Influences of Geographic Environment Part 23

The spirit of the colonial frontier is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of men who have traveled far, who are surcharged with energy, enterprise and self-reliance, often with impatience of restraint. A severe process of elimination culls out for the frontier a population strikingly differentiated from the citizens of the old inhabited centers. Then remoteness of location and abundance of opportunity proceed to emphasize the qualities which have squeezed through the sieve of natural and social selection. This is the type bred upon our own frontier, which, West beyond West, has crossed the continent from the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific. The Siberian frontier develops much the same type on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire. Here army officers find a compensation for their rough surrounding in the escape from the excessive bureaucracy of the capitals. Here is to be noted the independence, self-reliance and self-respect characteristic of other colonial frontiers. The Russian of the Asiatic border is proud to call himself a Siberian: he is already differentiated in his own consciousness. The force of Moscow tradition and discipline is faint when it reaches him, it has traveled so far. Even the elaborate observances of the orthodox Greek Church tend to become simplified on the frontier. The question naturally arises whether in the Russian Empire, as in the United States, the political periphery will in time, react upon the center, infuse it with the spirit of progress and youth.[390]

[Sidenote: Free border states as political survivals.]

When to a border situation is added a geographic location affording conditions of long-established isolation, this tendency to maintain political autonomy becomes very p.r.o.nounced. This is the explanation of so many frontier mountain states that have retained complete or partial independence, such as Nepal, Bhutan, the Asturias, which successfully withstood Saracen attack, and Montenegro, which has repelled alike Venetian, Servian, and Turkish dominion. Europe especially has numerous examples of these unabsorbed border states, whose independence represents the equilibrium of the conflicting political attractions about them. But all these smallest fragments of political territory have either some commercial or semi-political union with one or another of their neighbors. The little independent princ.i.p.ality of Liechtenstein, wedged in between Switzerland and the Tyrol, is included in the customs union of Austro-Hungary. The small, independent duchy of Luxemburg, which has been attached in turn to all the great states which have grown up along its borders, is included in the _Zollverein_ of Germany. The republic of Andorra, far up in a lofty valley of the Pyrenees, which has maintained its freedom for a thousand years, acknowledges certain rights of suzerainty exercised by France and the Spanish bishopric of Urgel.[391]

[Sidenote: Guardians of the marches.]

Oftentimes a state gains by recognizing this freedom-loving spirit of the frontier, and by turning it to account for national defence along an exposed boundary. In consequence of the long wars between Scotland and England, to the Scotch barons having estates near the Border were given the Wardens.h.i.+ps of the Marches, offices of great power and dignity; and their clans, accustomed only to the imperfect military organization demanded by the irregular but persistent hostilities of the time and place, developed a lawless spirit. Prohibited from agriculture by their exposed location, they left their fields waste, and lived by pillage and cattle-lifting from their English and even their Scotch neighbors. The valor of these southern clans, these "reivers of the Border," was the bulwark of Scotland against the English, but their mutinous spirit resisted the authority of the king and led them often to erect semi-independent princ.i.p.alities.[392]

[Sidenote: Border nomads as frontier police.]

China has fringed her western boundaries with quasi-independent tribes whose autonomy is a.s.sured and whose love of freedom is a guarantee of guerilla warfare against any invader from Central Asia. The Mantze tribes in the mountain borders of Sze-Chuan province have their own rulers and customs, and only pay tribute to China.[393] The highlands of Kansu are sprinkled with such independent tribes. Sometimes a definite bargain is entered into--a self-governing military organization and a yearly sum of money in return for defence of the frontier. The Mongol tribes of the Charkar country or "Borderland" just outside the Great Wall northwest of Pekin const.i.tute a paid army of the Emperor to guard the frontier against the Khalkhas of northern Mongolia, the tribe of Genghis Khan.[394] Similarly, semi-independent military communities for centuries made a continuous line of barriers against the raids of the steppe nomads along the southern and southeastern frontiers of Russia, from the Dnieper to the Ural rivers. There were the "Free Cossacks,"

located on the debatable ground between the fortified frontier of the agricultural steppe and marauding Crimean Tartars. Nominally subjects of the Czar, they obeyed him when it suited them, and on provocation rose in open revolt. The Cossacks of the Dnieper, who to the middle of the seventeenth century formed Poland's border defence against Tartar invasion, were jealous of any interference with their freedom. They lent their services on occasions to the Sultan of Turkey, and even to the Crimean Khan; and finally, in 1681, attached themselves and their territory to Russia.[395] Here speaks that spirit of defection which is the natural product of the remoteness and independence of frontier life.

