Influences of Geographic Environment / On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography

by Ellen Churchill Semple

Chapter XI—The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

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]

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.]

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.

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.

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 preëminence 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.

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]

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 preëminence 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]

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."

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.

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.

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]

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 Ot-tawe 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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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 preëminence 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.

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, Saône 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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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. Cæsar 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]

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° 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.

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, Graubünden 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.

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.

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 Cæsar 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.

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 rôle 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]

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]

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.

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 côte. One côte 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.

The Riparian Villages Of The Lower St. Lawrence.

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 côte 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]

Boatmen tribes or castes.

In undeveloped countries, where rivers are the chief highways, we occasionally see the survival of a distinct race of boatmen amid an intruding people of different stock, preserved in their purity by their peculiar occupation, which has given them the aloofness of a caste. In the Kwang-tung province of southern China are 40,000 Tanka boat people, who live in boats and pile-dwellings in the Canton River. The Chinese, from whom they are quite distinct, regard them as a remnant of the original population, which was dislodged by their invasion and forced to take refuge on the water. They gradually established intercourse with the conquerors of the land, but held themselves aloof. They marry only among themselves, have their own customs, and enjoy a practical monopoly of carrying passengers and messages between the steamers and the shore at Macao, Hongkong and Canton.[711] In the same way, the middle Niger above Gao possesses a distinct aquatic people, the Somnos or Bosos, who earn their living as fishermen and boatmen on the river. They spread their villages along the Niger and its tributaries, and occupy separate quarters in the large towns like Gao and Timbuctoo. They are creatures of the river rather than of the land, and show great skill and endurance in paddling and poling their narrow dugouts on their long Niger voyages.[712]

Reference has been made before to the large river population of China who live on boats and rafts, and forward the trade of the vast inland waterways. These are people, differentiated not in race, but in occupation and mode of life, constantly recruited from the congested population of the land. Allied to them are the trackers or towing crews whose villages form a distinctive feature of the turbulent upper Yangtze, and who are employed, sometimes three hundred at a time, to drag junks up the succession of rapids above Ichang.[713] Similarly the complex of navigable waterways centering about Paris, as far back as the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, gave rise to the Nautae Parisii or guild of mariners, from whom the city of Paris derived its present coat of arms—a vessel under full sail. These Lutetian boatmen handled the river traffic in all the territory drained by the Seine, Marne, and Oise. Later, in the reign of Louis the Fat, they were succeeded by the Mercatores aquae Parisiaci, and from them sprang the municipal body appointed to regulate the river navigation and commerce.[714]

River islands as protected sites.

The location of the ancient tribe of the Parisii is typical of many other weak riverine folk who seek in the islands of a river a protected position to compensate for their paucity of number. The Parisii, one of the smallest of the Gallic tribes, ill-matched against their populous neighbors, took refuge on ten islands and sandbars of the Seine and there established themselves.[715] Stanley found an island in the Congo near the second cataract of Stanley Falls occupied by five villages of the Baswa, who had taken refuge there from the attacks of the bloodthirsty Bakuma.[716] During the Tartar invasions of Russia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bands of refugees from the surrounding country gathered for mutual defense on the islands of the Dnieper River, and became the nucleus of the Dnieper Cossacks.[717] The Huron tribe of American Indians, reduced to a mere fragment by repeated Iroquois attacks, fled first to the islands of St. Joseph and Michilimackinac in Lake Huron, and in 1856 to the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence. But even this location under the guns of their French allies in Quebec failed to protect them, for the St. Lawrence was a highway for the war fleets of their implacable foe.[718]

River and lake islands as robber strongholds.

A river island not only confers the negative benefit of protection, but affords a coign of vantage for raids on the surrounding country, being to some extent proof against punitive attacks. It offers special facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle, and the island serves as a resting place on the passage. Immunity from punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago, inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi, utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands, under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, till Sebituane, the great Makololo chief, cleaned out their fastnesses and opened the river for trade.[719] The islands in the wide stretches of the Lualaba River in the Babemba country were described to Livingstone as harboring a population of marauders and robbers, who felt themselves safe from attack.[720] The same unenviable reputation attaches to the Budumas of the Lake Chad islands. A weak, timid, displaced people, they nevertheless lose no chance of raiding the herds of the Sudanese tribes inhabiting the shores of the Lake, and carrying off the stolen cattle on their wretched rafts to their island retreats.[721]

River peninsulas as protected sites.

