Sherburne Friend Cook: Rebel-Revisionist (1896-1974)

Abstract

ONE OF MY friends who often visits Puritan cemeteries remembers this epitaph on an early New England tombstone: He killed 25 Indians before he fell asleep in Jesus.' Although Sherburne Cook in his later years investigating the mortality of New England Indians seems to have missed this bit of intriguing data, he found much more evidence of a similar kind. Not too long before he died Cook wrote to me commenting on fresh data on New England Indian population he had found while probing into the historical complexities of disease and interracial warfare.2 For a year now I have been looking into the population status of New England Indians, he wrote, mostly because I was born and raised in Massachusetts and I know the country pretty well. So far it has become evident that the precolonial Indian population was far greater than has been indicated by [James] Mooney, [John R.] Swanton and others. The same old story.3 Cook wrote this letter in 1973, but he had been involved in revisionism and controversy from almost the first days of his career as a physiologist in the University of California medical school. His studies on New