DCHP-1 Online

park

• 1 n. Obs. a fenced enclosure into which animals, especially buffalo, were driven to be slaughtered; a pound.

  • Meanings 1, 2, and perhaps 3 are derived from French parc through the French Canadians (coureurs de bois and voyageurs), who were the first to see these topographical features of the western prairies and mountains.

  • 1797  (1819)  A good runner frequently goes before the band with the hair of his robe outwards and half bent, sous to represent a buffalo and, by that means, decoys them into the park which has a small door to make him a passage out.
  • 1804  (1820)  In order to kill them [buffalo], the Natives in large bands . . . drive them into parks and kill them at their leisure.

• 2 See hole 1961 quote

  See also: hole (def. 1)  

  • 1900  When the young Spruce are growing, and would choke up the park, we strip the bark off and they die, and the open is still with us.
  • 1954  The place was what the old mountain men used to call a hole or a park--it was a little country of its own.

• 3 n. the lightly wooded, grassy belt of rich land lying between the open prairie and the northern forests in the three Prairie Provinces; also, similar but smaller areas of lightly wooded rolling grasslands, as the Peace River country.

  See also: parkland(s) (def. 1)  

  • 1905  Then came park country, rich green pasturage and dark forest belts, with a winding coal-black stream-bed meandering in the most abandoned manner through it all.
  • 1952  The climate is drier and the vegetation grades from park to treeless steppe.

• 4 n. a national park or a provincial park.

  See also: provincial park  

  • 1905  The Rocky Mountain Park stretches from the great wall that overhangs the foothills to the Divide, where it is joined by the almost equally extensive Yoho Park Reserve embracing a vast tract on the Pacific slope.
  • 1940  The Canadian Government, full conscious of the value of this alpine wilderness as a national asset, has . . . set aside for recreational purposes and for preservation for future generations, seven large park areas embracing 8,720 square miles of the most easily accessible and picturesque parts of the Rockies and Selkirks.