uld have repeated the work of Cortes, and we would very
possibly have been barred out of the greater portion of our present
domain. Had it not been for their Indian allies, it would have been
impossible for the French to prolong, as they did, their struggle with
their much more numerous English neighbors.

The Indians have shrunk back before our advance only after fierce and
dogged resistance. They were never numerous in the land, but exactly
what their numbers were when the whites first appeared is impossible to
tell. Probably an estimate of half a million for those within the limits
of the present United States is not far wrong; but in any such
calculation there is of necessity a large element of mere rough
guess-work. Formerly writers greatly over-estimated their original
numbers, counting them by millions. Now it is the fashion to go to the
other extreme, and even to maintain that they have not decreased at all.
This last is a theory that can only be upheld on the supposition that
the whole does not consist of the sum of the parts; for whereas we can
check off on our fingers the tribes that have slightly increased, we can
enumerate scores that have died out almost before our eyes. Speaking
broadly, they have mixed but little with the English (as distinguished
from the French and Spanish) invaders. They are driven back, or die out,
or retire to their own reservations; but they are not often assimilated.
Still, on every frontier, there is always a certain amount of
assimilation going on, much more than is commonly admitted;[1] and
whenever a French or Spanish community has been absorbed by the
energetic Americans, a certain amount of Indian blood has been absorbed
also. There seems to be a chance that in one part of our country, the
Indian territory, the Indians, who are continually advancing in
civilization, will remain as the ground element of the population, like
the Creoles in Louisiana, or the Mexicans in New Mexico.

The Americans when they became a nation continued even more
successfully the work which they had begun as citizens of the several
English colonies. At the outbreak of the Revolution they still all
dwelt on the seaboard, either on the coast itself or along the banks
of the streams flowing into the Atlantic. When the fight at Lexington
took place they had no settlements beyond the mountain chain on our
western border. It had taken them over a century and a half to spread
from the Atlantic to the Alle