American Language Supplement 2 (115 page)

Will C. Barnes’s “Arizona Place Names,” before mentioned, is a painstaking and excellent compilation; indeed, it comes close to exhausting its subject. Barnes complains of a tendency common all over the country, to wit, to ascribe to “Indian origin” every place-name for which no other etymology is available. There are, he says, more than twenty tribes in the State, and running down such vague ascriptions is seldom rewarding. He finds some mellifluous names of Spanish origin,
e.g., Huerfano
(orphan),
Nogales
(walnut),
Tortolia
(little dove) and
Tinja
(an earthen water-jug), and others authentically Indian,
e.g., Huachuca
(Chirchua-Apache: thunder),
Vekol
(Papago: grandmother),
Topock
(Mohave: bridge),
Parish-hawampitts
(Piute: boiling water),
Cochibo
(Papago:
kochi
, pig,
and
bo
, pond), and
Shato
(Navajo: sunny side), but most of the pioneers were matter-of-fact men and were content with such banal names as
Milltown, Maryville, New London, Shultz, Sunset City
and
Smithville
, with an occasional ascent to
Grasshopper, Frog Tanks, Tombstone
and
Total Wreck
.
¹
In Arkansas the place-names of French origin have been studied by Branner and Renault,
²
and there is a discussion of the State names in general by Fred. W. Alsopp.
³

Those of California, now dealt with at length in Gudde’s study, before mentioned, have been listed by many other fanciers, beginning with C. M. Drake.
⁴
As everyone knows, the map of the State is adorned with a large number of charming Spanish names, many of them worn down considerably by American speech habits,
e.g., Los Angeles
, but the rest fairly well preserved. Walt Whitman, in “An American Primer,” objected to the saints’ names among them on the ground that they had “a tinge of melancholy and of a curious freedom from roughness and money-making” and hence knew nothing “of democracy – of the hunt for gold leads and the nugget or of the religion that is scorn and negation.” “Chase them away,” he exclaimed, “and substitute aboriginal names.” Fortunately, his fatuous counsel went unheard for years and when it was heard at last it was not heeded.
⁵
The sonorous Spanish names were described romantically in 1914 by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
⁶
and more soberly by various other writers afterward,
e.g.
, Joseph B. Vasché,
⁷
Gertrude Mott,
⁸
Martha A. Marshall,
⁹
Archibald A. Hill,
¹⁰
Laura K. McNary
¹
and Robert Shafer.
²
Most of these authors make some effort to expound the true pronunciations, but usually without much effect, for there is a difference of usage and opinion in and about many names beside
Los Angeles
. The commonest error says Vasché, is the substitution of the
a
in
cat
for the Spanish
a
in
father
, but almost as bad are the substitutions of the
a
in
father
or the
u
in
up
for the Spanish
o
and of the
i
in it for the Spanish long
l
, as in
machine
. The California place-names of Indian origin have been studied by the anthropologist, A. F. Kroeber.
³
One of them,
Pasadena
, is commonly assumed to be Spanish, but it actually comes from a Chippewa term said to mean “crown of the valley” and was suggested to the first settlers by a missionary to Missouri who was a relative of one of them.
⁴

