THE UPPER PRAIRIE REGION OF THE COTTON BELT. 73 
easily injured by washes, which 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 River, 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 Blulf or I. (jess 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 lull prairies. 
Within the area herein included there arc many varieties of soil, from 
the poorest sandy ridges to the richest black caleareous 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 (Kotten 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 
color supporting a growth in which the post oak is prominent. 
