Erase every American city from the map for a moment.
Leave only the rivers and the land underneath.

You know what happens? The same cities grow back in the same spots.
Louisville. Cincinnati. St. Louis. Pittsburgh.

Because those places weren’t chosen by architects or settlers🧵 A river ford.
A place where the water runs shallow enough to walk.
They were more than a crossing. It was a continent’s nervous system.

Animals moved through it. Hunters watched it. Nations met there.

Across the East and Midwest, these fords created natural funnels where every trail, migration route, and trade path eventually converged.

Most Americans don’t realize it, but many of our highways follow routes far older than the country itself.

Originally corridors carved by geology, crafted by bison migrations, and turned into continental road systems by Indigenous nations.

Let’s peel back the asphalt.🧵 Bison weren’t just wandering the continent.
They were reading it.

They followed the logic of the land:

• ridge spines avoiding deep valleys
• wind gaps cut by ancient rivers
• river terraces high enough to stay dry
• limestone benches that drain clean
• the shallowest possible fords
• salt and mineral lines that shaped migration

Then they pounded that wisdom into the ground for thousands of years, turning soft forest into hardened corridors that could handle tens of thousands of animals in motion.

The first paths.

Beneath the brown water of a New England river sits a 40-ton sandstone mystery….etched long before a European map ever touched this coast.

Figures. Spirals. Hands.
Symbols no outsider could read.

They called it Dighton Rock.
And it rewrites what “history” looks like. When colonists found it in the 1600s, they couldn’t believe it was Native.
They blamed Vikings, Phoenicians….even a lost Portuguese explorer.

But the Wampanoag already knew the river, the stone, and its stories.

They didn’t need to “discover” it.
They remembered it.

The Erie Canal Part III:
The Empire Awakens (1825 – 1840)

In 1825, a boat named Seneca Chief left Buffalo carrying two kegs of Lake Erie water. 🧵 When it reached New York Harbor, that water was poured into the Atlantic.

Cannon fire answered every fifteen minutes from Buffalo to the sea….a chain of thunder across 363 miles of handmade earth.

A young republic proved it could reshape its continent.

THE ERIE CANAL, PART II
CARVING THE BACKBONE (1817–1825)

They built it by hand.
363 miles through wilderness and rock.
🧵 The Erie Canal wasn’t born of machines.

It was carved by men with shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows…Irish immigrants, farmhands, veterans, drifters.

For eight years they dug a river through the bones of New York.

When the Missouri River was dammed, the water didn’t rush…it crept.

By 1962, it had swallowed whole Lakota and Mandan worlds.

Homes. Graves. Schools. Churches.
All gone beneath a reservoir called Lake Oahe.

They said it would bring light and power.
It brought silence. Lake Oahe came from the Pick–Sloan Plan…a postwar promise to “tame” the Missouri.

Six great dams.
Billions in federal money.
Flood control. Irrigation. Hydropower.

But under that progress lay the fine print: Over 200,000 acres of tribal land flooded.

No consent. No repair. No return.

“They handed the keys of the White House and abandoned Black America.”

In 1877, the U.S. elite made a secret deal. What followed was a century of suffering.

This is the story of the Compromise of 1877…..but also, a warning from history. 🧵👇 The Civil War was over, but peace wasn’t.

The South was burning with resentment.
The North was tired of fighting.
And Black Americans were building real power for the first time.

Then came the election of 1876….the dirtiest in U.S. history.

For millions of Americans, Israel isn’t politics.
It’s prophecy.

Foreign policy became scripture, and U.S. wars turned into sermons with bombs for punctuation.

Part 5 of a 10 part 🧵 saga The roots run deep.
Puritans once called themselves a “New Israel.”

By the 19th century, Christian Zionists preached that “Jews returning to Palestine was not strategy but divine destiny.”

The biggest open secret in U.S. foreign policy:

Israel has nuclear weapons.
And for 50+ years, America’s role has been to lie about it.

Every president since Nixon has honored the silence.

Not oversight.
Not denial. Silence.

Part 4 of a 10 part 🧵 saga It began in the 1960s at Dimona, in the Negev desert.

On paper?
A “textile plant.”

In reality?
A secret reactor, built with French engineers, hidden even from Washington at first.

In 1948, Truman recognized Israel in just 11 minutes.

But America’s embrace wasn’t instant. For two decades, the bond was hesitant, improvised….shaped more by faith and myth than hard alliance.

Only in 1967 did the U.S. truly choose its side.

A 10 part 🧵 saga The roots ran deep in America’s imagination.
Puritans preached they were a “New Israel”
They read the Book of Joshua as their map: conquest, wilderness, promised land.

By the 1800s, Protestant missionaries were sailing to Palestine, planting schools and churches from Jerusalem to Jaffa.

Their reports filtered home….letters describing the “Holy Land” in ruin, waiting to be redeemed.

This seeded Christian Zionism in America long before Israel was born.

For many, supporting a Jewish homeland wasn’t foreign policy…it was prophecy.

1933
America was on its knees

Dust storms swallowed towns, breadlines stretched for blocks, and millions of young men had no work.

