The most common way to see Pueblo Grande is from the air, not because it lies in a remote and inaccessible place, but because it lies near the end of a runway of Sky Harbor International Airport in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona. Thousands of passengers fly directly over it each day without noticing it. The ruins appear directly beneath the airplane almost as soon as the wheels lift off from the pavement at the east end of the runway.

It is easy for a passenger to miss the ruins, since they lack the colorful motion and visual interest of the district surrounding the airport. Due north of Pueblo Grande, the affluent suburb of Scottsdale spreads out beneath the imposing mass of reddish brown Camelback Mountain. To the west the scattered high-rises of downtown Phoenix dot the skyline, and in the south rises the dramatic architecture of Arizona State University at Tempe. The relatively empty and sparse Salt River Indian Reservation fills the airplane window in the northeastern quadrant beside the scar of the dry bed of the Salt River.

All towns seen from the air seem to resemble quilts with their patchwork of blocks, but Phoenix must have the oddest pattern of all, for each patch seems to have been designed and sewn without any knowledge of the others. The squares do not connect with one another; they do not look outward. Each square faces inward on itself as each housing development focuses on its own lake, pool complex, golf course, community center, or shopping area while erecting walls and other barricades to cut it off from the surrounding quadrants. Only the interlocking ribbons of canals sew together this crazy quilt.

The canals, fountains, pools, and ponds make Phoenix into a virtual water city. Nowhere outside of the Netherlands has an urban people built so many canals, and nowhere outside of the Arabian world can one see such a passion for water fountains. If one ignores the desert surrounding this oasis, Phoenix could easily be in the Florida Everglades.

Amid so much theatrical display of water and tropical lushness, one must look hard to see the earth-colored ruins of Pueblo Grande. The eye tends to divert toward the bright green golf courses, the sparkling blue pools of water, the rushing cascades of artificial waterfalls, the soft pastels of the new architecture, the jets of water from fountains so high that they seem to threaten the aircraft. The mud walls of Pueblo Grande are barely visible in the wide, dusty zone where they crouch between the airport and a largely deserted industrial area. Next to the platform mound, the ruins of an ancient ball court look more like a sunken oil or water tank than an ancient sports facility of the Hohokam.

The contrast between modern Phoenix and the ancient, almost hidden ruins of Pueblo Grande seems immense. The ruins seem to have no more connection with the modern city than if the archaeologists had found the fossilized skeleton of some ancient whale or mastodon on this site.

As the airplane rises over the ruins, one notices a curious pattern of dried canals and waterways radiating out from Pueblo Grande. Crisscrossing these ancient canals and sometimes following them are the modern canals that feed the incredible thirst of this desert city. Seen from the air, the Hohokam settlement of Pueblo Grande sits at the hub of Phoenix today because it was the prototype for the modern city. The network of ancient canals also made Pueblo Grande into a water city that otherwise would not have survived long in the incredibly hot and dry area now called the Valley of the Sun.

For more than two thousand years before the first European ever came to America, the Hohokam people around the Salt River irrigated their crops of maize, squash, cotton, chilis, and beans. The land of the Sonoran Desert of Arizona was not a desert because of poor soil but merely because of a lack of water. Sand deserts such as the Sahara do not produce crops even when water is added, because sand, not soil, covers the land. To grow crops in the Sahara, the farmer needs, in addition to water, all the chemicals that good soil provides. But the land around the Salt and Gila rivers of southern Arizona needed only water to make plants thrive in the rich soil.

Scientists still debate the exact date of the arrival of maize in the area. Some evidence indicates that farmers grew maize there as early as 3500 B.C.; other evidence indicates that true domestication began two thousand years later.

No matter when maize arrived, by 300 B.C. we find the first results of this revolutionary food and the novel technology it engendered. The community called Snaketown arose near the Gila River, south of modern Phoenix. This marked the beginning of civilization in the North American Southwest, and we call the people and their culture Hohokam. As with most ancient Americans, we do not know what they called themselves. We call them Hohokam based on the Pima words for “ancient ones,” although the name might be more accurately translated as “all used up.” The Hohokam occupied most of the territory along and between the Salt and Gila rivers in southern Arizona.

Occupation of the Pueblo Grande site began about A.D. 300 and lasted until about 1450. During this time the community may have reached about one thousand inhabitants, but much of the evidence for its true size and history has now been lost beneath the urban growth of the modern city. The community possibly stretched out as far as two miles, but today only this center part remains.

The Hohokam built the most extensive system of canals in North America. A canal is much more than just a ditch. The Hohokam had to build the canals to take advantage of the natural slope of the land and the course of the river. To minimize loss of water into the dry earth of the desert, the Hohokam occasionally lined some sections of their canals with a protective layer of clay, thereby making them watertight.

