Note 685 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

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. Cæsar 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