Influences of Geographic Environment Part 22

Similarly Xenophon found that the Armenian side of the River Kentrites, which formed the boundary between the Armenian plains and the highlands of Karduchia, was unpeopled and dest.i.tute of villages for a breadth of fifteen miles, from fear of the marauding Kurds.[346] In the eastern Sudan, especially in that wide territory along the Nile-Congo watershed occupied by the Zandeh, Junker found the frontier wilderness a regular inst.i.tution owing to the exposure of the border districts in the perennial intertribal feuds.[347] The same testimony comes from Barth,[348] Boyd Alexander,[349] Speke,[350] and other explorers in the Sudan and the neighboring parts of equatorial Africa.

[Sidenote: Border wastes of Indian lands.]

The vast and fertile region defined by the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, lay as a debatable border between the Algonquin Indians of the north and the Appalachians of the south. Both claimed it, both used it for hunting, but neither dared dwell therein.[351] Similarly the Cherokees had no definite understanding with their savage neighbors as to the limits of their respective territories The effectiveness of their claim to any particular tract of country usually diminished with every increase of its distance from their villages. The consequence was that a considerable strip of territory between the settlements of two tribes, Cherokees and Creeks for instance, though claimed by both, was practically considered neutral ground and the common hunting ground of both.[352] The Creeks, whose most western villages from 1771 to 1798 were located along the Coosa and upper Alabama rivers,[353] were separated by 300 miles of wilderness from the Chickasaws to the northwest, and by a 150-mile zone from the Choctaws. The most northern Choctaw towns, in turn, lay 160 miles to the south of the Chickasaw nation, whose compact settlements were located on the watershed between the western sources of the Tombigby and the head stream of the Yazoo.[354] The wide intervening zone of forest and canebrake was hunted upon by both nations.[355]

Sometimes the border is preserved as a wilderness by formal agreement. A cla.s.sic example of this case is found in the belt of untenanted land, fifty to ninety kilometers wide, which China and Korea once maintained as their boundary. No settler from either side was allowed to enter, and all travel across the border had to use a single pa.s.sway, where three times annually a market was held.[356] On the Russo-Mongolian border south of Lake Baikal, the town of Kiakhta, which was established in 1688 as an entrepot of trade between the two countries, is occupied in its northern half by Russian factories and in its southern by the Mongolian-Chinese quarters, while between the two is a neutral s.p.a.ce devoted to commerce.[357]

[Sidenote: Alien intrusions into border wastes.]

These border wastes do not always remain empty, however, even when their integrity is respected by the two neighbors whom they serve to divide; alien races often intrude into their unoccupied reaches. The boundary wilderness between the Sudanese states of Wadai and Dar Fur harbors several semi-independent states whose insignificance is a guarantee of their safety from conquest.[358] Similarly in the wide border district between the Creeks on the east and the Choctaws on the west were found typical small, detached tribes--the Chatots and Thomez of forty huts each on the Mobile River, the Tensas tribe with a hundred huts on the Tensas River, and the Mobilians near the confluence of the Tombigby and Alabama.[359] Along the desolate highland separating Norway and Sweden the nomadic Lapps, with their reindeer herds, have penetrated southward to 62 North Lat.i.tude, reinforcing the natural barrier by another barrier of alien race. From this point southward, the coniferous forests begin and continue the border waste in the form of a zone some sixty miles wide; this was unoccupied till about 1600, when into it slowly filtered an immigration of Finns, whose descendants to-day const.i.tute an important part of the still thin population along the frontier to the heights back of Christiania. Only thirty miles from the coast does the border zone between Norway and Sweden, peopled chiefly by intruding foreign stocks, Lapps and Finns, contract and finally merge into the denser Scandinavian settlements.[360]

Where the border waste offers favorable conditions of life and the intruding race has reached a higher status of civilization, it multiplies in this unpeopled tract and soon spreads at the cost of its less advanced neighbors. The old No Man's Land between the Ohio and Tennessee was a line of least resistance for the expanding Colonies, who here poured in a tide of settlement between the northern and southern Indians, just as later other pioneers filtered into the vague border territory of weak tenure between the Choctaws and Creeks, and there on the Tombigby, Mobile and Tensas rivers, formed the nucleus of the State of Alabama.[361]

[Sidenote: Politico-economic significance of the waste boundary.]

