We were left asking the same question all these towns face as the ground shifts beneath their feet: What's it going to be? Change? Or die? Is there maybe another choice? The towns individually try to reinvent themselves, and the region as a whole tries to reinvent itself, in a great American tradition that just seems harder here. As you move farther south, many towns don't have the roads or infrastructure to recruit some big new car plant or distribution center. The idea of luring a nice little software company is years away. Ask Ingram Barge Co.'s assistant vice president for operations Steve Crowley whether he feels threatened by the roar of the information age, and he says, "You're not gonna get away from manufacturing. You can't eat information. You gotta make something." New technology in this case means using selective breeding to invent a better catfish, with a bigger body and a smaller head so less goes to waste.

Suppose you have lost your brickyard, and the tugs no longer stop at your town, and the interstate has drawn the megastores, and even the schools and churches move away, and the young people leave, and Main Street is on life support. The Chamber of Commerce gets together and daydreams: What would it take to bring life back to this town? Or do we just roll up the streets and move on?

In Natchez, Miss., the mayor lost a runoff election last month because he supports bringing in more tourists, while his opponent wants to attract more manufacturing plants, which tend to pay better wages. Just about every town has, or has had a fight about, gambling: Do you let the riverboats come, bearing tax revenues and tourists and crime and addiction? For those who believe in tourism as the answer to all prayers, the riverboats have not quite delivered. Tax revenues did rise, and a few cities, such as suburban Kenner outside New Orleans, saw big gains for public works. The tourist money, though, never rolled in: many gamblers are regulars from the surrounding area, and visiting high rollers tend to spend their money on the boats and get out. Local officials realize that. "Gamblers are not tourists," says the mayor of Grafton, Ill. Tunica County, Miss., now the third largest gambling municipality in the U.S., has not seen its sharecropper shacks disappear. Most of the workers come from Memphis, an hour north, and go home after work. The casino company makes most of the money.

The boats themselves aren't even real, a sort of bad joke on the scolds who didn't want sin tying up on their shores. Let them float out on the water, the reasoning went; don't actually build them here on the land, all those moral contaminants and temptations. But the river defied that idea—it was not really navigable for big paddleboats, and the Coast Guard agreed. So the rule that the boats had to cruise was dropped, and now they are just as anchored as any landlocked Las Vegas outfit. Most of the boats aren't even required to have engines anymore.

There are towns, of course, that would give anything to attract the boats other towns are swatting away. "We've tried to get a riverboat casino," recalls Jay Manus of the First National Bank of Cairo, Ill., "but it's a very political thing." Cairo had been a big gaming town a century ago, when it was a major trading crossroads, full of bars and brawls and whores and sharks. Eventually, says Manus, "the morality improved, but the economy declined."

So the fight plays out again and again: If we can't find some big new employer to bring the new economy to town, how about reverting to the old economy—the really old one, polished and pasteurized, in which Main Street is a theme park of 19th century life, with women wearing petticoats and shops selling candlesticks and lemon drops? Kimmswick, Mo., was almost dead after the lumberyard and the brickyard closed—until 7up heiress Luci Anna Ross began buying up collapsing buildings and renting them out as gift shops and bed-and-breakfasts. Now there is the Kimmswick Korner gift shop and lots of places to buy apple butter or have your horse reshod. The annual apple-butter festival gets 40,000 people. More than 100,000 come to Hannibal, Mo., for Tom Sawyer Days on the Fourth of July weekend. Disney even sent a representative to Hannibal to learn how to re-create Tom Sawyer for its theme parks. It is as though memory is the only virgin land left in America, and every town along the river is ready to light out for the territory. Having developed everyplace else, Americans are homesteading the past.

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