The southern end of this area was made available first, and the hills preceded the delta in popularity for cotton culture.
It was not until the middle thirties that the broadest expanse of the bottoms, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, began to receive its great influx.
The rest of the western cotton belt had soils varying through much the same range as those of Georgia and the Carolinas.

Except in the bottoms, where the planters themselves did most of the pioneering, the choicer lands of the whole district were entered by a pellmell throng of great planters, lesser planters and small farmers, with the farmers usually a little in the lead and the planters ready to buy them out of specially rich lands.
Farmers refusing to sell might by their own thrift shortly rise into the planter class; or if they sold their homesteads at high prices they might buy slaves with the proceeds and remove to become planters in still newer districts.
[Footnote 6: This use of the term "black belt" is not to be confused with the other and more general application of it to such areas in the South at large as have a majority of negroes in their population.] The process was that which had already been exemplified abundantly in the eastern cotton belt.

A family arriving perhaps in the early spring with a few implements and a small supply of food and seed, would build in a few days a cabin of rough logs with an earthen floor and a roof of bark or of riven clapboards.

To clear a field they would girdle the larger trees and clear away the underbrush.

Corn planted in April would furnish roasting ears in three months and ripe grain in six weeks more.