od agriculturists, raising a variety of fruits and
vegetables. On the river banks at regular intervals are market greens,
neutral ground, whither people come from up and down stream and from the
interior to trade. Their long riparian villages consist of a single
street, thirty feet wide and often two miles long, on which face perhaps
three hundred long houses,[705] Fisher and canoe people line the Welle,
the great northern tributary of the Congo.[706] The same type appeared
in South America in the aboriginal Caribs and Tupis dwelling along the
southern tributaries of the Amazon and the affluents of the Paraguay.
These were distinctly a water race, having achieved a meager development
only in navigation, fishing and the cultivation of their alluvial
soil.[707] The ancient mound-builders of America located their villages
chiefly, though not exclusively, along the principal watercourses, like
the Mississippi, Illinois, Miami, Wabash, Wisconsin, and Fox,[708] on the
very streams later dotted by the trading posts of the French voyageurs.

[Sidenote: Riparian villages of French Canada.]

The presence of the great waterways of Canada and the demand of the fur
trade for extensive and easy communication made the early French
colonists as distinctly a riverine people as the savage Congo tribes.
Like these, they stretched out their villages in a single line of cabins
and clearings, three or four miles long, facing the river, which was the
King's highway. Such a village was called a _cote_. One cote ran into
the next, for their expansion was always longitudinal, never lateral.
These riparian settlements lined the main watercourses of French Canada,
especially the St. Lawrence, whose shores from Beaupre, fifteen miles
below Quebec, up to Montreal at an early date presented the appearance
of a single street. Along the river passed the stately trading ship from
France with its cargo of wives and merchandise for the colonists, the
pirogue of the _habitant_ farmer carrying his onions and grain to the
Quebec market, the birchbark canoe of the adventurous voyageur bringing
down his winter's hunt of furs from the snow-bound forests of the
interior, and the fleet of Jesuit priests bound to some remote inland
mission.

[Illustration: THE RIPARIAN VILLAGES OF THE LOWER ST. LAWRENCE.]

On this water thoroughfare every dwelling faced. Hence land on the river
was at a premium, while that two miles back was to be had for the
taking. The origin