The protection of an island location is almost equalled in the peninsulas formed by the serpentines or meanders of a river. Hence these are choice sites for fortress or settlement in primitive communities, where hostilities are always imminent and rivers the sole means of communication. The defensive works of the mound-builders in great numbers occupied such river peninsulas. The neck of the loop was fortified by a single or double line of ditch and earthen wall, constructed from bank to bank of the encircling stream.[722] This was exactly the location of Vesontio, now Besançon, once the ancient stronghold of the Sequani in eastern Gaul. It was situated in a loop of the Dubis, so nearly a circle that its course seems to have been "described by a compass," Cæsar says, while fortifications across the isthmus made the position of the town almost impregnable.[723] Verona, lying at the exit of the great martial highway of the Brenner Pass, occupies just such a loop of the Adige, as does Capua on the Volturno, and Berne on the Aare. Shrewsbury, in the Middle Ages an important military point for the preservation of order on the marches of Wales, is almost encircled by the River Severn, while a castle on the neck of the peninsula completes the defense on the land side.[724] Graaf Reinett, at one time an exposed frontier settlement of the Dutch in Cape Colony, had a natural moat around it in the Sunday River, which here describes three-fourths of a circle.

River islands as sites of trading posts and colonies.

The need of protection felt by all colonists in new countries amid savage or barbarous people whom encroachment sooner or later makes hostile, leads them if possible to place their first trading posts and settlements on river islands, especially at the mouth of the streams, where a delta often affords the site required, and where the junction of ocean and river highway offers the best facilities for trade. A river island fixed the location of the English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the French at Montreal and New Orleans, the Dutch at Manhattan and Van Renssellær Island in the Hudson, the Swedes at Tinicum Island in the Delaware River a few miles below the mouth of the Schuylkill.[725] St. Louis, located on a delta island of the Senegal River, is one of the oldest European towns in West Africa;[726] and Bathurst, founded in 1618 on a similar site at the mouth of the Gambia, has for centuries now been the safe outlet for the trade of this stream.[727] Such island settlements at river mouths are a phenomenon of the outer edge of every coastal region; but inland stations for trade or military control also seek the protection of an island site. The Russians in the seventeenth century secured their downstream conquest of the Amur by a succession of river island forts,[728] which recall Colonel Byrd's early frontier post on an island in the Holston River, and George Rogers Clark's military stockade on Corn Island in the Ohio, which became the nucleus of the later city of Louisville.

Swamps as barriers and boundaries.

More effective than rivers in the protection which they afford are swamps. Neither solid land nor navigable water, their sluggish, passive surface raises an obstacle of pure inertia to the movements of mankind. Hence they form one of those natural boundaries that segregate. In southern England, Ronmey Marsh, reinforced by the Wealden Forest, fixed the western boundary of the ancient Saxon kingdom of Kent by blocking expansion in that direction, just as the bordering swamps of the Lea and Colne rivers formed the eastern and western boundaries of Middlesex.[729] The Fenland of the Wash, which extended in Saxon days from the highland about Lincoln south to Cambridge and Newmarket, served to hem in the Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk on the west, so that the occupation of the interior was left to later bands who entered by the estuaries of the Humber and Forth.[730] In northern Germany, the low cross valleys of the Spree, Havel and Netze rivers, bordered by alder swamps, were long a serious obstacle to communication, and therefore became boundaries of districts,[731] just as the Bourtanger Moor drew the dividing line between Holland and Hanover.

Swamps as regions of survival.

Swamp-bordered regions, as areas of natural isolation, guard and keep intact the people which they hold. Therefore they are regions of survival of race and language. The scattered islets of the Fens of England furnished an asylum to the early British Celts from Teutonic attacks,[732] and later protected them against dominant infusion of Teutonic blood. Hence to-day in the Fenland and in the district just to the south we find a darker, shorter people than in the country to the east or west.[733] Similarly the White Russians, occupying the poor, marshy region of uncertain watershed between the sources of the Duna, Dnieper and Volga, have the purest blood of all the eastern Slavs, though this distinction is coupled with poverty and retarded culture,[734] a combination that anthropo-geography often reveals. Wholly distinct from the Russians and segregated from them by a barrier of swampy forests, we find the Letto-Lithuanians in the Baltic province of Courland, speaking the most primitive form of flectional languages classed as Aryan. The isolation which preserved their archaic speech, of all European tongues the nearest to the Sanskrit, made them the last European people to accept Christianity.[735] The great race of the Slavic Wends, who once occupied all northern Germany between the Vistula and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.[736] [See ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.[737]

Swamps as places of refuge.

Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls, despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to the Indian Territory. The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,[738] to the retreat thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.[739] The Isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wessex in 878,[740] while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of sustained resistance to the invaders. It was the Fenland that two hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to William of Normandy. Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the "Camp of Refuge."[741]

The spirit of the marshes.

