Another estimate that some may offer is that in the year 1600, there were approximately twenty million Indians and two-thousand European settlers, but in the year 2000, there were about 2.5 million Indians and three-hundred million Euro-Americans. This fact in itself is astounding. What has to be taken into consideration is that fact that in the year 1600 people were settled strictly on the east coast and there was a massive amount of land that was yet to be discovered so no one can really tell how large the Indian population was at that time. This is the first way that Euro-Americans showed how little Indians mattered in their "New World". The main way the literature of the day tried to prove that we didn't harm the Indians nearly as bad as people said was by simply hiding the fact about how many Indians there were to begin with. If the public thought that there were not many Indians originally living at the place they now called home, then they wouldn't feel nearly as bad taking over all the land they felt they needed, which in reality was the whole continent. This idea was fueled by everyone believing the continent was made up primarily of terra nullius, or empty space, that was theirs for the taking (pg. 130). The notable and well recognized Smithsonian Institute is one of the front runners of denying how many people originally lived in North America with an original estimate of about 1 million, but since then changing it to possibly 2 million, at most. .
The next mode of denial used to explain what happened is that of the "disease factor." Deniers say it was the diseases themselves, smallpox being the most influential, along with typhoid, measles and diphtheria, that killed the Indians, not the explorers and such that carried them. Of course the people cannot be blamed because the diseases are smart enough to know who to attack and who not to. For example, Cornell University professor Steven T.
