But beyond the sphere rhetoric, the Indians as a people did not die out, awful though the suffering was. Killing people is one thing, killing them off is another. The Sand Creek Massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes on the Western frontier and a permanent scar on the history of the state of Colorado, killed at least two hundred, mostly women and children, of Chief Black Kettle's band of Southern Cheyenne in 1864. The Mohicans, of whom we were supposed to have seen the last in the 1750s, recently prevented Wal-Mart from building a multiacre discount store on land they consider sacred in upstate New York. In 1900, there were fewer than a quarter of a million Indians in the United States.
Today there are two million or more.
The population of those claiming Indian descent on the census forms has been growing four times as fast as the population as a whole, making Native Americans the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country. Like many comfortable stories, the story of the Indians' destruction hides other stories that are less so. For starters, it leaves out that the destruction was and is actually worse than can be easily described. A well-informed person probably knows of the bigger and more famous massacres, but big and small massacres took place in many states over the years. Killing Indians was once the official policy of the state of California, which spent a million dollars reimbursing Indian-hunters for the ammunition they used.