The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom. Therefore these small and scarcely habitable portions of the land assume an historical dignity and generate stirring historical events out of all proportion to their size and population. Their content is ethical rather than economic. They attract to their fastnesses the vigorous souls protesting against conquest or oppression, and then by their natural protection sustain and nourish the spirit of liberty. It was the water-soaked lowlands of the Rhine that enabled the early Batavians,[742] Ditmarscher and Frieslanders to assert and to maintain their independence, generated the love of Independence among the Dutch and helped them defend their liberty against the Spanish[743] and French. So the Fenland of England was the center of resistance to the despotism of King John, who therefore fixed his headquarters for the suppression of the revolt at Lincoln and his military depôt at Lynn. Later in the conflict of the barons with Henry III, Simon de Montfort and other disaffected nobles entrenched themselves in the islands of Ely and Axholm, till the Provisions of Oxford in 1267 secured them some degree of constitutional rights.[744] Four centuries later the same spirit sent many Fenlanders to the support of Cromwell.

Economic and political importance of lakes.

A river that spreads out into the indeterminate earthform of a marsh is an effective barrier; but one that gathers waters into a natural basin and forms a lake retains the uniting power of a navigable stream and also, by the extension of its area and elimination of its current, approaches the nature of an enclosed sea. Mountain rivers, characterized by small volume and turbulent flow, first become navigable when they check their impetuosity and gather their store of water in some lake basin. The whole course of the upper Rhone, from its glacier source on the slope of Mount Furca to its confluence with the Saône at Lyon, is unfit for navigation, except where it lingers in Lake Geneva. The same thing is true of the Reuss in Lake Lucerne, the upper Rhine in Lake Constance, the Aare in Thun and Brienze, and the Linth in Lake Zurich. Hence such torrent-fed lakes assume economic and political importance in mountainous regions, owing to the paucity of navigable waterways. The lakes of Alpine Switzerland and Italy and of Highland Scotland form so many centers of intercourse and exchange. Even such small bodies of water as the Alpine lakes have therefore become goals of expansion, so that we find the shores of Geneva, Maggiore, Lugano, and Garda, each shared by two countries. Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, and the three German states of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, have all managed to secure a frontage upon Lake Constance. Lake Titicaca, lying 12,661 feet (3854 meters) above sea level but affording a navigable course 136 miles (220 kilometers) long, is an important waterway for Peru and Bolivia. In the central Sudan, where aridity reduces the volume of all streams, even the variable and indeterminate Lake Chad has been an eagerly sought objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to reach this goal.

Lakes as nuclei of states.

The uniting power of lakes manifests itself in the tendency of such basins to become the nuclei of states. Attractive to settlement in primitive times, because of the protected frontier they afford—a motive finding its most emphatic expression in the pile villages of the early lake-dwellers—later because of the fertility of their bordering soil and the opportunity for friendly intercourse, they gradually unite their shores in a mesh of reciprocal relations, which finds its ultimate expression in political union. It is a significant fact that the Swiss Confederation originated in the four forest cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, which are linked together by the jagged basin of Lake Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, as the Swiss significantly call it, but are otherwise divided by mountain barriers. So we find that Lake Titicaca was the cradle of the Inca Empire, just as Lake Tezcoco was that of the Toltecs in Mexico and an island in Lake Chalco later that of the Aztec domain.[745] The most stable of the short-lived native states of Africa have apparently found an element of strength and permanence in a protected lake frontier. Such are the petty kingdoms of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem on Lake Chad, and Uganda on Victoria Nyanza.

Large lakes, which include in their area islands, peninsulas, tides, currents, fiords, inlets, deltas, and dunes, and present every geographical feature of an enclosed sea, approach the latter too in historical importance. Some of the largest, however, have long borne the name of seas. The Caspian, which exceeds the Baltic in area, and the Aral, which outranks Lake Michigan, show the closest physical resemblance to thalassic basins, because of their size, salinity and enclosed drainage systems; but their anthropo-geographical significance is slight. The very salinity which groups them with the sea points to an arid climate that forever deprives them of the densely populated coasts characteristic of most enclosed seas, and hence reduces their historical importance. Their tributary streams, robbed of their water by irrigation canals, like "the shorn and parcelled Oxus", renounce their function of highways into the interior. To this rule the Volga is a unique exception. Finally, cut off from union with the ocean, these salt lakes lose the supreme historical advantage which is maintained by freshwater lakes, like Ladoga, Nyassa, Maracaibo and the Great Lakes of North America, all lying near sea level.

Lakes as fresh water seas.

