The Malay fisherman, trader and pirate, with the love of the sea in his blood, by these pile dwellings combines security from his foe and proximity to his familiar field of activity. The same objects are achieved by white traders on the west coast of Africa by setting up their dwellings and warehouses on the old hulks of dismasted vessels, which are anchored for this purpose in the river mouths. They afford some protection against both fever and hostile native, and at the same time occupy the natural focus of local trade seeking foreign exchanges.

[Sidenote: River dwellers in populous lands.]

When advancing civilization has eliminated the need for this form of protection, water-dwellers may survive or reappear in old and relatively over-populated countries, as we find them universally on the rivers of China and less often in Farther India. Here they present the phenomenon of human life overflowing from the land to the streams of the country; because these, as highways of commerce, afford a means of livelihood, even apart from the food supply in their fish, and offer an unclaimed bit of the earth's surface for a floating home. Canton has 250,000 inhabitants living on boats and rafts moored in the river, and finding occupation in the vast inland navigation of the Empire, or in the trade which it brings to this port of the Si-kiang. Some of the boats accommodate large families, together with modest poultry farms, crowded together under their low bamboo sheds. Others are handsome wooden residences ornamented with plants, and yet others are pleasure resorts with their professional singing girls.[593] In the lakes and swamp-bordered rivers of southern Shantung, a considerable fishing population is found living in boats, while the land shows few inhabitants. This population enjoys freedom from taxation and unrestricted use of the rivers and fisheries. To vary their scant and monotonous diet, they construct floating gardens on rafts of bamboo covered with earth, on which they plant onions and garlic and which they tow behind their boats. They also raise hundreds of ducks, which are trained to go into the water to feed and return at a signal,[594] thus expanding the resources of their river life. Bangkok has all its business district afloat on the Menam River—shops, lumber yards, eating-houses and merchants' dwellings. Even the street vendor's cart is a small boat, paddled in and out among the larger junks.[595]

A far more modern type of river-dwellers is found in the "shanty-boat" people of the western rivers of the United States. They are the gypsies of our streams, nomads who float downstream with the current, tying up at intervals along the bank of some wooded island or city waterfront, then paying a tug to draw their house-boat upstream. The river furnishes them with fish for their table and driftwood for their cooking-stove, and above all is the highway for the gratification of their nomad instincts. There is no question here of trade and overpopulation.

[Sidenote: Reclamation of land from the sea.]

Pile dwellings and house-boats are a paltry form of encroachment upon the water in comparison with that extensive reclamation of river swamps and coastal marshes which in certain parts of the world has so increased the area available for human habitation. The water which is a necessity to man may become his enemy unless it is controlled. The alluvium which a river deposits in its flood-plain, whether in some flat stretch of its middle course or near the retarding level of the sea, attracts settlement because of its fertility and proximity to a natural highway; but it must be protected by dikes against the very element which created it. Such deposits are most extensive on low coasts at or near the river's mouth, just where the junction of an inland and oceanic waterway offers the best conditions for commerce. Here then is a location destined to attract and support a large population, for which place can be made only by steady encroachment upon the water of both river and sea. Diking is necessitated not only by the demand for more land for the growing population, but also by the constant silting up of the drainage outfalls, which increases the danger of inundation while at the same time contributing to the upbuilding of the land. Conditions here institute an incessant struggle between man and nature;[596] but the rewards of victory are too great to count the cost. The construction of sea-walls, embankment of rivers, reclamation of marshes, the cutting of canals for drains and passways in a water-soaked land, the conversion of lakes into meadow, the rectification of tortuous streams for the greater economy of this silt-made soil, all together constitute the greatest geographical transformation that man has brought about on the earth's surface.[597]

[Sidenote: The struggle with the water.]

Though the North Sea lowland of Europe has suffered from the serious encroachment of the sea from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, when the Zuyder Zee, the Dollart and Jade Bay were formed, nevertheless the counter encroachment of the land upon the water, accomplished through the energy and intelligence of the inhabitants, has more than made good the loss. Between the Elbe and Scheldt more than 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) have been reclaimed from river and sea in the past three hundred years. Holland's success in draining her large inland waters, like the Haarlem Meer (70 square miles or 180 square kilometers) and the Lake of Ij, has inspired an attempt to recover 800 square miles (2,050 square kilometers) of fertile soil from the borders of the Zuyder Zee and reduce that basin to nearly one-third of its present size.[598] One-fourth of the Netherlands lies below the average of high tides, and in 1844 necessitated 9,000 windmills to pump the waste water into the drainage canals.[599]

The Netherlands, with all its external features of man's war against the water, has its smaller counterpart in the 1,200 square miles of reclaimed soil about the head of the Wash, which constitute the Fenland of England. Here too are successive lines of sea-wall, the earliest of them attributed to the Romans, straightened and embanked rivers, drainage canals, windmills and steam pumps, dikes serving as roads, lines of willows and low moist pastures dotted with grazing cattle. No feature of the Netherlands is omitted. The low southern part of Lincolnshire is even called Holland, and Dutch prisoners from a naval battle of 1652 were employed there on the work of reclamation, which was begun on a large scale about this time.[600] In the medieval period, the increase of population necessitated measures to improve the drainage and extend the acreage; but there was little co-operation among the land owners, and the maintenance of river dikes and sea-walls was neglected, till a succession of disasters from flooding streams and invading tides in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led to severe measures against defaulters. One culprit was placed alive in a breach which his own neglect or criminal cutting had caused, and was built in, by way of educating the Fenlanders to a sense of common responsibility.[601]

The fight against the water on the coast begins later than that against rivers and swamps in the interior of the land; it demands greater enterprise and courage, because it combats two enemies instead of one; but its rewards are correspondingly greater. The Netherlands by their struggle have acquired not only territory for an additional half million population, but have secured to themselves a strategic position in the maritime trade of the world.

[Sidenote: Mound villages in river flood-plains.]

The abundant fertility of river flood-plains inevitably attracts population and necessitates some kind of artificial protection against inundation. The most primitive form of this protection is obvious and widespread, restricted in neither locality nor race. When the flood season converts the flat plain of the White Nile below Gondokora (7 deg. N. Lat.) into an extensive marsh, countless hills of the white ant emerge over the waters. During the dry season, the ants build up their hills to about ten feet, and then live in safety in the upper section during the flood. They greatly surpass in intelligence and constructive ability the human occupants of the valley, the low and wretched Kytch tribe of the Dinka Negroes, who like the ants are attracted by the natural vegetation of the flood-plain, and who use the ant-hills as refuge stations for themselves and their cattle during the flood.[602] Elsewhere in Africa the natives are more intelligent, for flood-plain villages built on artificial mounds have existed from the earliest times. Diodorus Siculus tells us that those of ancient Egypt, when the Nile was high, looked like the Cyclades Islands.[603] Similar ones are constructed by the Barotse tribe on the upper Zambesi.[604] The Niger River, rising in the Foota Jallon and Kong Mountains which form a region of heavy rainfall from February to July, inundates a plain of several thousand square miles for a distance of 250 miles above Timbuctoo. Here again the villages of the agricultural Song-hoi duplicate those of Egypt, built on the same clay mounds, wreathed in the same feathery palms, and communicating with one another only by small boats.[605] The same picture is presented by the Yangtze Kiang plain during the summer overflow—low artificial hills rising from the expanse of muddy water and topped with trees and villages, while sampans moored to their base show the means of communication.[606] In the broad flood-plain of the lower Mississippi River, the chronicles of the De Soto expedition state that the Indian villages visited stood "on mounds made by art." The Yazoo River Indians, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, had their cabins dispersed over the low deltaic land on earthen mounds made by their own hands. There is also strong evidence that some of the works of the Mound-builders in the "bottoms" of the middle and lower Mississippi served as protected sites for the dwellings of their chiefs.[607]

[Sidenote: Diking of rivers.]

Such meager provisions against inundation suffice for the sparse population characterizing the lower stages of civilization, but they must be supplemented for the increasing density of higher stages by the embankment of the stream, to protect also the adjacent fields. Hence the process of confining rivers within dikes goes back into gray antiquity. Those of the Po and its tributaries were begun before the political history of the Lombardy plains commenced. Strabo mentions the canals and dikes of Venetia, whereby a part of the country was drained and rendered tillable.[608] The main Po has been embanked for centuries as far up as Cremona, a distance of 600 miles, and the Adige to Verona.[609] But the most gigantic dike system in the world is that of the Hoangho, by which a territory the size of England is won from the water for cultivation.[610] The cost of protecting the far spread crops against the autumn floods has been a large annual expenditure and unceasing watchfulness; and this the Chinese have paid for two thousand years, but have not always purchased immunity. Year by year the Yellow River mounts higher and higher on its silted bed above the surrounding lowlands, increasing the strain on the banks and the area of destruction, when its fury is uncaged. The flood of 1887 covered an area estimated at 50,000 square miles, wiped out of existence a million people, and left a greater number a prey to famine.[611] So the fertile Chengtu plain of the Min River, supporting four millions of people on its 2,500 square miles of area, owes its prosperity to the embanking and irrigating works of the engineer heroes, Li Ping and his son, who lived before the Christian era. On the temple in their honor in the city of Kuan Hsien is Li Ping's motto, incised in gold: "Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low." For twenty-one centuries these instructions have been carried out. The stone dikes are kept low to permit a judicious amount of flooding for fertilization, and every year five to six feet of silt are removed from the artificial channel of the Min. To this work the whole population of the Chengtu plain contributes.[612] [See map page 8.]

[Sidenote: Social gain by control of the water.]