The Hohokam irrigation system became the magnet that attracted Anglo settlers after they had consumed most of the good farmlands of North America. In 1868 the Swilling Irrigation Canal Company took over the ancient Hohokam irrigation system, cleared the sand-filled canals, and filled them with water again. Colonists fleeing the civil strife of the East and the debilitating Civil War eagerly staked land claims in the newly opened lands of the Arizona desert. Freed slaves and displaced whites from the South found that cotton grew better in Arizona than in the over-farmed and exhausted soils of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

These colonists created a new city near the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers, but even in building their new city, they recognized that they were reviving something far older. The desert settlement was but one more in a long line of civlizations in this place. In recognition of the debt the new settlement owed to the old Hohokam one that came before it, the settlers named their new place Phoenix. Like the mythological bird that was reborn from the ashes of its own burning every five centuries, this settlement rose from the ruins of the ancient Hohokam settlement and canals after five centuries of abandonment.

Like the Mississippian civilization at Cahokia, the southwestern United States produced a civilization based on maize. Starting before the Hohokam and continuing to the present, corn constituted the staple food of the daily diet in the Southwest, as is evident in the corn tortillas, corn tamales, corn soups, corn stews, and in a dozen varieties of baked or grilled cornbreads. The agriculture of modern Arizona grew from Hohokam irrigation systems and Hohokam crops, and today the diet of the people depends heavily on the same staple foods.

This legacy of the Indians in Arizona is shown clearly in places such as Pueblo Grande in the heart of modern Phoenix, but the agricultural debt to the ancient Indians is no greater in Arizona than in other parts of the United States. The difference is that the debt goes unrecognized in most parts of the country, but it remains markedly visible in Arizona, which still uses the same canals to water the same crops.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth survived the winter of 1620-21 in America thanks to the generous help of the Wampanoag, Massachuset, and neighboring Indians who supplied most of the food for the first Thanksgiving feast as well as for subsequent ones. One Wampanoag, who has become known to us as Squanto, taught the Pilgrims so effectively because he spoke fluent English and had already traveled to several European countries after escaping from an English slaver. The Pilgrims arrived not knowing how to speak any of the Indian languages or how to grow European crops, much less American ones. Because the Pilgrims emigrated to America from cities and towns in Europe and not from the countryside, they knew nothing of living in the forest, or of farming. Squanto and other Indians patiently taught them to plant and cultivate Indian corn, pumpkins, beans, and squash.

After helping the Pilgrims start their farms, Squanto died in 1622, as did thousands of his fellow Indians who fell victim to the many fevers and epidemic diseases introduced by the Europeans. When the Indians died from disease or warfare, the Pilgrims took over their neatly prepared fields and storehouses. Even the settlement that we know as Plymouth began as the Wampanoag village of Patuxet before the Pilgrims appropriated it for themselves, taking over the Wampanoag houses, cleared fields, corn bins, and even tools.

After only seven years in America, the Puritans had accumulated enough money to create the Massachusetts Bay Company and buy out the stock of the Plymouth Company, which had financed and owned the Massachusetts settlement. Within another six years the Pilgrim settlers managed to pay off the entire debt of this company through trade with the Indians and their own production of American Indian crops.

Despite hideous crimes against them, the Indians continued to help the newcomers to America. As new waves of settlers washed up on American shores in the decades after the arrival of the Pilgrims, new generations of Indians introduced them to the flora and fauna of America, and taught them how to farm. The American colonial economy, like our modern one, depended on a solid base of American Indian crops. The early settlers exported tobacco, cotton, and corn supplemented by the Indian trade of fur pelts in the northern colonies and deerskins in the southern colonies. Throughout all of this, Indian corn served as the new staff of life for the colonists.

If humans ever invented a miracle food, it must have been corn. All types of corn belong to a single species, Zea mays, but a world of variation exists within that species. Over the last few millennia before the European arrival, the American Indian farmers developed a type of corn for virtually every ecological niche from southern Canada to northern Chile and Argentina. Farmers grew corn in the deserts of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, in the swamps of the southeastern United States and Central America. They grew it high on the slopes of the Andes as well as along the coasts of the Caribbean islands.

Corn was the only staple grown in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and even today it grows in virtually every part of the world where humans can grow crops. Unlike rice, which grows best in tropical climates and is ill-suited to most of North America, and unlike wheat, which grows well in the northern and central parts of the continent but not in the southern and far western parts, corn grows everywhere.

