During the past fifty years few subjects of historical consequence have been more controversial than that of the population history of the American Indian. At one extreme, in 1939 Alfred L. Kroeber estimated the population of pre-Columbian North America at about 900,000. At the other extreme, in 1983 Henry F. Dobyns estimated it at about 18,000,000. Since the total North American Indian population by the early twentieth century was no more than 350,000 to 450,000, the human question concealed in the statistical controversy is staggering: did the North American Indian population decline by a ratio of about 2 to 1 between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century – or did it decline by 50 to 1 ? Or more?

He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type… here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen… kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown.

The world of Tom Sawyer, both that of the character and of the novel which bears his name, is a world dominated by fences; the neat, straight palings that surround the Widow Dougla's property, the fence around the Teacher house over which the lovestick Tom gazes longingly after Becky, and all the other upright boundaries delineating St. Petersburg respectability. As the central icon of the novel, Aunt Polly's white-washed fence appropriately represents the care and maintenance of order to which the town is committed, an order upon which both Tom and his story depend. Although Twain first identifies St. Petersburg as a poor, shabby, frontier village, it is far from defenseless in its confrontations either with shabbiness or wilderness. Well ordered by its fences and undergirded, like Tom's story, by the central institutions of civil and cultural order — the court, the school, the church — it is a society where things have been assigned their proper places and where the primary function of the St. Petersburg elect is to tend those places. This is a world overseen by guardians and Sunday superintendents, schoolmastes, and judges, authorities who, if sometimes mistaken, or even slightly absurd, are essentially benign and nearly always reliable. Thus it is that the minister, praying for the community's children, does so in the context of a hierarchy of responsibility that from country officials to the President of the United States, an ordering presence that, among other reassuring work, is to guarantee the well-being of the young. As though to provide the fullest representation of this benevolent system, Missouri's most important senator, Thomas Hart Benton, makes a cameo appearance in the novel, albeit one in which he is judged of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a book about boyish freedom, it affirms at every turn an order of the most conventional sort and depends upon that order for the version of boyhood it depicts.