Only where there is an abundance of free land can a people retire as a whole before the onslaught, and maintain their national or racial solidarity.
Thus the Slavs seem largely to have withdrawn before the Germans in the Baltic plains of Europe.

The Indians of North and South America retired westward before the advance of the whites from the Atlantic coast.

The Cherokee nation, who once had a broad belt of country extending from the Tennessee Valley through South Carolina to the ocean,[166] first retracted their frontier to the Appalachian Mountains; in 1816 they were confined to an ever shrinking territory on the middle Tennessee and the southern end of the highlands; in 1818 they began to retire beyond the Mississippi, and in 1828 beyond the western boundary of Arkansas.[167] The story of the Shawnees and Delawares is a replica of this.[168] In the same way Hottentots and Kaffirs in South Africa are withdrawing northward and westward into the desert before the protruding frontier of white settlement, as the Boers before the English treked farther into the veldt.

[See map page 105.] Where the people attacked or displaced is small or a broken remnant, it often takes refuge among a neighboring or kindred tribe.

The small Siouan tribes of the Carolinas, reduced to fragments by repeated Iroquois raids, combined with their Siouan kinsmen the Catawbas, who consequently in 1743 included twenty dialects among their little band.[169] The Iroquoian Tuscaroras of North Carolina, defeated and weakened by the whites in 1711, fled north to the Iroquois of New York, where they formed the Sixth Nation of the Confederation.