Descriptive
A selection of evocative prose describing the prairie both in Canada and the United States.
- Chapter XIII: The Great Lone Land: A Narrative Of Travel And Adventure In The North-West Of America
- By William Francis Butler
- The Flat Prairie
- By Frederick Philip Grove
- Reaction To The Prairie
New and Naked Land: Making The Prairies Home - By Ronald Rees
- Chapter IV: Snow
Over Prairie Trails - By Frederick Philip Grove
- The Lawns of God
Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie - By John Madson
- The Question Mark in the Circle
Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier - By Wallace Stegner
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The title of Butler's most popular book, The Great Lone Land, entered the language of the day, and no reference to Western Canada had seemed complete without it. The book ran through nineteen official printings—four in a single year—and an unknown number of pirated printings in Canada and the United States. In Britain alone the book had been read by several hundred thousand people.
Description of the prairie landscape by the first great Anglophone Manitoba author.
Rees’ New and Naked Land is a well-written, engaging and nuanced history of the Canadian prairie landscape and settlement. Highly recommended. The chapter “Reactions To The Prairie” describes the variety of reactions of various explorers, settlers, and others upon their first encounters with the prairie.
This chapter describes a trip by horse across the prairie in a blizzard. Although Grove is often identified as a prairie realist, this piece is quite surreal.
Chapter 3 from a very well-written botanist-naturalist’s description of the prairie landscape, intended for a general, non-specialist audience.
Contains some of the most evocative descriptive prose of the prairie I’ve ever come across. Stegner is usually identified as American, but born/grew up in Saskatchewan.