50 The Winning of the West 



called Illinois towns, the villages of Kaskaskia and 

 Cahokia, with between them the little settlements 

 of Prairie du Rocher and St. Philip. 10 



Both these groups of old French hamlets were 

 in the fertile prairie region of what is now southern 

 Indiana and Illinois. We have taken into our lan- 

 guage the word prairie because when our back- 

 woodsmen first reached the land and saw the great 

 natural meadows of long grass sights unknown 

 to the gloomy forests wherein they had always 

 dwelt they knew not what to call them, and bor- 

 rowed the term already in use among the French 

 inhabitants. 



The great prairies, level or rolling, stretched from 

 north to south, separated by broad belts of high 

 timber. Here and there copses of woodland lay 

 like islands in the sunny seas of tall, waving grass. 

 Where the rivers ran, their alluvial bottoms were 

 densely covered with trees and underbrush, and 

 were often overflowed in the spring freshets. Some- 

 times the prairies were long, narrow strips of mead- 

 ow land ; again they were so broad as to be a day's 

 journey across, and to the American, bred in a 

 wooded country where the largest openings were 

 the beaver meadows and the clearings of the fron- 

 tier settlers, the stretches of grass land seemed 

 limitless. They abounded in game. The buffalo 

 crossed and recrossed them, wandering to and fro 

 in long files, beating narrow trails that they fol- 



10 State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 89. 



