Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/184

 136 one of the earliest settlements of Cossacks and Russian fur traders. From here they spread northward, and founded Surgut, Narim, Beryoza, Obdorsk and Yeniseisk.

But Russian village colonization in these northern latitudes does not extend beyond the banks of the main rivers, for nowhere else are the typical communal colonies of Siberian peasants, who live by fishing, trading and cultivating rye, to be found. On all sides these little colonies are surrounded by a boundless expanse of forest, scrub and swamp, and in the farthest north by the frozen toundras. In these sub-Arctic forests and wastes between latitudes 57 and 62 a sparsely scattered semi-nomadic population of Siberian backwoodsmen live—men who have left their villages on the rivers' banks and gone off pioneering in the wilds alone. The vastness and monotony of the land which surrounds them, and the length and rigour of the winter season, are in striking contrast to the beautiful and fertile black earth steppes and the foothills of the Altai in the south. It is under the former conditions that one sees Siberia in that uninviting aspect which has in the past always figured so largely in the European mind.

The principal and in fact the only other inhabitants of these forests and toundras are the native Finns, who live a nomadic life, fur-hunting, fishing and keeping reindeer. They are the relics of the so-called Ugrian tribes which once covered Siberia and formed no doubt an important element in the Tartar Khanate, which was overthrown by Yermak and his Cossacks. With these natives the Siberian colonies along the rivers have intercourse, trading in fish and