In such organized struggles to reduce the domain of the water and extend that of the dry land, the material gain is not all: more significant by far is the power to co-operate that is developed in a people by a prolonged war against overwhelming sea or river. A common natural danger, constantly and even regularly recurring, necessitates for its resistance a strong and sustained union, that draws men out of the barren individualism of a primitive people, and forces them without halt along the path of civilization. It brings a realizing sense of the superiority of common interests over individual preferences, strengthens the national bond, and encourages voluntary subservience to law.

This is the social or political gain; but this is not all. The danger emanating from natural phenomena has its discoverable laws, and therefore leads to a first empirical study of winds, currents, seasonal rainfall and the whole science of hydraulics. With deep national insight, the Greeks embodied in their mythology the story of Perseus and his destruction of the sea monster who ravaged the coast, and Hercules' killing of the many-headed serpent who issued from the Lernean Marshes to lay waste the country of Argos. Even so early a writer as Strabo states that yet earlier authorities interpreted Hercules' victory over the river god of the Achelous as the embankment of that stream and the draining of its inundated delta tract by the national benefactor.[613] So the Chinese, whose land abounds in swamps and devastating rivers, have a long list of engineer heroes who embanked and drained for the salvation and benefit of mankind. It is highly probable that the communal work involved in the construction of dikes and canals for the control of the Hoangho floods cemented the Chinese nationality of that vast lowland plain, and supplied the cohesive force that developed here at a very remote period a regularly organized state and an advancing civilization.

[Sidenote: Control of water as factor in early civilizations of arid lands.]

The history of Egypt shows a similar effect of the yearly inundation of the Nile Valley. Here, as in all rainless countries where irrigation must be practiced, the water becomes a potent factor of political union and civilization. Its scarcity necessitates common effort in the construction and maintenance of irrigation works, and a central control to secure fair distribution of the water to the fields of the inhabitants. A stimulus to progress is found in the presence of a problem, perennial as the yearly threatenings of the Hoangho, which demands the application of human intelligence and concerted labor for its solution. Additional arable land for the growing population can be secured only by the wider distribution of the fructifying water; this in turn depends upon corporate effort wisely directed and ably controlled. Every lapse in governmental efficiency means an encroachment of the desert upon the alluvial fields and finally to the river bank, as to-day in Mesopotamia.

The fact that the earliest civilizations have originated in the sub-tropical rainless districts of the world has been ascribed solely to the regular and abundant returns to tillage under irrigation, as opposed to the uncertain crops under variable meteorological conditions; to the consequent accumulation of wealth, and the emancipation of man for other and higher activities, which follows his escape from the agricultural vicissitudes of an uncertain climate. When Draper says: "Civilization depends on climate and agriculture," and "the civilization of Egypt depended for its commencement on the sameness and stability of the African climate," and again, "agriculture is certain in Egypt and there man first became civilized,"[614] he seizes upon the conspicuous fact of a stable food supply as the basis of progress, failing to detect those potent underlying social effects of the inundations—social and political union to secure the most effective distribution of the Nile's blessings and to augment by human devices the area accessible to them, the development of an intelligent water economy, which ultimately produced a long series of intellectual achievements.[615]

[Sidenote: Cultural areas in primitive America.]

This unifying and stimulating national task of utilizing and controlling the water was the same task which in various forms prompted the early civilization of the Hoangho and Yangtze basins, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Peru, Mexico, and that impressive region of prehistoric irrigation canals found in the Salt, Gila River, and upper Rio Grande valleys.[616] Here the arid plateaus of the Cordilleras between the Pueblo district and Central America had no forests in which game might be found; so that the Indian hunter had to turn to agriculture and a sedentary life beside his narrow irrigated fields. Here native civilization reached its highest grade in North America. Here desert agriculture achieved something more than a reliable food supply. It laid the foundation of the first steady integration of wandering Indian hordes into a stable, permanently organized society. Elsewhere throughout the North American continent, we see only shifting groups of hunter and fisher folk, practising here and there a half nomadic agriculture to supplement the chase.

The primitive American civilization that arose among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, the only strictly sedentary tribes relying exclusively on agriculture north of the Mexican plateau, was primarily a result of the pressure put upon these people by a restricted water supply.[617] Though chiefly offshoots of the wild Indians of the northern plains, they have been markedly differentiated from their wandering Shoshone and Kiowa kindred by local environment.[618] Scarcity of water in those arid highlands and paucity of arable land forced them to a carefully organized community life, made them invest their labor in irrigation ditches, terraced gardens and walled orchards, whereby they were as firmly rooted in their scant but fertile fields as were their cotton plants and melon vines;[619] while the towering mesas protected their homes against marauding Ute, Navajo and Apache.[620] This thread of a deep underlying connection between civilization and the control of water can be traced through all prehistoric America, as well as through the earliest cultural achievements in North Africa and Asia.

[Sidenote: Economy of the water: fisheries.]

The economy of the water is not confined to its artificial distribution over arid fields, but includes also the exploitation of the mineral and animal resources of the vast world of waters, whether the production of salt from the sea, salt lakes and brine springs, the cultivation of oyster beds, or the whole range of pelagic fisheries. The animal life of the water is important to man owing not only to its great abundance, but also to its distribution over the coldest regions of the globe. It furnishes the chief food supply of polar and sub-polar peoples, and therefore is accountable for the far-northern expansion of the habitable world. Even the reindeer tribes of Arctic Eurasia could hardly subsist without the sea food they get by barter from the fishermen of the coast. Norway, where civilization has achieved its utmost in exploiting the limited means of subsistence, shows a steady increase from south to north in the proportion of the population dependent upon the harvest of the deep. Thus the fisheries engross 44 per cent. of the rural population in Nordland province, which is bisected by the Arctic Circle; over 50 per cent. in Tromso, and about 70 per cent. in Finmarken. If the towns also be included, the percentages rise, because here fishing interests are especially prominent.[621] Proximity to the generous larder of the ocean has determined the selection of village sites, as we have seen among the coast Indians of British Columbia and southern Alaska, among all the Eskimo, and numerous other peoples of Arctic lands. [See map page 153.]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.]

Not only in polar but also in temperate regions, the presence of abundant fishing grounds draws the people of the nearest coast to their wholesale exploitation, especially if the land resources are scant. Fisheries then become the starting point or permanent basis of a subsequent wide maritime development, by expanding the geographical horizon. It was the search for the purple-yielding murex that first familiarized the Phoenicians with the commercial and colonial possibilities of the eastern Mediterranean coasts.[622] The royal dye of this marine product has through all the ages seemed to color with sumptuous magnificence the sordid dealings of those Tyrian traders, and constituted them an aristocracy of merchants. The shoals of tunny fish, arriving every spring in the Bosporus, from the north, drew the early Greeks and Phoenicians after them into the cold and misty Euxine, and furnished the original impulse to both these peoples for the establishment of fishing and trading stations on its uncongenial shores.[623] To the fisheries of the Baltic and especially to the summer catch of the migratory herring, which in vast numbers visited the shores of Pomerania and southern Sweden to spawn, the Hanse Towns of Germany owed much of their prosperity. Salt herring, even in the twelfth century, was the chief single article of their exchanges with Catholic Europe, which made a strong demand for the fish, owing to the numerous fast days. When, in 1425, by one of those unexplained vagaries of animal life, the herring abandoned the Baltic and selected the North Sea for its summer destination, a new support was given to the wealth of the Netherlands.[624] There is a considerable amount of truth in the saying that Amsterdam was built on herrings. New England, with an unproductive soil at home, but near by in the sea a long line of piscine feeding grounds in the submarine banks stretching from Cape Cod to Cape Race and beyond, found her fisheries the starting point and base of her long round of exchanges, a constant factor in her commercial and industrial evolution.[625]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as nurseries of seamen.]

Fisheries have always been the nurseries of seamen, and hence have been encouraged and protected by governments as providing an important element of national strength. The Newfoundland Banks were the training school which supplied the merchant marine and later the Revolutionary navy of colonial New England;[626] ever since the establishment of the Republic, they have been forced into prominence in our international negotiations with the United Kingdom, with the object of securing special privileges, because the government has recognized them as a factor in the American navy. The causal connection between fisheries and naval efficiency was recognized in England in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, by an act aiming to encourage fisheries by the remission of custom duties to native fishermen, by the imposition of a high tariff on the importation of foreign fish in foreign vessels, and finally by a legislative enforcement of fasts to increase the demand for fish, although any belief in the religious efficacy of fasts was frankly disclaimed. Thus an artificial demand for fish was created, with the result that a report on the success of the Fishery Acts stated that a thousand additional men had been attracted to the fishing trade, and were consequently "ready to serve in Her Majesty's ships."[627]

The fishing of the North Sea, especially on the Dogger Bank, is participated in by all the bordering countries, England, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium; and is valued equally on account of the food supply which it yields and as a school of seamen.[628] The Pomors or "coasters" of Arctic Russia, who dwell along the shores of the White Sea and live wholly by fisheries, have all their taxes remitted and receive free wood from the crown forests for the construction of their ships, on the condition that they serve on call in the imperial navy.[629] The history of Japan affords the most striking illustration of the power of fisheries alone to maintain maritime efficiency; for when by the seclusion act of 1624 all merchant vessels were destroyed, the marine restricted to small fishing and coasting vessels, and intercourse confined to Japan's narrow island world, the fisheries nevertheless kept alive that intimacy with the sea and preserved the nautical efficiency that was destined to be a decisive factor in the development of awakened Japan.

[Sidenote: Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.]

