Mississippi has been thought to typify the Deep South during the era of Jim Crow that began in the late 19th century. But it had an enormous frontier of undeveloped land in the backcountry and bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta. Tens of thousands of black and white migrants came to the Delta seeking the chance to buy and work land, cut timber, and make lives for themselves and their families. Because the Mississippi Delta contained so much fertile bottomland away from the river settlements, African Americans achieved unusually high rates of land ownership from 1870 to 1900. Two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Delta were black.