Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) ๐
The protection of a water frontier--Pile villages of ancienttimes--Modern pile dwellings--Their geographicdistribution--River-dwellers in old and popular lands--Man'sencroachment upon the sea by reclamation of land--The struggle with thewater--Mound villages in river flood-plains--Social and political gainby control of the water--A factor in early civilization of aridlands--The economy of the water--Fisheries--Factors in maritimeexpansion--Fisheries as nurseries of seamen--Anthropo-geographicimportance of navigation.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS
Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea--Sea navigation mergesinto river navigation--Historical importance of seas and oceansinfluenced by their debouching streams--Lack of coast articulationssupplied by rivers--River highways as basis of commercialpreรซminence--Importance of rivers in large countries--Rivers as highwaysof expansion--Determinants of routes in arid or semi-aridlands--Increa
Read free book ยซInfluences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) ๐ยป - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
- Performer: -
Read book online ยซInfluences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) ๐ยป. Author - Ellen Churchill Semple
The cheapness and ease of river travel have tended to check or delay the construction of highroads and railways, where facilities for inland navigation have been abundant, and later to regulate railway freight charges. Conversely, riverless lands have everywhere experienced an exaggerated and precocious railroad development, and have suffered from its monopoly of transportation. Even canals have in most lands had a far earlier date than paved highroads. This has been true of Spain, France, Holland, and England.674 In the Hoang-ho Valley of northern China where waterways are restricted, owing to the rapid current and shallowness of this river, highroads are comparatively common; but they are very rare in central and southern China where navigable rivers and canals abound.675 New England, owing to its lack of inland navigation, was the first part of the United States to develop a complete system of turnpikes and later of railroads. On the other hand, the great river valleys of America have generally slighted the highroad phase of communication, and slowly passed to that of railroads. The abundance of natural waterways in Russiaโ51,800 miles including canalsโhas contributed to the retardation of railroad construction.676 The same thing is true in the Netherlands, where 4875 miles (7863 kilometers) of navigable waterways677 in an area of only 12,870 square miles (33,000 square kilometers) have kept the railroads down to a paltry 1818 miles (2931 kilometers); but smaller Belgium, commanding only 1375 miles (3314 kilometers) of waterway and stimulated further by a remarkable industrial and commercial development, has constructed 4228 miles (6819 kilometers) of railroad.
If we compare the countries of Central and South America, where railroads are still mere adjuncts of river and coastwise routes, a stage of development prevalent in the United States till 1858, we find an unmistakable relation between navigable waterways and railroad mileage. The countries with ample or considerable river communication, like Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Paraguay, are all relatively slow in laying railroads as compared with Mexico and Argentine, even when allowance is made for differences of zonal location, economic development, and degree of European elements in their respective populations. Mexico and Argentine, having each an area only about one-fourth that of Brazil but a railroad mileage nearly one-fourth greater, have been pushed to this development primarily by a common lack of inland navigation. Similarly South Africa, stricken with poverty of water communication south of the Zambesi, has constructed 7500 miles of railroads678 in spite of the youth of the country and the sparsity of its white population. Similar geographic conditions have forced the mileage of Australian railways up to twice that of South Africa, in a country which is still in the pastoral and agricultural stage of development, and whose most densely populated province Victoria has only fourteen inhabitants to the square mile. In the almost unpeopled wastes of Trans-Caspia, where two decades ago the camel was the only carrier, the Russian railroad has worked a commercial revolution by stimulating production and affording an outlet for the irrigated districts of the encircling mountains.679 In our own Trans-Missouri country, where the scanty volume of the streams eliminated all but the Missouri itself as a dependable waterway, even for the canoe travel of the early western trappers, railroads have developed unchecked by the competition of river transportation.680 With no rival nearer than the Straits of Magellan and the Isthmus of Panama for transportation between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast, they have fixed their own charges on a monopoly basis, and have fought the construction of the Isthmian Canal.
A river system is a system of communication. It therefore makes a bond of union between the people living among its remoter sources and those settled at its mouth. Every such river system forms geographically an unbroken whole. Only where a wild, torrent-filled gorge, like the Brahmaputra's path through the Himalayas, interrupts communication between the upper and lower course, is human life in the two sections divorced. But such cases are rare. Even the River Jhelam, which springs with mad bounds from the lofty Vale of Kashmir through the outer range of the Himalayas down to its junction with the Indus, carries quantities of small logs to be used as railway sleepers; and though it shatters a large per cent. of them, it makes a link between the lumber men of the Kashmir forests and British railroad engineers in the treeless plains of the Indus.681
In arid lands, where the scant and variable streams are useless for navigation, but invaluable for irrigation, a rival interest in the limited water supply leads almost inevitably to conflict, and often to the political union of the peoples holding the upper and lower courses, in order to secure adjustment of their respective claims. The ancient Salassi of the upper Doria Baltea Valley in the Alps drew off all the water of the stream for washing gold, and thus deprived the agricultural people lower down the valley of the water necessary for irrigation. The result was frequent wars between the two tribes.682 The offensive is taken by the downstream people, whose fields and gardens suffer from every extension of tillage or increase of population in the settlements above them. Occasionally a formal agreement is a temporary expedient. The River Firenze and other streams watering southern Trans-Caspia have their sources in the mountains of northern Persia; hence the Russians, in the boundary convention with Persia of 1881, stipulated that no new settlement be established along these streams within Persian territory, no extension of land under cultivation beyond the present amount, and no eduction of the water beyond that necessary to irrigate the existing fields.683 Russia's designs upon Afghanistan aim not only at access to India, but also at the control of the upper Murghab River, on whose water depends the prosperity of the Pendjeh and Merv oases.684 In such regions the only logical course is the extension of the political frontier to the watershed, a principle which Russia is applying in western Asia, and which California applied in drawing her eastern boundary to include even Goose Lake.