The resources of the sea first tempted man to trust himself to its dangerous surface; but their rewards were slight in comparison with the wealth of experiences and influences to which he fell heir, after he learned to convert the barrier of the untrod waste into a highway for his sail-borne keel. It is therefore true, as many anthropologists maintain, that after the discovery of fire the next most important step in the progress of the human race was the invention of the boat. No other has had such far-reaching results. Since water covers three-fourths of the earth's surface and permits the land-masses to rise only as islands here and there, it presents to man for his nautical ventures three times the area that he commands for his terrestrial habitat. On every side, the break of the waves and the swell of the tides block his wanderings, unless he has learned to make the water carry him to his distant goal. Spacially, therefore, the problem and the task of navigation is the most widespread and persistent in the history of mankind. The numerous coaling-stations which England has scattered over the world are mute witnesses to this spacial supremacy of the water, to the length of ocean voyages, and the power of the ocean to divide and unite. But had the proportion of land and water been reversed, the world would have been poorer, deprived of all these possibilities of segregation and differentiation, of stimulus to exchange and far-reaching intercourse, and of ingenious inventions which the isolating ocean has caused. Without this ramifying barrier between the different branches of the human family, these would have resembled each other more closely, but at the cost of development. The mere multiplicity of races and sub-races has sharpened the struggle for existence and endowed the survivors with higher qualities. But it was navigation that released primitive man from the seclusion of his own island or continent, stimulated and facilitated the intercourse of peoples, and enabled the human race to establish itself in every habitable part of the world.

NOTES TO CHAPTER X

[579] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 465, 563-567, 573. Washington, 1905.

[580] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 173-223. New York, 1872.

[581] Ferdinand Keller, Lake Dwellings, Vol. I, pp. 2-7, 576. London, 1876. English Lake Dwellings, Westminster Review, pp. 337-347. 1887.

[582] P.W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland, Vol. II, pp. 65-66. London, 1903.

[583] Herodotus, V. 16.

[584] Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, pp. 148-149. Translated by Mrs. Sabine, Philadelphia, 1849. E.F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 203. London, 1883.

[585] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 184. London, 1905.

[586] Verney L. Cameron, Across Africa, pp. 332-334. London, 1885.

[587] David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of Expedition to the Zambezi, p. 414. New York, 1866.

[588] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 464-466, 565. Washington, 1905.

[589] Stanford's Australasia, Vol. II, pp. 256-257. London, 1894.

[590] A.R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, pp. 368, 381. New York, 1869.

[591] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 262-263, 344. London, 1896-1898.

[592] Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, pp. 340-342, 347. London, 1899.

[593] John L. Stoddard, Lectures, Vol. III, p. 311. Boston, 1903.

[594] John Barrows, Travels in China, pp. 377-379. Philadelphia, 1805.

[595] William M. Wood, Fankwei, pp. 169-174. New York, 1859.

[596] Edmondo de Amicis, Holland and Its People, pp. 4-13. New York, 1890.

[597] G.P. Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, chap. IV, pp. 330-352. New York, 1871.

[598] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 106-108. London, 1903.

[599] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 127, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1888.

[600] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 222-223. New York, 1886. Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland, Past and Present, pp. 7-9. London, 1878.

[601] Ibid., pp. 145-147.

[602] Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Albert Nyanza, Great Basin of the Nile, pp. 49-50. London and Philadelphia, 1866.

[603] Diodorus Siculus, Book I, chap. III, p. 41. Translated by G. Booth. London, 1814.

[604] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels in Africa, pp. 234-236, 239, 272. New York, 1858.

[605] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 51-55, 145. New York, 1896.

[606] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond., Vol. I, pp. 8, 10, 97. London and New York, 1900.

[607] Cyrus Thomas, Mound Explorations, pp. 626, 650-653. Twelfth Annual Report Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.

[608] Strabo, Book V, chap. I, 4.

[609] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 88-89. London, 1904.

[610] John Barrows, Travels in China, p. 349. Philadelphia, 1805.

[611] Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 278-284. New York, 1904.

[612] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 72-73 76-81. New York and London, 1900. For the future of land reclamation, see N.S. Shaler, Man and the Earth, chap. V. New York, 1906.

[613] Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.

[614] John W. Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe, Vol. I, pp. 84-86. New York, 1876.

[615] Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, pp. 9-17. Eighth Edition, New York.

[616] Irrigation, Thirteenth Report of the U.S. Geological Survey, Part III, pp. 133-135. Washington, 1895. J.W. Powell, Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. XII, XIII. Washington, 1904. Cosmos Mindeleff, Aboriginal Remains in the Verde Valley, Arizona, pp. 187, 192-194, 238-245. Thirteenth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1896. V. Mindeleff, Pueblo Architecture, pp. 80, 216-217. Eighth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1891. F. W. Hodge, Prehistoric Irrigation in Arizona, American Anthropologist, July, 1893.

[617] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 105-106, 113, 118, 120-144, 478. Philadelphia, 1905.

[618] Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, pp. 49, 161, 415. Washington, 1894. D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-117. Philadelphia, 1901.

[619] Ibid., pp. 161, 181, 182, 188, 191, 193, 198, 410, 441-445. M.C. Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, pp. 351-354. Twenty-third Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1904.

[620] Ibid., pp. 13-14. H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 539-547. San Francisco, 1886.

[621] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 99-100. Christiania, 1900.

[622] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 49-50. New York.

[623] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 440.

[624] Dietrich Schaefer, Die Hansestaedte und Koenig Waldemar von Daenemark, pp. 255-257. Jena, 1879. Helen Zimmern, Story of the Hansa Towns, pp. 26-27. New York, 1895.

[625] W.B. Weeden, Social and Economic History of New England, Vol. I, pp. 17, 18, 90, 91, 128-135, 139. Boston, 1899.

[626] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 245.

[627] H.D. Traill, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 363-364, 540. London and New York, 1895.

[628] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 311. London, 1903.

[629] Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 54-71. From the Russian. London, 1899.



CHAPTER XI

THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS

[Sidenote: Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea.]

To a large view, rivers appear in two aspects. They are either part of the general water envelope of the earth, extensions of seas and estuaries back into the up-hill reaches of the land, feeders of the ocean, roots which it spreads out over the surface of the continents, not only to gather its nourishment from ultimate sources in spring and glacier, but also to bring down to the coast the land-born products of the interior to feed a sea-born commerce; or rivers are one of the land forms, merely water filling valley channels, serving to drain the fields and turn the mills of men. In the first aspect their historical importance has been both akin and linked to that of the ocean, despite the freshness and smaller volume of their waters and the unvarying direction of their currents. The ocean draws them and their trade to its vast basin by the force of gravity. It unites with its own the history of every log-stream in Laurentian or Himalayan forest, as it formerly linked the beaver-dammed brooks of wintry Canada with the current of trade following the Gulf Stream to Europe.

Where sea and river meet, Nature draws no sharp dividing line. Here the indeterminate boundary zone is conspicuous. The fresh water stream merges into brackish estuary, estuary into saltier inlet and inlet into briny ocean. Closely confined sea basins like the Black and Baltic, located in cool regions of slight evaporation and fed from a large catchment basin, approach in their reduced salinity the fresh water lakes and coastal lagoons in which rivers stretch out to rest on their way to the ocean. The muddy current of the Yangtze Kiang colors the Yellow Sea, and warns incoming Chinese junks of the proximity of land many hours before the low-lying shores can be discerned.[630] Columbus, sailing along the Caribbean coast of South America off the Orinoco mouth, found the ocean waters brackish and surmised the presence of a large river and therefore a large continent on his left.[631]

The transitional form between stream and pelagic inlet found in every river mouth is emphasized where strong tidal currents carry the sea far into these channels of the land. The tides move up the St. Lawrence River 430 miles (700 kilometers) or half way between Montreal and Quebec, and up the Amazon 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). Owing to their resemblance to pelagic channels, the estuaries of the American rivers with their salty tide were repeatedly mistaken, in the period of discoveries, for the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Newport in 1608 explored the broad sluggish course of the James River in his search for a western ocean. Henry Hudson ascended the Hudson River almost as far as Albany, before he discovered that this was no maritime pathway, like the Bosporus or Dardanelles, leading to an ulterior sea. The long tidal course of the St. Lawrence westward into the heart of the continent fed La Salle's dream of finding here a water route to the Pacific, and fixed his village of "La Chine" above the rapids at Montreal as a signpost pointing the way to the Indies and Cathay. In the same way a tidal river at the head of Cook's Inlet on the Alaskan coast was mistaken for a Northeast Passage, not by Captain Cook but by his fellow officers, on his Pacific voyage of 1776-1780; and it was followed for several days before its character as a river was established.[632]

[Sidenote: Sea navigation merges into river navigation.]

Rivers have always been the great intermediaries between land and sea, for in the ocean all find their common destination. Until the construction of giant steamers in recent years, sea navigation has always passed without break into river navigation. Sailing vessels are carried by the trade wind 600 miles up the Orinoco to San Fernando. Alexander's discovery of the Indus River led by almost inevitable sequence to the rediscovery of the Eastern sea route, which in turn ran from India through the Strait of Oman and the Persian Gulf up the navigable course of the Euphrates to the elbow of the river at Thapsacus. Enterprising sea folk have always used rivers as natural continuations of the marine highway into the land. The Humber estuary and its radiating group of streams led the invading Angles in the sixth century into the heart of Britain.[633] The long navigable courses of the rivers of France exposed that whole country to the depredations of the piratical Northmen in the ninth and tenth centuries. Up every river they came, up the Scheldt into Flanders, the Seine to Paris and the Marne to Meaux; up the Loire to Orleans, the Garonne to Toulouse and the Rhone to Valence.[634] So the Atlantic rivers of North America formed the lines of European exploration and settlement. The St. Lawrence brought the French from the ocean into the Great Lakes basin, whose low, swampy watershed they readily crossed in their light canoes to the tributaries of the Mississippi; and scarcely had they reached the "Father of Waters" before they were planting the flag of France on the Gulf of Mexico at its mouth. The Tupi Indians of South America, a genuine water-race, moved from their original home on the Paraguay headstream of the La Plata down to its mouth, then expanded northward along the coast of Brazil in their small canoes to the estuary of the Amazon, thence up its southern tributary, the Tapajos, and in smaller numbers up the main stream to the foot of the Andes, where detached groups of the race are still found.[635] So the migrations of the Carib river tribes led them from their native seats in eastern Brazil down the Xingu to the Amazon, thence out to sea and along the northern coast of South America, thence inland once more, up the Orinoco to the foot of the Andes, into the lagoon of Maracaibo and up the Magdalena. Meanwhile their settlements at the mouth of the Orinoco threw off spores of pirate colonies to the adjacent islands and finally, in the time of Columbus, to Porto Rico and Haiti.[636] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Historical importance of seas and oceans influenced by their debouching streams.]

