THE UPPER PRAIRIE REGION OF THE COTTON BELT. 73 



easily injured by washes, wliicli carry away the top soil, and frequently 

 leave bare the rather sterile sands and other materials of the underly- 

 ing Drift. 



(2) The cane hills. This includes a narrow strip of lands, averaging 

 perhaps 15 miles in width, lying immediately adjacent to the bluff of the 

 Mississippi Eiver, being best developed and most continuous on the 

 eastern side of that river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. 



The surface is generally hilly and broken, and its timber consists of 

 water, willow, swamp chestnut oaks, hickories, beech, magnolia, locust, 

 tulip tree, and originally a dense undergrowth of cane, which has since 

 mostly disappeared. 



The soil is a fertile brown loam, 4 to 7 feet in depth, resting on a fine 

 calcareous silt of the Bluff or Loess formation. 



There is in this region also a great liability to injury from washes, 

 and many farms have thus been ruined. 



5. THE UPPER PRAIRIE REGION. 



This region has been subdivided into two, viz : 



a. The black prairie lands, and 



b. The blue marl lands and hill prairies. 



Within the area herein included there are many varieties of soil, from 

 the poorest sandy ridges to the richest black calcareous loams, and the 

 names have been chosen which apply to the most characteristic soil 

 varieties. 



a. Black prairie lands. — East of the Mississippi this region is com- 

 prised in a belt extending from the eastern edge of Alabama, nearly 

 westward through that State, and northwest through Mississippi, and 

 north through Tennessee. In Alabama the width of the belt is 20 to 30 

 miles, but in Tennessee it narrows down considerably. This region oc- 

 cupies a depression between hilly lands with oaks and pines, and its sur- 

 face is comparatively level, with here and there small hills and ridges 

 capped with sand and loam, the remnants of a covering of Drift which 

 probably once covered the entire region, but which has subsequently 

 been almost entirely removed by denudation. 



The underlying rock throughout the whole region is an impure lime- 

 stone (Eotten Limestone), the disintegration of which has given rise to 

 the peculiar soils of this region. 



The typical black prairie soil is a stiff calcareous clay of grayish to 

 yellowish color when uncultivated, but of dark to nearly black color 

 when mixed with vegetable matter in cultivation. 



In the vicinity of the ridges and hills of Drift above alluded to, the 

 sands and loam of this latter formation are more or less mingled with 

 the calcareous clays, and there result mixed soils of varying degrees of 

 fertility and of different physical qualities. One of these mixed soils 

 is known as the post-oak soil. It is a stiff' loam of reddish to yellow 

 coljr supporting a growth in which the post oak is prominent. 



