Made In America (21 page)

Indian names frequently evolved into forms that disguised their native origins.
Kepaneddik
became
Cape Neddick. Norwauk
transmuted into
Norwalk.
The arresting
Waycake Creek,
New Jersey, grew out of
Waakaack,
while Long Island’s
Rockaways
had their origins in
Rackawackes. Moskitu-auke
became, almost inevitably,
Mosquito Hawk. Oxopaugsgaug
became the jauntily accessible
Oxyboxy. No Man’s Land
island in Massachusetts commemorates not some forgotten incident, but is taken from an Indian chief named
Tequenoman.
The list goes on and on.
Ticklenaked, Smackover, Pohamoonshine, Poo Run, Zilly Boy
and countless other resonant place names are the result of the confusion or comic adaptability of early colonial settlers.

Non-Indian names likewise sometimes underwent a kind of folk evolution.
Burlington,
Delaware, was originally called
Bridlington,
after the town in Yorkshire.
⁷
Newark
is a shortening of
New Ark of the Covenant. Teaneck
was a folk adaptation
of the Dutch family name
Teneyck. Newport News
has nothing to do with news; it was originally
New Port Newce
and named for the Newce family that settled there.
⁸

Although Indian names occasionally were lost in this process – as when
Cappawack
became
Martha’s Vineyard
or
Mattapan
was turned into
Dorchester
– for the most part Native American names have proved remarkably durable. You have only to cast an eye over a map of the United States to see how extraordinarily rich its heritage of Indian names is. In his classic study
Names on the Land,
George R. Stewart notes that ‘26 states [now 27; Alaska has been added since he wrote], 18 of the greatest cities, and most of the larger lakes and longer rivers’ all owe their names to the Indians.
⁹
The sentiment is true enough, but the specifics demand some qualifying. For one thing, many ‘Indian’ names were never uttered by any Indian –
Indiana
being the most obvious example.
Oklahoma
was a word coined in Congress. It employed Choctaw elements but not in any way ever used by the Choctaws themselves.
Wyoming
was taken from a sentimental poem of the early 1800s called ‘Gertrude of Wyoming’, commemorating a massacre. The poem was so popular that communities all over the country were given the name before it was applied in 1868 to a Western territory in which it had no linguistic relevance.
Idaho,
even more absurdly, had no meaning whatever. It simply sounded to nineteenth-century Congressmen like a good Indian word.

Indian town names, too, often arose not out of any historical connection, but under the impulse of the romanticism that swept the country in the nineteenth century. All the many
Hiawathas
owe their existence not to the Mohawk chief but to the poem by Longfellow. The great Seminole chief Osceola never went anywhere near Iowa, but there is a town there named for him. Even when an Indian place name has some historical veracity, it was often applied relatively late. Agawam, Massachusetts, for instance, took its
place on the map two hundred years after the nearby town of Ipswich did.

As America moved west, the need for names grew apace. For a time, the fashion was to give classical names to new communities hence the proliferation, particularly among those states that received the first westward migrations, of classical names:
Cincinnati, Troy, Utica, Athens, Corinth, Memphis, Sparta, Cicero, Carthage, Cairo, Hannibal,
even
Romeo
and
Juliet.
The residents of one town in New York evidently grew so wearied by the various spellings that attached themselves to their town –
Sinneken, Sinnegar, Sennicky
– that they seized the opportunity to give the place both consistency and classical credibility by making it
Seneca.

Another approach, and one that grew increasingly common as Americans plunged still further west, was to name places and landmarks after people, usually their founders but often someone deemed to have admirable qualities. In the Midwest especially, every state is dotted with communities bearing the name of some forgotten pioneer or hero of the nineteenth century. In Iowa you can find
Webster City, Mason City, Ames, Audubon, Charles City, Grinnell
(named by and not for the man who took Horace Greeley’s advice to ‘go west, young man’) and perhaps two hundred others in a similar vein. A notable (if seldom noted) feature of American place names is how many of the larger cities honour people hardly anyone has ever heard of. There are no great cities named Franklin or Jefferson, but there is a Dallas. It was named for George Mifflin Dallas, who rose to the certain obscurity of the Vice-Presidency under James K. Polk and then sank from history like a stone dropped in deep water. Cleveland (originally spelled
Cleaveland)
is named for a forgotten Connecticut lawyer, Moses Cleaveland, who owned the land on which it stood but never bothered to visit the community that bears his name. Denver commemorates a governor of the Kansas Territory. It is not that these people
were deemed especially worthy of having great cities named after them, but that the communities grew to greatness later.