Henry Gannett’s gazetteer to Colorado, brought out in 1906, held the field alone until 1932, when Levette J. Davidson and Olga Hazel Koehler published a paper on “The Naming of Colorado’s Towns and Cities” in
American Speech
.
⁵
They recalled that in the days following the Mexican War what is now the State narrowly escaped being named
Idaho
and that soon afterward it was actually called
Jefferson Territory
. The name finally chosen was taken from that of the river
Colorado
, a Spanish term meaning florid or ruddy.
Denver
, the capital and metropolis, was first called
Montana City
. It presently had an adjacent rival named
St. Charles City
and then a second,
Auraria
. In the end
St. Charles City
engulfed the other two and was renamed
Denver
in honor of James W. Denver, Governor of Kansas Territory. Davidson and Koehler listed some of the
more picturesque place-names of the State, many of them now only memories of ghost-towns,
e.g., Tin Cup, Buckskin Joe
and
Tarry-all
. In 1935 Eleanor L. Richie and George L. Trager, followed with reports on its Spanish place-names.
¹
There were only a few Mexican settlements within its bounds before the American occupation, but some Spanish names had got in along the southern border and others later penetrated northward. Miss Richie says that most of them have become Americanized in pronunciation, including
Colorado
itself, which is frequently
Colo-ray-do. Raton Pass
is
Rah-tone
in New Mexico, but
Ra-toon
in Colorado.
Garcia
is
Garsha, San Luis
is
San Loo-ie
or
San Loo-is, Alamosa
is
Ala-moosa
, and
Rio Grande
may be
Ree-o Grand
or
Rye-o Grand
. In 1939 the Colorado Writers’ Project undertook an examination of all the town names of the State, of whatever provenance, and its reports were printed in the
Colorado Magazine
, beginning in January, 1940, and running to May, 1943. The field-workers made a diligent search of all the State records, examined early newspaper files and consulted many old settlers, but in the end they had to confess that the origin and meaning of large numbers of names, especially those of ghost-towns, were lost to human memory.
²

J. H. Trumbull’s early work on Indian place-names, beginning in 1870, had chiefly to do with those of Connecticut. He was followed in 1885 by F. B. Dexter with a paper on Connecticut town names in general,
³
and in 1894 Gannett contributed one of his gazetteers. Trumbull devoted himself largely to interpreting various Indian prefixes and suffixes, and to this subject Stanley Martin returned in 1939.
⁴
During the same year H. A. Wright published a paper on the corruption of Indian place-names in Connecticut and the adjacent States.
⁵
That corruption, he found, had been produced in the early days by the fact that the Algonquin Indians of the region spoke many different dialects, some of them so unlike as to be mutually unintelligible. In one dialect
l, n
and
r
were interchanged; in another
l
was not used; in yet another,
r;
in a fourth, neither
r
nor
l
. Thus the Indian name of the Northampton, Mass., area appeared variously as
Norwotock, Nonotuck, Nolwotogg, Nanotuck
and
Nalwottoge
. The elements here were two roots meaning a far away place, common to all the dialects, but they varied so much from one to another that the name became greatly distorted, and the English settlers changed it further to
Nauwot, Nawwatick
and
Nawwatuck
. In 1941 it was announced in
American Speech
that Odell Shepard and Arthur H. Hughes, of Trinity College, Hartford, were engaged upon “a list of Connecticut place-names and notes of their origin and development,” but Shepard withdrew from the enterprise in 1946 and Hughes has not yet published his accumulations. So far as I know, nothing has been done about the place-names of Delaware save what is to be found in Gannett’s 15-page gazetteer of 1904, and his “Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States” of two years before. As I have hitherto noted, the State is the only one in the Union without a
Washington
, but it can boast of a
Rehoboth
, a
Lebanon
and a
Bethany Beach
, beside an
Angola
, a
Smyrna
, a
Glasgow
, a
Leipsic
, an
Odessa
, a
Mount Cuba
, a
Viola
, a
Brickyard
, a
Canal
, a
Sandtown
and a
Slaughter
, so its nomenclature should be well worth investigating.

