New England was a land of textile mills powered by water, the South a land of plantations powered by slaves. This division became more pronounced over time as the North invested in new machinery and the South invested in more slavery.

Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.

Anyone who has ever canoed on the upper Missouri River knows what a welcome sight a grove of cottonoods can be. They provide shade, shelter, and fuel. For Indian ponies, they provide food. For the Corps of Discovery, they provided wheels, wagons, and canoes.
Pioneering Lewis and Clark scholar Paul Russell Cutright pays the cottonwoods an appropriate tribute: 'Of all the wetern trees it contributed more to the success of the Expedition than any other. Lewis and Clark were men of great talent and resourcefulness, masters of ingenuity and improvisation. Though we think it probable that they would hae successfully crossed the continent without the cottonwood, don't as us how!

Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.

Add water, and the soil is so fertile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book.

The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf.

Dutch smugglers kept slipping in more slaves from Africa. There were two developments which worried thoughtful men in both Barbados and England: with the slow depletion of the soil, it became more difficult each year to grow the basic crops, tobacco being especially destructive

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

Pommes de Terre”

The plow; the raw September earth; the massive-haunched and mighty-hoofed old bay clomping and farting down the furrow; Father holding the plow, my brother the reins, and me with a sack following, gathering the fruits of the overturned soil – the earth apples…

Richly abundant, brown fat potatoes, thick as stars, appearing like miracles out of the barren, weedy, stony patch, thousands of big hefty solid spuds, bushel after bushel, a hundred bushels per acre, a mass of treasure from the earth…

How our hands and eyes delighted in that harvest, how gladly we dragged our bulging gunnysacks to the wagon…a wagonful of potatoes! Dark, crusted with dirt, soil, earth, cool to the touch, good to eat even raw; we plowed the shabby-looking field and turned up nuggets, plenty, abundance, more than we needed, riches unimagined…

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

Some people grow cotton, while I have a t-shirt farm. The rainy season is when I get the most visitors.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator...

All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.