Timing was all in these matters. Lewis Cass’s nearest brush with immortality was to be defeated by Zachary Taylor in the 1848 presidential election, but counties in nine states are named for him none the less. Taylor had to be content with just seven county names – though that is perhaps seven more than a longer view of history would grant him. Henry Clay, the Kentucky senator and twice failed presidential candidate, did better than both put together. He is honoured with county names in no fewer than eighteen states. You can search the West for notable commemorations of Lewis and Clark and find almost nothing, but Zebulon Pike is grandly honoured with a mountain peak he never climbed or even got very close to (he merely sighted it from afar). Even Warren G. Harding, a President whose greatest contribution to American history was to die in office, has a county named in his honour in New Mexico. Only George Washington got anything approaching his just reward, receiving the approbation of a state, the nation’s capital, 31 counties and at least 120 communities.
¹⁰
Once there were even more. Cincinnati, for example, began life as Fort Washington.

Often Americans arrived in a place to find it already named. The process began with the names the Dutch left behind when they gave up their hold on Nieuw Amsterdam. The British hastily changed that to New York – in honour of the Duke of York, and not the historic English city – but others required a little linguistic surgery.
Haarlem
was shorn of a vowel,
Vlissingen
was transformed into
Flushing,
and
Breukelyn
became
Brooklyn
(and at one point looked like evolving further into Brookland).
¹¹
Deutel Bogt
begat
Turtle Bay, Vlachte Bosch
became
Flatbush, Thynevly
became
Tenafly, Bompties Hoek
became
Bombay Hook,
and
Antonies Neus
became
Anthony’s Nose.
As with the English and French, the Dutch often took Indian names and rendered them into
something more palatable to their tongues. Thus
Hopoakan,
a village across the river from Manhattan, became
Hoboken.

Further west, the French left many hundreds of names. In a single summer in 1673, the explorers Marquette and Jolliet set down eleven important names that live on yet in the names of rivers or cities (often both): Chicago, Des Moines, Wisconsin, Peoria, Missouri, Osage, Omaha, Kansas, Iowa, Wabash and Arkansas, though those weren’t quite the spellings they used. To Marquette and Jolliet, the river was the
Mesconsing.
For reasons unknown, this was gradually altered to
Ouisconsing
before eventually settling into English as
Wisconsin.
Similarly
Wabash
evolved from
Ouabasche
and
Peoria
from
Peouarea. Iowa
began life as the somewhat formidable
Ouaouiatonon.
The French quickly shortened this to the still challenging
Ouaouia
before English-speaking settlers finished the job for them.

In Marquette and Jolliet’s wake came French trappers, traders and explorers. For a century and a half much of America west of the Appalachians was under French control and the names on the landscape record the fact: Michigan, Illinois, Louisiana, Detroit, Baton Rouge, St Louis, Chicago and countless others. Many of these names are of uncertain significance. Chicago appears to be from an Indian word meaning ‘place that stinks of onions’, and Baton Rouge was evidently so called because in 1700 a party of explorers came upon a red stake – a
baton rouge
– marking the boundary between two Indian hunting-grounds and built a trading post there, but Coeur d’Alene, the city in Idaho, is utterly baffling. It translates as ‘heart of awl’, and quite what the founders had in mind by that is anybody’s guess.
¹²

No less of a mark was made by the Spanish. Though we tend to associate the Spanish with the south-west, Spain’s American dominions stretched at one time across most of the continent, from the Florida Keys as far north as Alaska. Memphis was once known as San Fernando and Vicksburg as
Nogales.
¹³
But, preoccupied with their holdings in Central and South America and convinced that North America was mostly worthless desert, the Spanish never made much of the lands to the north. By 1821, when Spain withdrew from North America, its estate north of the border consisted of only a few scattered garrisons and just three towns worthy of the name – Santa Fe, San Antonio and St Augustine, though even they couldn’t muster 10,000 citizens between them. (Mexico City by contrast had a population comfortably above 150,000.) Even so, as I need hardly tell you, the Spanish left hundreds of names on the American landscape, including the oldest non-Amerindian place name in the United States – Florida, or ‘place of flowers’, so dubbed by Juan Ponce de León when he became the first known European to set foot on what would eventually become US soil, on 2 April 1513. Missions and other small settlements soon followed, among them Tortugas (the second oldest European place name in North America), St Augustine and Apalchen. This last named was never anything more than a hamlet, but the name somehow came to be applied to the vaguely defined mountainous interior. Eventually it attached itself to the mountain themselves – hence,
Appalachians.

