Note 705 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

Rivers tend always to be centers of population, not outskirts or perimeters. They offer advantages that have always attracted settlement—fertile alluvial soil, a nearby water supply, command of a natural highway for intercourse with neighbors and access to markets. Among civilized peoples fluvial settlements have been the nuclei of broad states, passing rapidly through an embryonic development to a maturity in which the old center can still be distinguished by a greater density of population. Only among savages or among civilized people who have temporarily reverted to primitive conditions in virgin colonial lands, do we find genuine riverine folk, whose existence is closely restricted to their bordering streams. The river tribes of the Congo occupy the banks or the larger islands, while the land only three or four miles back from the stream is held by different tribes with whom the riverine people trade their fish. The latter are expert fishermen and navigators, and good agriculturists, raising a variety of fruits and vegetables. On the river banks at regular intervals are market greens, neutral ground, whither people come from up and down stream and from the interior to trade. Their long riparian villages consist of a single street, thirty feet wide and often two miles long, on which face perhaps three hundred long houses,705 Fisher and canoe people line the Welle, the great northern tributary of the Congo.706 The same type appeared in South America in the aboriginal Caribs and Tupis dwelling along the southern tributaries of the Amazon and the affluents of the Paraguay. These were distinctly a water race, having achieved a meager development only in navigation, fishing and the cultivation of their alluvial soil.707 The ancient mound-builders of America located their villages chiefly, though not exclusively, along the principal watercourses, like the Mississippi, Illinois, Miami, Wabash, Wisconsin, and Fox,708 on the very streams later dotted by the trading posts of the French voyageurs.