Lakes as part of a system of inland waterways may possess commercial importance surpassing that of many seas. This depends upon the productivity, accessibility and extent of their hinterland, and this in turn depends upon the size and shape of the inland basin. The chain of the five Great Lakes, which together present a coastline of four thousand miles and a navigable course as long as the Baltic between the Skager Rack and the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, constitutes a freshwater Mediterranean. It has played the part of an enclosed sea in American history and has enabled the Atlantic trade to penetrate 1400 miles inland to Chicago and Duluth. Its shores have therefore been a coveted object of territorial expansion. The early Dutch trading posts headed up the Hudson and Mohawk toward Lake Ontario, as did the English settlements which succeeded them. The French, from their vantage point at Montreal, threw out a frail casting-net of fur stations and missions, which caught and held all the Lakes for a time. Later the American shores were divided among eight of our states. The northern boundaries of Indiana and Illinois were fixed by Congress for the express purpose of giving these commonwealths access to Lake Michigan. Pennsylvania with great difficulty succeeded in protruding her northwestern frontier to cover a meager strip of Erie coast, while New York's frontage on the same lake became during the period of canal and early railroad construction, a great factor in her development.

In 1901, the tonnage of our merchant vessels on the Great Lakes was half that of our Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined,[ 746] constituting a freshwater fleet greater than the merchant marine of either France or sea-bred Norway. A remote but by no means faint echo of this fact is found in the five hundred or more boats, equally available for trade or war, which Henry M. Stanley saw the Uganda prince muster on the shore of Victoria Nyanza Lake. Ocean, sea, bay, estuary, river, swamp, lake: here is Nature's great circle returning upon itself, a circle faintly notched into arcs, but one in itself and one in man's uses.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XI

[630.]

Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 26-27. New York and London, 1900.

Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 492. Boston, 1892.

Capt. James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 1776-1780, Vol. II, pp. 321-332. New York, 1796.

John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63-66, 84-86, 95, 96. London, 1904.

E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, Vol. II, Part I, pp. 374-375, 378-379, 381-382, 385-386. Paris, 1903.

Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191, map. New York, 1902-1906.

Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 192-194.

G.W. Kitchen, History of France, Vol. I, pp. 59-60. Oxford, 1892.

Dietrich Schaeffer, Die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von Dänemark, p. 36. Jena, 1879.

G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 311. London, 1904.

Capt. A.T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia, pp. 41, 60, 120. New York, 1900.

Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 97-98. New York and London, 1900.

E.C. Semple, Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their Geographic Environment, Bulletin Amer. Geog. Soc., Vol. 31. No. 3. 1899.

Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 519-530, 552. New York, 1882. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, Note pp. 278-281. New York, 1902.

Agnes Laut, Voyagers of the Northern Ocean, Harper's Magazine, January, 1906.

Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 21-54. New York, 1899.

Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 198-190, 251-257. New York, 1896.

Ibid., p. 38.

D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 71, 177. New York, 1858.

W. Deecke, Italy, p. 87. London, 1904.

G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, map facing p. 167; also pp. 287, 327-328. New York, 1897.

F.M. Stapff, Karte des unteren Khiusebthal, Petermanns Mitteilungen, p. 202. July, 1885.

Strabo, Book III, chap. II, 4.

For full discussion, see Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses. Stuttgart, 1889.

Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 24-28. Boston, 1886.

A.B. Hulbert, Historic Highways of America, Vol. VII, Portage Paths, pp. 182-183, 187-188. Cleveland, 1903.

Herodotus, Book I, 194. A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. II, pp. 79-81. New York, 1849.

Charles W. Hawes, The Uttermost East, p. 60. New York, 1904.

Transportation by Water in 1906, Table 30, p. 181. Report of Department of Commerce and Labor, Washington, 1908.

G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 277. London, 1904.

E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 466. London. 1882.

J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 68-85. London, 1907.

Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 218. Leipzig, 1897.

E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 466. London, 1882.

G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 511. London, 1904.

J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 318. London, 1903.

Ratzel, Politische Geographie, pp. 739-740. Munich, 1903.

Annual Register for 1901, p. 358. New Series, London and New York, 1902.

H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 958. New York, 1902.

Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 473. London, 1896-1898.

H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 406. New York, 1902.

G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, map p. 312. London, 1904.

Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 273, 277, 296. New York, 1880.

Albert Gallatin, American State Papers, Misc. Doc., Vol. I, No. 250. Washington, 1834.

Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 449, 453-454. Stuttgart, 1889.

H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 530-531. New York, 1902.

G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 310, 312. London, 1904.

J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 314. London, 1903.

Statesman's Yearbook for 1907.

