that
the migrant trapper was here early converted into the agricultural
settler, his shifting camp fire into the hearthstone of the farmhouse.
Expansion was slow but solid. The relatively small area rendered
accessible by their streams became compactly filled by the swelling tide
of immigrants and the rapid natural increase of population. In sharp
contrast to this development, the long waterway of the St. Lawrence and
the Great Lakes leading to the still vaster river system of the
Mississippi betrayed the fur-trading French into excessive expansion,
and enabled them to appropriate but not to hold a vast extent of
territory. A hundred years after the arrival of Champlain at Montreal,
they were planting their fur stations on Lake Superior and the
Mississippi, 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) back from the coast, at a
time when the English settlements had advanced little beyond tide-water.
And when after 1770 the westward movement swept the backwoodsmen of the
English colonies over the Appalachian barrier to the Ohio, Cumberland
and Tennessee, these long westward flowing streams carried them rapidly
on to the Mississippi, communicated the mobility and restlessness of
their own currents to the eager pioneer, and their capacity to master
great distances; so that in forty short years, by 1810, settlements were
creeping up the western tributaries of the Mississippi. The abundant
water communication in the Mississippi Valley, which even for present
large river craft contains 15,410 miles of navigable streams and which
had therefore a far greater mileage in the day of canoe and flatboat,
afforded outlet for bulky, backwoods produce to the sea at New Orleans.
When the English acquired Canada in 1763, they straightway fell under
the sway of its harsh climate and long river systems, taking up the
life of the fur trader; they followed the now scarcer pelts from the
streams of Superior westward by Lake Winnipeg and along the path of the
Saskatchewan River straight to the foot of the Rockies.

[Sidenote: Siberian rivers and Russian expansion.]

Rivers have played the same part in expediting Russian expansion across
the wide extent of Siberia. Here again a severe climate necessitated
reliance on furs, the chief natural product of the country, as the basis
of trade. These, as the outcome of savage economy, were gathered in from
wide areas which only rivers could open up. Therefore, where the
Siberian streams flatten out their upper cour