Note 1187 — Chapter XV · —Mountain Barriers And Their Passes

High massive mountain systems present the most effective barriers which man meets on the land surface of the earth. To the spread of population they offer a resistance which long serves to exclude settlers. The difficulty of making roads up steep, rocky slopes and through the forests usually covering their rain-drenched sides, is deterrent enough; but in addition to this, general infertility, paucity of arable land, harsh climatic conditions, and the practical lack of communication with the outside world offer scant basis for subsistence. Hence, as a rule, only when pressure of population in the lowlands becomes too great under prevailing economic methods, do clearings and cabins begin to creep up the slopes. Mountains are always regions of late occupation. Even in the Stone Age, we find the long-headed race of Mediterranean stock, who originally populated Europe, distributed over the continent close up to the foot of the high Alps, but not in the mountains themselves, and only scantily represented in the Auvergne Plateau of France. The inhospitable highlands of Switzerland, the German Alps, and the Auvergne received their first population later when the Alpine race began to occupy western Europe.1187 The Mittelgebirge of Germany were not settled till the Middle Ages. In the United States, the flood of population had spread westward by 1840 to the ninety-fifth meridian and the north-south course of the Missouri River; but out of this sea of settlement the Adirondack Mountains, a few scattered spots in the Appalachians, and the Ozark Highlands rose as so many islands of uninhabited wilderness, and they remain to-day areas of sparser population. In 1800, the "bare spots" in the eastern mountains were more pronounced. [See map page 156.] Great stretches of the Rocky Mountains, of the Laurentian Highlands of Canada, like smaller patches in the Scandinavian and Swiss Alps, are practically uninhabited.