This untenanted hem of territory surrounding so many savage and barbarous peoples reflects their superficial and unsystematic utilization of their soil, by reason of which the importance of the land itself and the proportion of population to area are greatly reduced. It is a part of that uneconomic and extravagant use of the land, that appropriation of wide territories by small tribal groups, which characterizes the lower stages of civilization, as opposed to the exploitation of every square foot for the support of a teeming humanity, which marks the most advanced states. Each stage puts its own valuation upon the land according to the return from it which each expects to get. The low valuation is expressed in the border wilderness, by which a third or even a half of the whole area is wasted; and also in the readiness with which savages often sell their best territory for a song.

For the same reason they leave their boundaries undefined; a mile nearer or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within.

Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims which are the abiding source of war. Owing to these overlapping boundaries--border districts claimed but not occupied--the American colonists met with difficulties in their purchase of land from the Indians, often paying twice for the same strip.

[Sidenote: Common boundary districts.]

Even civilized peoples may adopt a waste boundary where the motive for protection is peculiarly strong, as in the half-mile neutral zone of lowland which ties the rock of Gibraltar to Spain. On a spa.r.s.ely populated frontier, where the abundance of land reduces its value, they may throw the boundary into the form of a common district, as in the vast, disputed Oregon country, accepted provisionally as a district of joint occupancy between the United States and Canada from 1818 to 1846, or that wide highland border which Norway so long shared with Russia and Sweden. In South America, where land is abundant and population spa.r.s.e, this common boundary belt is not rare. It suggests a device giving that leeway for expansion desired by all growing states. By the treaty of 1866, the frontier between Chile and Bolivia crossed the Atacama desert at 24 South Lat.i.tude; but the zone between 23 and 25 was left under the common jurisdiction of the two states, for exploitation of the guano deposits and mineral wealth.[362] A common border district on a much larger scale is found between Brazil and the eastern frontier of French Guiana. It includes a belt 185 miles (300 kilometers) wide between the Oyapok and Arawary rivers, and is left as a neutral district till its fate is decided by arbitration.[363] All these instances are only temporary phases in the evolution of a political frontier from wide, neutral border to the mathematically determined boundary line required by modern civilized states.

[Sidenote: Tariff free zones.]

Even when the boundary line has been surveyed and the boundary pillars set up, the frontier is p.r.o.ne to a.s.sert its old zonal nature, simply because it marks the limits of human movements. Rarely, for instance, does a customs boundary coincide with a political frontier, even in the most advanced states of Europe, except on the coasts. The student of Baedecker finds a gap of several miles on the same railroad between the customs frontier of Germany and France, or France and Italy. Where the border district is formed by a high and rugged mountain range, the custom houses recede farther and farther from the common political line upon the ridge, and drop down the slope to convenient points, leaving between them a wide neutral tariff zone, like that in Haute Savoie along the ma.s.sive Mont Blanc Range between France and Italy.

Allied to this phase, yet differing from it, is the "Zona Libre" or Free Zone, 12 miles broad and 1,833 miles long, which forms the northern hem of Mexico from the Gulf to the Pacific. Here foreign goods pay only 18-1/2 per cent., formerly only 2-1/2 per cent., of the usual federal duties. Goods going on into the interior pay the rest of the tariff at the inner margin of the Zone. This arrangement was adopted in 1858 to establish some sort of commercial equilibrium between the Mexican towns of the Rio Grande Valley, which were burdened by excessive taxation on internal trade, and the Texas towns across the river, which at this time enjoyed a specially low tariff. Consequently prices of food and manufactured goods were twice or four times as high on the Mexican as on the American side. The result was persistent smuggling, extensive emigration from the southern to the northern bank, and the commercial decline of the frontier states of Mexico, till the Zona Libre adjusted the commercial discrepancy.[364] Since 1816 a tariff free zone a league wide has formed the border of French Savoy along the Canton and Lake of Geneva, thus uniting this canton by a free pa.s.sway with the Swiss territory at the upper end of the lake.[365]

[Sidenote: Boundary zones of mingled race elements.]

