COLUMBUS AND THE INDIANS.
Gen. Thomas J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. In an article, "Columbus and the Indians," in the New York Independent, June 2, 1892.
Columbus, when he landed, was confronted with an Indian problem, which he handed down to others, and they to us. Four hundred years have rolled by, and it is still unsolved. Who were the strange people who met him at the end of his long and perilous voyage? He guessed at it and missed it by the diameter of the globe. He called them Indians—people of India—and thus registered the fifteenth century attainments in geography and anthropology. How many were there of them? Alas! there was no census bureau here then, and no record has come down to us of any count or enumeration. Would they have lived any longer if they had been counted? Would a census have strengthened them to resist the threatened tide of invaders that the coming of Columbus heralded? If instead of corn they had presented census rolls to their strange visitors, and exhibited maps to show that the continent was already occupied, would that have changed the whole course of history and left us without any Mayflower or Plymouth Rock, Bunker Hill or Appomattox?