On the outskirts of Boone, North Carolina, a small college and ski town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Travis Cornett had turned his bucolic farm into a virtual fortress. He’d started by installing a handful of security cameras across his 12 acres of sloping pine woods. Then he’d nailed 15 bright red signs to tree trunks along the property line that warned, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” He also kept a .22 Ruger rifle and a Kalashnikov on hand. As far as Cornett was concerned, no one was going to touch his ginseng. It was the fall of 2013, six years since Cornett had planted his first “sang,” as locals call it: some 40 pounds of seed in a patch of forest shade. Initially, Cornett wasn’t too worried about poachers, well known around Boone for stealing ginseng from land that isn’t theirs. His fledging crop, low growing with green, jagged-edged leaves, had looked like wild strawberry plants. Now, though, it was coming into its prime. The maturing stems were taking on a distinctive purple tinge, their leaves multiplying, their berries turning lipstick red. Cornett knew that the plants’ roots, which are more valuable with age, could soon fetch hundreds of dollars per pound. It was only a matter of time before the rest of his farm, where he’d planted more seed over the years, would grow ripe for profit — and for theft. Yet his fortifications weren’t enough. One September afternoon, neighbors saw a scruffy man creeping around Cornett’s land. When Cornett got the news — the security cameras had failed to pick up the intruder — he grabbed a weed whacker and unleashed it on his oldest ginseng, slicing off the leafy tops. If poachers couldn’t spot the decapitated plants, he reasoned, they couldn’t steal the roots. A week later, though, he got a call that the trespasser had returned. Just then, the man was walking up a country byway near Cornett’s property, wearing dirt-covered jeans and carrying a backpack. Cornett, who was a few minutes from home, jumped into his black GMC truck and sped through the rural hills until he spotted David Presnell. When confronted, Presnell pleaded with Cornett not to call the cops. Cornett pulled out his cell phone anyway, and Presnell took off running, unzipping his backpack as he went. Then he reached inside and started tossing tan, snaking ginseng roots by the handful into laurel thickets lining the road. By the time police arrived several minutes later, nothing was left in Presnell’s bag save some dirt and a few stringy runners. At Cornett’s urging, however, the cops drove to Presnell’s mobile home, where they found several roots strung up to dry. Others were dehydrating on large screened trays. The incursion into Cornett’s property, police suspected, wasn’t a first offense. In December 2014, Presnell became the first person in North Carolina to be convicted of felony ginseng larceny on private property. He joined other thieves across Appalachia — the mountainous strip of territory extending from southern New York through the Carolinas down into Mississippi — who’ve been arrested, fined, even imprisoned for various ginseng-related crimes, including poaching, illegal possession, and unlawful trade across state lines. Presnell received 30 months’ probation. For Cornett, now a taciturn 39-year-old with brown hair and a goatee, the verdict was a warning shot to other poachers, including one who struck his backyard about a year after Presnell’s arrest. One morning, Cornett found footprints and empty holes where several big, valuable plants had been. He suspects that a former neighbor “stole’d every one of them,” he recalls in his Southern drawl. Cornett went into business for the same reason poachers are keen to rob him. The global market for ginseng root, popularly used as an herbal supplement, is estimated at more than $2 billion. Long a staple of traditional Chinese medicine, ginseng products are also ubiquitous in Korea and increasingly popular in Singapore, Malaysia, and other countries with large ethnic Chinese populations. These days, most ginseng is mass-produced on large, pesticide-sprayed farms under the artificial shade of wood and fabric canopies. Wild ginseng, which tends to grow in temperate forests, is considered more potent and fetches a higher price. Plants like Cornett’s, cultivated in the woods, are closer to wild than to conventionally farmed ginseng. Due to centuries of overharvesting, however, wild roots are rare commodities. In East Asia, native stocks are nearly extinct; in China and Russia, they are banned from being traded. The only other place where ginseng is indigenous is the eastern half of North America, where it grows amid ferns, trillium, bloodroot, and other low-lying vegetation. Concerned about overharvesting, Canada has prohibited the sale of wild roots. In the United States, it’s still legal — but scientists have observed stocks in Appalachia, where ginseng once flourished, dipping over the last decade. Dwindling supply and robust demand have inflated wild American ginseng’s value. In 2014, according to public and academic data, the 81,500 pounds that were legally exported commanded an average wholesale price of $800 per dried pound. That was almost 15 times more than the going rate for farmed roots. Nearly all exports go to China, where a burgeoning middle class is willing to pay marked-up retail prices — sometimes even thousands of dollars per pound. To feed this appetite, some Appalachians hunt during government-designated harvests and sell to local dealers, who then trade with wholesalers in Hong Kong, the epicenter of the ginseng market. Others, however, help themselves to roots with no regard for the law, hoping for easy cash in a region that’s home to six of the 10 U.S. counties with the lowest median household incomes. An alphabet soup of agencies is responsible for the land where ginseng grows — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the National Park Service (NPS), the U.S. Forest Service, various state agencies, local police departments — and no one keeps comprehensive, national statistics on ginseng theft. Still, there’s strong evidence that criminal activity is expanding. In West Virginia, officials seized 190 pounds of illegally foraged roots worth about $180,000 in the weeks leading up to the 2014 harvest season. That’s compared with just 30 pounds in a typical year, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Everyone will tell you that ginseng — 90 percent is illegally dug somehow, one way or the other,” Cornett says on a stormy May afternoon as we drive along the picturesque Blue Ridge Parkway. The fear among growers and dealers is that Appalachia’s ginseng, traded with Asia since the earliest days of the American republic and now among the last wild roots on Earth, may soon be gone for good. Cornett, who keeps his energy up by chewing on a gnarled ginseng root he stashes in his truck, says the situation is dire. “Out in the country, it’s gone,” he tells me. “It’s been raped. It’s just not there anymore.”

