Volume 53, Number 6 · April 6, 2006
Apologies to the Iroquois
By Gordon S. Wood
The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution
by Alan Taylor
Knopf, 542 pp., $35.00
In 1700 the native peoples, whom the Europeans called Indians, demographically dominated the North American continent north of the Rio Grande. If we are to believe the best estimates, they numbered at least 1.6 million, nearly five times the 330,000 or so Europeans and Africans huddled along the Atlantic coast. A century later, by 1800, these proportions had been radically reversed: the inhabitants of North America with European and African ancestry had multiplied dramatically since 1700 and now numbered 5.5 million, over five times the number of remaining indigenous peoples, nine out of ten of whom now lived west of the Mississippi, with most of the eastern Indians having become the victims of war and especially disease.[1]
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