From the top of Monks Mound, on a clear day, you can see them both.

Two monuments to two different Americas.

One built of steel in the twentieth century to celebrate the expansion that reshaped the continent.

One built of earth over centuries before the first European reached these shores, by people who were part of a civilization that the later history would work hard to forget.

Monks Mound is still there.

The city that built it was real.

The people who lived there were real, and their descendants are real, and the history they represent — complex, sophisticated, and inseparable from the broader story of this continent — is real.