THE CENTRAL "RIVER BOTTOMS" "Alluvial soils occupy a larger area in the Cotton Belt and subtropic Crop Belt than in any other region in the United States," 2fl and they are the most highly special ized in cotton. America drains itself into the Cotton Belt, sloping from the Appalachian table-land to the Atlantic in the East and through the vast interconnected Missis sippi River system to the Gulf. An analysis of lands in need of drainage shows Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, Minnesota, Michigan, North Carolina, Missis sippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina leading in acreage of wet, swamp, and overflowed lands. J. Russell Smith calls a chart of these areas "a map of the mosquito in dustry." 29 The course of the Mississippi, the Arkansas, and the Red rivers can be traced by the cotton produc tion in these bottoms.' The shift to the Central Valley had begun by 1821, and in 1833 less than half of the cotton production was in the Atlantic Coast. The first areas developed in the Alluvial Bottoms of the Mississippi were around Memphis and in the delta formed by the Yazoo where it flows into the Mississippi. The brown and mottled clay soil char acterized by cypress, red gum, and oak growth produces a smooth silky staple as long as 134 inches and of ex ceptional strength." The occasional overflows to which the land on the three rivers mentioned is subject serve to enrich the soil. Old buyers have given special names to the best cotton grades. "Benders" are grown in the bends of the Mississippi; "rivers," on the banks of tributaries to the Father of Waters, and "creeks," along the smaller streams." "The size of the yield and the height and vigor
of the plants are exceptional." Hubbard speaks of old time photographs displayed in many cotton offices show ing a planter on horseback in his field with the animal almost hidden in the foliage." The Yazoo Delta has the highest average yield of cotton in the Cotton Belt, 265 pounds to the acre. In the Delta 70 per cent of the im proved land is in cotton, 85 per cent of the farm land is operated according to the plantation system, and 86 per cent of the farms are operated by Negro tenants. The average holding is about thirty-three acres with around twenty acres in cotton. The sixteen million acres average about a million bales." The so-called second bottoms, which lie above over flow, produce good yields in southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas. Very little fertilizer is found nec essary on any of the alluvial farms." The weevil has also spread devastation in the alluvial valleys, playing espe cial havoc with fine delta cotton.
The plantations in Arkansas and Mississippi are much larger than those found elsewhere. The largest planta tion in the world at Scott, Mississippi, in the Delta con tains 37,000 acres. The land is flat, and the rows stretch far away. One viewing the region for the first time is likely to be oppressed by the lowness of the country and the innumerable Negro tenant shacks, each with its cotton house, that stretch away into the distance.