The Indian farmer is under the instruction of upward of five hundred skilled specialists who demonstrate the art of profitable farming. His lands equal in area all New England and New York, and their value is placed at six hundred million dollars.
4. The Siouan (sixty-eight tribes) including the great Dakota (Sioux) tribes, with their numerous sub-divisions; the Omahas, Poncas, Osages, the Winnebagos, Iowas, Crows; and the Catawbas in Carolina, who perhaps mark the original eastern habitat from which Siouan tribes moved northwest.
5. The Shoshonean (twelve tribes) including the Comanches, Utes, Hopis, and Shoshone.
6. The Muskhogean (nine tribes) including the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles.
7. The Eskimauan family (seventy tribes) scattered through Greenland and the Arctic Coast and islands of Central and North America and Alaska.
8. The Pueblo, including the Zuñi, Hopi and Tegna.
On the continent of North America, north of Mexico, three or four hundred years ago, there were probably about 1,150,000 Indians. Of these, perhaps 850,000 were on territory now that of the United States proper; 220,000 in British America; 72,000 in Alaska; and 10,000 in Greenland. Numerous and prolonged intertribal wars, ravages of tuberculosis, and fevers, are known to have swept off entire populations of large districts, before contact with Whites had greatly accelerated the death-rate of the American Indians. Smallpox, introduced by the Whites, has nearly extinguished entire tribes, time after time. Whiskey, and attendant dissipation, sexual diseases brought in by Whites, and the lowered vitality which results from changed conditions of life, with tuberculosis, rendered much more deadly in the conditions of life forced upon Indians by the Whites, had largely reduced the Indian population before 1800, and have steadily tended toward the extermination of Indians since that date, although intermarriages and enrolment of mixed-bloods have kept up the numbers on tribal rolls.
The most interesting groups of Indians in Central and South America have been the (a) Aztecs, (b) Pipils, making the Nahuatlan group; and the (a) Mayas, (b) Quichés, (c) Pocomans, making the Huastecan group.