If the Spanish were modest in peopling their North American settlements, they were often lavish, not to say excessive, when it came to bestowing names upon them. To them Santa Fe was not just Santa Fe but La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco (The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis), while the California community that we know as Los Angeles went by the dauntingly ambitious name of EI Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río Porciúncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels by the Little-Portion River), giving it nearly as many syllables as residents.

Often, as with Los Angeles and Santa Fe, these names left behind by the French and Spanish had to be shortened,
re-spelled, or otherwise modified to make them sit more comfortably on English-speaking tongues. Thus L’Eau Froid (’cold water’), a lake in Arkansas, was turned into Low Freight. Mont Beau, North Carolina, evolved into Monbo. Les Mont Verts became Lemon Fair. Similarly the Siskiyou Mountains may be an adaptation of the French
six cailloux,
’six stones’. Waco, Texas, began as the Spanish
Hueco,
while Key West was corrupted from Cayo Hueso. Bob Ruly, Michigan, started life as
Bois Brulé.
¹⁴
More often the English-speaking settlers kept the spelling but adapted its pronunciation. Des Moines, Detroit, St Louis and Illinois are obvious examples of French words with non-French pronunciations, but there are countless lesser-known ones, like Bois D’Arc, Missouri, pronounced ‘bodark’, and De Blieux, Fortier, and Breazale, Louisiana, pronounced respectively ‘double-you’, ‘foshee’ and ‘brazil’.
¹⁵

Odd pronunciations are by no means exclusive to communities with a foreign pedigree. Often founders of towns selected an exotic name and then either didn’t know how to pronounce it or decided they had a better way. Thus we find Pompeii, Michigan, pronounced ‘pom-pay-eye’, Russiaville and Peru, Indiana, as ‘rooshaville’ and ‘pee-roo’, Versailles, Kentucky as ‘vur-sales’, Pierre, South Dakota, as ‘peer’, Bonne Terre, Missouri, as ‘bonny tar’, Beatrice, Nebraska, as ‘be-
at
-riss’, Dante and Fries, Virginia, as ‘dant’ and
’freeze’.
(The joke in Fries is that it is ‘fries’ in summer and
’freeze’
in winter.)

If America had a golden age of place-naming it would be the middle portion of the nineteenth century when in quick order Oregon fever, the California gold rush and the opening of a transcontinental railway saw hundreds of new communities spring up practically overnight. Often, as we saw at the start of the chapter, the naming of towns was left to the railways, which not only arbitrarily bestowed titles on new communities but sometimes took the opportunity to rename
existing ones. Marthasville, Georgia, had its new name – Atlanta – forced on it entirely against its wishes by a railway official in 1845. Occasionally, as Mencken notes, the first passengers on a new line were given the privilege of naming the towns along the way.
¹⁶
Post Office officials also enjoyed free rein. One official, Stewart relates, was said to have named post offices all over the West ‘for practically all the kids and babies in his immediate neighbourhood’.
¹⁷

When the naming was left to unofficial sources, as with the towns that sprang up around the mining camps in California, the results were generally livelier. California briefly revelled in such arresting geographic designations as Murderer’s Gulch, Guano Hill, Chucklehead Diggings, Delirium Tremens, Whiskey Diggings, You Bet, Chicken Thief Flat, Poker Flat, Git-Up-And-Git, Dead Mule, One Eye, Hell-out-for-Noon City, Puke and Shitbritches Creek.
¹⁸
The practice was by no means confined to California. The whole of the West was soon dotted with colourful nomenclature – Tombstone, Arizona; Cripple Creek, Colorado; Whiskey Dick Mountain, Washington; Dead Bastard Peak, Wyoming; and others beyond counting. Often the more colourful of these names were later quietly changed for reasons that don’t always require elucidation, as with Two Tits, California, and ShitHouse Mountain, Arizona. Once, doubtless in consequence of the loneliness of western life, the West had more Nipple Mountains, Tit Buttes and the like than you could shake a stick at. Today we must make do with the Teton Mountains, whose mammary implications are evident only to those who are proficient in French.