In what now forms the United States, taking the country as a whole, the foes who had to be met and overcome were very much more formidable.  The ground had to be not only settled but conquered, sometimes at the expense of the natives, often at the expense of rival European races.  As already pointed out the Indians themselves formed one of the main factors in deciding the fate of the continent.  They were never able in the end to avert the white conquest, but they could often delay its advance for a long spell of years.  The Iroquois, for instance, held their own against all comers for two centuries.  Many other tribes stayed for a time the oncoming white flood, or even drove it back; in Maine the settlers were for a hundred years confined to a narrow strip of sea-coast.  Against the Spaniards, there were even here and there Indian nations who definitely recovered the ground they had lost.

When the whites first landed, the superiority and, above all, the novelty of their arms gave them a very great advantage.  But the Indians soon became accustomed to the new-comers’ weapons and style of warfare.  By the time the English had consolidated the Atlantic colonies under their rule, the Indians had become what they have remained ever since, the most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock.  Relatively to their numbers, they have shown themselves far more to be dreaded than the Zulus or even the Maoris.

Their presence has caused the process of settlement to go on at unequal rates of speed in different places; the flood has been hemmed in at one point, or has been forced to flow round an island of native population at another.  Had the Indians been as helpless as the native Australians were, the continent of North America would have had an altogether different history.  It would not only have been settled far more rapidly, but also on very different lines.  Not only have the red men themselves kept back the settlements, but they have also had a very great effect upon the outcome of the struggles between the different intrusive European peoples.  Had the original inhabitants of the Mississippi valley been as numerous and unwarlike as the Aztecs, de Soto would 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