Local historian J.B. Hogan has written that Indigenous Tribes had referred to the rise of land that would become downtown Fayetteville as “Prairie Hill,” presumably in an Indigenous language.
The Quapaw words, for instance, are ma-zhoⁿ bahé.
The name reflects the two faces of Fayetteville — the level prairie that once extended from the west deep into the heart of Fayetteville and the forested hills and mountains that still predominate to the east.