American Language Supplement 2 (116 page)

Read notes that the Iowans have always been hostile to long and clumsy names,
e.g., Portlandville
and
Rocksylvania
, and have diligently avoided prefixes indicating relative situation. “The subsidiary position of being
West
Something,” he says, “seems derogatory to the reputation of the town.” Since they abandoned their frontier ways and took to golf, psychoanalysis and Kiwanis, they have purged their map of many old names of a ribald or otherwise embarrassing character. Thus the
Skunk Grove
of the early days is now
Rose Grove
, and
Barkersville
, named after a pioneer who later got into woman trouble, is now
Attica
. Many of the early settlements had the grandiloquent
City
attached to their names, and Fitzpatrick shows that Appanoose county has a
Pearl City
and a
Walnut City
, both of them small villages, to this day, but as hopes faded most such boastful appendages were dropped. Fitzpatrick’s lists contain very few names of any originality or even of any appositeness. To every
Beetrace
(commemorating a route used by the Indians in hunting honey),
Jaybird
and
Snort Creek
there are a dozen commonplace
Centervilles
and
Pleasant Hills
and a score of such steals as
Cincinnati, Memphis
and
Philadelphia
.

The literature of place-names in Kansas seems to be confined to some local pamphlets and newspaper articles and a brief series of papers by W. H. Carruth, published in 1901–02. There is a card-index in the headquarters of the State Historical Society, but it is far from complete. Kentucky has even less to offer. Louisiana, like Florida, owes the investigation of its Indian names to William A. Read.
²
Nearly all come from the Longtown dialect of the Choctaw
language and some have a considerable mellifluousness,
e.g., Okaloosa, Panola, Shongaloo
and
Tchoupitoulas
. Many, as they stand today, show early efforts at folk-etymology, either by the French or the succeeding Americans,
e.g., Funny Louis
, which comes from the Choctaw
fani
, a squirrel, and
lusa
, black. A few names are borrowed from northern Indian languages,
e.g., Chautauqua
and
Chenango
, and at least one,
Plaquemine
, comes from the old Mobile trade language through Creole French.
¹

Maine is richer in picturesque Indian names than any other State, and they have been competently studied by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm,
²
a native and life-long resident of Brewer, near Bangor. Some of them are of appalling length,
e.g., Chemquasabamticook
and
Moosetocmaguntic
, and in the early days there were many others, now abandoned,
e.g., Kassanumganumkeag
and
Matchihun-dupemubtunk
.
³
They have been borrowed mainly from the Abnaki and Maliseet languages, both of which are still spoken by Indians in the State, but others seem to come from the Micmac, the original speakers of which lived over what is now the Canadian border but no doubt made forays into Maine. Mrs. Eckstorm’s study includes a valuable treatise upon the Indian languages, especially Abnaki, which she mastered in the field. She warns against the facile assumption, so productive of absurd folk-etymologies, that the Indians formed words as we do, and that their grammatical categories were identical with our own. She gives all due credit to her predecessors, but does not spare a certain asperity in dealing with those who indulged themselves in speculations more donkeyish than perspicacious.

A study of the place-names of Maryland was undertaken during the 1930s by J. Louis Kuethe, of the Johns Hopkins, but he was soon diverted to other matters, and there remains nothing of his inquiry
save a few preliminary papers
¹
and a file of notes. The place-names of Massachusetts got some attention from the scholars of an earlier day,
²
but the banality of so many of them apparently discouraged the inquiry, and in late years the only contribution to it has been a pamphlet published by the Federal Writers’ Project as a by-product of a “general research upon historical subjects.”
³
The vain effort of the first Legislature of Michigan to get rid of eponymic and imitative place-names has been mentioned; since that primeval day both the statesmen and the scholars of the State have held aloof from its nomenclature, which includes some far from commonplace names,
e.g., Ann Arbor, Sault Sainte Marie, Kalamazoo
,
⁴
Ypsilanti, Au Train, Baie de Wasal, Hamtramck, Grosse Pointe, Lulu, Defiance, Bravo, Bovine, Male, Dice
and
Zilwaukee
.
⁵
Minnesota also has many picturesque place-names,
e.g., Mille Lacs, Good Thunder, Yellow Medicine, Sleepy Eye, Pigs Eye
,
⁶
Blue Earth, Fond du Lac, Ah-quah-ching
,
Albert Lea, Lac qui Parle, Wang, Triumph, Plato
and
Moe
. There is a comprehensive study of the State’s geographical nomenclature in “Minnesota Geographic Names,” by Warren Upham.
¹
Those of Indian origin have been studied by A. W. Williamson
²
and Joseph A. Gilfillan
³
and those of Scandinavian origin by Roy W. Swanson.
⁴

