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.