This paper explores the positioning of William Cullen Bryant's "The Prairies" within ecocriticism, noting that Bryant was among the earliest poets to incorporate the prairies into the American imagination. The non-human material elements depicted in the poem—such as grass, clouds, mounds, and animals—exhibit local characteristics and construct an ecological network that dissolves the boundaries of time and space. Hay argues that Bryant transcends the label of a "poet of the land" to become an ecological poet. However, situating the poem's prairie elements within the 19th-century contexts of colonialism and nationalism reveals the ecological fears, traumatic fantasies, and colonial ideologies underlying the poet's unique perception of the wilderness.

The "Trauma" of the Mounds

In the early 19th century, after the U.S. acquired the Louisiana Territory from France, Bryant's "The Prairies" became a representative work showcasing the region's distinctive landscape. While the poem depicts the grandeur of the prairies, the poet's admiration for the wilderness is largely based on abstract imagination from a distance, whereas the actual landscape evokes unease and fear. Bryant uses the word "lonely" to express his fear of "unseen beauty," with the dynamic play of light and shadow on the prairie and the solitary flight of the prairie eagle intensifying this sentiment. The poet compares the prairie to the chaos before Genesis, hinting at the pain induced by solitude. As the perspective shifts, his description of weeds suggests a deeper fear of lost boundaries and norms, transforming the wilderness into a "ruin" inhabited by humans—a metaphor for the ruins of human civilization and an abandoned, lonely history.

The mounds on the prairie become symbols of civilized society and a uniquely American geographical feature. Through their transformation, the poet projects an imaginative mystique onto mound civilization. Although the mounds were actually Native American burial sites, 19th-century colonizers sought to dissociate them from Indigenous peoples, constructing a myth about mound builders and their civilization. This imagined mound civilization alleviates the poet's fear of the wilderness, recasting it as an alluring relic of culture. However, the sudden appearance of "the red man" interrupts this civilizational narrative, reintroducing the fear of the wilderness while layering it with the profound trauma and hatred of displacement. Even as the poet promotes his narrative, he betrays a hatred for those who would erase civilization.

The "Savagery" of the Red Man

This section examines the stereotypes and racist attitudes toward Native Americans in Bryant's "The Prairies." Bryant portrays Indigenous people as savage, inferior beings no different from beasts, aligning with then-popular "scientific" theories such as Linnaean taxonomy and phrenology. The poet reinforces this "savage" nature through negatively charged animal imagery and action verbs. Additionally, Bryant borrows from Gibbon's narrative of barbarian invasions in *The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*, framing Native Americans as destroyers of civilization. The survivor narrative in the poem links historical trauma to contemporary fears, further entrenching stereotypes. Yet this portrayal starkly contrasts with the more nuanced depictions of Native Americans by writers like Washington Irving. Bryant's work reflects the fears and prejudices of white settlers, equating Indigenous people with the wildness of the wilderness to justify their subjugation or eradication in the name of civilization.

The "Healing" of the Bees

This section analyzes how Bryant employs ecological fears and traumatic fantasies to depict the relationship between mounds, Native Americans, and bees in "The Prairies." The poet presents a triumphant ending where good prevails over evil, highlighting love and song as shared traits between ancient civilizations and contemporary colonizers, as well as the continuity of disciplined, industrious farming. Bees, as companions to the settlers, symbolize pioneers in taming the wilderness, their diligent and communal nature mirroring that of the new immigrants. On a prairie stripped of its terror, all life exhibits gentle, beautiful, and graceful "humanized" qualities, blurring the line between human and non-human. Yet this harmony masks a deep-seated control over nature, betraying an ecological fear rooted in human superiority. The poem begins with silent, chaotic wildness and ends with vibrant pastoral scenery, using textual distance to obscure the incompatibility of wilderness and cultivated land in the same space. The wilderness is replaced by the pastoral, their boundary "dissolved" by human effort, fulfilling the poet's vision of American exceptionalism and reviving the colonizers' beloved "primitive myth." This lays the groundwork for Bryant's civilizational imagination. As Cronon argues, uninhabited wilderness must first be invented before it can be preserved—and preservation requires the elimination of its enemies. Rather than resorting to violence, Bryant opts for a more "civilized" erasure of Native Americans, juxtaposing wilderness and civilization on the prairie through contrasting tenses: one restless and savage, the other serene and civilized. The former, belonging to the wilderness and the "red man," is the source of fear; the latter belongs to mound civilization and its heirs, where all fears and traumas are soothed by divine breath, and civilization inevitably replaces savagery. The wilderness becomes pastoral, ruins become civilization—transformation without violence, all by divine will. Yet this remains only the poet's wistful fantasy. The sudden melancholy at the poem's end, as Buell observes, "reproduces a contradiction in colonial culture: the desire to preserve nature while struggling to project its own image onto the vast western wilderness." However, Buell's interpretation softens the poet's ecological fear, framing it as a benign "love" for the wilderness. Returning to the early 19th century, the French outsider Tocqueville perhaps saw more clearly what the wilderness meant to colonizers. Bryant's visit to the prairie was to see his brothers Arthur and John, who had settled there. In a letter to John dated November 21, 1831, he wrote, "Now that you are a landowner, I have no doubt that if you ever consider leaving this place, you will be able to sell it at a high price." The "place" he referred to was Jacksonville, named after President Jackson, who championed and signed the Indian Removal Act. This act was a naked expression of the colonizers' westward expansionist desires since the late 18th century. Expelling Native Americans and seizing their land and wealth was the most direct path to colonial development. Initially, colonizers used legal precedents and statutes to erode Indigenous rights, granting colonial governments unilateral authority over Native affairs. The 1830 Indian Removal Act mandated the relocation of all Native Americans east of the Mississippi to designated lands west of the river. Under armed federal escort, forced removals began in 1831 with the Choctaw, followed by the Chickasaw in 1834, the Creek in 1836, and the Cherokee in 1838. By 1840, approximately 60,000 Native Americans had been displaced. The Cherokee removal, one of the best-documented, saw around 21,500 people forced westward, with 8,000 dying along the route later known as the "Trail of Tears." Perhaps another reason for the poet's awakening was his awareness of the real Indigenous people. Once idealized as "noble savages"—healthy and primitive contrasts to European decadence—they frequently appeared in the writings and artworks of white travelers. Their nobility was exemplified by alliances with whites, even saving white lives, or conversion to Christianity, assimilating into white society, even joining the American Revolution. Whites even learned local customs of friendship and etiquette from them. Yet by the early 19th century, facing colonial expansion, Native Americans became ungovernable natives, unlike the tameable prairie. More critically, their presence conflicted with settler development and electoral politics. Thus, from mound trauma to captivity trauma, the poet leads one myth into another, one fantasy justifying the next. His masterful verse vividly presents these intertwined stories to readers while implying: