STATELINE: Portrayals of the Lower Wabash River Landscape
This work focuses on digital visualization as a method for indexing geo-humanist research. Participants conducted investigations on one geographic territory from among a series of contiguous territories along the Lower Wabash River and present their findings in this exhibition of eighteen drawing cycles.
As one of the participants in the team, my task is to reveal the cultural and physical layers between Knox Conty of Indiana and Lawrence County of Illinois.
The map of this region is dotted with crossing of roads – roads leading in different directions. This composite of distorted lines seems to tell a story of the last 250 years.
The first road was a river. The Wabash River is the mother of all the native people who lived here once. No one else knows more about this mother than inhabitants who once lived in the highland’s tents. The mother nature was so kind to them, it stretched so many branches of the Wabash in to the hinterland of the earth of the Midwest: Busseron Creek, Old Busseron Creek, New Busseron Creek, Cotton Branch, Smalls Creek, Scott Creek, Snapp Creek, Bonpas Creek, Indian Creek, Bens Creek, Prairie Creek, Hawkins Creek, Hurricane Branch and so on.
The creeks and ponds in the prairie earth bred generation after generation of plentiful life. Sometimes, the mother river would also be angry like a buffalo, which could swallow villages and lowlanders. In that case, the Native Americans moved to high land to settle their tents down. The abundant water resource attracted not only human beings but also many animals: buffalo, rabbit, deer, squirrel and so forth.
When the first European settlers arrived on the scene in late 18th century, they were amazed at the abundant land where they had thousands of things to explore and construct. They cut down the woods. They ploughed the soil. They sowed the prairie into corn fields, which managed the drainage basins. They improved their engineering technology to pump the underground water and began to raise animals. They began to dream of a future of industrial agriculture: the corn fields would witness boom of agriculture soon.