Note 1245 — Chapter XV · —Mountain Barriers And Their Passes

Natural thoroughfares, whether river highways or mountain pass routes, draw to themselves migration, travel, trade and war. They therefore early assume historical importance. Hence we find that peoples controlling transmontane routes have always been able to exert an historical influence out of proportion to their size and strength; and that in consequence they early become an object of conquest to the people of the lowlands, as soon as these desire to control such transit routes. The power of these pass tribes is often due to the trade which they command and which compensates them for the unproductive character of their country. In the eastern Himalayas the Tomos of the Chumbi Valley are intermediaries of trade between Darjeeling and Tibet, In the western Himalayas, the Kumaon borderland of northern India, which commands some of the best passes, has made its native folk or Bhutias bold merchants who jealously monopolize the trade over the passes to the Tibetan markets. They stretch for a zone of thirty miles south of the boundary from Nepal to Garhwal along the approach to every pass, each sub-group having its particular trade route.1245