When the political boundary has evolved by a system of contraction out of the wide waste zone to the nicely determined line, that line, nevertheless, is always encased, as it were, in a zone of contact wherein are mingled the elements of either side. The zone includes the peripheries of the two contiguous racial or national bodies, and in it each is modified and a.s.similated to the other. On its edges it is strongly marked by the characteristics of the adjacent sides, but its medial band shows a mingling of the two in ever-varying proportions; it changes from day to day and s.h.i.+fts backward and forward, according as one side or the other exercises in it more potent economic, religious, racial, or political influences.

Its peripheral character comes out strongly in the mingling of contiguous ethnic elements found in every frontier district. Here is that zone of transitional form which we have seen prevails so widely in nature. The northern borderland of the United States is in no small degree Canadian, and the southern is strongly Mexican. In the Rio Grande counties of Texas, Mexicans const.i.tuted in 1890 from 27 to 55 per cent.

of the total population, and they were distributed in considerable numbers also in the second tier of counties. A broad band of French and English Canadians overlaps the northern hem of United States territory from Maine to North Dakota.[366] In the New York and New England counties bordering on the old French province of Quebec, they const.i.tute from 11 to 22 per cent. of the total population, except in two or three western counties of Maine which have evidently been mere pa.s.sways for a tide of _habitants_ moving on to more attractive conditions of life in the counties just to the south.[367] But even these large figures do not adequately represent the British-American element within our boundaries, because they leave out of account the native-born of Canadian parents who have been crossing our borders for over a generation.

[Sidenote: Ethnic border zones in the Alps.]

If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more p.r.o.nounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical with the broad-headed Savoyards.[368] More than this, Provencal French is spoken in the Dora Baltea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the Provencal. More than this, the whole Piedmontese Italian is characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin sounds very much like Provencal.[369] To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch in a broad zone.[370] The traveller in the southern Tyrol becomes accustomed in the natives to the combination of Italian coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form; whereas, if on reaching Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs, folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pa.s.s.[371]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SLAV-GERMAN BOUNDARY IN EUROPE.]

[Sidenote: The Slav-German boundary.]

Where Slavs and Teutons come together in Central Europe, their race border is a zone lying approximately between 14 and 24 degrees East Longitude; it is crossed by alternate peninsulas of predominant Germans and Austrians from the one side, Czechs and Poles from the other, the whole spattered over by a sprinkling of the two elements. Rarely, and then only for short stretches, do political and ethnic boundaries coincide. The northern frontier hem of East Prussia lying between the River Niemen and the political line of demarcation is quite as much Lithuanian as German, while German stock dots the whole surface of the Baltic provinces of Russia as far as St. Petersburg, The eastern rim of the Kaiser's empire as far south as the Carpathians presents a broad band of the Polish race, averaging about fifty kilometers (30 miles) in width, spa.r.s.ely sprinkled with German settlements; these are found farther east also as an ethnic archipelago dotting the wide Slav area of Poland. The enclosed basin of Bohemia, protected on three sides by mountain walls and readily accessible to the Slav stock at the sources of the Vistula, enabled the Czechs to penetrate far westward and there maintain themselves; but in spite of encompa.s.sing mountains, the inner or Bohemian slopes of the Boehmer Wald, Erz, and Sudetes ranges const.i.tute a broad girdle of almost solid German population.[372] In the Austrian provinces of Moravia and Silesia, which form the southeastward continuation of this Slav-German boundary zone, 60 per cent. of the population are Czechs, 33 per cent. are German, and 7 per cent., found in the eastern part of Silesia, are Poles.[373]

An ethnic map of the western Muscovite Empire in Europe shows a marked infiltration into White and Little Russia of West Slavs from Poland, and in the province of Bessarabia alternate areas of Russians and Roumanians. The latter in places form an unbroken ethnic expansion from the home kingdom west of the Pruth, extending in solid bands as far as the Dniester, and throwing out ethnic islands between this stream and the Bug.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF RUSSIA.

MONGOLOID: Kalmucks, Kirghis, Nogai, Tartars, Bashkirs, Voguls, Ostiaks, Samoyedes.

