and government parks and attractions. Many others doubtlessly dis-
appeared into nature, their rotted wood feeding and hastening inevitable
encroachment. Countless other native settlements and burial sites were
obliterated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by farmers cre-
ating and leveling fields, and by road builders. Other towns became the
foundations of successor Euro-southern settlements for the most practi-
cal of reasons. Native southerners, after all, had located towns with the
same instrumental sensibilities demonstrated by Europeans, Asians, and
Africans—by water, usually at outlets to the ocean, at fall lines, at ripar-
ian mountain passes, and almost always at convenient heads of navigation.
Creeks and rivers were the highways of communication, trade, and war-
fare amid heavily forested, sometimes barely penetrable landscapes. Euro-
southerners perpetuated the geographical trope. And because they were
the last Americans to construct large cities—New Orleans was long the sole
exception—and the last regional population to become generally urban-
ized, we might consider very old waterside towns as best representatives of
southern civilization until quite recently.
West Point, Virginia, visited here before, presents a fine example of
small-scale urbanized continuityas well asof longitudinal tumult and dis-
continuity in all respects save occupancy of terrestrial space. John Smith
named the place in English. Exploring the lower Chesapeake from his base
at Jamestown in , Smith and his men sailed westward on the river they
had named York. About forty-five miles above the river’s mouth, at the bay,
the English spied a narrow peninsula ahead, and Smith named it from their
maritime perspective. Terrestrial West Point actually points east. Here the
meandering Mattaponi and Pamunkey rivers converge to create the broad
York. Native peoples called Mattaponi and Pamunkey—these are probably
somewhat Anglicized versions of the names—had long settled the river-
banks, the Mattaponi upriver from the point, and the Pamunkey along their
own river down toward the tip of the peninsula, where their ethnic capital
stood. Pamunkey territory was in fact the center of the great Powhatan ‘‘em-
pire’’ that had expelled a Spanish Franciscan mission in and would
nearly repel the English during the bloody wars of and . Pa-mun-
kee, West Point, Deleware [sic] Town, again West Point—by whatever name
—has always been a place of beauty and marvelous potential for human ad-
vantage. Therefore, by destiny perhaps, West Point has alternatively thrived
and clung to existence by bare threads.
The vast Chesapeake region’s gloriously easy navigability and the early
development of an export tobacco culture effectively discouraged English