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Dobyns published his conclusions in the journal Current Anthropology in 1966. They spawned rebuttals, conferences, even entire books. (Denevan assembled one: The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) “I always felt guilty about the impact of my Current Anthropology article,” Dobyns told me, “because I thought and still think that Cook and Borah and Sauer had all said this in print earlier, but people weren’t listening. I’m still puzzled by the reaction, to tell you the truth. Maybe it was the time—people were prepared to listen in the 1960s.”

Listen—and attack. Dobyns’s population projections were quickly seen by some as politically motivated—self-flagellation by guilty white liberals or, worse, a push to inflate the toll of imperialism from the hate-America crowd. “No question about it, some people want those higher numbers,” Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown, told me. These people, he said, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a 1983 book, Their Number Become Thinned, and revised his estimates upward.

Most researchers thought Dobyns’s estimates too high but few critics were as vehement as David Henige, of the University of Wisconsin, whose book, Numbers from Nowhere, published in 1998, is a landmark in the literature of demographic vilification. “Suspect in 1966, it is no less suspect nowadays,” Henige charged of Dobyns’s work. “If anything, it is worse.” Henige stumbled across a seminar on Indian demography taught by Denevan in 1976. An “epiphanic moment” occurred when he read that Cook and Borah had “uncovered” the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of people? he wondered. “We can make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases,” he said to me. “But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that—applying large figures like 95 percent—we’re saying things we shouldn’t say. The number implies a level of knowledge that’s impossible.”

Indian activists reject this logic. “You always hear white people trying to minimize the size of the aboriginal populations their ancestors personally displaced,” according to Lenore Stiffarm, an ethnologist at the University of Saskatchewan. Dismissing the impact of disease, in her view, is simply a way to reduce the original population of the Americas. “Oh, there used to be a few people there, and disease killed some of them, so by the time we got here they were almost all gone.” The smaller the numbers of Indians, she said, the easier it is to regard the continent as empty, and hence up for grabs. “It’s perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land,” Stiffarm told me. “And land with only a few ‘savages’ is the next best thing.”

When Henige wrote Numbers from Nowhere, the fight about pre-Columbian population had already consumed forests’ worth of trees—his bibliography is ninety pages long. Four decades after Dobyns’s article appeared, his colleagues “are still struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology,” according to James Wilson, author of Their Earth Shall Weep, a history of North America’s indigenous peoples after conquest. The dispute shows no sign of abating. This is partly because of the inherent fascination with the subject. But it is also due to the growing realization of how much is at stake.

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On May 30, 1539, Hernando De Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay in Florida. De Soto was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He grew very rich very young in Spanish America by becoming a market leader in the nascent slave trade. The profits helped to fund the conquest of the Inka, which made De Soto wealthier still. He accompanied Pizarro to Tawantinsuyu, burnishing his reputation for brutality—he personally tortured Challcochima, Atawallpa’s chief general, before his execution. Literally looking for new worlds to