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]