Made In America (6 page)

Partly from lack of daily contact with the British, partly from conditions peculiar to American life, and partly perhaps
from whim, American English soon began wandering off in new directions. As early as 1682, Americans were calling folding money
bills
rather than notes. By 1751,
bureau
had lost its English meaning of a writing desk and come to mean a chest of drawers.
Barn
in Britain was and generally still is a storehouse for grain, but in America it took on the wider sense of being a general-purpose farm building. By 1780
avenue
was being used to designate any wide street in America; in Britain it implied a line of trees – indeed, it still does to the extent that many British towns have streets called Avenue Road, which sounds comically redundant to American ears. Other words for which Americans gradually enlarged the meanings include
apartment, pie, store, closet, pavement
and
block. Block
in late eighteenth-century America described a group of buildings having a similar appearance – what the British call a terrace – then came to mean a collection of adjoining lots and finally, by 1823, was being used in its modern sense to designate an urban rectangle bounded by streets.
¹²

But the handiest, if not always the simplest, way of filling voids in the American lexicon was to ask the local Indians what words they used. At the time of the first colonists there were perhaps fifty million Indians in the New World (though other estimates have put the figure as high as one hundred million and as low as eight million). Most lived in Mexico and the Andes. The whole of North America had perhaps no more than two million inhabitants. The Indians of North America are generally broken down into six geographic, rather than linguistic or cultural, families: those from the plains (among them the Blackfoot, Cheyenne and Pawnee), eastern woodlands (the Algonquian family and Iroquois confederacy), south-west (Apache, Navaho, Pueblo), northwest coast (Haida, Modoc, Tsimshian), plateau (Paiute, Nez Percé), and northern (Kutchin, Naskapi). Within these groups considerable variety was to be found. Among the plains Indians, the Omaha and Pawnee were settled farmers,
while the Cheyenne and Commanches were nomadic hunters. There was also considerable movement: the Blackfoot and Cheyenne, for example, began as eastern seaboard Indians, members of the Algonquian family, before pushing west into the plains.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the relative paucity of inhabitants in North America, the variety of languages spoken on the continent was particularly rich, with as many as 500 altogether. Put another way, the Indians of North America accounted for only 5 per cent of the population of the New World, but perhaps as much as a quarter of its tongues. Many of these languages – Puyallup, Tupi, Assinboin, Hidatsa, Bella Coola – were spoken by only a relative handful of people. Even among related tribes the linguistic chasm could be considerable. As the historian Charlton Laird has put it: ‘The known native languages of California alone show greater linguistic variety than all the known languages of the continent of Europe.‘
¹³

Almost all of the Indian terms taken directly into English by the first colonists come from the two eastern families: the Iroquois confederacy, whose members included the Mohawk, Cherokee, Oneida, Seneca, Delaware and Huron tribes, and the even larger Algonquian group, which included Algonquin, Arapaho, Cree, Delaware, Illinois, Kickapoo, Narragansett, Ojibwa, Penobscot, Pequot and Sac and Fox, among many others. But here, too, there was huge variability, so that to the Delaware Indians the river was the Susquehanna, while to the neighbouring Hurons it was the Kanastoge (or Conestoga).

The early colonists began borrowing words from the Indians almost from the moment of first contact.
Moose
and
papoose
were taken into English as early as 1603.
Raccoon
is first recorded in 1608,
caribou
and
opossum
in 1610,
moccasin
and
tomahawk
in 1612,
hickory
in 1618,
powwow
in 1624,
wigwam
in 1628.
¹⁴
Altogether, the Indians provided some 150
terms to the early colonists. Another 150 came later, often after being filtered through intermediate sources.
Toboggan,
for instance, entered English by way of Canadian French.
Hammock, maize
and
barbecue
reached the continent via Spanish from the Caribbean.

Occasionally Indian terms could be adapted fairly simply. The Algonquian
seganku
became without too much difficulty
skunk. Wuchak
settled into English almost inevitably as
woodchuck
(despite the tongue-twister, no woodchuck ever chucked wood).
Wampumpeag
became
wampum.
The use of
neck
in the northern colonies was clearly influenced by the Algonquian naiack, meaning a point or corner, and from which comes the expression
that neck of the woods.
Similarly the preponderance of
capes
in New England is at least partly due to the existence of an Algonquian word,
kepan,
meaning ‘a closed-up passage’.
¹⁵

