I’ve visited this area of southeast Missouri known as “The Bootheel” before and made some friends I was happy to see again. Claudia and Randy Arington invited me to stay with them in the country outside of Charleston, MO. When they told me the hill south of Cape Girardeau was the last hill on this side of the river, they weren’t kidding. The land now is flat and low as far as the eye can see.  Before the Little River Drainage Project began in 1907, this was a vast swampland, thickly forested with Tupelo and Cypress trees (like these I shot across the river at Horseshoe Lake) and populated mostly by snakes, frogs, ducks, herons, egrets and a rich assortment of other wildlife. By 1927, the forests were cleared and the swamps almost completely gone, drained by nearly 1,000 miles of ditches and over 300 miles of levees.  What remains is some of the richest farmland in the country. Mile after mile of cultivated and irrigated land now produces soybeans, wheat and corn.