[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 deg.  North Latitude, 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 constitute 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.