So intimate is this connection between marine and inland waterways, that the historical and economic importance of seas and oceans is noticeably influenced by the size of their drainage basins and the navigability of their debouching rivers. This is especially true of enclosed seas. The only historical importance attached to the Caspian's inland basin is that inherent in the Volga's mighty stream. The Mediterranean has always suffered from its paucity of long river highways to open for it a wide hinterland. This lack checked the spread of its cultural influences and finally helped to arrest its historical development. If we compare the record of the Adriatic and the Black seas, the first a sharply walled cul de sac, the second a center of long radiating streams, sending out the Danube to tap the back country of the Adriatic and the Dnieper to draw on that of the Baltic, we find that the smaller sea has had a limited range of influence, a concentrated brilliant history, precocious and short-lived as is that of all limited areas; that the Euxine has exercised more far-reaching influences, despite a slow and still unfinished development. The Black Sea rivers in ancient times opened their countries to such elements of Hellenic culture as might penetrate from the Greek trading colonies at their mouths, especially the Greek forms of Christianity. It was the Danube that in the fourth century carried Arianism, born of the philosophic niceties of Greek thought, to the barbarians of southern Germany, and made Unitarians of the Burgundians and Visigoths of southern Gaul.[637] The Dnieper carried the religion of the Greek Church to the Russian princes at Kief, Smolensk, and Moscow. Owing to the southward course of its great rivers, Russia has found the crux of her politics in the Black Sea, ever since the tenth century when the barbarians from Kiev first appeared before Constantinople. This sea has had for her a higher economic importance than the Baltic, despite the latter's location near the cultural center of western Europe.

[Sidenote: Baltic and White Sea rivers.]

In other seas, too, rivers play the same part of extending their tributary areas and therefore enhancing their historical significance. The disadvantages of the Baltic's smaller size and far-northern location, as compared with the Mediterranean, were largely compensated for by the series of big streams draining into it from the south, and bringing out from a vast hinterland the bulky necessaries of life. Hence the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages, which had its origin among the southern coast towns of the Baltic from Lubeck to Riga, throve on the combined trade of sea and river.[638] The mouths of the Scheldt, Rhine, Weser, Elbe and Thames long concentrated in themselves the economic, cultural and historical development of the North Sea basin. So the White Sea, despite its sub-polar location, is valuable to Russia for two reasons; it affords a politically open port, and it receives the Northern Dwina, which is navigable for river steamers from Archangel south to Vologda, a distance of six hundred miles, and carries the export trade of a large territory.[639] Similarly in recent years, Bering Sea has gained unwonted commercial activity because the Yukon River serves as a waterway 1,370 miles long to the Klondike gold fields.

[Sidenote: Atlantic and Pacific rivers.]

If we compare the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in respect to their rivers, we find that the narrow Atlantic has a drainage basin of over 19,000,000 square miles as opposed to the 8,660,000 square miles of drainage area commanded by the vastly larger Pacific. The Pacific is for the most part rimmed by mountains, discharging into the ocean only mad torrents or rapid-broken streams. The Atlantic, bordered by gently sloping plains of wide extent, receives rivers that for the most part pursue a long and leisurely course to the sea. Therefore, the commercial and cultural influences of the Atlantic extend from the Rockies and Andes almost to the heart of Russia, and by the Nile highway they even invade the seclusion of Africa. Through the long reach of its rivers, therefore, the Atlantic commands a land area twice as great as that of the Pacific; and by reason of this fundamental geographic advantage, it will retain the historical preeminence that it so early secured. The development of the World Ocean will mean the exploitation of the Pacific trade from the basis of the Atlantic, the domination of the larger ocean by the historic peoples of the smaller, because these peoples have wider and more accessible lands as the base of their maritime operations.

[Sidenote: Lack of coast articulations supplied by rivers.]

The geographic influence of abundant rivers navigable from the sea is closely akin to that of highly articulated coasts. The effect of the Hardanger or Sogne Fiord, admitting ocean steamers a hundred miles into the interior of Norway, is similar to that of the Elbe and Weser estuaries, which admit the largest vessels sixty miles upstream to Hamburg and Bremen. Since river inlets can, to a certain extent, supply the place of marine inlets, from the standpoint of anthropo-geographic theory and of human practice, a land dissected by navigable rivers can be grouped with one dissected by arms of the sea. South America and Africa are alike in the unbroken contour of their coasts, but strongly contrasted in the character of their rivers. Hence the two continents present the extremes of accessibility and inaccessibility. South America, most richly endowed of all the continents with navigable streams, receiving ocean vessels three thousand miles up the Amazon as far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty years after its discovery. Africa, historically the oldest of continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom. China, amply supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized by a paucity of larger inlets, finds compensation in the long navigable course of the Yangtze Kiang. This river extends the landward reach of the Yellow Sea 630 miles inland to Hanchow, where ocean-going vessels take on cargoes of tea and silk for Europe and America,[640] and pay for them in Mexican dollars, the coin of the coast. Hence it is lined with free ports all the way from Shanghai at its mouth to Ichang, a thousand miles up its course.[641]

[Sidenote: River highways as basis of commercial preeminence.]

Navigable rivers opening passages directly from the sea are obviously nature-made gates and paths into wholly new countries; but the accessibility with which they endow a land becomes later a permanent factor in its cultural and economic development, a factor that remains constantly though less conspicuously operative when railroads have done their utmost to supplant water transportation. The importance of inland waterways for local and foreign trade and intercourse has everywhere been recognized. The peoples who have long maintained preeminence among the commercial and maritime nations of the world have owed this in no small part to the command of these natural highways, which have served to give the broad land basis necessary for permanent commercial ascendency. This has been the history of England, Holland, France and the recent record of Germany. The medieval League of the Rhine Cities flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine highway across western Europe. The Hanseatic League, from Bruges all the way east to Russian Novgorod, owed their brilliant commercial career, not only to the favorable maritime field in the enclosed sea basins in front of them, but also to the series of long navigable rivers behind them from the Scheldt to the Neva and Volchov. Wherefore we find the League, originally confined to coast towns, drawing into the federation numerous cities located far up these rivers, such as Ghent, Cologne, Magdeburg, Breslau, Cracow, Pskof and Novgorod.[642]

[Sidenote: Importance of rivers in large countries.]

In countries of large area, where commerce and intercourse must cover great distances, these natural and therefore cheap highways assume paramount importance, especially in the forest and agricultural stages of development, when the products of the land are bulky in proportion to their value. Small countries with deeply indented coasts, like Greece, Norway, Scotland, New England, Chile, and Japan, can forego the advantage of big river systems; but in Russia, Siberia, China, India, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentine, the history of the country, economic and political, is indissolubly connected with that of its great rivers. The storm center of the French and English wars in America was located on the upper Hudson, because this stream enabled the English colonies to tap the fur trade of the Great Lakes, and because it commanded the Mohawk Valley, the easiest and most obvious path for expansion into the interior of the continent. The Spanish, otherwise confining their activities in South America to the Caribbean district and the civilized regions of the Andean highlands, established settlements at the mouth of the La Plata River, because this stream afforded an approach from the Atlantic side toward the Potosi mines on the Bolivian Plateau. The Yangtze Kiang, that great waterway leading from the sea across the breadth of China and the one valuable river adjunct of maritime trade in the whole Orient, was early appropriated by the discerning English as the British "sphere of influence."

[Sidenote: Rivers as highways of expansion.]

No other equally large area of the earth is so generously equipped by nature for the production and distribution of the articles of commerce as southern Canada and that part of the United States lying east of the Rocky Mountains. The simple build of the North American continent, consisting of a broad central trough between distant mountain ranges, and characterized by gentle slopes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, has generated great and small rivers with easy-going currents, that everywhere opened up the land to explorer, trader and settler. The rate of expansion from the "Europe-fronting shore" of the continent was everywhere in direct proportion to the length of the rivers first appropriated by the colonists. North of Chesapeake Bay the lure to landward advance was the fur trade. The Atlantic rivers of the coast pre-empted by the English were cut short by the Appalachian wall. They opened up only restricted fur fields which were soon exhausted, so that the migrant trapper was here early converted into the agricultural settler, his shifting camp fire into the hearthstone of the farmhouse. Expansion was slow but solid. The relatively small area rendered accessible by their streams became compactly filled by the swelling tide of immigrants and the rapid natural increase of population. In sharp contrast to this development, the long waterway of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes leading to the still vaster river system of the Mississippi betrayed the fur-trading French into excessive expansion, and enabled them to appropriate but not to hold a vast extent of territory. A hundred years after the arrival of Champlain at Montreal, they were planting their fur stations on Lake Superior and the Mississippi, 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) back from the coast, at a time when the English settlements had advanced little beyond tide-water. And when after 1770 the westward movement swept the backwoodsmen of the English colonies over the Appalachian barrier to the Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee, these long westward flowing streams carried them rapidly on to the Mississippi, communicated the mobility and restlessness of their own currents to the eager pioneer, and their capacity to master great distances; so that in forty short years, by 1810, settlements were creeping up the western tributaries of the Mississippi. The abundant water communication in the Mississippi Valley, which even for present large river craft contains 15,410 miles of navigable streams and which had therefore a far greater mileage in the day of canoe and flatboat, afforded outlet for bulky, backwoods produce to the sea at New Orleans. When the English acquired Canada in 1763, they straightway fell under the sway of its harsh climate and long river systems, taking up the life of the fur trader; they followed the now scarcer pelts from the streams of Superior westward by Lake Winnipeg and along the path of the Saskatchewan River straight to the foot of the Rockies.

