s
border of the Sahara, have opened a vast number of artesian wells
through the agency of skillful engineers, and thus created oases in
which the fecund sands support abundant date-palm groves.[1113] The method
pursued energetically by the Russians is to compress the tribes into
ever narrowing limits of territory, taking away their area of plunder
and then so restricting their pasture lands, that they are forced to the
drudgery of irrigation and tillage. In this way the Yomuts and Goklans
occupying the Caspian border of Trans-Caspia have been compelled to
abandon their old marauding, nomadic life and become to some extent
agriculturists.[1114] The method of the Chinese is to push forward the
frontier of agricultural settlement into the grasslands, dislodging the
shepherd tribes into poorer pastures. They have thus reclaimed for grain
and poppy fields considerable parts of the Ordos country in the great
northern bend of the Hoangho, which used to be a nursery for nomadic
invaders. A similar substitution of agriculture for pastoral nomadism of
another type has in recent decades taken place in the semi-arid plains
of the American West. Sheep-grazing on open range was with difficulty
dislodged from the San Joaquin Valley of California by expanding farms
in the sixties. More recently "dry farming" and scientific agriculture
adapted to semi-arid conditions have "pushed the desert off the map" in
Kansas, and advanced the frontier of tillage across the previous domain
of natural pastures to the western border of the state.

Pastoral nomadism has been gradually dislodged from Europe, except in
the salt steppes of the Caspian depression, where a vast tract, 300,000
square miles in area and wholly unfit for agriculture, still harbors a
sparse population of Asiatic Kalmuck and Kirghis hordes, leading the
life of the Asiatic steppes.[1115] In Asia, too, the regions of pastoral
nomadism have been curtailed, but in Africa they still maintain for the
most part the growing, expanding geographical forms which they once
showed in Europe, when nomadism prevailed as far as the Alps and the
Rhine. In Africa shepherd tribes cover not only the natural grasslands,
but lap over into many districts destined by nature for agriculture.
Hence it is safe to predict that a conspicuous part of the future
economic and cultural history of the Dark Continent will consist in the
release of agricultural regions from nomad occupancy and dominion.

[Sidenote