The indefatigable Henry Gannett tackled the place-names of Mississippi in 1902,
⁵
but his inquiry did not go very far and I know of no other discussion of the subject save some brief mention in a paper devoted mainly to those of Alabama
⁶
and a note on the etymology of
Natchez
.
⁷
The map of the State shows some striking Indian names,
e.g., Chulahoma, Issaquena, Oktibbeha
and
Pascagoula
, and also some recalling the days when it was French soil,
e.g., Bay St. Louis, Picayune
and
Bonhomie
, and frontier,
e.g., Logtown, Increase, Kiln, Sunflower, Lost Gap, Turkey
and
Bells
, but the majority of its present names belong to the depressing category of
Batesville, Franklin, Oxford, Rosedale
and
West Point
. The magnificent work of Robert L. Ramsay and his associates in Missouri I have already described.

Thanks to the initiative of Dr. Louise Pound, the place-names of Nebraska were investigated in the 1920s by one of her students, Lillian Linder Fitzpatrick, and the result was a report so comprehensive that it has not been surpassed since.
⁸
Miss Fitzpatrick showed that more than half the names on the State map are borrowed
personal names, chiefly those of early settlers and railway builders. The next largest division embraces descriptive names, often combined with such trite suffixes as
-town, -view, -dale, -field, -port, -side, -ford
and
-grove
. Indian names are relatively rare, though they include the name of the State and that of its largest city,
Omaha. Nebraska
is derived from an Omaha Indian term,
Nibthaska
, meaning flat water and referring to the Platte river. This combination of sounds was baffling to the pioneers, so they inserted an
r
, which was not found in the Indian speech, for the sake of euphony.
Omaha
was taken from the name of the circumambient tribe. In the original it was
O-mán-ha
, signifying upstream and with the accent on the second syllable. Most Nebraska names are commonplace, but there are a few exceptions.
Horsefoot
and
Keystone
were named from cattle-brands, and
Enola
is
Malone
spelled backward, with the
m
omitted.
Sarben
is a backward spelling of the first two syllables of
Nebraska. Whynot
is said to have been suggested by an early settler who asked, “Why not name the town
Why Not?
”
¹

I know of no published work on Nevada place-names save some brief papers in the annual reports of the State Historical Society, but it is noted frequently in the newspapers that the local pronunciation makes the first
a
in the State’s name that of
cat
.
²
Mr. Gustavus Swift Paine calls my attention to the fact that a number of its town and geographical-names include the syllable
pah, e.g., Tonopah, Illipah, Pahranagat, Pahroc, Weepah, Pahrump
and
Timpahute:
he suggests that it may be an Indian term meaning water, which also appears in the name of the
Piute, Paiute
or
Pah Ute
Indians. He says that
Chinatown
was first used in 1857 to designate a settlement in which is now Nevada near what is now Dayton. The DAE’s earliest example is dated 1877. The place-names of New Hampshire and New Jersey have got but scant attention from recent students of geographical nomenclature. On the former there is little save a brief but excellent paper on the naming of
Mount Washington
, by Lawrence Martin,
³
two others on the nomenclature of the White Mountains
by Frank H. Burt,
¹
and one on the county names of the State by Otis G. Hammond.
²
On New Jersey I can find nothing since Henry Gannett’s “Geographic Dictionary” of 1894 save a far from comprehensive Federal Writers’ Project pamphlet,
³
two short papers in the
Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society
in 1925–26,
⁴
and three even shorter newspaper articles published in 1937.
⁵
The material in the last-named seems to have been mainly derived from Gannett. Some of the place-names of northern New Jersey are of Dutch origin,
e.g., Barnegat
,
⁶
Sandy Hook
and
Kill van Kull
. In the Pine Barrens to the southward there are many abandoned villages with picturesque names,
e.g., Chicken Bone, Hogwallow La-Ha Way, Ong’s Hat, Loveladies
and
Batsto
.
⁷
There is, so far as I know, no formal treatise upon the colorful place-names of New Mexico, but Dr. Thomas M. Pearce, of the State university, has published a paper upon some of those that have acquired folk-etymologies,
e.g., Mora, Cimarron, Socorro, Lemitar, Pie Town
and
Picketwire
.
⁸
Not a few are the linguistic stumps of what were once long and sonorous Spanish names,
e.g., Santa Fe
, which was originally
La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Assisi
,
⁹
and
Picket-wire
, which is traditionally a folk-Americanization of
El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio
(The River of Souls Lost in Purgatory). Some charming early names survive,
e.g., Alamogordo, Bernalillo,
Carrizozo, Hilario, Los Vigiles, Tierra Amarilla, Tres Piedras, Ojo Caliente
and
San Ildefonso
, but
La Junta
has been degraded to
Hondo
.