[Sidenote: Siberian rivers and Russian expansion.]

Rivers have played the same part in expediting Russian expansion across the wide extent of Siberia. Here again a severe climate necessitated reliance on furs, the chief natural product of the country, as the basis of trade. These, as the outcome of savage economy, were gathered in from wide areas which only rivers could open up. Therefore, where the Siberian streams flatten out their upper courses east and west against the northern face of the Asiatic plateau, with low watersheds between, the Russian explorer and sable hunter struck their eastward water trail toward the Pacific. The advance, which under Yermak crossed the Ural Mountains in 1579, reached the Yenisei River in 1610 and planted there the town of Turuchansk as a sort of milestone, almost on the Arctic Circle opposite the mouth of the Lower Tunguska, a long eastern tributary. Up this they passed to the Lena in 1627, thence to Bering Sea by the Kolima and Anadyr rivers, because these arctic fields yielded sable, beaver and fox skins in greatest quantity.[643] The Lena especially, from its source down to its eastern elbow at Yakutsk, that great rendezvous of Siberian fur traders, was a highway for trapper and Cossack tribute-gatherer.[644] From the sources of the Yenisei in Lake Baikal to the navigable course of the Amur was a short step, taken in 1658, though the control of the river, which was claimed by China, was not secured till two hundred years later.[645] [See map page 103.]

As the only highways in new countries, rivers constitute lines of least resistance for colonial peoples encroaching upon the territory of inferior races. They are therefore the geographic basis of those streamers of settlement which we found making a fringe of civilization across the boundary zone of savagery or barbarism on the typical colonial frontier. Ethnic islands of the expanding people cluster along them like iron filings on a magnetized wire. Therefore in all countries where navigable rivers have fixed the lines of expansion, as in the United States, the northern part of the Russian Empire, and the eastern or colonial border of Germany and Austria, there is a strong anthropo-geographic resemblance in the frontiers of successive decades or centuries. But in arid or semi-arid regions like South Africa, the western plains of North America, the steppes of Russian and Chinese Turkestan, the river highway motif in expansion is lost in a variety of other geographic and geologic factors, though the water of the streams still attracts trail and settlement.

[Sidenote: Determinants of routes in arid or semi-arid lands.]

A river like the Nile, lower Volga, Irtysh or Indus, rising in highlands of abundant rainfall but traversing an arid or desert land, acquires added importance because it furnishes the sole means of water travel and of irrigation. The Nile has for ages constituted the main line of intercourse between the Mediterranean and Equatorial Africa. The Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and the Niger where it makes its great northern bend into the Sahara near Timbuctoo,[646] attest the value to local fertility and commerce inherent in these rivers of the deserts and steppes. Such rivers are always oasis-makers, whether on their way to the sea they periodically cover a narrow flood-plain like that of the Nile, or one ninety miles wide, like that of the Niger's inland delta above Timbuctoo;[647] or whether they emerge into a silent sea of sand, like the Murghab of Russian Turkestan, which spreads itself out to water the gardens of Merv.

Even where such rivers have a volume too scanty to float a raft, they yet point the highway, because they alone supply water for man and beast across the desert tract. The Oxus and Sir Daria have from time immemorial determined the great trade routes through Turkestan to Central Asia. The Platte, Arkansas, Cimarron and Canadian rivers fixed the course of our early western trails across the arid plains to the foot of the Rockies; and beyond this barrier the California Trail followed the long-drawn oasis formed by the Humboldt River across the Nevada Desert, the Gila River guided the first American fur-trapping explorers across the burning deserts of Arizona to the Pacific, and the succession of water-holes in the dry bed of the Mohave River gave direction to the Spanish Trail across the Mohave Desert towards Los Angeles. In the same way, Livingstone's route from the Orange River in South Africa to Lake Ngami, under the direction of native guides, ran along the margin of the Kalahari Desert up the dry bed of the Mokoko River, which still retained an irregular succession of permanent wells.[648]

[Sidenote: Wadi routes in arid lands.]

In the trade-wind regions of the world, which are characterized by seasons of intense drought, we find rivers carrying a scant and variable amount of water but an abundance of gravel and sand; they are known in different localities as wadis, fiumares and arroyos. Their beds, dry for long periods of the year, become natural roads, paved with the gravel which the stream regularly deposits in the wet season. Local travel in Sicily, Italy[649] and other Mediterranean countries uses such natural roads extensively. Trade routes across the plateau of Judea and Samaria follow the wadis, because these give the best gradient and the best footing for the ascent.[650] Wadis also determine the line of caravan routes across the highlands of the Sahara. In the desert of Southwest Africa, the Khiuseb Is the first river north of the Orange to reach the Atlantic through the barrier dunes of the coast. Hence it has drawn to its valley the trade routes from a wide circle of inland points from Ottawe to Windhoek and Rehobeth, and given added importance to the British coast of Walfish Bay, into which it debouches.[651] But just to the north, the broad dry bed of the Swakop offered a natural wagon route into the interior, and has been utilized for the railroad of German Southwest Africa.

[Sidenote: Increasing historical importance from source to mouth.]

The historical importance of a river increases from its source toward its mouth. Its head springs, gushing from the ground, and the ramifying brooks of its highland course yield a widely distributed water supply and thereby exercise a strong influence in locating the dwellings of men; but they play no part in the great movements and larger activities of peoples. Only when minor affluents unite to form the main stream, enlarge it in its lower course by an increasing tribute of water, and extend constantly its tributary area, does a river assume real historical importance. It reaches its fullest significance at its mouth, where it joins the world's highway of the ocean. Here are combined the best geographical advantages—participation in the cosmopolitan civilization characteristic of coastal regions, opportunity for inland and maritime commerce, and a fertile alluvial soil yielding support for dense populations. The predominant importance of the debouchment stretch of a river is indicated by the presence of such cities as London, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux, Odessa, Alexandria, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hongkong, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai, Montreal and Quebec, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Buenos Ayres and Montevideo. This debouchment stretch gains in practical value and hence in permanent historical importance if it is swept by a scouring tide, which enables the junction of inland and maritime routes to penetrate into the land. Even Strabo recognized this value of tidal reaches.[652] Hence in tideless basins like the Baltic and Caribbean, the great river ports have to advance coastward to meet the sea; and the lower course of even mighty streams like the Volga and Nile achieve a restricted importance.[653]

The control of a river mouth becomes a desideratum or necessity to the upstream people. Otherwise they may be bottled up. Though history shows us countless instances of upstream expansion, nevertheless owing to the ease of downstream navigation and this increasing historical importance from source to mouth, the direction of a river's flow has often determined the course of commerce and of political expansion.

[Sidenote: Location at hydrographic centers.]

The possibility of radial expansion, which we have found to be the chief advantage of a central location, is greatly enhanced if that central location coincides with a hydrographic center of low relief. The tenth century nucleus of the Russian Empire was found about the low nodal watershed formed by the Valdai Hills, whence radiated the rivers later embodied in the Muscovite domain. Here In Novgorod at the head of the Volchov-Ladoga-Neva system, Pskof on the Velikaya, Tver at the head of the navigable Volga, Moscow on the Oka, Smolensk on the Dnieper, and Vitebsk on the Duna, were gathered the Russians destined to displace the primitive Finnish population and appropriate the wide plains of eastern Europe. Everywhere their conquests, colonization, and commercial relations have followed the downstream course of their rivers. The Dnieper carried the Rus of Smolensk and Kief to the Euxine, into contact with the Byzantine world, and brought thence religion, art, and architecture for the untutored empire of the north. The influence of the Volga has been irresistible. Down its current Novgorod traders in the twelfth century sought the commerce of the Caspian and the Orient; and later the Muscovite princes pushed their conquest of the Tartar hordes from Asia. The Northern Dwina, Onega, Mesen and Petchora have carried long narrow bands of Slav settlement northward to the Arctic Ocean. [See map page 225.] Medieval Russian trade from Hanseatic Pskof and Novgorod, and later Russian dominion followed the Narva and Neva to the Baltic. "The Dnieper made Russia Byzantine, the Volga made It Asiatic. It was for the Neva to make it European."[654]

In the same way, when the early French explorers and traders of Canada reached the hydrographic center of the continent about Lakes Superior and Michigan, they quickly crossed the low rim of these basins southward to the Mississippi, and northward to the Rainy Lake and Winnipeg system draining to Hudson Bay.[655] While it took them from 1608 to 1659 and 1662 to penetrate upstream from Quebec to this central watershed, only nine years elapsed from the time (1673) Marquette reached the westward flowing Wisconsin River to 1682, when La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi.

[Sidenote: Effect of current upon trade and expansion.]

The effect of mere current upon the course of trade and political expansion was conspicuous in the early history of the Mississippi Valley, before steam navigation began to modify the geographic influence of a river's flow. The wide forest-grown barrier of the Appalachian Mountains placed the western pioneers under the geographic control of the western waters. The bulkiness of their field and forest products, fitted only for water transportation, and the immense mass of downstream commerce called loudly for a maritime outlet and the acquisition from Spain of some port at the Mississippi mouth. For twenty years the politics of this transmontane country centered about the "Island of New Orleans," and in 1803 saw its dream realized by the Louisiana Purchase.