Corn proved higher in nutrition than most other grain crops, and it gave higher yields. Corn syrup is the closest to human glucose of any plant derivative. The uniqueness of corn becomes more apparent when we realize that at the time the Europeans arrived in America, their grain crops usually produced six measures of seed for each measure planted. By contrast, from one kernel of corn, a whole corn plant grew with several ears of corn. This yielded a crop of one hundred fifty measures for each measure planted, making corn thirty times more productive than the traditional grains (Warman). In the best of years, some corn yields reached as high as eight hundred new kernels produced for each kernel planted.

The settlers ate corn chowder, cornbread, corn tortillas, corn tamales, hominy, and grits as well as fresh corn and popped corn. Just as important, they fed corn to chickens, turkeys, and pigs to give American settlers more meat in their diets than their European counterparts enjoyed back in the home country.

Corn became so important as a crop for the early settlers that it substituted for money in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 1630s, when the colony suffered a shortage of silver coins. John Winthrop ordered that Indian corn should “pass in payment of new debts” at a rate of four shillings to the bushel (Hosmer).

The colonists who lived along rivers and coastal areas also exported corn to the Caribbean, where it fed the millions of slaves working in the sugarcane plantations. As long as the European demand for sugar remained high, the Caribbean plantation owners found it more lucrative to devote all their lands to sugarcane cultivation while feeding the slaves on cheaper food imported from the American mainland.

Dependence on corn as a staple food became so great among slaves and poor settlers in the southern United States and the Caribbean that a new disease began to stalk them. The method by which the colonists processed the corn leached out the niacin—vitamin B—and this resulted in the nutritional ailment pellagra, which caused the skin to erupt in hideous sores. If not treated, it also affected the nervous system and led to eventual dementia and death. Even though pellagra became common, especially in the rural South, and lasted until the twentieth century, it occurred only among people of European and African descent, but not among the natives. The native cooking methods, which included adding wood ashes to the food, enhanced niacin in the corn, but the Indians also showed less physiological susceptibility to the disease.

In Europe, people showed little interest in importing American corn, but they developed a voracious appetite for American livestock fattened on that corn. American hams and dried beef, from animals fed on the cheaper produce of America, supplemented the large catches of codfish to help feed an overcrowded and protein-deficient European population.

During the twentieth century, colonial Williamsburg in Virginia was remade into the grand eighteenth-century capital of Virginia through the financial backing of the Rockefeller family and their foundation. The renovators stripped away the modernized additions of nineteenth-century builders and exposed the natural brick stateliness of the United States’ first elegant city. The renovated area of Williamsburg includes the symmetrically perfect buildings of William and Mary College, the old courthouse, the public gaol, several stately offices, the ammunition storehouse, taverns, stores, homes, and the governor’s palace.

The modern tourist attraction of colonial Williamsburg exemplifies the basic, traditional American values of balance, orderliness, simplicity, and ingenuity. The buildings lack fancy decorations, but each one shows precise mathematical symmetry. On the William and Mary campus, the Wren Building, the oldest surviving academic building in the United States, demonstrates this precision in the way it radiates from a large central doorway on the ground floor. A balcony sits directly above the door, on the second floor, and a small cupola with a clock rises directly above the balcony on the roof. To the left and right of this central axis, each floor has six identical windows on each wing. The six windows of the first floor are placed directly beneath those of the third floor, and those of the roof are directly above the six of the basement. The chimneys stand like precise and even-numbered sentinels jutting from the roof of both wings.

On the Wren Building, only the weathervane rotates, of necessity, in an asymmetrical manner, with one side protruding more than the other. Perched atop the cupola, the moving weathervane only emphasizes the otherwise exact symmetry of the building.

The modern renovators of Williamsburg shaped the land outside the buildings to emphasize the precision that made Williamsburg the first “planned community” in America. Picket fences, brick walls, and split-rail fences neatly cordon off the various strips of property from one another, according to function and ownership. The barriers carefully separate each domestic complex with its concomitant outbuildings for kitchens, dairies, springs, smokehouses, and toilets from each other one.

Walking through Williamsburg, one half expects at any moment to round a corner and trip over the string of Benjamin Franklin’s kite, or maybe even the fallen cherry tree of George Washington. This is America as we all remember it from some mythic images we learned even as we grew up in a world filled with automobiles, urban blight, suburban sprawl, drug addiction, vacant lots, and television chatter. No matter how we live today, this is the way life is supposed to be, and the way it supposedly once operated in America.

The simple symmetry of Williamsburg is matched by the cleverness of it all. Each of the small gates in the picket fences has a metal chain from which hangs an iron ball that weighs down the chain and thus automatically pulls the gate shut each time it is opened. Visiting parents stand around the gates and marvel while pointing and gesturing to impress on their bored children the finer points of such sound, all-American engineering. Any modern American can easily see in the gate the cultural predecessor of the automatically opening and closing garage door or the electronic doors in the suburban supermarket, but the achievement of the colonials is all the more remarkable because they did it without electricity.

