'How has gambling changed Tunica?' said Paul Battle, a wealthy cotton planter and catfish farmer who has chaired the county board of supervisors for the past 33 years. Where two years ago a dirt road once disappeared over a levee along the Mississippi River, Johnny Cash is now playing to a packed house at Sam's Town Hotel and Gambling Hall, the Old West look-alike. It is a giddy and disorienting phenomenon - for visitors and residents alike. Mississippi now has more square feet of gaming space than Atlantic City. A short drive from the old sharecropper shacks in a county once deemed America's poorest, there rises above the fallow cotton fields an Irish castle, along with a Spanish galleon and an Old West town - just three of 10 casinos erected here over the past two years.Īlmost overnight, Tunica County, a place populated largely by field hands, welfare mothers and children, has been transformed into one of the hottest casino gambling destinations in the country.