For the western trader, the Mississippi and Ohio were preeminently downstream paths. Gravity did the work. Only small boats, laden with fine commodities of small bulk and large value, occasionally made the forty day upstream voyage from New Orleans to Louisville. Flat boats and barges that were constructed at Pittsburg for the river traffic were regularly broken up for lumber at downstream points like Louisville and New Orleans; for the traders returned overland by the old Chickasaw Trail to the Cumberland and Ohio River settlements, carrying their profits in the form of gold. The same thing happens today, as it also happened two thousand years ago, on the Tigris and Euphrates. The highlander of Armenia or northern Mesopotamia floats down the current in his skin boat or on his brushwood raft, to sell his goods and the wood forming the frame-work of his primitive craft in timberless Bagdad and Busra, as formerly in treeless Babylon. He dries out his skins, loads them on his shoulders or on a mule brought down for the purpose, and returns on foot to his highland village.[656] The same preponderance of downstream traffic appears to-day in eastern Siberia. Pedlers on the Amur start in the spring from Stretensk, 2025 miles up the river, with their wares in barges, and drift down with the current, selling at the villages en route, to the river's mouth at Nikolaievsk. Here they dispose of their remaining stock and also of their barges, the lumber of which is utilized for sidewalks, and they themselves return upstream by steamer. The grain barges of western Siberia, like the coal barges of the Mississippi, even within recent decades, are similarly disposed of at the journey's end.[657] The tonnage of downstream traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi to-day greatly exceeds that upstream. The fleet of 56 coal boats, carrying about 70,000 tons, which the great towboat Sprague takes in a single trip from Louisville down to New Orleans, all return empty. Of the 15,226,805 net tons of freight shipped in 1906 on the Ohio system, 13,980,368 tons of coal, stone, sand and lumber were carried in unrigged craft, fitted chiefly for downstream traffic.[658]

[Sidenote: Importance of mouth to upstream people.]

Owing to the strong pull exerted by a river's mouth upon all its basin, current, commerce and people alike tend to reach the ocean. For a nation holding the terrestrial course of a stream, the political fate of its tidal course or mouth must always be a matter of great concern. To the early westerner of the United States, before the acquisition of the Louisiana country, it was of vital importance whether belligerent France or more amenable Spain or the Republic itself should own the mouth of the Mississippi. Germany, which holds 240 miles (400 kilometers) of the navigable Danube,[659] can never be indifferent to the political ownership of its mouth, or to the fact that a great power like Russia has edged forward, by the acquisition of Bessarabia in 1878, to the northern or Kilia debouchment channel.[660] Such interest shows itself in sustained efforts either to gain political control of the mouth, or to secure the neutrality of the stream by having it declared an international waterway, and thus partially to deprive the state holding its mouth of the advantages of its transit location.

The only satisfactory solution is undivided political ownership. After France pushed eastward to the Rhine in 1648, she warred for three centuries to acquire its mouth. Napoleon laid claim to Belgium and Holland on the ground that their soil had been built up by the alluvium of French rivers. Germany's conquest of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 was significant chiefly because it dislodged Denmark from the right bank of the lower Elbe, and secured undivided control of this important estuary. The Rhine, which traverses the Empire from north to south and constitutes its greatest single trade route, gives to Germany a more vital interest in Holland than ever France had. Her most important iron and coal mines and manufacturing industries are located on this waterway or its tributaries, the Ruhr, Mosel, Saar and Main. Hence the Rhine is the great artery of German trade and outlet for her enormous exports, which chiefly reach the sea through the ports of Belgium and Holland. These two countries therefore fatten on German commerce and reduce German profits. Hence the Empire, by the construction of the Emden-Dortmund canal, aims to divert its trade from Rotterdam and Antwerp to a German port, and possibly thereby put the screw on Holland to draw her into some kind of a commercial union with Germany.[661] Heinrich von Treitschke, in his "Politik," deplores the fact that the most valuable part of the great German river has fallen into alien hands, and he declares it to be an imperative task of German policy to recover the mouth of that stream, "either by a commercial or political union." "We need the entrance of Holland into our customs union as we need our daily bread."[662]

[Sidenote: Prevention of monopoly of river mouth.]

When the middle and upper course of a river system are shared by several nations, their common interest demands that the control of the mouth be divided, as in the case of the La Plata between Argentine and Uruguay; or held by a small state, like Holland, too weak to force the monopoly of the tidal course. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 extended the territory of Moldavia at the cost of Russia, to keep the Russian frontier away from the Danube.[663] Her very presence was ominous. The temptation to giant powers to gobble up these exquisite morsels of territory is irresistible. Hence the advisability of neutralizing small states holding such locations, as in the case of Roumania; and making their rivers international waterways, as in the case of the Orinoco,[664] Scheldt, Waal, Rhine and Danube.[665] The Yangtze Kiang mouth, where already the treaty ports cluster thick, will probably be the first part of China to be declared neutral ground, and as such to be placed under the protection of the combined commercial powers,[666] as is even now foreshadowed by the International Conservancy Board of 1910.[667] The United States, by her treaty with Mexico in 1848, secured the right of free navigation on the lower or Mexican course of the Colorado River and the Gulf of California. The Franco-British convention, which in 1898 confirmed the western Sudan to France, also conceded the principle of making the Niger, the sole outlet of this vast and isolated territory, an international waterway, and created two French enclaves in British Nigeria to serve as river ports.[668]

[Sidenote: Motive for canals in lower course.]

The mouth of a large river system is the converging point of many lines of inland and maritime navigation. The interests of commerce, especially in its earlier periods of development, demand that the contact here of river and sea be extensive as possible. Nature suggests the way to fulfill this requirement. The sluggish lowland current of a river, on approaching sea level, throws out distributaries that reach the coast at various points and form a network of channels, which can be deepened and rendered permanent by canalization. In such regions the opportunity for the improvement and extension of waterways has been utilized from the earliest times. The ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, East Indians, and the Gauls of the lower Po for thousands of years canaled the waters of their deltas and coastal lowlands for the combined purpose of irrigation, drainage, and navigation. The great canal system of China, constructed in the seventh century primarily to facilitate Inland intercourse between the northern and central sections of the Empire, extends from the sea at Hangchow 700 miles northward through the coastal alluvium of the Yangtze Kiang, Hoang-ho and Pie-ho to Tientsin, the port of Peking. Only the canal system of the center, important both for the irrigation of the fertile but porous loess and for the transportation of crops, is still in repair. Here the meshes of the canal network are little more than half a mile wide; farmers dig canals to their barns and bring in their produce in barges instead of hay wagons.[669] Holland, where the ancient Romans constructed channels in the Rhine delta and where the debouchment courses of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt present a labyrinth of waterways, has to-day 1903 miles (3069 kilometers) of canals, which together with the navigable rivers, have been important geographic factors in the historical preeminence of Dutch foreign commerce. So on the lower Mississippi, in the greatest alluvial area of the United States, the government has expended large sums for the improvement of the passes and bayous of the river. The Barataria, Atchafalaya, Terrebonne, Black, Teche and Lafourche bayous have been rendered navigable, and New Orleans has been given canal outlets to the sea through Lakes Salvador, Pontchartrain and Borgne.

[Sidenote: Watershed canals.]

As the dividing channels of the lower course point to the feasibility of amplifying the connection with the ocean highway, so the spreading branches of a river's source, which approach other head waters on a low divide, suggest the extension of inland navigation by the union of two such drainage systems through canals. Where the rivers of a country radiate from a relatively low central watershed, as from the Central Plateau of France and the Valdai Hills of Russia, nature offers conditions for extensive linking of inland waterways. Hence we find a continuous passway through Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic by the canal uniting the Volga and Neva rivers; another from the Black Sea up the Dnieper, which by canals finds three different outlets to the Baltic through the Vistula, Niemen and Duna.[670] The Northern Dwina, linked, by canals, with the Neva through Lakes Onega and Ladoga, unites the White Sea with the Baltic.[671] Sully, the great minister of Henry IV. of France, saw that the relief of the country would permit the linking of the Loire, Seine, Meuse, Saone and Rhine, and the Mediterranean with the Garonne. All his plans were carried out by his successors, but he himself, at the end of the sixteenth century, began the construction of the Briare Canal between the Loire near Orleans and the Seine at Fontainebleau.[672] Similarly in the eastern half of the United States, the long, low watershed separating the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes from that of the Mississippi and the Hudson made feasible the succession of canals completing the "Great Belt" of inland navigation from St. Lawrence and New York bays to the Gulf. Albert Gallatin's famous report of 1808[673] pointed out the adaptation of the three low divides to canal communication; but long before this, every line of possible canoe travel by river and portage over swamp or lake-dotted watershed had been used by savages, white explorers and French voyageurs, from Lake Champlain to Lake Winnebago, so that the canal engineer had only to select from the numerous portage paths already beaten out by the moccasined feet of Indian or fur-trader.

[Sidenote: Rivers and railroads.]

The cheapness and ease of river travel have tended to check or delay the construction of highroads and railways, where facilities for inland navigation have been abundant, and later to regulate railway freight charges. Conversely, riverless lands have everywhere experienced an exaggerated and precocious railroad development, and have suffered from its monopoly of transportation. Even canals have in most lands had a far earlier date than paved highroads. This has been true of Spain, France, Holland, and England.[674] In the Hoang-ho Valley of northern China where waterways are restricted, owing to the rapid current and shallowness of this river, highroads are comparatively common; but they are very rare in central and southern China where navigable rivers and canals abound.[675] New England, owing to its lack of inland navigation, was the first part of the United States to develop a complete system of turnpikes and later of railroads. On the other hand, the great river valleys of America have generally slighted the highroad phase of communication, and slowly passed to that of railroads. The abundance of natural waterways in Russia—51,800 miles including canals—has contributed to the retardation of railroad construction.[676] The same thing is true in the Netherlands, where 4875 miles (7863 kilometers) of navigable waterways[677] in an area of only 12,870 square miles (33,000 square kilometers) have kept the railroads down to a paltry 1818 miles (2931 kilometers); but smaller Belgium, commanding only 1375 miles (3314 kilometers) of waterway and stimulated further by a remarkable industrial and commercial development, has constructed 4228 miles (6819 kilometers) of railroad.