Proof of the mechanical cleverness of our ancestors abounds in Williamsburg. The clocks and weathervanes stand out dramatically on public buildings, and large locks with gigantic keys seem to be the aesthetic and technological focus of each home. Large chimneys dominate each building. Behind the scenes, one can see glassmaking, leatherworking, printing, dairying, metalworking, the smoking of foods, and the weaving of Christmas wreaths from local flora. It’s a busy little place. Even Santa’s elves could not be expected to work any harder than the colonists of Williamsburg or the college kids who portray them today for visitors.

Colonial Williamsburg contrasts starkly with the reconstructed settlement of Jamestown, only a short drive away on the banks of the James River. At first glance, Jamestown resembles the Indian villages depicted in early etchings and engraved prints made by travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It looks like a summer camp for scouts. The rustic buildings, made of wood, bark, and thatch, appear to be simple, almost playful, adaptations of Indian designs and the natural resources of the Virginia coast. Walking among the small buildings in the fortress today, one almost expects a camp counselor to step out, blow a whistle, and have hundreds of screaming kids pour out of the rustic but cute buildings.

Whereas Jamestown is small, jumbled, and built of wood, Williamsburg is large, expansive, and made of brick. The reconstructed Jamestown and the reconstructed Williamsburg belong to totally different worlds, but the grandeur of Williamsburg arose within a mere century of the founding of Jamestown.

Viewing Williamsburg today, it is easy to imagine how the colonists turned a simple, almost Indian-style camp into a grand city. It must have been through the clever industriousness of the people in making their clocks, weathervanes, automatically closing gates, printing presses, butter molds, cookie presses, and tin lanterns. This is a view of American history that suits us very well: our European ancestors arrived in nothingness and, through diligence and their natural cleverness, made a beautiful city.

The cleverness and the stately buildings of Williamsburg resulted from American prosperity, but they did not create that prosperity. The reason that Williamsburg rose within a century of the founding of simple Jamestown has nothing to do with closing gates, weathervanes, brickmaking, and all the other clever technology displayed there. All of this prosperity came from the highly profitable sales of one single Indian crop—tobacco. Because of tobacco, Jamestown turned into Williamsburg and made Virginia into an aristocratic state that some Virginia patriots pretentiously called the “fifth crown” of the British monarchy, following the other kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Without tobacco or some comparable crop, Virginia would have fared little better than the other American colonies of Great Britain in Guyana, Jamaica, and Belize.

Tobacco grows in almost as many diverse environments as does corn. Indians cultivated it throughout North and South America, but it seems to grow best around the Caribbean and adjacent mainland areas, including the fields of southeastern North America. Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas became virtual “tobacco colonies” devoted to this monoculture.

After experimenting with several potential cash crops, the Virginia colonists eventually concentrated on Indian tobacco as the source of the highest profits from their fields. Throughout the seventeenth century, tobacco in Europe graduated from the status of an occasional fumigant and medicinal drug (used, among other things, as a treatment for pellagra) to become a common and habitual social vice.

Tradition maintains that John Rolfe played the crucial role in turning tobacco cultivation into a mercantile endeavor by Englishmen in America. Rolfe arrived in Jamestown in May of 1610, after nine months shipwrecked in Bermuda. While trapped in Bermuda, his wife, whose name we do not know, gave birth to a daughter whom they named Bermuda, but who soon died. The ordeal of Rolfe and the other emigrants on the ship, aptly named the Sea Adventure, became the kernel around which Shakespeare wrote his play The Tempest.

Safely rescued from Bermuda, Rolfe settled in Jamestown, in a home much like those primitive structures still visible there for modern tourists. In Virginia, Rolfe returned to his habit of pipe-smoking, something he had not been able to do while stranded in Bermuda. Rolfe tried the tobacco grown by the Indians of the area, but did not like the native Virginia tobacco. The Indians grew a very strong tobacco, Nicotiana rustica, which they used primarily for ceremonial occasions. It had much too powerful a bite for the Englishmen, who wanted to smoke it frequently after a good meal, while playing cards, with a pint of ale, or at other relaxing times in the daily routine. The milder Nicotiana tabacum grown by the Caribbean Indians and sold by the Spaniards suited the tastes of Englishmen much better than the native Virginia varieties.

Rolfe acquired some of the seeds of the tobacco grown by the Caribbean Indians, probably from Trinidad, and planted them in Jamestown by the year 1612. Soon thereafter he exported the first small shipment of the leaf to England. During the time when Rolfe was experimenting with the new tobacco crop, his English wife died. In April 1614, Rolfe married Chief Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, whose name became much more famous than his own.