ZIRIAN: Mingled Mongoloid and Finnish.]

[Sidenote: a.s.similation of culture in boundary zones.]

In the northern provinces of Russia, in the broad zone shared by the aboriginal Finns and the later-coming Slavs, Wallace found villages in every stage of Russification. "In one everything seemed thoroughly Finnish; the inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek bones, obliquely set eyes, and a peculiar costume; none of the women and very few of the men could understand Russian and any Russian who visited the place was regarded as a foreigner. In the second, there were already some Russian inhabitants; the others had lost something of their purely Finnish type, many of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke Russian fluently, and a Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a third, the Finnish type was still further weakened; all the men spoke Russian, and nearly all the women understood it; the old male costume had entirely disappeared and the old female was rapidly following it; and intermarriage with the Russian population was no longer rare. In a fourth, intermarriage had almost completely done its work, and the old Finnish element could be detected merely in certain peculiarities of physiognomy and accent." This amalgamation extends to their religions--prayers wholly pagan devoutly uttered under the shadow of a strange cross, next the Finnish G.o.d Yumak sharing honors equally with the Virgin, finally a Christianity pure in doctrine and outward forms except for the survival of old pagan ceremonies in connection with the dead.[374]

At the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, this boundary zone of Russians and Finns meets the borderland of the Asiatic Mongols; and here is found an intermingling of races, languages, religions, and customs scarcely to be equalled elsewhere. Finns are infused with Tartar as well as Russian blood, and Russians show Tartar as well as Finnish traits.

The Bashkirs, who const.i.tute an ethnic peninsula running from the solid Mongolian ma.s.s of Asia, show every type of the mongrel.[375] [See map page 225.]

[Sidenote: Boundary zones of a.s.similation in Asia.]

If we turn to Asia and examine the western race boundary of the expanding Chinese, we find that a wide belt of mingled ethnic elements, hybrid languages, and antagonistic civilizations marks the transition from Chinese to Mongolian and Tibetan areas. The eastern and southern frontiers of Mongolia, formerly marked by the Great Wall, are now difficult to define, owing to the steady encroachment of the agricultural Chinese on the fertile edges of the plateau, where they have converted the best-watered pastures of the Mongols into millet fields and vegetable gardens, leaving for the nomad's herds the more sterile patches between.[376] Every line of least resistance--climatic, industrial, commercial--sees the Chinese widening this transitional zone. He sprinkles his crops over the "Land of Gra.s.s," invades the trade of the caravan towns, sets up his fis.h.i.+ng station on the great northern bend of the Hoangho in the Ordos country, three hundred miles beyond the Wall, to exploit the fis.h.i.+ng neglected by the Mongols.[377] The well-watered regions of the Nan-Shan ranges has enabled him to drive a long, narrow ethnic wedge, represented by the westward projection of Kansu Province between Mongolia and Tibet, into the heart of the Central Plateau. [See map page 103.] Here the nomad Si Fan tribes dwell side by side with Chinese farmers,[378] who themselves show a strong infusion of the Mongolian and Tibetan blood to the north and south, and whose language is a medley of all three tongues.[379]

[Sidenote: Boundary zones of mountain Tibet.]

In easternmost Tibet, in the elevated province of Minjak (2,600 meters or 8,500 feet), M. Hue found in 1846 a great number of Chinese from the neighboring Sze-Chuan and Yun-nan districts keeping shops and following the primary trades and agriculture. The language of the Tibetan natives showed the effect of foreign intercourse; it was not the pure speech of Lha.s.sa, but was closely a.s.similated to the idiom of the neighboring Si Fan speech of Sze-Chuan and contained many Chinese expressions. He found also a modification of manners, customs, and costumes in this peripheral Tibet; the natives showed more of the polish, cunning, and covetousness of the Chinese, less of the rudeness, frankness, and strong religious feeling characteristic of the western plateau man.[380] Just across the political boundary in Chinese territory, the border zone of a.s.similation shows predominance of the Chinese element with a strong Tibetan admixture both in race and civilization.[381] Here Tibetan traders with their yak caravans are met on the roads or encamped in their tents by the hundred about the frontier towns, whither they have brought the wool, sheep, horses, hides and medicinal roots of the rough highland across that "wild borderland which is neither Chinese nor Tibetan." The Chinese population consists of hardy mountaineers, who eat millet and maize instead of rice. The prevailing architecture is Tibetan and the priests on the highways are the red and yellow lamas from the Buddhist monasteries of the plateau. "The Country is a cross between China and Tibet."[382]

