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honey, and wax provided essentials for clothing, food, andlight, as well as the wherewithal for tax payments, raritiesfor the rich and the staples of early Russian exports.Hunter and trader were apt to be one and the same, andoften enough merged into river pirates or mountedbuccaneers. Of necessity the hunting grounds of thelittle companies of trappers were fluctuating and indeterminate,in a vast land with so few inhabitants, independence on wild life migrations and tales of what layuntapped farther afield. The hard struggle to make aliving, cupidity, adventure, pride in skill with trap, net,and bow, with canoe and axe, later the organized plans ofNovgorod merchant-adventurers and Volga princelings—all combined to push the frontier ever onward to theeast and north. To the south it was different. Therethe Tatar peoples of the steppes were strong, and theRussian frontiersman, as we shall see, was for longthrown back on to the defensive; but there eventually,in the sixteenth century, the most famous type of Russianhunter frontiersman was thrown up, the Cossacks.The lumberman, specialized as such on any scale onlywithin the last three centuries, fashioned a pioneerfrontier of his own type. The miners' frontier is stillmore recent, hardly dating on a telling scale frombefore 1700, when Peter the Great created a largely newiron and copper industry, mainly in the Urals, andthrust out in more determined search for gold and silverin Siberia. The lure of gold produced its own varietyof mining frontier with its own special history, but gold,even though Soviet development has made the Unionthe second largest producer in the world after SouthAfrica, has played a less important role than the nonpreciousmetals. From Peter onwards the state, directlyor indirectly, planted mining colonies of serfs or deportees,who made Russia in the eighteenth century the largestEuropean producer of iron ore, and who at one and thesame time tamed the forest both to charcoal and toagriculture and drove another wedge into the life of theBsahkirs and Siberian tribes.Iron in conjunction with coal produced an even greatercolonizing effect when in the later nineteenth century the18