The first written account of ginseng is a Chinese manuscript called The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica, penned about 1,800 years ago. It heralds a litany of the root’s supposed health benefits, from a quiet mind to sharp senses. If taken consistently, ginseng may “make the body light and prolong life.” This restorative reputation spurred widespread harvesting in China and later earned ginseng the basis of its scientific name, Panax, from the Greek word for “cure-all” — the same linguistic origin as that of panacea. Modern studies have found that chemical compounds in ginseng can reduce inflammation, relieve extreme fatigue in cancer patients, and help treat diabetes. Contrary to longstanding beliefs, however, there’s limited proof that it enhances sexual performance or athleticism.

For all its mythos, ginseng’s life cycle is lethargic. Seeds enter the soil in the early fall, when ginseng berries ripen, but take up to two years to sprout. It can then be a year or more before the infant plant grows another prong of leaves, and so on. Wild plants can live for up to 50 years, in rare cases longer. (There are apocryphal tales of 1,000-year-old ginseng.) Roots become long and aromatic as time passes, and believers say the older ginseng is, the more powerful its medicinal qualities. After being harvested and dried for one to two weeks, ginseng can last up to seven years under ideal conditions: in nonhumid air kept just above freezing, sealed off from rodents and pathogens like mold.

American ginseng entered the international economy in the early 18th century. A Jesuit cleric named Joseph-François Lafitau living in Quebec read an article about the plant written by a fellow priest dispatched to China. He became convinced ginseng was also in the New World, based on the description of the plant’s habitat, and searched the woods near his home. Lafitau found the root he was looking for. (Scientists believe ginseng is native to both East Asia and North America because some 70 million years ago, the two land masses were part of a single megacontinent known as Laurasia, according to David Taylor’s book Ginseng, the Divine Root.)

Lafitau detailed his findings in a report that set off a flurry of foraging and trading in Canada, and the quest for wild ginseng soon spread south into Appalachia. After the Revolutionary War, George Washington wrote in his journal that a survey party in West Virginia “met with many mules and pack horses laden with ginseng going east,” bound for ports such as New York; Philadelphia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. In 1784, the first U.S. ship to sail directly to East Asia, Empress of China, carried nearly 30 tons of ginseng out of New York. Investors netted a fat 25 percent profit on the haul.