The Russians also attached to themselves the Kalmucks located between the lower Volga and Don, and used them as a frontier defence against their Tartar and Kirghis neighbors.[396] In this case, as in that of the Cossacks and the Charkars of eastern Mongolia, we have a large body of men living in the same arid gra.s.sland, leading the same pastoral life, and carrying on the same kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders whose pillaging, cattle-lifting raids they aim to suppress. The imperial orders to the Charkars limit them strictly to the life of herdmen, with the purpose of maintaining their mobility and military efficiency. So in olden times, for the Don Cossacks agriculture was prohibited on pain of death, lest they should lose their taste for the live-stock booty of a punitive raid. A still earlier instance of this utilization of border nomads is found in the first century after Christ, when the Romans made the Arabian tribe of Beni Jafre, dwelling on the frontier of Syria, the warders of the eastern marches of the Empire.[397]

[Sidenote: Lawless citizens deported to frontiers.]

The advancing frontier of an expanding people often carries them into a spa.r.s.ely settled country where the unruly members of society can with advantage be utilized as colonists. After centralized and civilized Russia began to encroach with the plow upon the pastures of the steppe Cossacks, and finally suppressed these military republics, the more turbulent and obstinate remnants of them she colonized along the Kuban and Terek rivers, to serve as bulwarks against the incursions of the Caucasus tribes and as the vanguard of the advance southward.[398]

This is one principle underlying the transportation of criminals to the frontier. They serve to hold the new country. There these waste elements of civilization are converted into a useful by-product. They may be only political radicals or religious dissenters: if so, so much the better colonial material. The Russian government formerly transported the rebellious sect of the Molokans or Unitarians to the outskirts of the Empire, where the danger of contagion was reduced. Hence they are to be found to-day scattered in the Volga province of Samara, on the border of the Kirghis steppe, in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Siberia, still faithful and still persecuted.[399] Since 1709 the Russian advance into Siberia has planted its milestones in settlements formed of prisoners of war, political exiles, and worse offenders.[400] Penal colonists located on the sh.o.r.es of Kamchatka helped build and man the crazy boats which set out for Alaska at the end of the eighteenth century. China settles its thieves and cheats among the villages of its own border provinces of Shensi[401] and Kansu; but its worst criminals it transports far away to the Hi country on the western frontier of the Empire, where they have doubtless contributed to the spirit of revolt that has there manifested itself.[402]

[Sidenote: Drift of lawless elements to the frontiers.]

The abundance of opportunity and lack of compet.i.tion in a new frontier community, its remoteness from the center of authority, and its imperfect civil government serve to attract thither the vicious, as well as the st.u.r.dy and enterprising. The society of the early Trans-Allegheny frontier included both elements. The lawless who drifted to the border formed gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and murderers, who called forth from the others the summary methods of lynch law.[403] North Carolina, which in its early history formed the southern frontier of Virginia, swarmed with ruffians who had fled thither to escape imprisonment or hanging, and whose general att.i.tude was to resist all regular authority and especially to pay no taxes.[404] Similarly, that wide belt of mountain forest which forms the waste boundary between Korea and Manchuria is the resort of bandits, who have harried both sides of the border ever since this neutral district was established in the thirteenth century.[405] The frontier communities of the Russian Cossacks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were regular asylums for runaway serfs and peasants who were fleeing from taxation; their hetmans were repeatedly fugitive criminals. The eastern border of Russia formed by the Volga basin in 1775 was described as "an asylum for malcontents and vagabonds of all kinds, ruined n.o.bles, disfrocked monks, military deserters, fugitive serfs, highwaymen, and Volga pirates"--disorderly elements which contributed greatly to the insurrection led by the Ural Cossacks in that year.[406] "The Debatable Land," a tract between the Esk and Sark rivers, formerly claimed by both England and Scotland, was long the haunt of thieves, outlaws and vagabonds, as indeed was the whole Border, subject as it was to the regular jurisdiction of neither side.[407]

[Sidenote: Asylums beyond the border.]

