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It represented the movement of the backwoodsman, with axe
and rifle, advancing to the conquest of the forest. But closer to
the old settlements a more highly developed agriculture was to be
seen. Hodgson, in 1821, describes plantations in northern Alabama in
lands ceded by the Indians in 1818. Though settled less than two
years, there were within a few miles five schools and four places of
worship. One plantation had one hundred acres in cotton and one
hundred and ten in corn, although a year and a half before it was
wilderness. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 269; see
Riley (editor), "Autobiography of Lincecum," in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VIII., 443, for the wanderings of a southern pioneer
in the recently opened Indian lands of Georgia and the southwest in
these years.]
But while this population of log-cabin pioneers was entering the
Gulf plains, caravans of slave-holding planters were advancing from
the seaboard to the occupation of the cotton-lands of the same
region.


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