The prairie ecosystem of North America once stretched over 100 million hectares, from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and from west of the Appalachian mountains to the Rockies. Prairies were mostly extirpated from the landscape in less than a century with the settlement of Europeans. A southern protrusion of this gigantic prairie ecosystem, however, reached almost the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, between southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana. This prairie along the southern coast is also known as "Cajun prairie," because this is the territory where Europeans of French origin (the Cajuns) settled in largest numbers, since the last dérangement (mass deportations of French colonists by the British who had settled initially in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755).
Vidrine could have not done a better job in connecting the natural history of the Cajun prairie (flora, fauna, soils, hydrology, and other abiotic factors) with its people (both...
University of California Press