Even the high wall of the Himalayas does not suffice to prevent similar exchanges of ethnic elements and culture between southern Tibet and northern India. Lha.s.sa and Giamda harbor many emigrants from the neighboring Himalayan state of Bhutan, allow them to monopolize the metal industry, in which they excel, and to practise undisturbed their Indian form of Buddhism.[383] The southern side of this zone of transition is occupied by a Tibetan stock of people inhabiting the Himalayan frontiers of India and practising the Hindu religion.[384] In the hill country of northern Bengal natives are to be seen with the Chinese queue hanging below a Hindu turban, or wearing the Hindu caste mark on their broad Mongolian faces. With these are mingled genuine Tibetans who have come across the border to work in the tea plantations of this region.[385] [See map page 102.]

[Sidenote: Relation of ethnic and cultural a.s.similation.]

The a.s.similation of culture within a boundary zone is in some respects the result of race amalgamation, as, for instance, in costume, religion, manners and language; but in economic points it is often the result of identical geographic influences to which both races are alike subjected.

For example, scarcity of food on the arid plateau of Central Asia makes the Chinese of western Kansu eat b.u.t.ter and curds as freely as do the pastoral Mongols, though such a diet is obnoxious to the purely agricultural Chinese of the lowlands.[386] The English pioneer in the Trans-Allegheny wilderness shared with the Indians an environment of trackless forests and savage neighbors; he was forced to discard for a time many essentials of civilization, both material and moral. Despite a minimum of race intermixture, the men of the c.u.mberland and Kentucky settlements became a.s.similated to the life of the red man; they borrowed his scalping knife and tomahawk, adopted his method of ambush and extermination in war; like him they lived in great part by the chase, dressed in furs and buckskin, and wore the noiseless moccasin. Here the mere fact of geographical location on a remote frontier, and of almost complete isolation from the centers of English life on the Atlantic slope, and the further fact of persistent contact with a lower status of civilization, resulted in a temporary return to primitive methods of existence, till the settlements secured an increase of population adequate for higher industrial development and for defence.

A race boundary involves almost inevitably a cultural boundary, often, too, a linguistic and religionary, occasionally a political boundary.

The last three are subject to wide fluctuation, frequently overstepping all barriers of race and contrasted civilizations. Though one often accompanies another, it is necessary to distinguish the different kinds of boundaries and to estimate their relative importance in the history of a people or state. We may lay down the rule that the greater, more permanent, and deep-seated the contrasts on the two sides of a border, the greater is its significance; and that, on this basis, boundaries rank in importance, with few exceptions, in the following order: racial, cultural, linguistic, and political. The less marked the contrasts, in general, the more rapid and complete the process of a.s.similation in the belt of borderland.

[Sidenote: The boundary zone in political expansion.]

The significance of the border zone of a.s.similation for political expansion lies in the fact that it prepares the way for the advance of the state boundary from either side; in it the sharp edge of racial and cultural antagonism is removed, or for this antagonism a new affinity may be subst.i.tuted. The zone of American settlement, industry, and commerce which in 1836 projected beyond the political boundary of the Sabine River over the eastern part of Mexican Texas facilitated the later incorporation of the State into the Union, just as a few years earlier the Baton Rouge District of Spanish West Florida had gravitated to the United States by reason of the predominant American element there, and thus extended the boundary of Louisiana to the Pearl River.

