the area was known locally as "Lapland, because it's the place where Missouri laps over into Arkansas". During the American Civil War, a number of battles took place in this area, most notably the Battle of Island No. 10. Until the early 20th century, the district was largely covered by wetlands and swamps, but otherwise was a wheat-growing area of family farms. Lumbering was important in the 1890s until the most valuable trees were taken. In 1905, the Little River Drainage District built an elaborate network of ditches, canals, and levees to drain the swamps, as people believed, not understanding about the important function of wetlands in modifying river flooding, that the highest use was for agriculture. From 1880 to 1930, the population in the area more than tripled as many workers were brought in. Cotton became the chief commodity crop. Meanwhile, the boll weevil ruined the cotton crop in Arkansas, and planters moved into the Bootheel, bought up the new lands or leased them from insurance companies that had invested in the area, and recruited thousands of black sharecroppers as workers. During the 1910s, the Bootheel experienced a surge in racial violence as white tenant farmers attacked black workers who were imported by landowners from the South. This competition between white laborers and black laborers resulted in a period of extreme racial violence which took the form of lynchings in New Madrid, Charleston, and Caruthersville. In contrast to the other cotton-growing areas of the South, where blacks had been disfranchised around the turn of the century, they were allowed to vote in Missouri and played a political role in this area. In the main, political power was held by white power brokers, especially Democrat J. V. Conran from the 1930s to 1960s. He worked closely with blacks in the region. An ally of Senator and President Harry S. Truman, Conran packed the ballot boxes but did bring efficiency and government services, and helped improve economic and social conditions. During the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration said that the Bootheel was a "paradox of rich land and poor people." In 1935 three fourths of all farms were operated by tenants, most of them black. Radicals in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union organized protests by hundreds of sharecroppers in early 1939, alleging that landlords had evicted masses of tenants because they did not want to share federal AAA checks with