Rivers unite. Ancient Rome grew up on both banks of the Tiber, and extended her commercial and political supremacy up and down stream. Both sides of the Rhine were originally occupied by the Gallic tribes, whose villages were in some instances bisected by the river. Cรฆsar found the Menapii, a Belgian people on the lower Rhine, with their fields, farmhouses and villages on both banks.685 Then the westward advance of the Teutonic tribes gradually transformed the Rhine into a German river, from the island of Batavia at its mouth up to the great elbow at the foot of the Jura Mountains.686 To the American Indians even the widest rivers were no barriers. Christopher Gist, exploring the Ohio in 1751, found a Shawnee village situated on both sides of the river below the mouth of the Scioto, with about a hundred houses on the north bank and forty on the south.687 The small and unique nation of the Mandan Indians were found by Lewis and Clark near the northern bend of the Missouri in 1804, in two groups of villages on opposite sides of the river. They had previously in 1772 occupied nine villages lower down the stream, two on the east bank and seven on the west.688 The Connecticut River settlers of early colonial days laid out all their towns straight across the valley, utilizing the alluvial meadows on both banks for tillage, the terraces for residence sites, and the common river for intercourse.689
Every river tends to become a common artery feeding all the life of its basin, and gradually obliterating ethnic and cultural differences among the peoples of its valley. The Nile, with its narrow hem of flood-plain on either bank and barrier sands beyond, has so linked race and history in Egypt and Nubia, that the two countries cannot be separated. A common highway from mountains to sea, a common frontier of trackless desert have developed here a blended similarity of race, language and culture from the delta to Kordofan. The Hamitic race seems to have originated in the south and migrated northward down the Nile towards the delta. Later the whole valley, north and south, received the same Semitic or Arab immigration, which spread from Cairo to the old Sudanese capital of Sennar, while a strain of negro blood has filtered in from the equatorial black belt and followed the current down to the sea.690 The culture of the valley originated in Lower Egypt, and, with that easy transmissibility which characterizes ideas, it moved upstream into Ethiopia, which never evolved a culture of its own. Just as noticeable is the political interplay. The rule of the Pharaohs extended far up the Nile, at times to the Third Cataract at 20ยฐ N.L.; and at one period Ethiopian kings extended their sway over Egypt. At another, a large body of mutinous Egyptian soldiers abandoned their country and their wives, and emigrated along the one line of slight resistance open to them into Ethiopia, to found there a new state and new families by marriage with native women, thus contributing to the amalgamation of races in the valley.
The most pronounced types of the identity of a country with a river valley are found where strongly marked geographical boundaries, like deserts and mountains, emphasize the inner unity of the basins by accentuating their isolation from without. This is especially the case in high mountain regions; here canton or commune or county coincides with the river valley. Population hugs the margins of the streams where alone is soil fit for cultivation, and fairly level land suitable for dwellings. Above are the unoccupied heights, at once barrier and boundary. In the Alps, Salzburg is approximately identical with the valley of the Salzach, Uri with that of the Reuss, the Valais with the upper Rhone, the Engadine with the upper Inn, Glarus with the Linth, Graubรผnden or Grisons with the upper Rhine, Valtellina with the Adda. So in the great upheaved area of the Himalayas, the state of Kashmir was originally the valley of the upper Jhelam River, while Assam, in its correct delimitation, is the valley of the Brahmaputra between the Himalayan gorge and the swamps of Bengal.691
In mountain regions which are also arid, the identity of a district with a stream basin becomes yet more pronounced, because here population must gather about the common water supply, must organize to secure its fair distribution, and cooperate in the construction of irrigation channels to make the distribution as economical and effective as possible. Thus in Chinese Turkestan, the districts of Yarkand, Kashgar, Aksu and Kut-sha are identical with as many mountain tributaries of the Tarim, whose basin in turn comprises almost the whole of Chinese Turkestan.
In all such desert and mountain-rimmed valleys, the central stream attracts to its narrow hem of alluvial
Comments (0)