When the political boundary of Siberia was fixed at the Amur River, the Muscovite government began extending the border zone of a.s.similation far to the south of that stream by the systematic Russification of Manchuria, with a view to its ultimate annexation. Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine, by reason of their large German population, have been readily incorporated into the German Empire. Only in Lorraine has a considerable French element r.e.t.a.r.ded the process. The considerable sprinkling of Germans over the Baltic provinces of Russia and Poland west of the Vistula, and a certain Teutonic stamp of civilization which these districts have received, would greatly facilitate the eastward extension of the German Empire; while their common religions, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would help obliterate the old political fissure. Thus the borderland of a country, so markedly differentiated from its interior, performs a certain historical function, and becomes, as it were, an organ of the living, growing race or state.

[Sidenote: Tendency toward defection along political frontiers.]

Location on a frontier involves remoteness from the center of national, cultural, and political activities; these reach their greatest intensity in the core of the nation and exercise only an attenuated influence on the far-away borders, unless excellent means of communication keep up a circulation of men, commodities, and ideas between center and periphery.

For the frontier, therefore, the centripetal force is weakened; the centrifugal is strengthened often by the attraction of some neighboring state or tribe, which has established bonds of marriage, trade, and friendly intercourse with the outlying community. Moreover, the mere infusion of foreign blood, customs, and ideas, especially a foreign religion, which is characteristic of a border zone, invades the national solidarity. Hence we find that a tendency to political defection constantly manifests itself along the periphery. A long reach weakens the arm of authority, especially where serious geographical barriers intervene; hence border uprisings are usually successful, at least for a time. When accomplished, they involve that shrinkage of the frontiers which we have found to be the unmistakable symptom of national decline.

This defection shows itself most promptly in conquered border tribes of different blood, who lack the bond of ethnic affinity, and whose remoteness emboldens them to throw off the political yoke. The decay of the Roman Empire, after its last display of energy under Trajan, was registered in the revolt of its peripheral districts beyond the Euphrates, Danube, and Rhine, as also in the rapid Teutonization of eastern Gaul, which here prepared the way for the a.s.sertion of independence. The border satraps of the ancient Persian Empire were constantly revolting, as the history of Asia Minor shows. Aragon, Old Castile, and Portugal were the first kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula to throw off Saracen dominion. Mountain ranges and weary stretches of desert roads enabled the rebellions in Chinese Turkestan and the border districts of Sungaria in 1863 to be maintained for several years.[387]

[Sidenote: Centrifugal forces on the frontier.]

A feeble grasp upon remote peripheral possessions is often further weakened by the resistance of an immigrant population from beyond the boundary, which brings with it new ideas of government. This was the geographical history of the Texan revolt. A location on the far northern outskirts of Mexican territory, some twelve hundred miles from the capital, rendered impossible intelligent government control, the enforcement of the laws, and prompt defence against the Indians.

Remoteness weakened the political cohesion. More than this, the American ethnic boundary lapped far over eastern Texas, forming that border zone of two-fold race which we have come to know. This alien stock, antagonistic to the national ideals emanating from the City of Mexico, dominant over the native population by reason of its intelligence, energy, and wealth, ruptured the feeble political bond and a.s.serted the independence of Texas. Quite similar was the history of the "Independent State of Acre," which in 1899 grew up just within the Bolivian frontier under the leaders.h.i.+p of Brazilian caoutchouc gatherers, resisted the collection of taxes by the Bolivian government, and four years later secured annexation to Brazil.[388]

Even when no alien elements are present to weaken the race bond, if natural barriers intervene to obstruct and r.e.t.a.r.d communications between center and periphery, the frontier community is likely to develop the spirit of defection, especially if its local geographic, and hence social, conditions are markedly different from those of the governing center. This is the explanation of that demand for independent statehood which was rife in our Trans-Allegheny settlements from 1785 to 1795, and of that separatist movement which advocated political alliance with either the British colonies to the north or the Spanish to the west, because these were nearer and offered easier access to the sea. A frontier location and an intervening mountain barrier were important factors in the Whisky Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, just as similar conditions later suggested the secession of the Pacific States from the Union. Disaffection from the government was manifested by the Trek Boers of early South Africa, "especially by those who dwelt in the outlying districts where the Government had exerted and could exert little control." In 1795 the people of Graaf-Reinet, a frontier settlement of that time, revolted against the Dutch South African Company and set up a miniature republic.[389]

[Sidenote: The spirit of colonial frontiers.]