Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Mineral wealth or waterpower in the mountains serves to collect an urban and industrial population along their rim, as we see it about the base of the Erz Mountains in Saxony, the Riesen range in Silesia, the coal-bearing Pennine Mountains of northwestern England, and the highlands of southern Wales, all which piedmont zones show a density of over 150 to the square kilometer (385 to the square mile). Hence the original Swiss Confederation, which included only the mountain cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, was greatly strengthened by the accession of the piedmont cantons of Lucerne, Zurich, Zug and Bern in the early fourteenth century, as later by St. Gall, Aargau and Geneva. These marginal cantons to-day show a density of population exceeding 385 to the square mile, and rising to 1356 in the canton of Geneva.
Piedmont belts tend strongly towards urban development, even where rural settlement is sparse. Sparsity of population and paucity of towns within the mountains cause main of traffic to keep outside the highlands, but close enough to their base to tap their trade at every valley outlet. On the alluvial fans or plains of these valley outlets, where mountain and piedmont road intersect, towns grow up. Some of them develop into cities, when they command transverse routes of communication quite across the highlands. The ancient Via Aemilia traced the northern base of the Apennines from Ariminum on the Adriatic to Dertona at the foot of the Ligurian range back of Genoa, and connected a long line of Roman colonies. The modern railroad follows almost exactly the course of the old Roman road,1197 while a transverse line southward across the Apennines, following an ancient highway over the Poretta Pass to the Arno Valley, has maintained the old preëminence of Bologna. A line of towns, connected by highways or railroads, according to the economic development of the section, defines the bases of the Pyrenees, Alps, Jura, Apennines, Harz, Vosges, Elburz and numerous other ranges. Along the Elburz piedmont runs the imperial road of Persia from Tabriz through Teheran to Meshed. In arid regions these piedmont roads are an unfailing feature, but their towns shrink to rural settlements, except at the junction of transmontane routes.
Piedmont cities draw their support from plain, mountain and transmontane region, relying chiefly on the fertile soil of the level country to feed their large populations. Sometimes they hug the foot of the mountains, as Bologna, Verona, Bergamo, Zurich, Denver and Pittsburg do; sometimes, like Milan, Turin, and Munich, they drop down into the plain, but keep the mountains in sight. They flourish in proportion to their local resources, in which mineral wealth is particularly important, and to the number and practicability of their transmontane connections. Hence they often receive their stamp from the mountains behind them as well as from the bordering plain. The St. Gotthard route is flanked by Lucerne on the north and Milan on the south. The Brenner has its urban outlets at Munich and Verona. Narbonne and Barcelona form the termini of the route over the eastern Pyrenees; Toulouse commands the less used central passes, and Bayonne the western. Tiflis is situated in the great mountain trough connecting the Black Sea and the Caspian; but over the Caucasus by the Pass of Dariel come the influences which make it a Russian town. Peshawar, situated in the mountain angle of the Punjab, depends more upon the Khaibar Pass and its connections thereby with Central Asia than upon the plains of the Indus; its population, in appearance and composition nearly as much Central Asiatic as Indian, is engaged in traffic between the Punjab and the whole trans-Hindu Kush country.1198
Where a mountain system describes a semi-circular course, its transit routes tend to converge on the inner side, and at their foci fix the sites of busy commercial centers. Turin draws on a long series of Alpine and Apennine routes from the Pass of Giovi (1548 feet or 472 meters) leading up from Genoa on the south, to the Great St. Bernard on the north. Milan gets immense support from the St. Gotthard and Simplon railroads over the Alps, besides wagon routes over several minor passes. Kulm, Balkh and Kunduz in the piedmont of northern Afghanistan are fed by twenty or more passes over the Hindu Kush and Pamir. Bukhara is the remoter focus of all these routes, and also of the valley highways of the western Tian Shan. It therefore occupies a location which would make it one of the great emporiums of the world, were it not for the expanse of desert to the west and the scantiness of its local water supply, which is tapped farther upstream for the irrigation of Samarkand. In its bazaars are found drugs, dyes and teas from India; wool, skins and dried fruit from Afghanistan; woven goods, arms, and books from Persia; and Russian wares imported by rail and caravan. English goods, which formerly came in by the Kabul route from India, have been excluded since Russia established a protectorate over the province of Bukhara. Across the highlands to the east, the cities of Kashgar and Yarkand, situated in that piedmont zone of vegetation where mountain and desert meet, are enclosed by a vast amphitheater formed by the Tian Shan, the Pamir Highlands, and the Karakorum range. Stieler's atlas marks no less than six trade routes over the passes of these mountains from Kashgar to the headstreams of the Sir-daria and Oxus, and six from Yarkand to the Oxus and Indus. Kashgar is a meeting ground of many nationalities. To its bazaars come traders from China, India, Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Russian Turkestan.1199 The Russian railway up the Sir-daria to Andizhan brings European goods within relatively easy reach of the Terek Davan Pass, and makes serious competition for English wares entering by the more difficult Karakorum Pass from India.1200
Where mountains drop off into a desert, as these Central Asiatic ranges do, their piedmont cities are confined to a narrow zone between mountains and arid waste. Bordering two transit regions of scant population and through travel, they become natural outfitting points, centers of exchange rather than production. Where mountains drop off into the sea and the piedmont therefore becomes a coastal belt, again it borders two transit regions; but here the ports of the desert are replaced by maritime ports, which command the world thoroughfare of the ocean. They therefore tend to concentrate population and commerce wherever a good harbor coincides with the outlet of a transmontane route, as in Genoa and Bombay.
