Here and there copses of woodland lay like islands in the sunny seas of tall, waving grass.

Where the rivers ran, their alluvial bottoms were densely covered with trees and underbrush, and were often overflowed in the spring freshets.
Sometimes the prairies were long, narrow strips of meadow land; again they were so broad as to be a day's journey across, and to the American, bred in a wooded country where the largest openings were the beaver meadows and the clearings of the frontier settlers, the stretches of grass land seemed limitless.

They abounded in game.

The buffalo crossed and recrossed them, wandering to and fro in long files, beating narrow trails that they followed year in and year out; while bear, elk, and deer dwelt in the groves around the borders.[11] There were perhaps some four thousand inhabitants in these French villages, divided almost equally between those in the Illinois and those along the Wabash.[12] The country came into the possession of the British--not of the colonial English or Americans--at the close of Pontiac's war, the aftermath of the struggle which decided against the French the ownership of America.
It was held as a new British province, not as an extension of any of the old colonies; and finally in 1774, by the famous Quebec Act, it was rendered an appanage of Canada, governed from the latter.

It is a curious fact that England immediately adopted towards her own colonists the policy of the very nationality she had ousted.