The communities which within six years after the Treaty of Ghent were admitted into the Union as the States of Mississippi and Alabama, did not at first differ materially from Indiana and Illinois, which became Commonwealths at the same time. Much the same obstacles confronted the pioneer in the pine forests of Mississippi as in the hard woods of the Northwest. Either as squatter or _bona fide_ purchaser he had with the aid of his neighbors hewed out a clearing, or single-handed girdled the trees, and laid the sills of his log cabin. A "raising" or "frolic" was one of the few opportunities for social intercourse in the hard life of the frontiersman. Between the stumps of his clearing he planted his first crop of Indian corn; and what the soil did not yield for his sustenance, he supplied with his trusty rifle. Time wrought vast transformations in these new communities. The thriftless, who scratched the surface of the ground and then sold out to a newcomer of sterner fiber, passed on to a new frontier. Log cabins gave way to frame houses. Clearings became well-tilled farms. Better methods of cultivation extracted a surplus of produce which could be sent to market. Along the rivers of the Northwest, cities sprang up like mushrooms. From this point the history of the Southwest diverged from that of the Northwest. The virgin lands of the Gulf attracted also the planter with his capital invested in African slaves. Once again the small farmer felt the combined pressure of social and economic forces. He saw his wealthier neighbor acquire the more fertile lands; he found himself thrust into a socially inferior class; and again he yielded to fate. While a democratic society of self-reliant yeomen was developing in the northern half of the Mississippi Valley, a society based upon a plantation economy and aristocratic in its outward characteristics was forming in the Gulf States. Yet in its aggressiveness and commercial enterprise, the new South resembled the Northwest rather than the old South. [Map: The West as an Economic Section in 1820]