HISTORY AND RIVERS 353 



historic time has built a delta more than 14 miles beyond 

 Adria, a former port which gave its name to the Adriatic 

 Sea. 



163. History and Rivers. From earliest times rivers have 

 played a most important part in the world's history. At 

 first almost all human movement was along river valleys, 

 as they offered the easiest route of travel. Here, too, men 

 found the fertile and easily worked land so necessary in 

 their primitive agriculture. Thus their settlements were 

 usually placed upon the banks of rivers. In war the 

 river offered a means of defense, as the Tiber so often did 

 to Rome. 



Before the time of railways, rivers and lakes supplied 

 almost the only means of inland commerce. In our own 

 country the hundred and fifty miles of unobstructed river- 

 way stretching from New York to the north was the great 

 road from Canada and the Lakes to the sea, fought for 

 persistently in French and Indian Wars as well as in the 

 Revolution. If in the Revolution the British could have 

 obtained control of the Hudson, they would have effectu- 

 ally separated the colonists in the north from those in the 

 south and would probably have been able to crush each 

 separately. 



The Mississippi River served for years as the only artery 

 of transportation from the interior of the country to the 

 sea. When Spain held the mouth of this river and Con- 

 gress was unable or unwilling to exert itself to obtain 

 the privilege for American boats to pass to the sea, it 

 seemed for a time that the sturdy colonists along the Ohio 

 and Mississippi would either form an independent country 

 and fight for the privilege or else in some way ally them- 

 selves with Spain, so vital to them was the need of this 

 waterway. In the Civil War vast amounts of blood and 

 treasure were spent in fighting for the control of this river. 



