Drainage divisions

Usage examples of watersheds.

There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing.

But the future battle-fields are perceived to lie toward the sources, at the eaves, as it were, of the watersheds, the headwaters of its tributaries as well as its own.

A watershed is changed, according to that definition, only by an actual elevation or depression of the surface of the earth, whereas a railroad or canal that bridges ravines and tunnels or climbs elevations, or a freight rate that diverts traffic into a new course, as suddenly raises or lowers and as certainly removes watersheds as if mountains were miraculously lifted and carried into the midst of the sea.

The wheel has removed watersheds at pleasure, created cities and fortunes by its presence or its taking thought.

The mountains, once impenetrable barriers that had to be gone about, have been levelled, and in the levelling the watersheds, as we have seen, have been shifted.

America, now of such interest to the people of that other valley, the Mississippi, which was once separated from Canada by no boundaries save watersheds, and these so low that there was reciprocity of their waters.