Roosevelt launched the boldest social experiment in U.S. history:

The Civilian Conservation Corps
A gamble to rebuild men by rebuilding the land🧵 Enrollees were 18–25, broke, and hungry.

The CCC gave them uniforms, boots, 3 meals a day….and $30 a month.

$25 went straight home.
Families survived on that money.

“We can take it!”
Their motto and they proved it.

Long before Kentucky was a state…a gaunt hunter vanished into the mountains.

When he came out, the world behind him had changed.
Daniel Boone.

His name turned legend.
The man himself was harder to know: restless, wounded, and always moving west. 🧵 Born in 1734 on Pennsylvania’s frontier, Boone grew up where farm met forest.

He learned to track and shoot young, preferring the woods to the plow.

Neighbors said he had “a wandering disposition.”

That hunger for the horizon would never leave him.

They called them Beatniks.
Not polished, not safe.

Wandering poets with jazz in their veins, highways under their feet, and typewriters in their hands.

They didn’t just write…they set America on fire. 🧵 The Beat Generation rose after WWII.

Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs.

Young, restless, disgusted with conformity and the Cold War’s gray life.

They wanted something raw….truth without polish.

On a windswept Wyoming summit nearly 10,000 feet up lies a stone circle bigger than a house.

28 spokes.
6 cairns.
A hub at the center.

For centuries it’s been called the Bighorn Medicine Wheel but it isn’t a ruin.

It’s still alive. 🧵 Here, tribes like the Crow, Cheyenne, Shoshone, and Lakota fasted, prayed, and tied offerings.

Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow sought visions here….joined by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.

The wheel is one altar in a much larger sacred landscape.

1933.
America was on its knees.
Banks failed, families lost everything.

Then walked in Ferdinand Pecora…an immigrant lawyer nobody expected.

Armed only with questions, he dragged Wall Street’s gods into the light… and proved the Depression wasn’t an accident. 🧵 Pecora forced the titans into the Senate chamber:

•J.P. Morgan Jr.
•National City Bank (Citibank today)
•Chase executives

He uncovered the playbook:

•Dump worthless securities on the public
•Pay zero taxes on million-dollar incomes
•Insider loans to senators, judges…even presidents

Today, balance returns.

The Fall Equinox.
The sun rises due east, sets due west.
Day and night match.

For thousands of years, ancient builders aligned their greatest earthworks to this exact moment. 🧵 Why does it happen?

Earth tilts 23.5°.
Twice a year, sunlight strikes the equator directly.

Everywhere, light and dark nearly equal.

To us, trivia.
To them, survival written in the sky.

In Arizona’s desert lies a pool that poisons and sustains.
It has never dried.
It has no visible source.

Civilizations farmed from it but never dared drink.
It shelters species found nowhere else on Earth.
For centuries, it’s been called a portal.

This is Montezuma’s Well. 🧵 What looks to be crater is actually a collapsed limestone cavern….368 ft wide, 55 ft deep.

Every day, 1.5 million gallons surge up from a hidden aquifer.
Every day, they vanish into underground channels no one has ever traced.

A desert spring that feeds and swallows itself.

There’s a cave in Nevada the Paiute never forgot.

They spoke of the Si-Te-Cah…red-haired giants who raided villages and devoured flesh.

In 1911, miners cracked it open.

Bones.
Sandals too big for men.
Walls still scarred by fire.

Lovelock Cave was not silent. 🧵 The memory runs like blood through Paiute history.

The Si-Te-Cah were taller, hungrier, crueler than any foe.

When the tribes cornered them in Lovelock Cave, they set brush at the mouth.

Flames roared, smoke rolled in.
The screams ended there.

Alaska’s coast is thawing and with it, a village sealed in ice is rising again.

At Nunalleq, archaeologists and Yup’ik elders are pulling masks, dolls, parkas, even human hair out of the permafrost.

Not just artifacts.
A world, frozen for 400 years. 🧵 Permafrost isn’t just frozen dirt.

It’s an archive. Every centimeter locks in pollen, fish scales, parasites, soot, even ancient DNA.

Excavators cut it in thin slices, record exact depth, and bag samples. Later, microscopes and chemical assays turn those soils into timelines.

We were all taught the pyramids of Egypt.

But not this.
Hidden in Guatemala’s jungle is La Danta
a pyramid so massive it rivals Giza.

One of the largest monuments ever built… and yet it’s been erased from our memory. 🧵 La Danta isn’t just tall (230 ft).
Its volume: 2.8 million cubic meters of stone and fill.

That’s more than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Building it meant 15 million days of labor. Or so they say.

This wasn’t architecture. It was a civilization moving mountains.

Half a billion pounds of copper “vanished.”

Minoans in Michigan.
Bronze Age fleets on the Great Lakes.

The rumors never die.

But the ground tells another story….pits, hammerstones, artifacts and a silence we’ve been filling for over a century.

🧵 The Great Lakes hold the richest native copper on Earth.

On Isle Royale & the Keweenaw, Indigenous miners dug thousands of pits.

Hammerstones still lie where they were dropped.

In lake mud nearby, scientists find copper spikes ~6000 years ago
industrial fingerprints written in sediment.