Mrs. Annie McRae, of St. Petersburg, Fla., undertook a work on Florida place-names, eventually running to about 1300 items, in 1940, but it is still unpublished. The Indian names on the State map have been studied at length, and with great learning, by William A. Read.
¹
Most of them come from the Seminole-Creek language,
e.g., Tampa, Tallahassee, Hialeah
and
Palatka
, but there are others from the Choctaw,
e.g., Pensacola
, and Hitchiti,
e.g., Apalachicola
. The numerous names ending in
-hatchee
are derived from a Seminole-Creek word meaning river. Some names from the Indian languages of the North,
e.g., Muscogee
and
Ocoee
, were brought in by white settlers. The origin of a few very familiar ones,
e.g., Kissimee, Ocala
and
Suwanee
, remains undetermined. An effort has been made to interpret
Suwanee
as a corruption of the Spanish
San Juanito
, but Read says that it lacks ground. Gannett sought to derive it
from an Indian term,
sawani
, meaning echo,
¹
but Read dismisses this also, calling it “no doubt purely fanciful.”
²
The name of
Key West
reveals a curious corruption. The Spanish called it
Cayo Hueso
, meaning bone key, but the Americans turned
hueso
into
west
.
³
Some notes on early Georgia place-names are in Adiel Sherwood’s gazetteer,
⁴
but in recent years the subject has been neglected. There is an M.A. thesis, Georgia County Place-Names, by Margaret W. Godley, 1935, in the library of Emory University, but it has not been published. Nor has a paper, Our Names and How We Got Them, by Dr. Guy H. Wells, president of the Georgia State College for Women, read to a group of graduate students in 1940.
⁵
Many Georgia names, like many Florida names, end in
-hatchee
and show the same Indian origin.
⁶

The name of
Idaho
is generally supposed, though on dubious grounds, to be derived from two Indian words,
edah hoe
, meaning light on the mountains, but this etymology was challenged by Dr. Edward P. Roche, of Bath, Maine, writing in the Boston
Journal
in 1889.
⁷
Dr. Roche said that, in the Autumn of 1865, he met in New York one C. C. Cole, later a Congressman from Idaho, and that Cole told him the following story: At a time shortly before the organization of the Territory,
⁸
Cole and another man were riding through one of its ranges of barren mountains, and fell into a discussion of the various names that had been suggested for it. While so engaged they emerged upon a small plateau, and saw before them an Indian cabin. Just before they reached it an Indian woman came out of it and yelled. The word she uttered sounded to Cole like
Ee-dah-hoo-oo-oo
, with “a drop from the first
e
to the second, a
long
a
, almost as in
ah-ah
, and a musical, long drawn
hoo
, using the full force of the lungs in espuration
¹
and crescendo.” The caller’s tone “was a combination of those of the Swiss yodler, the Spanish Indian and the Louisiana Negress.” The travelers assumed that she was calling her husband, but it turned out that she was really calling her daughter, “an Indian girl about nine years of age, clean and better looking than many of her race.” The idea occurred to Cole that the name of this damsel would make a good name for the new Territory, and he and his companion advocated it on their return to the settlements, and with success. How it became changed from
Eedahoo
to
Idaho
does not appear, nor why
Idaho
had been proposed as a name for the present
Colorado
several years before, as recorded in the discussion of Colorado place-names.
²

There is little in print about the place-names of Illinois save a paper by William D. Barge and N. W. Caldwell.
³
Indiana has been better served, and a bibliography of the subject prepared by Richard B. Sealock and Pauline A. Seely in 1945 shows thirty-five items, but many of these are no more than
obiter dicta
in historical works of a more general character, and others are still in manuscript.
⁴
Iowa is more fortunate than either Indiana or Illinois, for Allen Walker Read, during his novitiate at the University of Missouri, made an extensive investigation of its place-names,
⁵
and T. J. Fitzpatrick has
printed excellent studies of those of various counties,
e.g.
, Appanoose, Des Moines, Lee and Van Buren.
¹
Read says that some of them “have grown up by common consent,” but that the majority have been “given upon authority.” When the State was opened to settlement immigrants poured in in large numbers, and there was a great deal of wholesale naming, “practically parallel to the naming of Pullman cars.” The results were a proliferation of banality and many confusing repetitions; for example, there are still twenty townships called
Liberty
, and dozens of towns and villages have been so called at different times, past and present.