According to Theodore Roosevelt: "We have taken into our language the word prairie, because when our backwoodsmen first reached the land [in the Midwest] 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."[1] Prairie is the French word for meadow, but the ultimate root is the Latin pratum (same meaning).