The big river flowed through lands dominated by expansive cypress swamps, freshwater marshes with acres of waving cane fields, and salt marshes whose knee-high wire grass ran for distances that reminded explorers of the northern prairies. Travel was strictly by boat down winding bayous with water as dark as molasses, across lakes and bays, and along the many fingers of a mighty river reaching across the delta. New Orleans' growth was naturally limited. No matter which direction the developers turned, they soon ran into water. Cities thriving in America's West swoop up and over the mountains that surround them, or gobble expanses of desert at their feet.
Midwestern towns eat at the prairie.
When the concrete no longer floated, city builders constructed a levee to keep the storm tides out, then turned in another direction. The land remains little changed from the days when pirate Jean Lafitte called it home Walk atop one of the levees, and you get to see this edge. On one side your eyes will fall on houses, shopping malls, or jazz clubs. On the other you'll see marsh, swamp, bayou, or lake, all arrayed in scenes that might have greeted Rene-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle in the 1860s when he paddled his birchbark canoe on his first voyage through this area. Out here, the roar of Mardi Gras fades into the quiet of finger lakes hidden by deep hardwood wetlands.