Note 616 — Chapter X · —Man's Relation To The Water

This unifying and stimulating national task of utilizing and controlling the water was the same task which in various forms prompted the early civilization of the Hoangho and Yangtze basins, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Peru, Mexico, and that impressive region of prehistoric irrigation canals found in the Salt, Gila River, and upper Rio Grande valleys.616 Here the arid plateaus of the Cordilleras between the Pueblo district and Central America had no forests in which game might be found; so that the Indian hunter had to turn to agriculture and a sedentary life beside his narrow irrigated fields. Here native civilization reached its highest grade in North America. Here desert agriculture achieved something more than a reliable food supply. It laid the foundation of the first steady integration of wandering Indian hordes into a stable, permanently organized society. Elsewhere throughout the North American continent, we see only shifting groups of hunter and fisher folk, practising here and there a half nomadic agriculture to supplement the chase.