Forest near the Massachusetts, it seemed to me a new found Golgotha"

Traveling in New England in 1619, English Trader Thomas Morton

7.     John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."

Charles Mann, “1491”, The Atlantic 2002

8.     Early in 1682 whites appeared (near the Mississippi) again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. One of them was Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The French passed through the area where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted—La Salle didn't see an Indian village for 200 miles.

Charles Mann, “1491,” The Atlantic 2002

9.     "As more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for dense populations than has thus far emerged." Dean Snow, the Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined Colonial-era Mohawk Iroquois sites (in 2002) and found "no support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region."

Charles Mann, “1491,”The Atlantic 2002

10.   In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains "promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers." Smallpox, Vancouver's crew discovered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were "most terribly pitted ... indeed many have lost their Eyes."

Charles Mann, “1491,”The Atlantic 2002

11.   “But North America was inhabited only by itinerant tribes that had never thought to avail themselves of the natural riches of the soil.  North America was still literally an empty continent, a wilderness awaiting settlers.”

Alexis DeToqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

12.   "Investigation shows, that the aboriginal population within the present United States at the beginning of the Columbian period could not have exceeded much over 500,000."

US Census bureau, 1894

13.   In 1928 Smithsonian Institution Anthropologist James Mooney estimated Pre-Columbian indian populations to be 1.148 million for all of North America.  (various sources)

14.   Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck.

Charles Mann, “1491,”The Atlantic 2002