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 language the word prairie, because when our backwoodsmen 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 borrowed 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.
Sometimes the prairies were long, narrow strips of meadow 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 frontier 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 followed year in and year out; while bear, elk, and
deer dwelt in the groves around the borders.[11]

There were perhaps some four thousand inhabitants in these French
villages, divided almost equally between those in the Illinois and those
along the Wabash.[12]

The country came into the possession of the British--not of the colonial
English or Americans--at the close of Pontiac's war, the aftermath of
the struggle which decided against the French the ownership of America.