rehead with prominent ridge bones, and the
eyes set somewhat obliquely so as to suggest, though probably without
reason, a kinship with Oriental peoples.

The Athapascans stood low in the scale of civilization. Most of them
lived in a prairie country where a luxuriant soil, not encumbered with
trees, would have responded to the slightest labour. But the
Athapascans, in Canada at least, knew nothing of agriculture. With
alternations of starvation and rude plenty, they lived upon the unaided
bounty of tribes of the far north, degraded by want and indolence, were
often addicted to cannibalism.

The Indians beyond the mountains, between the Rockies and the sea, were
for the most part quite distinct from those of the plains. Some tribes
of the Athapascans, as we have seen, penetrated into British Columbia,
but the greater part of the natives in that region were of wholly
different races. Of course, we know hardly anything of these Indians
during the first two centuries of European settlement in America. Not
until the eighteenth century, when Russian traders began to frequent
the Pacific coast and the Spanish and English pushed their voyages into
the North Pacific,--the Tlingit of the far north, the Salish,
Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl-Nootka and Kutenai. It is thought, however,
that nearly all the Pacific Indians belong to one kindred stock. There
are, it is true, many distinct languages between California and Alaska,
but the physical appearance and characteristics of the natives show a
similarity throughout.

The total number of the original Indian population of the continent can
be a matter of conjecture only. There is every reason, however, to
think that it was far less than the absurdly exaggerated figures given
by early European writers. Whenever the first explorers found a
considerable body of savages they concluded that the people they saw
were only a fraction of some large nation. The result was that the
Spaniards estimated the inhabitants of Peru at thirty millions. Las
Casas, the Spanish historian, said that Hispaniola, the present Hayti,
had a population of three millions; a more exact estimate, made about
twenty years after the discovery of the island, brought the population
down to fourteen thousand! In the same way Montezuma was said to have
commanded three million Mexican warriors--an obvious absurdity. The
early Jesuits reckoned the numbers of the Iroquois at about a hundred
thousand; in reality there seem t