Field Guide: Ishak Prairie

Louisiana's lost grasslands

The Marysee Prairie Preserve in Texas protects 12 acres of coastal prairie / Photo by William L. Farr

When you envision Cajun culture, you might picture a waterborne life: crawfishing in a flooded cypress forest, say, or a shrimp boat trawling through the coastal marshes. But in the late eighteenth century, as Acadians arrived in Louisiana, many settled west of the swamp country, running cattle atop Louisiana’s extensive prairies.

Grasslands once covered 4,000 square miles in the state, by some estimates, stretching from Lafayette, Louisiana, at the edge of the Mississippi River’s floodplain, to the Sabine River, which marks Louisiana’s western border with Texas. (Beyond the river, more grasslands reach southwest to Corpus Christi, Texas, though, as we’ll see below, this is less surprising.) In the 1980s, as local biologists began to study the local wildflowers, they named Louisiana’s grasslands the Cajun prairie, in honor of its first European settlers.