In the long process of turning tobacco into a large-scale commercial crop, Rolfe and the other tobacco colonists adopted agricultural and technological procedures from the Indians. Eventually the colonists standardized a procedure of planting the seeds in beds where they could be carefully nursed and tended until the plants became large enough for transplanting into fields. As the plants matured, the farmers learned to remove the buds and break off the smaller suckers that grew on the stem, in order to produce larger, more flavorful leaves.

The farmers found the picking of the large, moist tobacco leaves a messy procedure because the thick, gummy sap of the plant stuck to everything it touched, including human skin. After only a few minutes working in the fields, sap usually covered the pickers’ arms and heads, matting down the hair and trapping small insects attracted to the smell of the plant. After this difficult process of picking the leaves, they must be dried either in the sun or with fire.

The Indians traditionally pulled the whole tobacco plant out of the ground and dried the stalk and leaves together in order to avoid the stickier process of picking individual leaves. Initially the colonists followed the traditional Indian way of hanging entire plants up to dry, or of stacking them into piles in the sun, but Rolfe and the Englishmen found that with their large fields of tobacco, the drying of whole plants required too much space. Despite the mess involved, the colonists had to pick the leaves from the stalk and dry only the part that they would ultimately be able to sell.

Each of these stages in the procedure of growing and preparing tobacco for shipment required many trials and much experimentation with Indian cultivation and technology before the colonists found the right procedure for mass production. The final tobacco culture combined traditional aspects of both native American and European knowledge with some innovations developed in Virginia and neighboring tobacco colonies.

The Indians used tobacco in many ways other than smoking it, such as drinking it mixed into an herbal tea, or snorting its fumes. The Europeans tried all of these methods, but showed a marked preference for smoking the tobacco in pipes of the same type as those used by the natives. The natives of Virginia produced a variety of clay, bone, wooden, and stone pipes over many centuries before the colonists arrived. They manufactured them with straight and curved stems, and stems angled from the bowl. After the great success of the tobacco crop in Virginia, craftsmen did not want to waste time making pipes. They either bought them from the Indians or imported the lighter, polished pipes made in England.

By 1616, within a decade of their arrival in America, the Virginians exported over a ton of tobacco to Britain. Within seventy-five years, by 1689, this increased to more than seven thousand tons (Hamilton). By the time of the American Revolution, tobacco accounted for approximately a sixth of the combined exports of all thirteen colonies (Hobhouse).

Tobacco cultivation spread from Virginia south into the Carolinas and north around the Chesapeake Bay into what became Maryland and Delaware. The Chesapeake soon became famous throughout Europe as the source of the world’s best tobacco. Farmers of the area specialized in two mild types of Nicotiana tabacum, known as Orinoco (named for the South American river where it originated) and Sweet-Scented.

With the development of the slavery-based plantation system to cultivate tobacco, a new social form was created and imposed on North America. Modeled after the Caribbean sugarcane plantations, which themselves derived from the ancient Roman latifundia, the newly created tobacco plantations of North America relied heavily on forced labor. This slavery system spread precisely to those places where tobacco grew best. The northern edge of the tobacco country ran roughly along the northern boundary of modern Maryland, and that became the Mason-Dixon Line, the traditional division between the slave states and the free states.

Farmers managed to grow commercial tobacco crops in only a few places outside of the South. Farmers in the Connecticut River valley planted tobacco, but their short growing season confined the practice to an area circumscribed by the river valley stretching in a small band from Connecticut through Massachusetts to the Vermont and New Hampshire border. This area produced a small amount of high-quality tobacco important in the manufacture of snuff and later of wrapping leaves for cigars. Because of the limited scale of production in this area, small farmers could handle the requisite work without resorting to slaves.

The French planted tobacco along the lower Mississippi River in their colony of Louisiana. Despite the changing ownership of this land among Spain, France, and Britain, it produced a half-million pounds of tobacco a year by the 1780s. The American colonists on the Atlantic pushed westward toward the Mississippi River, and planted tobacco throughout the intervening states of Kentucky and Tennessee, then crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas and Missouri.

Unfortunately for the North American colonists, tobacco grows easily in many different climates; so the colonists could not maintain a monopoly on it. Tobacco cultivation followed fairly closely behind the introduction of tobacco use across the Old World. Soon the farmers of Turkey, of the Ottoman holdings in southern Europe, and of Italy all had tobacco farms. African and Asian farmers quickly followed, producing enough tobacco to meet their local demand and to export some of their crop to Europe in competition with the American farmers. As the European powers colonized more of Africa and Asia, they imported their tobacco from their own colonies and not from the newly independent United States.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, revenues from tobacco declined in the United States, but late in the century, the invention of the automatic cigarette-making machine temporarily revitalized tobacco cultivation in the United States and created a whole new industrial sector for the tobacco belt. North America has continued to be a major exporter of tobacco, but during the twentieth century, China became the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco.

