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Other devastating assaults on these ways of life included the Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and kinship systems… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo…
Even the most well-informed and most reasonable estimate of a population separated from contemporary inquiry by more than half a millennium is inevitably a very general approximation at best. Thornton’s own painstaking and evolving demographic research during the past three and one-half decades arguably provides the best example of this kind of inquiry and research. Thornton has challenged Moody’s very low estimate of Counting the Dead 9 the Indigenous population in what is today the continental United States because it assumed no early significant Indigenous-European contact or early catastrophic Indigenous population loss because of European and/or African diseases. In contrast, Thornton has pointed out that there were disastrous epidemics and population losses during the first half of the sixteenth century “resulting from incidental contact, or even without direct contact, as disease spread from one American Indian tribe to another.”28 Thornton has also challenged Dobyns’ much higher Indigenous population estimates, which are based on the Malthusian assumption that “populations tend to increase to, and beyond, the limits of the food available to them at any particular level of technology.”29 As Thornton has explained, “human populations do not necessarily expand to the numerical limits their technologies and natural resources allow.”