Clarification

In his review of Edmund S. Morgan’s essay collection American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America [NYR, June 11], Russell Baker, drawing on the estimates mentioned in Morgan’s 1958 essay “The Unyielding Indian,” wrote that in North America at the time of Columbus, “there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.” However, archaeological evidence and demographic research in recent decades suggest that the number was much larger, with estimates ranging up to 18 million.