ABSTRACT
In The Day Before America William MacLeish describes the relationship between Native Americans and the land, lending credence to the notion that early European settlers encountered something other than a pristine continent to civilize and call their own. Native Americans had long adapted the land to their own use. Roderick Nash argues in Wilderness and the American Mind, the image of a boundless wilderness took root in the American psyche from the very beginning of colonial times. Infrastructural development has molded the conception of the American landscape as much as or more so than the collection of preserved wilderness areas. The major wave of infrastructural development belongs to the railroads, standard bearers of nineteenth century industrial power and grime. City and town centers are biomorphic entities, like neurons, big and small, complete with the axons and dendrites of infrastructure. Towns, cities, and infrastructure constitute the nation's brain—the locus and embodiment of a collective intelligence and creative pulse.
