48. Seaports.—Most of the cotton manu facturing is done in small towns and cities. The larger cities are the seaports, which are busy with importing and ex porting. Look at the regional map (Fig. 21) and at the United States map (Fig. 309) and you will see why the chief ports of the Atlantic side of the Cotton Belt,— Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington,—do not have as much trade from the interior as New Orleans and Galveston. The Gulf ports, not having mountain barriers behind them, can serve a greater territory than can the Atlantic ports. New Orleans has the steam boats on the Mississippi and its branches to bring it trade. New Orleans will have much greater trade in the future. How will the Panama Canal help its trade? The city of Houston is a great railroad center with railroads reaching all of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Galveston, the port through which much of the sea trade of this region passes, is the greatest cotton shipping port in the world. It also exportsmuch wheat. From what states would the wheat naturally come? (Fig. 72.) Galveston and Mobile are the rivals of New Orleans as the southern gateway to the open center of the Continent.
Petroleum is found in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, and pipe lines (Fig. 44) carry it to the steamships on the Gulf Coast for shipment to northern cities. Where else do the pipe lines go? More will be said about petroleum later. (Secs. 190, 301.) .
49. The future—manufacturing.—The Cot ton Belt has so many rich resources that it may easily become the home of more peo ple than now live there. For man ufacturing, there are the great raw materialsof wood, cotton, iron and sulphur. Ala bama produces iron very cheaply at Birmingham. This state also has coal fields (Fig. 44). What other Cotton Belt state has coal? The United States is now the leading sulphur country because of the recent discovery of rich deposits near the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas (Fig. 32).
50. The future—agriculture.—In the public square of the town of Enterprise, Alabama, the people actually erected a monument in 1919 to the cotton-boll weevil, because this destructive insect had compelled them to grow different crops and diversify their agriculture. This change in farming had caused the district to grow legumes, pork, and beef (Sec. 42). This is typical of the new agriculture that is making the South a progressive part of the country with great agricultural development and possibilities.
51. Rice and pecans.—Two new Cotton Belt industries, pecan growing and growing rice with machinery, show us what this re gion and Florida can do, if men use scientific methods and cultivate all of the good land.
Rice has been grown for two hundred years in the swamp lands along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. It was grown here by hand as it is still grown in China and Japan (Sec. 672).
After being planted, rice needs to be flooded in order to give it moisture and to keep down the weeds. This can be done on the large level fields of Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas (Fig. 49) much more easily than in the swamps of Carolina or in the little ricefields of China and Japan (Fig. 491).
Rice land west of the Mississippi is so level that it is easy to have ricefields that cover many acres. The water is kept on the fields by means of banks, which are made by turning up a few fur rows with a plow. The water itself, which is found in layers of sand beneath the fields, is pumped up by oil driven engines. When the rice is nearly ripe, the bank is opened, the water flows away, the ground dries, and the rice is har vested by reapers and threshed like wheat.
The pecan is a good example of the way man is getting new crops from wild plants. Wild pecan trees grow by thousands in the woods along the Mississippi River from Iowa to the Gulf, and along hundreds of other streams in the Cotton Belt. Here and there, one pecan tree in many hundreds bears especially good nuts, with thin shells, so that they crack easily. We have learned that nut trees, like fruit trees, can be budded or grafted. From the best kinds of trees, buds or twigs are cut and grafted on the roots or tops of poorer kinds. Whole new tops then grow and each bears the same kind of excellent fruit or nut that was pro duced by the tree from which the twig or bud was taken. Nearly two million of these improved trees have been planted in the Cotton Belt from Texas to North Carolina.
The pecan tree grows to be a hundred feet high. Some live for several centuries, and some of the best of them bear two or three barrels of nuts at a crop. The amount of food from one such tree is sometimes greater than a farmer can raise in beef or pork on an acre of ground.
Make a list of the things which the Cotton Belt now exports to other regions or to foreign countries; of the things it might export if more fully used. Make a list of the things the people there use, but do mot make.