Instances of this sort, rare in modern times, because of of general economic and social progress, multiply when we go into the history of primitive or ancient peoples. The Cherokee Indians of the Southern Appalachians, surrounded by powerful neighbors in the Chickasaws, Creeks and the encroaching whites of the seaboard colonies, attacked by war parties of Shawnees and Iroquois from the north, located the bulk of their nation in the mountains. The Overhill and Middle towns, numbering together thirty-three and situated wholly in the mountains, comprised four-fifths of their fighting force in 1775, while the nine towns distributed in the flat lands of Georgia and South Carolina were small and unimportant. The Indians themselves distinguished these two divisions of their country, the one as Otarre or mountainous, and the others as Ayrate or low.[1259] Similarly in ancient Gaul the three strongest tribes, the Sequani, Aedui, and Arverni, all had a large mountain nucleus. The Sequani held the Jura range with part of the Saône Valley; the Aedui held the northeast corner of the Central Plateau and some lands on the Saône, while the Arverni inhabited the western and central portion of the same highland. In a period of constant tribal migrations and war, the occupants of these high, protected locations were better able to defend themselves, and they maintained an adequate food supply by holding some of the adjoining lowland. Archaeologists generally agree that in central and southern Italy settlement first took place in the mountains, gradually extending thence down into the plains. The superiority of the upland climate, the more abundant rainfall, the greater security against attack offered by mountain sites, and the excellent soil for agriculture resulting from the geological make-up of the Apennines, all combined to draw thither primitive and later settlement.[1260] [See map page 559.] Similarly in Britain of the Bronze Age, before the peoples of Aryan speech began to swarm over the island, the primitive inhabitants, involved in constant clan or tribal warfare, placed their villages on the hills, and left in the indestructible terraces on their slopes the evidences of a vanished race and an outgrown social order.[1261]
Geographic conditions affecting density of mountain population.
The advance of civilization, which brought the ancient pirate-ridden city from the inner edge of the coastal zone down to the wave-washed strand, also drew the hill town down to the plain, and the mountain population from their inaccessible strongholds to the more accessible and productive valleys. These facts contain a hint. The future investigation of archaeological remains in high mountain districts may reveal at considerable elevations the oldest and hence lowest strata of prehistoric development, strata which, in the more attractive valleys, have been obliterated or overlaid by later invasions of peoples and cultures. Ignoring this temporary attraction of population to protected mountain locations in ages of persistent warfare, we find that a comparison of many countries reveals a decreasing food supply and decreasing density of population, with every increase of height above a certain altitude, except in favored mining regions and in some tropical lands, where better climatic conditions and freedom from malaria distribute settlements far above the steaming and forest-choked lowlands. The density of population in mountains is influenced also by the composition of the soil, which affects its fertility; by the grade and exposure of the slopes, which determine the ease and success of tillage; by the proximity of the highlands to teeming centers of lowland population, and by the general economic development of the people.
In Great Britain, the sparsest population is found in the sterile highland moors of Scotland, where the county of Sutherland has only 11 inhabitants to the square mile, Inverness only 20.[1262] These figures reveal also the remoteness of a far northern location. In the southern half of the island the sparsest populations are found in the Welsh county of Radnor, with 49 to the square mile, and in English Westmoreland with 85, both of them mountain regions, but reflecting in their larger figures their close proximity to the teeming industrial centers of South Wales and Lancashire respectively. In France the most thinly settled départements are Basses-Alpes with 43 to the square mile and Hautes-Alpes with 50, which again owe even these figures in part to their situation on the margin of the densely populated valley of the middle Rhone. [See map page 559.] Norway, almost wholly a mountain country, averages only 18 souls to the square mile. Less than a thousand square miles of its territory are under cultivation, and these are distributed in small deltas at the heads of the fiords, in low strips here and there along its western coasts, or in the openings of its mountain valleys to the southeast. Here too is massed the larger part of its inhabitants. A barren granitic soil, unfavorable zonal location, excessive rainfall, paucity of level land, leaving the "upright farm" predominant, and remoteness from any thickly settled areas, together with the resulting enormous emigration, have combined to keep down Norway's population.
Sparsity of population in the Alps.
If we turn to Switzerland, a country poor in the resources of its land but rich in the resourcefulness of its people, we find a high average density, 218 to the square mile; but this is due to the surprising industrial development of the marginal plains, which show in the Canton of Geneva 1356 to the square mile, and in Canton Zurich 705, while the rugged upland of Graubünden (Grisons) shows only 38 to the square mile, Uri only 48, and Wallis (Valais) only 59. How limited is the food supply of the country is evident from the fact that only 2400 square miles, or fifteen per cent. of its area, can be ranked as arable land, fit for garden, orchard or grain field, while a larger proportion, or twenty-eight per cent. is made wholly useless by watercourses, glaciers, rock and detritus. One half of the entire country lies above the region where agriculture is possible. In the Cantons of Uri and Valais, more than half the area is absolutely unproductive, scarcely less in the Grisons, and a third even in sunny Ticino.[1263] The three strictly Alpine provinces of Austria, Tyrol, Salzburg and Carinthia, reproduce approximately these geographic conditions. Nearly half of their area is uninhabited, and only one-seventh consists of arable land. In consequence they support only 75 inhabitants to the square mile, while just outside the mountains, in the piedmont or Alpine foreland, this density is doubled.[1264] Many tracts of the Carpathians, especially about the sources of the Theiss and Pruth and the wooded mountain borders of Transylvania, are among the most sparsely inhabited parts of Europe.[1265] Japan, ridged by steep volcanic ranges, drenched by mountain-born rains, strewn with detritus from plunging torrents, can cultivate only 15.7 per cent. of its area, and is forced to leave 59 per cent. in forest reserves.[1266]
Terrace agriculture.