Natchez, Mississippi, is an odd little town that flourished for one brief moment of intense excitement just before the American Civil War, and since then nothing else has happened beyond the level of local gossip and an occasional murder. Natchez squats comfortably beside the Mississippi River in the land of catfish and beauty queens, a land of strong flavors and exaggerated gestures, where iced tea comes sweetened, sauces come peppered, and English or French words have extra vowels and missing consonants.

With such a large expanse of flat, rich land beside a gigantic river, this has always been the scene for dramas larger than life. In the nineteenth century, gangs of hundreds of brightly clothed slaves with cotton bags slung over their shoulders worked the fields in unison and retreated at the end of the day to plantation towns of thousands. The magnificent wealth of the planters in their grandiose houses contrasted dramatically with the shacks and unrivaled poverty of the blacks, the poorest people in America, even after they ceased being slaves. Such scenes of incredible excess and massive buildings amid unspeakable horror and suffering have long elicited the creativity of painters, film-makers, and writers of novels in which the characters never quite measure up to the scale of the bizarre social system and historical circumstances in which they thrived.

The rich black soils that washed downriver for millennia from the Dakotas, Iowa, and Minnesota had been deposited along the lower Mississippi River, and this land proved the best in America for the cultivation of cotton. In the late eighteenth century, when the industrial mills of England began to gobble up all the cotton British merchants could find, they developed a special appreciation for the soft, long strands of Mississippi delta cotton. Natchez served as the port connecting the delta cotton planters with the British textile manufacturers.

This brief boom ended with the Civil War. When the United States Navy successfully blockaded Southern ports, the Khedive Ismail of Egypt cleverly seized the opportunity to plant the rich Nile delta with the best American cottons. The Nile delta, covered with the rich earth washed down from Ethiopia and Uganda, proved just as fertile and hospitable to cotton as the Mississippi delta. The British manufacturers eagerly switched to this new supplier located closer to their ports and offering cheaper agricultural labor in a more politically tranquil country.

The American South languished as a backwater for the next century. While other parts of the South eventually found new crops and new ways to make money, Natchez clung tenaciously to the few trappings of a former boomtown. The rich merchants moved away, thus deserting their ostentatious houses built in those few short decades when money flowed so bountifully.

Every boomtown I have visited throughout the world displayed the same set of houses, no matter whether the place happened to be a rubber town in the Amazon jungle, an oil town in the Arabian desert, a henequen-fiber town in the Yucatàn, a spice town in Zanzibar, or a cocaine town in the Andean mountains. The newly enriched merchants built homes that mimicked the palaces of Europe, and each newly rich planter or merchant tried to outdo the last one with an even more ostentatious building. They constructed Italian villas with imported marble, Tudor country homes with paneling ripped from real homes in England, French chateaux with crests carved into the stone archways, Moorish palaces with ornate fountains, and German castles copied directly from the drawings in Grimm’s fairy tales. A few merchants have even sought to imitate some famous building and have erected a miniature Versailles, an oversized Mount Vernon, or a replica of the Taj Mahal. The buildings stand not as mere homes but as loud proclamations of wealth.

Once the architects of the boomtown have exhausted the stereotyped set of European building clichés, they reach for fantasy designs, often called “Oriental villas,” which throw together motifs from ancient Constantinople, India, China, and the Arabian tales. One of Natchez’s most unusual structures from the antebellum period, Longwood House, is an octagonal pagoda topped with a Muslim dome and trimmed in Victorian Italianate porches. The unfinished house now admits the public, and its tourist brochures proclaim it a “monument to the heart-rending break [sic] of the War of Southern Rebellion.”

Dozens of such homes line the banks of the Mississippi around Natchez. Just as, a century and a half ago, each house screamed for attention to the dollars that went into building it, so today each house screams out through the advertisements around town, on billboards and in the local newspaper, for the tourist dollar to maintain it and to validate it as a building worthy of attention, even though nothing of historical importance ever happened there.

To support the cast of historical characters, the whole town devotes itself to an antebellum charade of affluence and refinement, a veritable amusement-park luxury. The town survives by entertaining factory workers from the North and by admitting the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers into its fancy rooms to eat and sleep and savor a life that existed more in Hollywood films than in historical reality. Natchez offers Americans that forbidden pleasure of pretending to be aristocratic, nonegalitarian, and gloriously rich. It survives as a place that elicits both derisive scorn and tremendous lust. It is a place of aristocratic paste and pretense.

