Note 670 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

As the dividing channels of the lower course point to the feasibility of amplifying the connection with the ocean highway, so the spreading branches of a river's source, which approach other head waters on a low divide, suggest the extension of inland navigation by the union of two such drainage systems through canals. Where the rivers of a country radiate from a relatively low central watershed, as from the Central Plateau of France and the Valdai Hills of Russia, nature offers conditions for extensive linking of inland waterways. Hence we find a continuous passway through Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic by the canal uniting the Volga and Neva rivers; another from the Black Sea up the Dnieper, which by canals finds three different outlets to the Baltic through the Vistula, Niemen and Duna.670 The Northern Dwina, linked, by canals, with the Neva through Lakes Onega and Ladoga, unites the White Sea with the Baltic.671 Sully, the great minister of Henry IV. of France, saw that the relief of the country would permit the linking of the Loire, Seine, Meuse, Saône and Rhine, and the Mediterranean with the Garonne. All his plans were carried out by his successors, but he himself, at the end of the sixteenth century, began the construction of the Briare Canal between the Loire near Orleans and the Seine at Fontainebleau.672 Similarly in the eastern half of the United States, the long, low watershed separating the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes from that of the Mississippi and the Hudson made feasible the succession of canals completing the "Great Belt" of inland navigation from St. Lawrence and New York bays to the Gulf. Albert Gallatin's famous report of 1808673 pointed out the adaptation of the three low divides to canal communication; but long before this, every line of possible canoe travel by river and portage over swamp or lake-dotted watershed had been used by savages, white explorers and French voyageurs, from Lake Champlain to Lake Winnebago, so that the canal engineer had only to select from the numerous portage paths already beaten out by the moccasined feet of Indian or fur-trader.