There is a strong case to be made that the settling of the continent came to its conclusion in Township 22 North, Range 4 West. The physical closing of geography was accompanied by a wider closing of human possibility. All the land had been surveyed, mapped, owned, put into operation, harvested according to interconnected global markets. One of the last bits of land to be pulled into the American experiment was the piece of land where Emmett Till was tortured and killed.