[Sidenote: Relation of rivers to railroads in recent colonial lands.]

If we compare the countries of Central and South America, where railroads are still mere adjuncts of river and coastwise routes, a stage of development prevalent in the United States till 1858, we find an unmistakable relation between navigable waterways and railroad mileage. The countries with ample or considerable river communication, like Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Paraguay, are all relatively slow in laying railroads as compared with Mexico and Argentine, even when allowance is made for differences of zonal location, economic development, and degree of European elements in their respective populations. Mexico and Argentine, having each an area only about one-fourth that of Brazil but a railroad mileage nearly one-fourth greater, have been pushed to this development primarily by a common lack of inland navigation. Similarly South Africa, stricken with poverty of water communication south of the Zambesi, has constructed 7500 miles of railroads[678] in spite of the youth of the country and the sparsity of its white population. Similar geographic conditions have forced the mileage of Australian railways up to twice that of South Africa, in a country which is still in the pastoral and agricultural stage of development, and whose most densely populated province Victoria has only fourteen inhabitants to the square mile. In the almost unpeopled wastes of Trans-Caspia, where two decades ago the camel was the only carrier, the Russian railroad has worked a commercial revolution by stimulating production and affording an outlet for the irrigated districts of the encircling mountains.[679] In our own Trans-Missouri country, where the scanty volume of the streams eliminated all but the Missouri itself as a dependable waterway, even for the canoe travel of the early western trappers, railroads have developed unchecked by the competition of river transportation.[680] With no rival nearer than the Straits of Magellan and the Isthmus of Panama for transportation between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast, they have fixed their own charges on a monopoly basis, and have fought the construction of the Isthmian Canal.

[Sidenote: Unity of a river system.]

A river system is a system of communication. It therefore makes a bond of union between the people living among its remoter sources and those settled at its mouth. Every such river system forms geographically an unbroken whole. Only where a wild, torrent-filled gorge, like the Brahmaputra's path through the Himalayas, interrupts communication between the upper and lower course, is human life in the two sections divorced. But such cases are rare. Even the River Jhelam, which springs with mad bounds from the lofty Vale of Kashmir through the outer range of the Himalayas down to its junction with the Indus, carries quantities of small logs to be used as railway sleepers; and though it shatters a large per cent. of them, it makes a link between the lumber men of the Kashmir forests and British railroad engineers in the treeless plains of the Indus.[681]

[Sidenote: The effect of common water supply in arid lands.]

In arid lands, where the scant and variable streams are useless for navigation, but invaluable for irrigation, a rival interest in the limited water supply leads almost inevitably to conflict, and often to the political union of the peoples holding the upper and lower courses, in order to secure adjustment of their respective claims. The ancient Salassi of the upper Doria Baltea Valley in the Alps drew off all the water of the stream for washing gold, and thus deprived the agricultural people lower down the valley of the water necessary for irrigation. The result was frequent wars between the two tribes.[682] The offensive is taken by the downstream people, whose fields and gardens suffer from every extension of tillage or increase of population in the settlements above them. Occasionally a formal agreement is a temporary expedient. The River Firenze and other streams watering southern Trans-Caspia have their sources in the mountains of northern Persia; hence the Russians, in the boundary convention with Persia of 1881, stipulated that no new settlement be established along these streams within Persian territory, no extension of land under cultivation beyond the present amount, and no eduction of the water beyond that necessary to irrigate the existing fields.[683] Russia's designs upon Afghanistan aim not only at access to India, but also at the control of the upper Murghab River, on whose water depends the prosperity of the Pendjeh and Merv oases.[684] In such regions the only logical course is the extension of the political frontier to the watershed, a principle which Russia is applying in western Asia, and which California applied in drawing her eastern boundary to include even Goose Lake.

[Sidenote: Union of opposite river banks.]

Rivers unite. Ancient Rome grew up on both banks of the Tiber, and extended her commercial and political supremacy up and down stream. Both sides of the Rhine were originally occupied by the Gallic tribes, whose villages were in some instances bisected by the river. Caesar found the Menapii, a Belgian people on the lower Rhine, with their fields, farmhouses and villages on both banks.[685] Then the westward advance of the Teutonic tribes gradually transformed the Rhine into a German river, from the island of Batavia at its mouth up to the great elbow at the foot of the Jura Mountains.[686] To the American Indians even the widest rivers were no barriers. Christopher Gist, exploring the Ohio in 1751, found a Shawnee village situated on both sides of the river below the mouth of the Scioto, with about a hundred houses on the north bank and forty on the south.[687] The small and unique nation of the Mandan Indians were found by Lewis and Clark near the northern bend of the Missouri in 1804, in two groups of villages on opposite sides of the river. They had previously in 1772 occupied nine villages lower down the stream, two on the east bank and seven on the west.[688] The Connecticut River settlers of early colonial days laid out all their towns straight across the valley, utilizing the alluvial meadows on both banks for tillage, the terraces for residence sites, and the common river for intercourse.[689]

[Sidenote: Tendency toward ethnic and cultural unity in a river valley.]

Every river tends to become a common artery feeding all the life of its basin, and gradually obliterating ethnic and cultural differences among the peoples of its valley. The Nile, with its narrow hem of flood-plain on either bank and barrier sands beyond, has so linked race and history in Egypt and Nubia, that the two countries cannot be separated. A common highway from mountains to sea, a common frontier of trackless desert have developed here a blended similarity of race, language and culture from the delta to Kordofan. The Hamitic race seems to have originated in the south and migrated northward down the Nile towards the delta. Later the whole valley, north and south, received the same Semitic or Arab immigration, which spread from Cairo to the old Sudanese capital of Sennar, while a strain of negro blood has filtered in from the equatorial black belt and followed the current down to the sea.[690] The culture of the valley originated in Lower Egypt, and, with that easy transmissibility which characterizes ideas, it moved upstream into Ethiopia, which never evolved a culture of its own. Just as noticeable is the political interplay. The rule of the Pharaohs extended far up the Nile, at times to the Third Cataract at 20 deg. N.L.; and at one period Ethiopian kings extended their sway over Egypt. At another, a large body of mutinous Egyptian soldiers abandoned their country and their wives, and emigrated along the one line of slight resistance open to them into Ethiopia, to found there a new state and new families by marriage with native women, thus contributing to the amalgamation of races in the valley.

[Sidenote: Identity of country with river valley.]

The most pronounced types of the identity of a country with a river valley are found where strongly marked geographical boundaries, like deserts and mountains, emphasize the inner unity of the basins by accentuating their isolation from without. This is especially the case in high mountain regions; here canton or commune or county coincides with the river valley. Population hugs the margins of the streams where alone is soil fit for cultivation, and fairly level land suitable for dwellings. Above are the unoccupied heights, at once barrier and boundary. In the Alps, Salzburg is approximately identical with the valley of the Salzach, Uri with that of the Reuss, the Valais with the upper Rhone, the Engadine with the upper Inn, Glarus with the Linth, Graubuenden or Grisons with the upper Rhine, Valtellina with the Adda. So in the great upheaved area of the Himalayas, the state of Kashmir was originally the valley of the upper Jhelam River, while Assam, in its correct delimitation, is the valley of the Brahmaputra between the Himalayan gorge and the swamps of Bengal.[691]

In mountain regions which are also arid, the identity of a district with a stream basin becomes yet more pronounced, because here population must gather about the common water supply, must organize to secure its fair distribution, and cooperate in the construction of irrigation channels to make the distribution as economical and effective as possible. Thus in Chinese Turkestan, the districts of Yarkand, Kashgar, Aksu and Kut-sha are identical with as many mountain tributaries of the Tarim, whose basin in turn comprises almost the whole of Chinese Turkestan.

[Sidenote: Enclosed river valleys.]

In all such desert and mountain-rimmed valleys, the central stream attracts to its narrow hem of alluvial soil the majority of the population, determines the course of the main highroad, and is itself often the only route through the encompassing barriers. Hence the importance attached to the river by the inhabitants, an importance reflected in the fact that the river often gives its name to the whole district. To the most ancient Greeks Aigiptos meant the river, whose name was later transferred to the whole land; for the narrow arable strip which constituted Egypt was "the gift of the Nile." The Aryans, descending into India through the mountains on its northwest border, gave the name of Sindhu, "the flood" or "the ocean," to the first great river they met. In the mouth of Persians and Greeks the name was corrupted into Indus, and then applied to the whole country; but it still survives in its original form in the local designation of the Sind province, which comprises the valley of the Indus below the confluence of the five rivers, which again formed and named the original Punjab. Significantly enough the western political boundary of the Sind extends into the barren foothills of Baluchistan only so far as the affluents of the Indus render the land arable by irrigation; for the Indus performs for the great province of the Sind, by annual inundation and perennial irrigation, the same service that the Nile does for Egypt.

The segregation of such districts, and the concentration of their interests and activities along the central streams have tended to develop in the population an intense but contracted national consciousness, and to lend them a distinctive history. Their rivers become interwoven with their mythology and religion, are gods to be worshipped or appeased, become goals of pilgrimages, or acquire a peculiar sanctity. The Nile, Ganges, Jamna, Jordan, Tiber and Po are such sacred streams, while the Rhine figures in German mythology.

[Sidenote: Rivers as boundaries of races and peoples.]