Henry Norman, All the Russias, pp. 254-255, 285-292. New York, 1902.

E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 251-255. Boston, 1903.

E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 6. London, 1897.

Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 7.

Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 361-362. New York, 1899.

Angus Hamilton, Afghanistan, pp. 137-141. New York and London, 1906. Henry Norman, All the Russias, pp. 276-277. New York, 1902.

Bella Gallico, Book IV, chap. IV.

Ibid., Book I, chap. XXXI; Book II, chap. III; Book IV, chap. I.

Journals of Dr. Thomas Walker and Christopher Gist, p. 129. Filson Club Publications, Louisville, 1898.

H.R. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. III, pp. 248-249. Philadelphia, 1853.

Martha K. Genthe, The Valley Towns of Connecticut, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 39, pp. 1-7. New York, 1907.

Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 181-182, 192. London, 1898.

H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 495. New York, 1902.

W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 284-285. New York, 1899.

Ibid., Maps pp. 222, 340, 350.

Ibid., Maps pp. 402, 429.

J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 43, 241. London, 1903.

Ibid., p. 69. Sydow-Wagner, Methodischer Schul-Atlas, compare maps No. 13 and No. 25.

Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 380, 389-390. New York, 1882.

W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 318, map. New York, 1899.

H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 202-203. London, 1904.

Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 168, 169, 232, 306-307. London, 1907.

Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 102, 642. New York, 1858.

See Century Atlas, maps of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas for boundary line of 1850.

Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 57. London, 1905.

Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.

Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 120-124, 155-158, 168, 169, 173, 176, 177, 182, 266-274, 327. New York, 1879.

Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 252, 269-270. London, 1907.

Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189, 192-194. New York, 1902-1906.

Cyrus Thomas, Mound Explorations, pp. 526-527, 531, 551. Twelfth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.

Parkman, The Old Regime in Canada, pp. 292-303. Boston, 1904. E.C. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 36, pp. 449-466. 1904.

Martha Krug Genthe, Valley Towns of Connecticut, pp. 10-12, figures V. and VI, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 39, 1907.

J. Nacken, Die Provinz Kwantung und ihre Bevölkerung, Petermanns Mitteilungen, Vol. 24, p. 421, 1878. W.M. Wood, Fankwei, pp. 276-277. New York, 1859.

Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 19-22, 38. New York, 1896.

Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 164, 174-175, 179, 182, 189, 215. London and New York, 1900.

William Walton, Paris, Vol. I, pp. 31-32, 35. Philadelphia, 1899.

Cæsar, Bella Gallico, Book VIII, chaps, 57, 58.

Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 227-228. New York, 1879.

Article, Cossack, Encyclopedia Britannica.

Parkman, The Jesuits in North. America, pp. 292-303, 498-505, 534, 535. Boston, 1904.

Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 100, 102. New York, 1858.

Livingstone, Last Journals, Vol. I, p. 359. London, 1874.

Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. II, pp. 64, 66, 233. New York, 1857. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 237, 303-304, 320, 331-336; Vol. II, pp. 54, 56-58, 67-68, 96-99, 104-105. London, 1907.

J.P. McLean, The Mound Builders, p. 20. Cincinnati, 1904. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, pp. 6, 9, 10. New York, 1848.

Cæsar, Bello Gallico, Book I, chaps. 38, 39.

Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 101-102. New York, 1882.

John Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, Vol. I, p. 241. Boston.

H.E. Mill, International Geography, p. 956. New York, 1902.

H.B. George, Historical Geography of the British Empire, pp. 259-260. London, 1904.

Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 30-33, 50. New York, 1899.

H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 198-199. London, 1904.

John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63, 66. London, 1904.

J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 102. London, 1903.

Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 10, 11, 27-30. London, 1878.

W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 322-323. Map p. 327. New York, 1899.

Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, p. 108. New York, 1893.

Ibid., pp. 104-106. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 340-342, 352, 365. New York, 1899.

J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 135. London, 1903.

Ibid., p. 133. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 294-295. New York, 1899.

Herodotus, II, 137, 140.

Thucydides, I, 110. Brugsch-Bey, History of Egypt, Vol. II, p. 333. London, 1881.

John Richard Green, History of the English People, Vol. I, chap. III, p. 71.

Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 83, 101, 104, 107, 108. London, 1878.

Tacitus, History of the Germans, Book VI, chap. VI. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, pp. 2-5, 13. New York, 1885.

J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 299. London, 1903.

Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 113-114. London, 1878.

Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, pp. 327-328, 502-503. Oxford, 1892. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 163. London, 1896-1898.

U.S. Report of Commission of Navigation, p. 10. Washington, 1901.

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