Like seas, deserts, and other geographical transit regions, mountains too under primitive conditions develop their professional carriers. These collect in the piedmont, where highway and mule train cease, and where the steep track admits only human beasts of burden, trained by their environment to be climbers and packers. These mountain carriers are found on the Pacific face of the coast ranges of North and South America from the peninsula of Alaska to the Straits of Magellan. They are able to pack from 100 to 160 pounds up a steep grade. The Chilkoot Indians, men, women and children, did invaluable service on the White Horse and Chilkoot passes during the early days of the Klondike rush. They had devised a well-arranged harness, which enabled them better to carry their loads. Farther south in British Columbia the piedmont tribes had once a like importance; there they operated especially from the town of Hope on the lower Frazer River as a distributing center. The Mexican carrier is so efficient and so cheap that he enters into serious competition with modern schemes to improve transportation, especially as the rugged relief of this country makes those schemes expensive.[1204] The Indians of the eastern slope of the Andes pack India rubber, in loads of 150 pounds each, from the upper Purus and Madeira rivers up to the Andean plateau at a height of 15,000 feet, and there transfer their burdens to mules for transport down to the Peruvian port of Mollendo.[1205]
The retarded mountain peoples on the borders of the Central Asia plateau employ the same primitive means of transportation. The roads leading from the Sze Chuan province of western China over the mountain ranges to Tibet are traversed by long lines of porters, men, women and children, laden with bales of brick tea,[1206] the strongest of them shouldering 350 pounds. The Bhutia coolies of Sikkim act as carriers on military and commercial expeditions on the track across the Himalayas between Darjeeling and Shigatze. Colonel Younghusband found that these Bhutias, who were paid by the job, would carry a pack of 250 to 300 pounds, or three times the usual burden of a Central Asia carrier. Landon cites the case of a Bhutia lady who was said to have carried a piano on her head from the plains up to Darjeeling (7150 feet).[1207] In Nepal, women and girls, less often men, have long been accustomed to carry travellers and merchandise over the Himalayan ranges.[1208] In the marginal valleys of the Himalayas, like Kashmir and Baltistan, the natives are regularly impressed for begar or carrier service on the English military roads to strategic points on the high mountain frontier of the Indian Empire.[1209] So the Igorots of the Luzon province of Benguet pack all goods and supplies from Naguilian in the lowlands up 4000 feet in a distance of 25 miles to their little capital of Baguio; for this service they are now paid one peso (46 cents in 1901) a day with food, or ten times as much as under the Spanish rule.[1210]
Power of mountain barriers to block or deflect.
If the historical movement slackens its pace at the piedmont slope, higher up the mountain it comes to a halt. Only when human invention has greatly improved communication across the barrier are its obstacles in part overcome. The great highland wall stretching across southern Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea long cut off the solid mass of the continent from the culture of the Mediterranean lands. Owing to these mountains Central Europe came late into the foreground of history, not till the Middle Ages. Even the penetrating civilization of Greece reached it only by long detours around the ends of the mountain barrier; by Massilia and the Rhone, by Istria and the Danube, Greek commerce trickled through to the interior of the continent.
Where mountains fail to check, they deflect the historical movement. The wall of the Carpathians, bulwark of Central Europe, split the westward moving Slav hordes in the 6th century, diverting one southward up the Danube Valley to the Eastern Alps, and turning one northward along the German lowlands.[1211] The northward expansion of the Romans, rebuffed by the high double wall of the Central Alps, was bent to the westward over the Maritime, Cottine and Savoy Alps, where the barrier offered the shortest and easiest transmontane routes. Hence Germany received the elements of Mediterranean culture indirectly through Gaul, second-hand and late. The ancient Helvetians, moving southward from northern Switzerland into Gaul, took a route skirting the western base of the Alps by the gap at Geneva, and thus threatened Roman Provincia. Cæsar's campaigns into northern Gaul were given direction by the massive Central Plateau of France.[1212] The rugged and infertile area of the Catskills long retarded the westward movement in colonial New York and deflected it northward through the Mohawk depression, which therefore had its long thin line of settlements when the neighboring Catskills were still a "bare spot."
Significance of mountain valleys.
In their valleys, mountains lose something of their barrier nature, and approximate the level of the plains. Here they harbor oases of denser population and easier intercourse. Valleys favor human settlement through the milder climate of their lower elevation, the accumulation of soil on their floors, their sheltered environment, and their command of such routes of communication as the highlands afford. They are the avenues into and within a mountain system, and therefore radically influence its history by their direction and location. The Central Plateau of France, through the valleys of the Alliers and upper Loire, is most accessible from the north; therefore in that direction it has maintained its most important historical connections,[1213] from the days of Cæsar and Vercingetorix. The massive highland region of Transylvania, which opens long accessible valleys westward toward the plains of the Theiss and Danube, has since the eleventh century received thence Hungarian immigration and political dominion.[1214] Its dominant Roumanian population, however, seems to have fled thither from the Tartar-swept plains to the southeast.
The anthropo-geography of mountain valleys depends upon the structure of the highlands themselves, whether they are fold mountains, whose ranges wall in longitudinal valleys, or dissected plateaus, whose valleys are mostly transverse river channels leading from the hydrographic center out to the rim of the highlands. Longitudinal valleys are not only long, but also broad as a rule and often show a nearly level floor.[1215] They therefore form districts of considerable size, fertility, and individuality, and play distinct historical rôles in the history of their respective highlands. Such are the upper Rhone Valley with its long line of flourishing towns and villages, the Hither Rhine, the Inn of the Tyrol and the Engadine, the fertile trough of the meandering Isère above Grenoble,[1216] the broad Orontes-Leontes valley between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon where Kadesh and Baalbec were once the glory of northern Syria. Such is the central trough of the Appalachian Mountains, known as the Great Appalachian Valley, seventy-five miles wide, subdivided into constituent valleys of similar character by parallel, even-crested ridges following the trend of the mountains. These are drained by broad, leisurely rivers, bordered by fertile farms and substantial towns. Transverse valleys, on the other hand, are generally narrow, with steep slopes rising almost from the river's edge and supporting only small villages and farms. A comparison of the spacious, smooth-floored valley of Andermatt with the wild Reuss gorge, of the fertile and populous Shenandoah Valley in the Southern Appalachians with the canon of the Kanawha in the Cumberland Plateau, makes the contrast striking enough.