The steppe or desert policy for the curtailment of nomadism, and the reclamation of both land and people is to encourage or enforce sedentary life.  The French, to settle the wandering tribes on the Atlas border of the Sahara, have opened a vast number of artesian wells through the agency of skillful engineers, and thus created oases in which the fecund sands support abundant date-palm groves.[1113] The method pursued energetically by the Russians is to compress the tribes into ever narrowing limits of territory, taking away their area of plunder and then so restricting their pasture lands, that they are forced to the drudgery of irrigation and tillage.  In this way the Yomuts and Goklans occupying the Caspian border of Trans-Caspia have been compelled to abandon their old marauding, nomadic life and become to some extent agriculturists.[1114] The method of the Chinese is to push forward the frontier of agricultural settlement into the grasslands, dislodging the shepherd tribes into poorer pastures.  They have thus reclaimed for grain and poppy fields considerable parts of the Ordos country in the great northern bend of the Hoangho, which used to be a nursery for nomadic invaders.  A similar substitution of agriculture for pastoral nomadism of another type has in recent decades taken place in the semi-arid plains of the American West.  Sheep-grazing on open range was with difficulty dislodged from the San Joaquin Valley of California by expanding farms in the sixties.  More recently “dry farming” and scientific agriculture adapted to semi-arid conditions have “pushed the desert off the map” in Kansas, and advanced the frontier of tillage across the previous domain of natural pastures to the western border of the state.

Pastoral nomadism has been gradually dislodged from Europe, except in the salt steppes of the Caspian depression, where a vast tract, 300,000 square miles in area and wholly unfit for agriculture, still harbors a sparse population of Asiatic Kalmuck and Kirghis hordes, leading the life of the Asiatic steppes.[1115] In Asia, too, the regions of pastoral nomadism have been curtailed, but in Africa they still maintain for the most part the growing, expanding geographical forms which they once showed in Europe, when nomadism prevailed as far as the Alps and the Rhine.  In Africa shepherd tribes cover not only the natural grasslands, but lap over into many districts destined by nature for agriculture.  Hence it is safe to predict that a conspicuous part of the future economic and cultural history of the Dark Continent will consist in the release of agricultural regions from nomad occupancy and dominion.

[Sidenote:  Supplementary agriculture of pastoral nomads.]