The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 76, July 1972 - April, 1973 Page: 237
539 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Pioneer Evaluation
Even more impressive than the openings or barrens were the almost
countless prairies which dotted the eastern woodland all the way to the
Atlantic shore. Some of the smaller of these were Indian "old fields,"
agricultural plots abandoned by the native farmers before the coming
of the white men and grown up in grass. Many of the earliest European
colonists in America, including those in Massachusetts, made use of
such old fields.9 As one progressed westward from the Atlantic littoral
on beyond the Appalachians, the prairies grew steadily larger and more
numerous. The first really sizable grasslands encountered by settlers
were the Black Belt of Alabama, the Pickaway Plains of Ohio, and sev-
eral large prairies in Kentucky known as the Barrens (not to be con-
fused with the term used as a synonym for openings). Both Arkansas
and Louisiana, the eastern neighbor states of Texas, contained exten-
sive tracts of grassland, including the famous Opelousas Prairie of
South-central Louisiana.1'
A veritable Polynesia composed of hundreds and thousands of small
prairies was strewn across the portion of Texas which lay east of the
suggested grassland-forest border line (Figures 1, 2) . In addition, the
well-known Coastal Prairie stretches almost unbroken along the Texas
shore as far as the Louisiana border and beyond, including sizable por-
tions of the old Austin Colony and Atascosita district, two zones of early
Anglo-American settlement. Very few travelers who visited eastern
Texas in the first half of the nineteenth century and left written ac-
counts of their experiences failed to mention the Coastal Prairie and its
smaller vegetational counterparts. Describing the portion of East Texas
inland from the Coastal Prairie and between the Colorado and Trinity
rivers, Francis Moore wrote in 1840 that "the prairies and woodlands in
this region alternate in the most picturesque manner .... The prairies
are generally small, and interspersed with groves, resembling islets in a
grassy lake.""'
23; Gideon Lincecum, "Journal of Lincecum's Travels in Texas, 1835," ed. by A. L. Brad-
ford and T. N. Campbell, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, LIII (October, 1949), 184.
gRalph H. Brown, Historical Geography of the United States (New York, 1948), 13-19,
52, 179.
"OSee Edgar Nelson Transeau, "The Prairie Peninsula," Ecology, XVI (July, 1935),
map following p. 424; Erhard Rostlund, "The Myth of a Natural Prairie Belt in Alabama:
An Interpretation of Historical Records," Annals of the Association of American Geog-
raphers, XLVII (December, 1957), 392-411; Carl Ortwin Sauer, Geography of the Penny-
royal (Frankfort, Ky., 1927); and A. W. Kiichler, "United States and Canada, Natural
Vegetation" (map), in Goode's World Atlas (13th ed.; Chicago, 1970), 64-65. See also
Prunty, "Some Geographic Views," 161-168.
"'Francis Moore, Jr., Map and Description of Texas, Containing Sketches of Its History,
Geology, Geography and Statistics (Philadelphia and New York, 1840), 6.237
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 76, July 1972 - April, 1973, periodical, 1973; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101202/m1/279/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.