As I have hitherto recorded, the Indian place-names of New York early attracted the attention of the learned Schoolcraft, and since his day they have been studied by William H. Beauchamp,
¹
William W. Tooker
²
and others.
³
Also, there have been monographs on various individual names,
e.g., Manhattan
,
⁴
Poughkeepsie
⁵
and
Krom Elbow
.
⁶
In the 1840s there was a movement to substitute Indian names for some of the more banal place-names of the States,
e.g., Horicon
for
Lake George
and even
Ontario
for
New York
, but it got nowhere.
⁷
In 1944 L. Sprague de Camp published a long and interesting list of upstate names, showing their local pronunciation.
⁸

The study of the place-names of North Carolina goes back to 1888, when Kemp P. Battle printed a pamphlet on those of the counties,
⁹
but the field has been neglected since.
¹⁰
The same thing
may be said of North Dakota and Ohio, the place-name bibliographies of which are limited to a few superficial items. For Ohio the most interesting is “Origin of Ohio Place Names,” by Maria Ewing Martin, though it deals with the history of the settlement of the State rather than with its nomenclature, and is now sadly dated.
¹
The Indian place-names of the State come from the languages of a dozen or more different tribes, and in pre-settlement days the same place often bore as many successive names.
Scioto
is Wyandot,
Chillicothe
is Shawnee,
Coshocton
is Delaware, and
Miami
is from the Ottawa word for mother. The early whites abandoned most of the Indian names and substituted trite inventions of their own, mainly brought from the East,
e.g., Farmington, New Philadelphia Newark, Dover
and
North Amherst
.
²
For North Dakota the most interesting paper is a brief one on coined town names by Dorothy J. Hughes,
³
e.g., Alkabo
, from
alkali
and
gumbo; Grenora
, from
Great Northern Railway
, and
Sandoun
, from
sand-dune
.

The place-names of Oklahoma have been dealt with at length by Dr. Charles N. Gould, director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey and professor of geology in the State University
⁴
and its French names have had separate treatment.
⁵
Gould says that less than one percent of them are of French origin and less than a quarter of one percent Spanish. He calls attention to “the rather unusual abundance of feminine names of postoffices,” and lists more than a hundred, ranging from
Abbie
and
Addielle
to
Violet
and
Zula
. The of the
Modern Language Association
, Dec., 1931, p. 1312,
e.g.
, Pinch Gut, Lick Log, Broken Leg, Naked Place, Burnt Pone, Four-Killer, Chunky Gal, How Come You, Jerkem Tight,
Big Bugaboo
and
Barren She
. The Federal Writers’ Project brought out How They Began—the Story of North Carolina County, Town and Other Place Names in 1941, but it need not detain us.
place-names of Oregon are discussed at length in the excellent monograph of Lewis A. McArthur, already mentioned – in many ways the best study of its sort yet done in America. The origin of the State name has been long debated. Stewart produces impressive evidence in “Names on the Land” that it may be derived from
Ouaricon
, which in turn was derived from
Ouriconsint
, an early French name for a vague “River of the West,” apparently borrowed from the Indians.
¹
If this theory is sound, then
Oregon
and
Wisconsin
both came from the same source.
²