Just beyond the political boundary, where police authority comes to an end and where pursuit is cut short or r.e.t.a.r.ded, the fleeing criminal finds his natural asylum. Hence all border districts tend to harbor undesirable refugees from the other side. Deserters and outlaws from China proper sprinkle the eastern districts of Mongolia.[408] Marauding bands of Apaches and Sioux, after successful depredations on American ranches, for years fled across the line into Mexico and Canada before the hammering hoof-beats of Texas Ranger and United States cavalry, until a treaty with Mexico in 1882, authorizing such armed pursuit to cross the boundary, cut off at least one asylum.[409] Our country exchanges other undesirable citizens with its northern and southern neighbors in cases where no extradition treaty provides for their return; and the borders of the individual states are crossed and recrossed by s.h.i.+fty gentlemen seeking to dodge the arm of the law. The fact that so many State boundaries fall in the Southern Appalachians, where illicit distilling and feud murders provide most of the cases on the docket, has materially r.e.t.a.r.ded the suppression of these crimes by increasing the difficulty both of apprehending the offender and of subpoenaing the reluctant witness.

[Sidenote: Border refugees and ethnic mingling.]

Dissatisfied, oppressed, or persecuted members of a political community are p.r.o.ne to seek an asylum across the nearest border, where happier or freer conditions of life are promised. There they contribute to that mixture of race which characterizes every boundary zone, though as an embittered people they may also help to emphasize any existing political or religious antagonism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was followed by an exodus of Huguenots from France to the Protestant states of Switzerland, the Palatinate of the Rhine, and Holland, as also across the Channel into southern England; just as in recent years the Slav borderland of eastern Germany has received a large immigration of Polish Jews from Russia. When the Polish king in 1571 executed the leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, thousands of these bold borderers left their country and joined the community of the Don; and in 1722 after the Dnieper community had been crushed by Peter the Great, a similar exodus took place across the southern boundary into the Crimea, whereby the Tartar horde was strengthened, just as a few years before, during an unsuccessful revolt of the Don Cossacks, some two thousand of the malcontents crossed the southern frontier to the Kuban River in Circa.s.sia.[410] The establishment of American independence in 1783 saw an exodus of loyalists from the United States into the contiguous districts of Ontario, New Brunswick, and Spanish Florida, Five years later discontent with the Federal Government for its dilatory opposition to the occlusion of the Mississippi and the lure of commercial betterment sent many citizens of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths to the Spanish side of the Mississippi,[411] while the Natchez District on the east bank of the river contained a sprinkling of French who had become dissatisfied with Spanish rule in Louisiana and changed their domicile.

These are some of the movements of individuals and groups which contribute to the blending of races along every frontier, and make of the boundary a variable zone, as opposed to the rigid artificial line in terms of which we speak.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VII

[326] A.W. Greely, Report of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, Vol. I, pp. 28-33, 236. Misc. Doc. No. 393. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1888.

[327] A.P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 123-130.

Translated from the Russian. London, 1899.

[328] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60-62. New York, 1882.

[329] _Ibid._, pp. 146, 161.

[330] Col. F.E. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 194-199.

London, 1904.

[331] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp.

387-389, 426-431, 436-438. London, 1876.

[332] _Ibid._, 409, 424.

[333] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 105-108.

London, 1894.

[334] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp.

313, 321-322. London, 1876.

[335] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, ethnographical map. New York, 1893.

[336] Eleventh Census of the United States, _Population_, Part I., maps on pp. xviii-xxiii.

[337] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 64-68, 77. London, 1905.

[338] Fully treated in E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 22-31. Boston, 1903.

[339] Sir S.W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88, 128-129, 135. Hartford, 1868.

[340] Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 3-4 and map. Christiania, 1900.

[341] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 297. London, 1903.

[342] Caesar, _Bello Gallico_, Book IV, chap. 3 and Book VI, chap. 23.

[343] _Ibid._, Book VI, chap. 10.

[344] T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 56, Note I.

Oxford, 1892.

[345] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. IV, p. 510. New York, 1902-1906.

[346] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IX, chap. 70, pp. 99, 115. New York, 1859.

[347] Dr. Wilhelm Junker, Travels in Africa, pp. 18, 45, 79, 87, 115, 117, 138, 191, 192, 200, 308, 312, 325, 332. Translated from the German.

London, 1892.

[348] H. Barth, Human Society in North Central Africa, _Journal Royal Geographical Society_, Vol. x.x.x, pp. 123-124. London, 1860.

[349] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 163-164.

London, 1907.

[350] John H. Speke, Discovery of the Sources of the Nile, pp. 74, 89, 91, 94, 95, 173, 176-177, 197. New York, 1868.

[351] Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 50, 70, 135. New York, 1895.

[352] C. C. Royce, The Cherokee Nations of Indians, p. 140. _Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1884.