American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Civilization of the American Indian)

386 Pages·1990·5.05 MB·English

by  Russell Thornton

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title: American Indian Holocaust and Survival : A Population
History Since 1492 Civilization of the American Indian
Series ; V. 186
author: Thornton, Russell.
publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
isbn10 | asin: 080612220X
print isbn13: 9780806122205
ebook isbn13: 9780806170213
language: English
subject Indians of North America--Population, America--
Population.
publication date: 1987
lcc: E59.P75T48 1987eb
ddc: 304.6/08997073
subject: Indians of North America--Population, America--
Population.
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The Civilization of the American Indian Series

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American Indian Holocaust and Survival
A Population History Since 1492
by Russell Thornton
University of Oklahoma Press : Norman and London

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BY RUSSELL THORNTON
Sociology of American Indians: A Critical Bibliography (With Mary K. Grasmick)
(Bloomington, Ind., 1980)
The Urbanization of American Indians: A Critical Bibliography (with Gary D.
Sandefur and Harold G. Grasmick) (Bloomington, Ind., 1982)
We Shall Live Again: The 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance Movements as Demographic
Repitalization (New York, 1986)
American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman,
1987)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thornton, Russell, 1942
American Indian holocaust and survival.
(The Civilization of the American Indian series; v. 186)
Bibliography: p. 247.
Includes index.
1. IndiansPopulation. 2. AmericaPopulation.
I. Title. II. Series
E59.P75T48 1987 304.6'08997073 87-40216
ISBN: 0-8061-2220-X (paper)
ISBN: 0-8061-2074-6 (cloth)
American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 is Volume 186 in The Civilization of
the American Indian Series.
Copyright © 1987 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. All rights
reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A. First edition, 1987. First paperback printing, 1990.
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

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To my parents, Faye Garrett Thornton and Walter Gilbert Gip Thornton
For all those Indian lives unlived

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Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once
powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as
snow before a summer sun.
TECUMSEH (SHAWNEE)

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Contents
Preface Page xv
Acknowledgments xix
1. Arrivals in the Western Hemisphere 3
2. American Indian Population in 1492 15
3. Overview of Decline: 1492 to 18901900 42
4. Three Hundred Years of Decline: 1500 to 1800 60
5. Decline to Nadir: 1800 to 1900 91
6. The Great Ghost Dances 134
7. American Indian Population Recovery: 1900 to Today 159
8. Population Recovery and the Definition and Enumeration of American
Indians 186
9. Urbanization of American Indians 225
Appendix: The Native American Population History of Alaska, Canada, and
Greenland 241
References 247
Index 283

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Illustrations
Figures
P-
1.
American Indian Population Decline and Recovery in the United States Page
Area, 14921980 xvii
P- Non-Indian Population Growth in the United States Area, 14921980 xvii
2.
2-1.Excavated American Indian Ossuary at Nanjemoy Creek, Maryland 38
4-1.Kiowa Winter, Summer, and Monthly Counts 80
4-2.Sioux Pictographs from Winter Counts 81
5-1.Chief Four Bears of the Mandan, by George Catlin 97
5-2.The Battle of Greasy Grass (or Little Big Horn River) 106
5-3.Ishi, the Last Yahi Yana 112
5-4.The Trail of Tears, by Robert Lindneux 118
6-1.Karok Facial Painting for the 1870 Ghost Dance 137
6-2.Wovoka, the Northern Paiute Ghost Dance Prophet 141
6-3.1890 Sioux Ghost Dance Ceremony 143
6-4.Sitting Bull 150
6-5.Scene of the Wounded Knee Massacre 153
6-6.Chief Big Foot's Body at Wounded Knee 153
6-7.Burying the Dead at Wounded Knee 154
6-8.A Sioux Ghost Dance Shirt Worn at the Wounded Knee Massacre 155
6-9.Fenced Grave at Wounded Knee 156
7-1.Theory of Demographic Transition 164
8-1.The Big Road Census 214
8-2.Cover of 1880 Cherokee Census Schedule 215
Maps
1-1.
Location of Beringia 6
5-1. Flight of the Cheyenne 121
5-2. Texas Indian Tribes 128
6-1. Areas Influenced by the 1870 and the 1890 Ghost Dance Religions 135
6-2. The Sioux Reservations, 186889 147
6-3. Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890 152
8-1. Yuki and Tolowa Territories 202

