Growing by the Railway Side

On a steamy July day in 1986, scientists Malcolm Vidrine and Charles Allen were driving along backroads near Midland, Louisiana, conducting research on associations between plant communities and mosquito communities in the area’s rice fields. Their fieldwork was routine, mundane even, until the pair crept across a railroad bed bordered by an array of grasses and flowers that caught Allen’s eye.

Vidrine halted the car and Allen hopped out to walk along the rails. Upon closer inspection, Allen confirmed he was looking at a narrow strip of tallgrass Louisiana prairie, perhaps only 150 feet wide, 100 yards long. “I had only read about our prairies,” he said, in an interview conducted in 2023. Though this ecosystem had once encompassed 2.5 million acres, scientific knowledge at the time held that it had essentially vanished from the region due to farming, urban development, oil exploration, and cattle grazing. “I never realized that they were really still here.”

While the surrounding land had been converted to agriculture, the railroad right-of-way, owned by the rail company, had been left virtually untouched for decades—a time capsule. Routine fires lit by nearby farmers crept over to the sliver of preserved earth, inhibiting trees from taking root, and allowing the grasses and flowers to thrive.

Vidrine had noticed similar patches hugging railroad tracks they’d passed along their drive. “Immediately, Charles wanted to go and look at all these,” Vidrine said. “So, for the next few weeks, we drove around and found about a dozen of these remnants, each about a mile long or so, of prairie.”

The two scientists dedicated much of the rest of their careers to studying these slices of residual prairie. They founded the Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society, collecting native seeds and then dispersing them to foster new grasslands. Since its establishment in 1988, the Society has been involved in various prairie restorations—among them the ten-acre Eunice Prairie and the 334-acre Duralde Prairie.

Parts of these restoration sites were planted with seeds derived from the very same railroad beds that they discovered in the ‘80s. For their efforts, in April the Center for Louisiana Studies will honor Vidrine and Allen with the 2022 James William Rivers Prize in Louisiana Studies, which recognizes outstanding contributions to Louisiana’s culture and history (previous honorees include A. Hays Town, Ernest Gaines, Leah Chase, and George Rodrigue).

“Our work really brought the prairie to people’s attention,” Allen said. “Perhaps if we had not found it, all of that may have gotten destroyed.”

The History of the Cajun Prairie

The tallgrass coastal prairie of Southwest Louisiana, also called the Cajun Prairie, is just one part of an extensive network of plains called the Western Gulf Coastal Grasslands, which historically stretched 9 million acres westward along the coast of Texas. The ecosystem was botanically more similar to the prairies of Kansas than the swamps of southeast Louisiana. It adjoined the vast interior network of grasslands positioned between the Rocky Mountains and Mississippi River, an assortment of different prairies—tallgrass, mixed, and shortgrass—commonly referred to as America’s Great Plains.

The coastal prairie—made up of plants like Little Bluestem, Indiangrass, and Eastern gamagrass—was formed around 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. It was maintained over the millennia through a delicate balance of nature, kept intact and treeless by frequent fires set by lightning strikes and by the area’s Indigenous peoples, who set blazes to aid in hunting or land management. Herds of bison were attracted to the new growth that emerged after a burn; they grazed and also fertilized the land, their droppings supporting micro-organisms and insects, and increasing the nutrient flow to the soil.

[Read this: Matt Conn's Restored Wetland in Acadiana] 

Various Native peoples, such as the Atakapa-Ishak and Opelousa, called this region home for centuries before the French and Acadians began encroaching on this region in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of the area’s districts and towns are to this day named after these Indigenous tribes; others, like Robert’s Cove, were named for the nautical way the tall grass flowing with the wind resembled the ocean’s waves.

In 1803, Frenchman C.C. Robin traveled through the Louisiana prairie, later chronicling his journey in the travelogue Voyage to Louisiana. “Toward the upper end, the banks of the river (Teche) are wooded, and behind this curtain of forest, about two hundred paces wide, spacious prairies stretch out, as far as the eye can see, broken here and there by patches of woods, forming a most agreeable landscape … Crossing the wide prairie, strewn with flowers, whose stems raise them to the height of the horse on which the traveler is riding, surprise follows surprise in this varied vegetation.”

Only a few decades after Robin’s trip, farmers in Southwest Louisiana began plowing up swaths of fertile prairie land in order to grow rice. The rail line in southwest Louisiana was completed in the 1880s, connecting the region to Texas in the West and New Orleans in the East, and allowing the growth of towns like Iowa, Jennings, and Rayne by attracting scores of farmers. By the 1920s agriculture in the region had grown so much that nearly all of the pristine habitat had been destroyed. Yet, in a weird twist of fate, the railroad system—the exact operation that first attracted the farmers who brought about the prairie’s demise—is exactly what saved it.

The Cajun Prairie Today

Smoke billowed into the air, fueled by mounting flames engulfing swaths of grassland that has spent the winter drying, depositing seeds, and awaiting  this restorative moment. Colby Lejeune, vice president of the CPHPS, employed a butane torch to light a patch of grass before walking another few paces to scorch another. When the wind faltered, volunteers used leaf blowers to coax the blaze. Before long, the fire took on a life of its own, immense heat generating gusts that swept flames farther across this ten-acre patch of land in Eunice. The Society established prairie here in 1988, and each year it is scorched in this way by a team of volunteers. Due to the lack of grazing animals and natural fires, without human intervention this prairie would soon be overrun with invasive plants like Chinese tallow trees or Johnson grass.

[Read this: 5 Places to see Louisiana Native Plants at their best] 

“Our landscape is so dominated by humans that if you put in a prairie, humans need to keep it up because humans have destroyed the natural forces that would allow prairie to take care of itself,” said Lejeune, a 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Beyond preservation efforts like this, Allen and Vidrine have worked to further educate on the significance of this distinct ecosystem, hosting regular habitat tours and workshops, and fostering a collective of scientists, horticulturalists, and hobbyists in support of its cause. By funding an in-development documentary about the Cajun Prairie directed by Jillian Godshall and produced by  Phyllis Griffard, the Society hopes to bring the restoration story to an even wider audience.

To truly “bring back” the prairie, Vidrine estimated they will need to plant 10,000 acres of grasslands by 2030, before the irreversible threats of climate change and coastal land loss complete the destruction that monoculture rice agriculture began. He understands it’s a tall order, especially considering there aren’t any large-scale incentive efforts for farmers to convert their fields back to prairie. But he pointed to recent progress as a good sign—Dr. Paul Guillory is currently planting more than 500 acres of prairie on his family property, the Bruce and Gladys Guillory Farm, in Mamou. And others are following suit with smaller acreages.

“It’s happening,” he said. “If it continues, the streams would become healthier, the aquifer would start to work, and the prairie itself—which sequesters carbon—would help combat climate change.” 

Learn more about the mission of the Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society, and how you can get involved, at cajunprairie.org.

On March 18–19, the Society will host a Cajun Boucherie at Bajat Trail as a fundraiser for Jillian Godshall’s forthcoming documentary on the Cajun Prairie. Details here.