Note 682 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

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.