Some American icons also cashed in on ginseng. John Jacob Astor became the first U.S. multimillionaire because of real-estate interests and a fur business, which began exporting to China in the early 1800s. But he also used his contacts in Asia to trade ginseng, reportedly earning $55,000 on his first shipload. Daniel Boone, the eponymous frontiersman of the North Carolina mountain town, supplemented his own fur business by digging ginseng out of the Appalachian wilderness.

Between 1821 and 1899, an average of 190 tons of U.S. ginseng were exported every year, according to the journal Economic Botany. It wasn’t just harvested by wealthy entrepreneurs: Hunting ginseng became a routine way for Appalachian families, who lived far from ports and other commercial centers, to earn cash. According to Kristin Johannsen, author of Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America’s Most Valuable Plant, mountain forests at higher elevations than most settled lands were seen as commons — places where anyone could graze their livestock, cut trees, and gather ginseng.

Around Boone, old-timers say other customary hunting rules lingered into the 20th century. People could only harvest plants that were old enough to reproduce, and they needed to replant ginseng’s berries to ensure new growth. They could forage on private land unless it was fenced off or had signs telling people to keep out. “If I wanted to go up on [someone’s] property and hunt, they didn’t care,” says Clint Cornett, Travis’s 85-year-old uncle, who started gathering ginseng after he quit school as a teenager to cut timber.

Diggers sold roots to herb stores and traveling traders known as “sang men.” One popular buyer was Wilcox Drug in downtown Boone, then home to a cluster of trade and supply stores catering to locals. People came to the family-run business from the Blue Ridge slopes with burlap sacks full of ginseng, as well as ginger, sassafras, and other medicinal plants. Since the plant matures in the fall, ginseng roots were often sources of “Christmas money,” says Jeff Van Hoose, a friend and business partner of Travis Cornett. Wilcox Drug, in turn, sold roots to brokers in New York, whose clients were mostly buyers in Hong Kong.

Yet ginseng wasn’t profitable enough to encourage intensive poaching. When theft happened, no one tended to make a fuss. Wild ginseng grew on Clint Cornett’s land, and local boys knew when to pounce. “We’d go to church on Sunday, so they’d come out, help themselves,” he says. Yet he didn’t think to call the law.

The foraging culture began to change after the United States joined the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1974. Along with lions, mahogany, and alligators, wild ginseng falls under Appendix II of the treaty, which includes species on the verge of becoming endangered. For the first time, states that wanted to export wild roots were required to issue broad regulations on hunting. They designated specific digging and trading seasons; some mandated permits to forage on public lands. Dealers were instructed to register their businesses and certify that roots were harvested legally. The federal government had to clear inspected ginseng before export. (In the late 1990s, rules were tightened to stipulate how old harvested plants had to be; five years became the minimum.)

CITES had practical shortcomings, though. Dealers could do little more than take diggers at their word about ginseng’s provenance: In appearance, a root is a root is a root. Rangers, meanwhile, were hard-pressed to patrol vast forests. If anything, the new regulations expanded America’s ginseng market as people turned to farming roots, which wasn’t subject to as many bureaucratic hassles and was possible in different environments. Among them was Paul Hsu, a Taiwanese immigrant in Wausau, Wisconsin — far from Appalachia — who claimed that ginseng had alleviated his mother’s chronic pain from arthritis and diabetes. He started planting crops in 1978. Today, Wisconsin produces 95 percent of farmed American ginseng, and Hsu, with more than 1,000 acres, is one of the country’s biggest single growers.

As states registered dealers and compiled their names on public lists, overseas buyers began contacting them directly — much to the chagrin of New York export companies that had guarded their Asian contacts closely. Wilcox Drug was one beneficiary. In 1982, Tony Hayes, an herb-purchasing agent, joined the business and helped it build a network of international buyers. Within a year, Wilcox Drug tripled the amount of wild ginseng it sold, according to Hayes. Twelve years later, it was acquired fully by the Zuellig Group, a Swiss company that has global interests in pharmaceuticals and agribusiness.

Other Appalachians, including Travis Cornett, would jump into the ginseng game. First, though, China had to get rich.