Jamesland is a nation of three million, covering an area the size of Massachusetts or Belgium. Yet its citizens are all united in a way that no political state can match: by the flow of water. Every drop of rain within its bounds, from the Alleghenies to the Chesapeake, ultimately comes together to give us a shared history and a shared responsibility.
The James River is often called “America’s founding river,” because it was on its shores that the first lasting English colony was planted. This waterway and its tributaries later witnessed the first assembled representatives in the New World, the first African slaves in British America, the climax of revolution and the closure of civil war. But this only scratches the surface of its true history, which spans eighteen millennia or more of rich Indigenous culture—and before that, hundreds of millions of years of geological and evolutionary drama.