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 original grants measured generally 766 feet in width and 7,660 in depth inland; but when bequeathed from generation to generation, they were divided up along lines running back at right angles to the all important waterway.  Hence each habitant farm measured its precious river-front by the foot and its depth by the mile, while the cabins were ranged side by side in cosy neighborliness.  The cote type of village, though eminently convenient for the Indian trade, was ill adapted for government and defense against the savages; but the need for the communication supplied by the river was so fundamental, that it nullified all efforts of the authorities to concentrate the colonists in more compact settlements.  Parkman says:  “One could have seen almost every house in Canada by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence and Richelieu."[709] The same type of land-holding can be traced to-day on the Chaudiere River, where the fences run back from the stream like the teeth of a comb.  It is reproduced on a larger scale in the long, narrow counties ranged along the lower