Natchez illustrates how quickly and permanently the demand for native American crops such as cotton can transform a landscape. The demand for American products—tobacco and cotton from North America, henequen from Mexico, rubber from the Amazon, and coca from the Andes—traditionally arose in tidal waves that brought fast but temporary riches before crashing just as quickly as they arose. They left behind boomtowns, but they also created substantial wealth that helped to finance other commercial enterprises. The modern town of Natchez may be a moribund monument, but the entire economy of the modern South survives as a living and prospering descendent of the wealth that cotton produced.

Cotton failed to surpass tobacco cultivation in the United States until sometime in the 1820s. Prior to that time, cotton came mostly from the small holdings of white families who owned and worked their own subsistence farms, with cotton supplying a modest amount of cash. Not a single cotton plantation existed as late as the year 1800, but following the mechanization of the ginning process, cotton changed from a small-farm product into a plantation crop produced by slaves.

The plantation owners of the southern fringe of the tobacco belt found that in addition to growing good tobacco, their land could produce the best cotton in the world. South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi quickly abandoned tobacco for cotton, which also grew in areas such as Georgia and Alabama, where tobacco had never been very successfully grown.

In 1820 the United States produced about 400,000 bales of cotton, or about 200 million pounds. By 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, this had increased to 4 million bales or about 2 billion pounds of cotton, with a value of nearly $200 million. During this time of expansion, African slaves brought approximately 10 million acres of the American South into cultivation for their plantation owners. Cotton exceeded the combined total of all other American exports, including agricultural, manufactured, and natural resources (Hobhouse).

At the beginning of the Civil War, nearly a thousand mills in the Northern states produced $55 million in cotton products, a massive sum in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these Northern mills could only consume a quarter of the Southern cotton crop. Another 11 percent of the crop went to French mills, and the remaining 60 percent went to English mills. Cotton ranked as the most valuable export on the world market, and approximately 80 percent of the world’s cotton exports grew in the United States (Hobhouse).

From South Carolina straight across the lands of the Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw to Texas, the plantations took over the Indian farms and made them into a single, almost uninterrupted cotton field. Because the planters took the lands from the Indians by trickery when possible and by force when necessary, the land remained cheap. The planters then used it like a disposable resource rather than a renewable one.

As soon as the land wore out, usually within a decade or so, the planters moved their slaves and equipment farther west, into new Indian lands. The planters quickly depleted the soils of South Carolina and Georgia, forcing their children to move on to new plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. In the southeastern United States, only the coastal plantations of the exceptionally fertile Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina continued to produce high profits from cotton.

The planters acquired land more easily than they acquired slaves, who could no longer be legally imported into America after 1808, in accordance with the United States Constitution. With the shortage of field hands, South Carolina and Georgia became breeding grounds for slaves to supply the insatiable labor appetites of the new plantations farther west (Hobhouse). The number of slaves in the United States grew from less than a million at the time of American independence from Britain to 4 million at the time of the Civil War, less than a century later. The Southern states probably had more money invested in slaves than in all their land combined.

The United States supplied seven-eighths of Britain’s cotton before the Civil War (Hamilton). The cotton from Natchez was shipped down to New Orleans and across the ocean to the textile mills of Britain. Britain became the world’s greatest producer of textiles, and had such close ties to the Southern states that the Southerners hoped for British intervention in the Civil War. Had the Confederate States of America become truly independent of the Washington government, it would most certainly have become an economic if not a political colony of Great Britain.

Rather than becoming an economic colony of Britain, the Southern states of the United States became an economic colony of the Northern states, which could monopolize Southern cotton for their own burgeoning textile industry. By 1872 the Southern states were producing as much cotton as they had before the Civil War. The new cotton came from a reorganized agricultural system of sharecropping, which replaced the slave labor of the plantations. The sharecroppers included poor laborers, many of whom were freed slaves, but the majority of whom were poor and landless whites.

In the post-Civil War era, the revenues for cotton came not merely from the fiber itself but from newly developed uses for the by-products, which exceeded the value of the raw fiber in some years. Each bale of cotton weighed about five hundred pounds, but the ginning also produced massive quantities of seed and other by-products. The oil from the seed went into industrial processing for making soap, lamp oil, and edible oil. The cotton meal or “cake” remaining after the extraction of oil could be used as fuel, as fertilizer to restore nitrogen to the soil, or as animal feed (Hobhouse).