From the uniting power of rivers it follows that they are poor boundaries. Only mountains and seas divide sharply enough to form scientific frontiers. Rivers may serve as political lines of demarcation and therefore fix political frontiers; but they can never take the place of natural boundaries. A migrating or expanding people tend always to occupy both slopes of a river valley. They run their boundary of race or language across the axis of their river basin, only under exceptional circumstances along the stream itself. The English-French boundary in the St. Lawrence Valley crosses the river in a broad transitional zone of mingled people and speech in and above the city of Montreal. The French-German linguistic frontier in Switzerland crosses the upper Rhone Valley just above Sierre, but the whole canton of Valais above the elbow of the river at Martigny shows fundamental ethnic unity, indicated by identity of head form, stature and coloring.[692] Where the Elbe flows through the low plains of North Germany, its whole broad valley is occupied by a pure Teutonic population—fair, tall, long-headed; a more brunette type occupies its middle course across the uplands of Saxony, and speaks German like the downstream folk; but its upper course, hemmed in by the Erz and Riesen Mountains, shows the short, dark and broad-headed people of the Bohemian basin, speaking the Czech language.[693] On the Danube, too, the same thing is true. The upper stream is German in language and predominantly Alpine in race stock down to the Austro-Hungarian boundary; from this point to the Drave mouth it is Hungarian; and from the Drave to the Iron Gate it is Serbo-Croatian on both banks.[694] Lines of ethnic demarcation, therefore, cut the Elbe and Danube transversely, not longitudinally. [See map page 223.]

The statements of Caesar and Pliny that the Seine and Marne formed the boundary between the Gauls and Belgians, and the Garonne that between the Gauls and Aquitanians, must be accepted merely as general and preliminary; for exceptions are noted later in the text. Parisii, for instance, were represented as holding both banks of the Seine and Marne at their confluence, and the Gallic Bituriges were found on the Aquitanian side of the Garonne estuary.

[Sidenote: Scientific river boundaries.]

Only under peculiar conditions do rivers become effective as ethnic, tribal or political boundaries. Most often it is some physiographic feature which makes the stream an obstacle to communication, and lends it the character of a scientific boundary. The division of the Alpine foreland of southern Germany first into tribal and later into political provinces by the Iller, Lech, Inn, and Salzach can be ascribed in part to the tumultuous course of these streams from the mountains to the Danube, which renders them useless for communication.[695] The lower Danube forms a well maintained linguistic boundary between the Bulgarians and Roumanians, except in the northwest corner of Bulgaria, where the hill country between the Timok River and the Danube has enticed a small group of Roumanians across to the southern side. From this point down the stream, a long stretch of low marshy bank on the northern side, offering village sites only at the few places where the loess terrace of Roumania comes close to the river, exposed to overflows, strewn with swamps and lakes, and generally unfit for settlement, has made the Danube an effective barrier.[696] Similarly, the broad, sluggish Shannon River, which spreads out to lake breadth at close intervals in its course across the boggy central plain of Ireland, has from the earliest times proved a sufficient barrier to divide the plain into two portions, Connaught and Meath,[697] contrasted in history, in speech and to some extent even in race elements.[698] A different cause gave the Thames its unique role among the larger English rivers as a boundary between counties from source to mouth. London's fortified position at the head of the Thames estuary closed this stream as a line of invasion to the early Saxons, and forced them to make detours to the north and south of the river, which therefore became a tribal boundary.[699]

Where navigation is peculiarly backward, a river may present a barrier. An instructive instance is afforded by the River Yo, which flows eastward through northern Bornu into Lake Chad, and serves at once as boundary and protection to the agricultural tribes of the Kanuri against the depredations of the Tibbu robbers living in the Sahara or the northern grassland. But during the dry season from April to August, when the trickling stream is sucked up by the thirsty land and thirstier air, the Tibbu horsemen sweep down on the unprotected Kanuri and retreat with their booty across the vanished barrier. The primitive navigation by reed or brushwood rafts, practiced in this almost streamless district, affords no means of retreat for mounted robbers; so the raiding season opens with the fall of the river.[700]

[Sidenote: Rivers as political boundaries.]

For political boundaries, which are often adopted with little reference to race distribution, rivers serve fairly well. They are convenient lines of demarcation and strategic lines of defense, as is proved by the military history of the Rhine, Danube, Ebro, Po, and countless other streams. On the lower Zambesi Livingstone found the territories of the lesser chiefs defined by the rivulets draining into the main river. The leader of the Makololo formally adopted the Zambesi as his political and military frontier, though his people spread and settled beyond the river.[701] Long established political frontiers may become ethnic boundaries, more or less distinct, because of protracted political exclusion. To the Romans, the Danube and Rhine as a northeastern frontier had the value chiefly of established lines in an imperfectly explored wilderness, and of strategic positions for the defense of an oft assailed border; but the long maintenance of this political frontier resulted in the partial segregation and hence differentiation of the people dwelling on the opposite banks.

Poor as a scientific boundary, a river is not satisfactory even as a line of demarcation, because of its tendency to shift its bed in every level stretch of its course. A political boundary that follows a river, therefore, is often doomed to frequent surveys. The plantations on the meanders of the lower Mississippi are connected now with one, now with the other of the contiguous states, as the great stream straightens its course after the almost annual overflow.[702] The Rio Grande has proved a troublesome and expensive boundary between the United States and Mexico. Almost every rise sees it cutting a new channel for itself, now through Texas, now through Mexican territory, occasioning endless controversies as to the ownership of the detached land, and demanding fresh surveys. Recent changes in the lower course of the Helmund between Nasralabad and the Sistan Swamp, which was adopted in 1872 as the boundary between Afghanistan and Persia, have necessitated a new demarcation of the frontier; and on this task a commission is at present engaged.[703] In a like manner Strabo tells us that the River Achelous, forming the boundary between ancient Acarnania and Aetolia in western Hellas, by overflowing its delta region, constantly obliterated the boundaries agreed upon by the two neighbors, and thereby gave rise to disputes that were only settled by force of arms.[704]

[Sidenote: Fluvial settlements and peoples.]

Rivers tend always to be centers of population, not outskirts or perimeters. They offer advantages that have always attracted settlement—fertile alluvial soil, a nearby water supply, command of a natural highway for intercourse with neighbors and access to markets. Among civilized peoples fluvial settlements have been the nuclei of broad states, passing rapidly through an embryonic development to a maturity in which the old center can still be distinguished by a greater density of population. Only among savages or among civilized people who have temporarily reverted to primitive conditions in virgin colonial lands, do we find genuine riverine folk, whose existence is closely restricted to their bordering streams. The river tribes of the Congo occupy the banks or the larger islands, while the land only three or four miles back from the stream is held by different tribes with whom the riverine people trade their fish. The latter are expert fishermen and navigators, and good agriculturists, raising a variety of fruits and vegetables. On the river banks at regular intervals are market greens, neutral ground, whither people come from up and down stream and from the interior to trade. Their long riparian villages consist of a single street, thirty feet wide and often two miles long, on which face perhaps three hundred long houses,[705] Fisher and canoe people line the Welle, the great northern tributary of the Congo.[706] The same type appeared in South America in the aboriginal Caribs and Tupis dwelling along the southern tributaries of the Amazon and the affluents of the Paraguay. These were distinctly a water race, having achieved a meager development only in navigation, fishing and the cultivation of their alluvial soil.[707] The ancient mound-builders of America located their villages chiefly, though not exclusively, along the principal watercourses, like the Mississippi, Illinois, Miami, Wabash, Wisconsin, and Fox,[708] on the very streams later dotted by the trading posts of the French voyageurs.

[Sidenote: Riparian villages of French Canada.]

The presence of the great waterways of Canada and the demand of the fur trade for extensive and easy communication made the early French colonists as distinctly a riverine people as the savage Congo tribes. Like these, they stretched out their villages in a single line of cabins and clearings, three or four miles long, facing the river, which was the King's highway. Such a village was called a cote. One cote ran into the next, for their expansion was always longitudinal, never lateral. These riparian settlements lined the main watercourses of French Canada, especially the St. Lawrence, whose shores from Beaupre, fifteen miles below Quebec, up to Montreal at an early date presented the appearance of a single street. Along the river passed the stately trading ship from France with its cargo of wives and merchandise for the colonists, the pirogue of the habitant farmer carrying his onions and grain to the Quebec market, the birchbark canoe of the adventurous voyageur bringing down his winter's hunt of furs from the snow-bound forests of the interior, and the fleet of Jesuit priests bound to some remote inland mission.



On this water thoroughfare every dwelling faced. Hence land on the river was at a premium, while that two miles back was to be had for the taking. The original grants measured generally 766 feet in width and 7,660 in depth inland; but when bequeathed from generation to generation, they were divided up along lines running back at right angles to the all important waterway. Hence each habitant farm measured its precious river-front by the foot and its depth by the mile, while the cabins were ranged side by side in cosy neighborliness. The cote type of village, though eminently convenient for the Indian trade, was ill adapted for government and defense against the savages; but the need for the communication supplied by the river was so fundamental, that it nullified all efforts of the authorities to concentrate the colonists in more compact settlements. Parkman says: "One could have seen almost every house in Canada by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence and Richelieu."[709] The same type of land-holding can be traced to-day on the Chaudiere River, where the fences run back from the stream like the teeth of a comb. It is reproduced on a larger scale in the long, narrow counties ranged along the lower St. Lawrence, whose shape points to the old fluvial nuclei of settlement. Similarly the early Dutch grants on the Hudson gave to the patroons four miles along the river and an indefinite extension back from the stream. In the early Connecticut River settlements, the same consideration of a share in the river and its alluvial bottoms distributed the town lots among the inhabitants in long narrow strips running back from the banks.[710]