prairie

Prairie comes from French prairie, meaning 'meadow, grassland,' derived from Medieval Latin pratāria, from Latin prātum ('meadow, grass plot'). Latin prātum named the managed grasslands around Roman settlements — the hayfields and pastures that fed livestock in the agricultural world of the Mediterranean. The word was orderly and domestic: a prātum was a field someone had, a meadow someone cut for hay. The same root gives English 'prāirie' via French and also the Italian prato (meadow, as in the Tuscan city of Prato, whose name means 'the meadow'). Nothing in the original Latin or French suggests the scale that the word would eventually be required to contain.

French explorers and missionaries in the seventeenth century were the first Europeans to traverse the interior of North America in significant numbers, and they needed to describe what they found. The landscape between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains — roughly 500 million acres of temperate grassland — had no equivalent in European experience. It was not forest, not desert, not farmland; it was grass, extending to every horizon, flat or gently rolling, interrupted by rivers and scattered groves but fundamentally, relentlessly, grassland. The French word prairie — diminutive, domestic, the word for a meadow you could walk across in an hour — was what they had. They applied it to a sea of grass that took months to cross. The mismatch between the word's scale and the landscape's scale was total.

English absorbed prairie from French in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as American expansion pushed into the territory the French had named. The word quickly acquired connotations of vast open space, of a landscape beyond European agricultural experience, of both freedom and danger. The prairie in American mythology was the frontier par excellence: flat, featureless to the untrained eye, treeless, subject to violent weather, home to immense bison herds and nomadic peoples who had organized their civilization around the grass. The prairie schooner — the covered wagon of westward migration — took its name from the way wagons appeared to sail across the grassland like ships on water. The meadow had become an ocean.

The native tallgrass prairie of the central United States — once the most biologically productive temperate grassland on Earth — has been almost entirely converted to agriculture. Less than 4% of the original tallgrass prairie remains, making it one of the most endangered biomes in North America. The shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies of the western Great Plains have fared somewhat better but have also been dramatically reduced by farming, ranching, and urban development. The word that French missionaries applied to a seemingly inexhaustible ocean of grass now names a landscape that exists primarily in protected reserves, national parks, and the memory encoded in place names. The meadow that was too large to name has become a meadow small enough to protect.