Today, dinosaurs of farm machinery menacingly prowl the fields and backroads across the Mississippi delta. Mile-long mobile irrigation pipes look like serpents slithering across the fields on wheels, slowly watering the sun-blistered land. Cotton pickers, like green monsters as tall as telephone poles and wider than the length of a bus, stalk the cotton fields, whose length must be measured in miles. The great machines swallow rows of cotton faster than the largest slave gang with the fiercest slave drivers. After devouring the white cotton bolls, the behemoths disgorge them into large containers so that another long-armed machine can push and pack them like the arms of a gigantic spider wrapping its prey in silk. These gigantic cotton bales hold tons of cotton and can accommodate the equivalent of dozens of the old cotton bales that used to be taken down to the levy for shipment.

Today these gigantic bales travel in sixteen-wheel trucks that have replaced the farm pickup. The trucks prowl the backcountry roads that were not made for vehicles so large or heavy. When it rains, the trucks stick in the mud of the soft shoulders along the road, and bog down in the muddy fields and slide into the ditches that drain them. Their engines groan and their wheels squeal uselessly as they spray mud all around and strain to free themselves from the great bogs like dinosaurs trapped in a tar pit.

Dotted across the landscape, large cotton gins rise up like tin mountains. Laid out in neat rows in front of them, beneath plastic sheets to protect them from the rains, the gigantic cotton bales wait to be ginned. Like huge larvae individually wrapped and lined up, they sometimes stretch for miles and will one day make thousands of miles of cloth.

In the late summer and early autumn, the plains of the delta seem as white as the plains of Manitoba in January. Anyone who has seen the delta during cotton time understands the constant allusion of the Confederate poet laureate William Gilmore Simms to “the southern snows of summer”—an almost frightening whiteness. The white cotton covers the fields and litters the sides of the highway, obscuring even the grass. Road signs and the limbs of trees snag tufts of cotton from the air, creating the illusion of an ice storm. The only relief from the whiteness comes in an occasional line of laundry hung out to flap in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags strung over a glacial pass.

Natchez no longer enjoys the great wealth it once did, and the plantation system has gone with the wind, but cotton remains. It continues as one of the most important of the United States’ agricultural crops, although not nearly as lucrative a crop as it once was.

Nowhere does North America’s abiding agricultural debt to the Indians appear more clearly than at the state fair. This celebration starts in August in the far northern states and drifts south until the start of Christmas season. Farmers and politicians nudge their way through machinery exhibits and civic displays to see the best of the nation’s agriculture, machinery, and youth. Housewives bring out their best blueberry pies, pickled tomatoes, and dahlia arrangements. A visitor can see things at the fair that never seem to appear anywhere else in America: a pumpkin the size of a Japanese car; the crop-art portraits of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King made of sunflower and cotton seeds; thumbnail-sized doughnuts and lifesize sculptures of the Dairy Princesses cut from hundred-pound blocks of yellow butter.

On display at the fair are some of the crops the settlers brought to America from Africa, Asia, and Europe. These include wheat, oats, cabbage, turnips, rice, citrus fruits, apples, and almost all of the farm animals.

The great majority of crops exhibited and eaten at the fair came originally from American Indian agriculture. The native crops include tomatoes and potatoes; all the squashes and pumpkins; almost all the kinds of beans; peanuts, pecans, hickory nuts, black walnuts, sunflower seeds, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, maple syrup, and Jerusalem artichokes; all the peppers, prickly pears, chocolate, vanilla, allspice, sassafras, avocados, wild rice, and sweet potatoes. In the four hundred years since the European settlers began coming to North America, they have not found a single America plant suitable for domestication that the Indians had not already cultivated.

By the last decade of the twentieth century, crops of Indian origin constituted approximately one-third of the annual harvest of the United States. Corn alone accounted for nearly 15 percent of the cash receipts from all crops. According to USDA figures published in 1989, in addition to corn, cotton, and tobacco, the American Indian crops of potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts each had cash sales in excess of a billion dollars, with sunflower seeds closely trailing them. American Indian crops formed the basis on which the powerful agricultural economies of the United States and Canada developed and matured.

In contrast to the important role played by American Indian crops, animals domesticated by the Indians had a less impressive role in either the international or local markets. The greatest impact came from the turkey, which is still growing in importance within the United States. Following the decline in tobacco cultivation, North Carolina, which once led the nation in tobacco acreage, became the leading producer of turkeys in the United States in 1990, followed closely by Minnesota. Turkey sales grew to a little more than 2 percent of total U.S. livestock and poultry sales in the early 1990s.

Even today, when the United States suffers under an astronomical trade imbalance, crops of Indian origin still supply some of our most desired exports. While we consume a seemingly endless flow of European and Asian automobiles, textiles, and electronic geegaws, the world is not buying our industrial products in return. Foreign markets want our farm produce and its by-products: corn, corn oil, corn syrup, cotton, cotton oil, cottonseed, sunflower seeds and oil, tobacco, potatoes, peanuts, and dozens of other crops given to us by the American Indians.