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Coteau 3 million hectares of Saskatchewan

This continental French noun meaning ‘hillside, slope of a low hill’ came early to Québec, and remains in provincial place names like Coteau-du-Lac and Coteau-Landing. Among European French vintners, les coteaux means ‘hillside vineyards.’

Fur-crazed voyageurs and trappers paddling the canoe routes of what would become Canada spread the word coteau across our West. Still used today in Canadian English and Canadian French, coteau means ‘high prairie.’

A coteau is a plateau or a series of low ridges. In 1843 in his Narrative of the Discoveries of the North Coast of America, Thomas Simpson described a “route. . . through a more open country, consisting of rising grounds or coteaux, with bare ridges, and sides clothed with dwarf poplar and brushwood.”

Le Grand Coteau, part of Saskatchewan Geography

Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, the great French Canadian explorer, with one of the more orotund names in our history, was the first to name a prominent midcontinental feature of the American plains, namely Le Grand Coteau ‘the big slope.’ Also called The Missouri Coteau, it is a narrow band of prairie upland that stretches from the rolling grasslands of southern Saskatchewan to South Dakota.

“The Missouri Coteau is an extensive glacial moraine covering approximately 17 million acres (7 million hectares) in Canada and the United States, of which 6 million acres (3 million hectares) occur in Saskatchewan.” - - -from Wikipedia 

In Saskatchewan, the Coteau is a hummocky, pothole-dotted grassland. The Coteau’s vast tracts of grassland, prairie pothole wetlands and lakes make it a vitally important habitat for waterfowl. But these grasslands and all species who depend on them are endangered. Less than one per cent of North America’s native prairie still exists. Read about it and do something about it. A good start? An exquisite meditation of the solace and grace which a prairie gives back to a wanderer appears in a new book, Grass, Sky, Song by Trevor Herriot.

Among other modes of inducement, this is a book of aesthetic suasion. As you share Harriot’s sensate joy in prairie nature, you will want to seek out ways to preserve it. Unless we stop its evanescence, this ocean of grass shall wave no more. Human life among prairie grasslands has also been diminished — the losses and the blisses poetically recounted in Herriot’s beautifully crafted volume, the best Canadian nature book published this year.

Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds, by Trevor Herriot, HarperCollins/Phyllis Bruce, 273 pages, $32.95

On the Missouri Coteau, Canadian and American species at risk include the Loggerhead Shrike, Piping Plover, Burrowing Owl, Sprague’s Pipit, Ferruginous Hawk, Long-billed Curlew, Yellow Rail, Great Plains Toad, Northern Leopard Frog and Monarch Butterfly.

 

Surprisingly, the loggerhead shrike is an excellent mouser. It has learned to impale small rodents on thorns and, lately — yes — on barbed wire fences.

 

Une signification québécoise unique du mot ‘coteau’

A Special Local Meaning of Coteau

Coteau-du-Lac National Historical Site at Lake St. François preserves an historical Quebec meaning of coteau. Coteau-du-Lac was named in 1721. Coteau then also meant ‘a cluster of houses,’ ‘a little settlement.’ The “du-Lac” refers to the nearby Lake St. François.

 

Etymology

Coteau entered medieval French from Late Latin costellum ‘little side, hillock, slope of a hill,’ itself a diminutive of the Latin word costa ‘rib, side, sea-coast.’

From costa derive all manner of words in the Romance languages, like French côte ‘slope, coastline, human rib’ and Spanish place names like Costa del Sol ‘Sunshine Coast’ and Costa Brava. In South American Spanish is the word costanera ‘seaside drive or promenade.’

From Latin, medical English took the anatomical term intercostal muscles ‘muscles between the ribs.’ From French forms, English adopted words like sea coast, to accost (to come up to the ribs or ‘side’ of someone) and cutlet, not ‘small cut’ but originally côtelette ‘little rib.’

From medieval French, English named an apple variety Costard. That apple has prominent ribs or angles. In Old French the suffix –ard is augmentative. It makes the root mean something larger. An apple seller, costardmonger, is the original form of costermonger.

Italian has phrases like la costa del Pacifico ‘the Pacific seabord’ and le coste de una foglia ‘the veins in a leaf.’

Coteau is a North American landscape word worth promulgation. When more people know the term and its trove of earth-nursed riches, then more people may decide these undulant low-and-high-grass prairies are a heritage of verdure as worthy of preservation as Stephen Harper's lifeless smirk when he utters the word “ecology.”

 

                                                                                         piping plover in flight

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

Any comments, emendations, additional word lore?

Please email it to me at

canadiansayings@mountaincable.net