The Prairie is like the music. Flattened. An interacting root structure below is large and sophisticated. It has a simplistic surface but its roots are deep and complex. -Josh Caffery

The southwest corner of Louisiana, from the Sabine River at the Texas state line to the Atchafalaya Basin, from Ville Platte to the Gulf Coast, is a large coastal grassland many call the Cajun Prairie. Its 2.5 million acres are contiguous smaller prairies interdigitated by bayous, rivers and their associated narrow gallery forests. Most of these historic prairies have been farmed for rice, sugarcane and crawfish, grazed by cattle, or mown for hay. Very little of our historic prairie has not fallen to a plow. I am writing about our prairies so that we can appreciate our home and our natural heritage and conserve and restore it where we can, before it is lost forever.

Each of these regional prairies has a historic name. Maybe you live on one of them. Many names are associated with the waterways they drain into: Sabine, Choupique, Calcasieu, Mermentau, Vermilion. Others derive from family names and/or established communities within them: Roberts Cove, Swallow, D’Arbonne, Au Large, Hays, Cypremort, Plaquemine. Still other names have more mysterious origins: Cote Gelee, Faiquetaique. One area near Ville Platte in Evangeline Parish, at the northern edge of French Louisiana, is called Grand Prairie, with an English pronunciation. 

The prairies of Southwest Louisiana were named Cajun Prairie at the height of the Cajun culture fad of the 1980s and 90s. It was fitting then and caught on as fast as blackened redfish and Cajun music. If we considered all the people of the region Cajun, then it is a fitting name. La Grande Prairie is also fitting. The prairie is large, to be sure, and also great. This coastal prairie does not stop at the Texas state line. It is part of the Gulf Coast tallgrass prairie that extends across Southwest Louisiana, through Houston, and down the coast to Corpus Christi. La Grande Prairie is where our francophone ancestors from Acadie and France settled among the Spanish and Isleno settlers and the indigenous Attakapas-Ishak, Alabama-Coushatta, and Chitimacha people who were already here. It’s where Afro-Caribbean people were brought and later freed, and where Catholic German and Scotch-Irish farmers immigrated and added more spice to the gumbo and peculiar last names to the church registers. It’s where our rich regional food and music traditions evolved and continue to grow.

The Biology of the Prairie shaped the Biography of the People who settled here. I hope to share what I’m learning about this story with you.