Withdrawal and flight.
Every active historical movement which enters an already populated country gives rise there to passive movements, either compression of the native folk followed by amalgamation, or displacement and withdrawal. The latter in some degree attends every territorial encroachment. Only where there is an abundance of free land can a people retire as a whole before the onslaught, and maintain their national or racial solidarity. Thus the Slavs seem largely to have withdrawn before the Germans in the Baltic plains of Europe. The Indians of North and South America retired westward before the advance of the whites from the Atlantic coast. The Cherokee nation, who once had a broad belt of country extending from the Tennessee Valley through South Carolina to the ocean,[166] first retracted their frontier to the Appalachian Mountains; in 1816 they were confined to an ever shrinking territory on the middle Tennessee and the southern end of the highlands; in 1818 they began to retire beyond the Mississippi, and in 1828 beyond the western boundary of Arkansas.[167] The story of the Shawnees and Delawares is a replica of this.[168] In the same way Hottentots and Kaffirs in South Africa are withdrawing northward and westward into the desert before the protruding frontier of white settlement, as the Boers before the English treked farther into the veldt. [See map page 105.]
Where the people attacked or displaced is small or a broken remnant, it often takes refuge among a neighboring or kindred tribe. The small Siouan tribes of the Carolinas, reduced to fragments by repeated Iroquois raids, combined with their Siouan kinsmen the Catawbas, who consequently in 1743 included twenty dialects among their little band.[169] The Iroquoian Tuscaroras of North Carolina, defeated and weakened by the whites in 1711, fled north to the Iroquois of New York, where they formed the Sixth Nation of the Confederation. The Yamese Indians, who shifted back and forth between the borders of Florida and South Carolina, defeated first by the whites and then by the Creeks, found a refuge for the remnant of their tribe among the Seminoles, in whom they merged and disappeared as a distinct tribe[170] —the fate of most of these fragmentary peoples. [See map page 54.]
Dispersal in flight.
When the fugitive body is large, it is forced to split up in order to escape. Hence every fugitive movement tends to assume the character of a dispersal, all the more as organization and leadership vanish in the catastrophe. The fissile character of primitive societies especially contributes to this end, so that almost every story of Indian and native African warfare tells of shattered remnants fleeing in several directions. Among civilized peoples, the dispersal is that of individuals and has far-reaching historical effects. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered over the earth, the debris of a nation. The religious wars of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Huguenots to flee to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and South Carolina; they even tried to establish a colony on the coast of Brazil. Everywhere they contributed a valuable element to the economic and social life of the community which they joined. The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization. It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighboring provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia.[171]
Natural regions of retreat.
The hope of safety from pursuit drives fugitive peoples into isolated and barren places that are scarcely accessible or habitable, and thereby extends the inhabited area of the earth long before mere pressure of population would have stretched it to such limits. We find these refugee folk living in pile villages built over the water, in deserts, in swamps, mangrove thickets, very high mountains, marshy deltas, and remote or barren islands, all which can be classified as regions of retreat. Fugitives try to place between themselves and their pursuers a barrier of sea or desert or mountains, and in doing this have themselves surmounted some of the greatest obstacles to the spread of the human race.
Districts of refuge located centrally to several natural regions of migration receive immigrants from many sides, and are therefore often characterized by a bizarre grouping of populations. The cluster of marshy islands at the head of the Adriatic received fugitives from a long semi-circle of north Italian cities during the barbarian invasions. Each refugee colony occupied a separate island, and finally all coalesced to form the city of Venice. Central mountain districts like the Alps and Caucasus contain "the sweepings of the plains." The Caucasus particularly, on the border between Europe and Asia, contains every physical type and representative of every linguistic family of Eurasia, except pure Aryan. Nowhere else in the world probably is there such a heterogeneous lot of peoples, languages and religions. Ripley calls the Caucasus "a grave of peoples, of languages, of customs and physical types."[172] Its base, north and south, and the longitudinal groove through its center from east to west have been swept by various racial currents, which have cast up their flotsam into its valleys. The pueblos of our arid Southwest, essentially an area of asylum, are inhabited by Indians of four distinct stocks, and only one of them, the Moquis, show clearly kinship to another tribe outside this territory,[173] so that they are survivals. The twenty-eight different Indian stocks huddled together in small and diverse linguistic groups between the Pacific Ocean and the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range[174] leave the impression that these protected valleys, similar to the Caucasus in their ethnic diversity, were an asylum for remnants of depleted stocks who had fled to the western highlands before the great Indian migrations of the interior.[175] Making their way painfully and at great cost of life through a region of mountain and desert, they came out in diminished bands to survive in the protection of the great barrier. Of the twenty-one Indian linguistic stocks which have become extinct since the arrival of the white man, fifteen belong to this transmontane strip of the Pacific slope[176] —evidence of the fragmentary character of these stocks and their consequently small power of resistance, [See map page 54.]