Since mountains are inhospitable to every phase of the historical movement, they long remain regions of retardation. Hence to their bordering plains they sustain the relation of young undeveloped lands, so that life in their piedmont belts tends to show for a long time all the characteristics of a new colonial frontier. The rim of the Southern Appalachians abundantly illustrates this principle even to-day. During the westward expansion of the American people from 1830 to 1850, the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains was dotted with trading posts like that of the Missouri Fur Company at the forks of the Missouri River, Forts Laramie and Platte on the North Fork of the Platte, Vrain's Fort and Fort Lancaster on the South Fork, Bent's Fort at the mountain exit of the Arkansas River, and Barclay's in the high Mora Valley of the upper Canadian. These posts gathered in the rich pelts which formed the one product of this highland area susceptible of bearing the cost of transportation to the far away Missouri River. Though they developed into way-stations on the overland trails, when the movement of population to California and Oregon in the forties and fifties made the Rocky Mountains a typical highland transit region, yet they long remained frontier posts.1201 Later the abundant water supply of this piedmont district, as compared with the arid plains below, and the mineral wealth of the mountains concentrated here an agricultural and industrial population.
In Sze Chuan province of western China, the piedmont of a vast highland hinterland shows a similar development. Here the towns of Matang, Sungpan, Kuan Hsien, and even the capital Chengtu, situated in the high Min Valley at the foot of the mountains walling them in on the west, are emporiums for trade with the Tibetans, who bring hither furs, hides and wool from their plateau pastures, and musk from the musk deer on the Koko Nor plains.1202 Just to the north, Sian (Singan), capital of the highland province of Shensi, concentrates the fur trade of a large mountain wilderness to the west. Several blocks on the main street form a great fur market for the sale of mink and other skins used to line the official robes of mandarins.1203
Like seas, deserts, and other geographical transit regions, mountains too under primitive conditions develop their professional carriers. These collect in the piedmont, where highway and mule train cease, and where the steep track admits only human beasts of burden, trained by their environment to be climbers and packers. These mountain carriers are found on the Pacific face of the coast ranges of North and South America from the peninsula of Alaska to the Straits of Magellan. They are able to pack from 100 to 160 pounds up a steep grade. The Chilkoot Indians, men, women and children, did invaluable service on the White Horse and Chilkoot passes during the early days of the Klondike rush. They had devised a well-arranged harness, which enabled them better to carry their loads. Farther south in British Columbia the piedmont tribes had once a like importance; there they operated especially from the town of Hope on the lower Frazer River as a distributing center. The Mexican carrier is so efficient and so cheap that he enters into serious competition with modern schemes to improve transportation, especially as the rugged relief of this country makes those schemes expensive.1204 The Indians of the eastern slope of the Andes pack India rubber, in loads of 150 pounds each, from the upper Purus and Madeira rivers up to the Andean plateau at a height of 15,000 feet, and there transfer their burdens to mules for transport down to the Peruvian port of Mollendo.1205
The retarded mountain peoples on the borders of the Central Asia plateau employ the same primitive means of transportation. The roads leading from the Sze Chuan province of western China over the mountain ranges to Tibet are traversed by long lines of porters, men, women and children, laden with bales of brick tea,1206 the strongest of them shouldering 350 pounds. The Bhutia coolies of Sikkim act as carriers on military and commercial expeditions on the track across the Himalayas between Darjeeling and Shigatze. Colonel Younghusband found that these Bhutias, who were paid by the job, would carry a pack of 250 to 300 pounds, or three times the usual burden of a Central Asia carrier. Landon cites the case of a Bhutia lady who was said to have carried a piano on her head from the plains up to Darjeeling (7150 feet).1207 In Nepal, women and girls,
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