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Preface.
Each of the World's Peoples has had many histories over decades, centuries, and millenniums. None is so
fundamental as their history as a physical population. Yet as basic as this history is, it is often ignored, frequently
unrecognized, and more frequently unwritten. This is particularly true of the North American Indians. We know
much about North American Indian social and cultural history subsequent to contacts with Europeans, but little has
been written about their demographic history. This book is an attempt to redress that imbalance. It is a
demographic history of the populations of American Indians north of present-day Mexico, particularly those in the
conterminous United States of America.
Some 500 years ago Christopher Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere. Columbus did not, however,
discover the New World. It was already old when he came to it. Furthermore, Columbus was not even the first to
arrive from Europe. The Vikings had preceded him by 500 years. Others traveling across the oceans may have
preceded him both before and after the Vikings. The first human beings to arrivethe ancestors of the American
Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts living on the continent when Columbus arrivedhad preceded him by thousands and
thousands of years.
The demographic effects of Columbus's discovery were nevertheless important in many ways. There was a marked
shift in the world's populations as Europeans and others migrated to the Western Hemisphere, where they
experienced remarkable population growth. Great countries developed in a very short span of human history. Euro-
American people have much cause to celebrate Columbus's arrival in his New World.
Another demographic history exists, however. It is the history of the people Columbus met here: the descendants of
the first humans to arrive on the land, the first to populate it, the first to prosper on it. For them 1492 also marked a
turning point in population history. The date, however, is not one to be celebrated. Far from it! In the centuries
after Columbus these Indians suffered a demographic collapse. Numbers declined sharply; entire tribes, often
quickly, were wiped from the face of the earth.
This is certainly true of the American Indians on the land that was to become the United States of America. For
them the arrival of the Europeans marked the beginning of a long holocaust, although it came not in ovens, as it did
for the Jews. The fires that consumed North American Indians were the fevers brought on by newly encountered
diseases, the flashes of settlers' and soldiers' guns, the ravages of firewater, the flames of villages and fields burned
by the scorched-earth policy of vengeful Euro-Americans. The effects of this holocaust of North American Indians,
like that of the Jews, was millions of deaths. In fact, the holocaust of the North American tribes was, in a

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way, even more destructive than that of the Jews, since many American Indian peoples became extinct.
It is truly remarkable that during these 500 years somehowreasons range from chance to adaptation to
determinationmost North American Indian tribes survived the horrendous history. Even more remarkable,
numerous tribes have shown recent population gains. Their stories are tributes to human survival instincts,
perseverance, and hope.
In this book I trace the history of North American Indians as a physical population, considering both their
numerical decline after about 1492 and their recent resurgence. I occasionally compare the American Indian
population history with that of the non-Indians who later created the United States of America. The 500-year
population curves of the two groups are very different, as shown in figures P-1 and P-2.
In Chapter 1, I describe the arrivals of the people who would become American Indians and other Native
Americans. I also briefly discuss the far more recent arrivals of the Europeans in the Western Hemisphere. In
Chapter 2, I turn attention to American Indians as a population on the eve of their destruction. How the European
arrival affected North American Indian populations during the next four centuries is the subject of Chapters 3
through 6. The effect was disastrous: a demographic collapse. In Chapter 3, I examine the long-term pattern and
the general causes of this collapse: disease, including alcoholism; warfare and genocide; geographical removal and
relocation; and destruction of ways of life.
I generally organize discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 around these four major causes of the population decline.
Chapter 4 considers depopulation events during the 300 years of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries. Particular attention is devoted to the effects of the early European colonization on the East Coast of
North America, which seriously impacted the native populations there. In Chapter 5, I detail how the four general
causes of depopulation affected American Indian populations in the nineteenth century and how the causes
interacted with one another.
This is a disproportionate amount of attention given to the nineteenth century, but that was when the American
Indian population reached nadir. More significantly, we simply know more about American Indian populations
since 1800 than before 1800, particularly their demography. It does not mean that fewer important events,
demographic and otherwise, occurred in the first three centuries after the European arrival. Many did, and perhaps
they were the most important ones. The difficulty is that today we are either unaware or little aware of them.
In Chapter 6, I discuss American Indian reactions to population collapse, particularly the Ghost Dance religions of
1870 and 1890. This topic may seem inappropriate in a work on population history, but the Ghost Dances were
brought about more or less directly by the depopulation of the Indians. More important, they were deliberate efforts
to confront, even reverse, the demographic collapse that the Indians had experienced by the late nineteenth century.
After about 400 years, North American Indians reversed the depopulation

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