>From: "Jane Williams" <janewilliams20_at_...>
>Rural Britain has villages every 2-3 miles, because pre-car, that was the
>distance that made sense. So why, given similar means of transport, did the
>pioneering Americans want to isolate themselves?
The distance that Rural Britain had for village separation is based, as everywhere else, on what the land will bear, and how many people are trying to live off of it. That is, people will expand to take up all of the arable land in a place first. Following that, it's a question of how many people there are on each parcel of arable land and how much one can use. Given medieval methods in England, you get 2-3 mile village density. Given a very few cattle ranchers spread out to cover the entire American west, it's pretty sparse. Especially with the onset of the industrial revolution where there never was a chance that people would need to have the sorts of rural densities needed to farm all that land. Remember 90% agrarian to 2% agrarian from 1800-1950.
When your cattle ranch is the Ponderosa (which always looked on paper like it was the size of all of Nevada) there's just going to be large distances between you and your neighbor. There have been ranches in the US that were larger about 5000 square miles, which is about one tenth of England proper. When you have 150,000 cattle in your herd, you need that kind of space in the American West. http://www.xitmuseum.com/history.shtml
For the RPG bible on demographics, visit: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm
Overall, from what I've seen and checked, Glorantha is very plausible in terms of population density and such.
Mike
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