Indian Population
Estimates
The
number of Indians living in what is now Connecticut at the time
of English settlement has been a subject of recent investigation.
De-Forest’s figure of 6,000 is no longer taken seriously. Interested
scholars should see:
Collier,
Christopher. “Long Island Sound and the Arrival of Western Man,
with commentary by Alden Vaughan,” in Long Island Sound: the
People and the Environment. Stamford: The Oceanic Society,
1978. Collier claims there were at least 30,000 Indians in Connecticut
in the sixteenth century.
Cook,
Sherbume F. The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth
Century. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976.
—“Interracial
Warfare and Population Decline Among New England Indians.” Ethnohistory
20(1973).
—“The
Significance of Disease in the Extinction of New England Indians.”
Human Biology 45(1973). Mooney, James. The Aboriginal
Population of America North of Mexico. Washington: Smithsonian
Institution, 1928.
Ubelaker,
Douglas H. “The Sources and Methodology for Mooney’s Estimates
of North American Indian Populations.” In Native Populations
of the Americas in 1492. Edited by William M. Denevan. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.
The
figures of Mooney are, by general agreement, much too low; Jennings,
European Invasion, provides figures that most scholars
consider highly problematical and probably inflated. Obviously,
I think my own estimate, given above, is the most reasonable.
See also Wilbur Jacobs, “The Tip of the Iceberg: Pre-Columbian
Indian Demography and Some Implications for Revisionism,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 31(January, 1974)1:123-32.
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