About this ebook
Copper was being cut from the shores of Lake Superior nearly seven thousand years ago. The earthworks of Poverty Point were raised more than three thousand years before the Roman Republic existed. By 1100, Cahokia held between ten and twenty thousand people, a city larger than London of that day, fed by rivers that carried copper, mica, and shell across a thousand miles. Between 850 and 1150, the builders of Chaco Canyon laid roads as wide as thirty feet through empty desert and kept scarlet macaws alive a thousand miles from the rainforest that bred them.
No emperor ordered any of it. No army enforced it. Trust, kinship, and skill moved salt, turquoise, and dentalium shell from ocean to plain.
Then everything changed. The horse reached the Plains after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The Beaver Wars turned brokers into kings and destroyed those who lost their position. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 cut roads that had run for a thousand years. By 1869 the railroad had made the old geography worthless, and by the 1880s only a few hundred bison were left in the wild.
Salt Roads follows every stage of that story, from the first brine pits of Illinois to the laboratories that now trace turquoise to a single mine. Built on thirty scholarly sources, it will change how you read the ancient world, and you will want the next chapter before you finish the one in front of you.
Buy it now and start with Chapter One tonight.