Most Indian terms, however, were not so amenable to simple transliteration. Many had to be brusquely and repeatedly pummelled into shape, like a recalcitrant pillow, before any English speaker could feel comfortable with them. John Smith’s first attempt at transcribing the Algonquian word for a tribal leader came out as
cawcawwassoughes.
Realizing that this was not remotely satisfactory he modified it to a still somewhat hopeful
coucorouse.
It took a later generation to simplify it further to the form we know today:
caucus.
¹⁶
Raccoon
was no less challenging. Smith tried
raugroughcum
and
rahaugcum
in the same volume, then later made it
rarowcun,
and subsequent chroniclers attempted many other forms –
aracoune
and
rockoon,
among them – before finally finding phonetic comfort with
rackoone.
¹⁷
Misickquatash
evolved into
sacatash
and eventually
succotash. Askutasquash
became
isquontersquash
and finally
squash. Pawcohiccora
became
pohickery
and then
hickory.

Tribal names, too, required modification.
Cherokee
was really
Tsalaki. Algonquin
emerged from
Algoumequins.
Irinakhoiw
yielded
Iroquois. Choctaw
was variously rendered as
Chaqueta, Shacktau
and
Choktah
before settling into its modern form. Even the seemingly straightforward
Mohawk
has as many as 142 recorded spellings.
^*9

Occasionally the colonists gave up. For a time they referred to an edible cactus by its Indian name,
metaquesunauk,
but eventually abandoned the fight and called it a
prickly pear.
¹⁸
. Success depended largely on the phonetic accessibility of the nearest contact tribe. Those who encountered the Ojibwa Indians found their dialect so deeply impenetrable that they couldn’t even agree on the tribe’s name. Some said
Ojibwa,
others
Chippewa.
By whatever name, the tribe employed consonant clusters of such a confounding density –
mtik, pskikye, kchimkwa,
to name but three
¹⁹
– as to convince the new colonists to leave their tongue in peace.

Often, as might be expected, the colonists misunderstood the Indian terms and misapplied them. To the natives,
pawcohiccora
signified not the tree but the food made from its nuts.
Pakan
or
paccan
was an Algonquian word for any hard-shelled nut. The colonists made it
pecan
(after toying with such variants as
pekaun
and
pecaun)
and with uncharacteristic specificity reserved it for the produce of the tree known to science as the
Carya illinoensis.

Despite the difficulties, the first colonists were perennially fascinated by the Indian tongues, partly no doubt because they were exotic, but also because they had a beauty that was irresistible. As William Penn wrote: ‘I know not a language spoken in Europe, that hath words of more sweetness or
greatness, in accent or emphasis, than theirs.‘
²⁰
And he was right. You have only to list a handful of Indian place names –
Mississippi, Susquehanna, Rappahannock
– to see that the Indians found a poetry in the American landscape that has all too often eluded those who displaced them.

If the early American colonists treated the Indians’ languages with respect, they did not always show such scruples with the Indians themselves. From the outset they often treated the natives badly, albeit sometimes unwittingly. One of the first acts of the
Mayflower
Pilgrims, as we have seen, was to plunder Indian graves. (One wonders how the Pilgrims would have felt had they found Indians picking through the graves in an English churchyard.) Confused and easily frightened, the early colonists often attacked friendly tribes, mistaking them for hostile ones. Even when they knew the tribes to be friendly, they sometimes took hostages in the decidedly perverted belief that this would keep them respectful.

When circumstances were deemed to warrant it, they did not hesitate to impose a quite shocking severity, as a note from soldiers to the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during King Philip’s War reminds us: ‘This aforesaid Indian was ordered to be tourn to peeces by dogs, and she was so dealt with.‘
²¹
Indeed, early accounts of American encounters with Indians tell us as much about colonial violence as about seventeenth-century orthography. Here, for instance, is William Bradford describing a surprise attack on a Pequot village in his
History of Plimouth Plantation.
The victims, it may be noted, were mostly women and children: Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte ... It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre ... and horrible was the styncke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice.‘
²²
In 1675 in Virginia, John Washington, an ancestor of George,
was involved in a not untypical incident in which the Indians were invited to settle a dispute by sending their leaders to a powwow. They sent five chiefs to parley and when things did not go to the European settlers’ satisfaction, the chiefs were taken away and killed. Even the most faithful Indians were treated as expendable. When John Smith was confronted by hostile savages in Virginia in 1608 his first action was to shield himself behind his native guide.

In the circumstances, it is little wonder that the Indians began to view their new rivals for the land with a certain suspicion and to withdraw their goodwill. This was a particular blow to the Virginia colonists – or ‘planters’, as they were somewhat hopefully called – who were as helpless at fending for themselves as the
Mayflower
Pilgrims would prove to be a decade later. In the winter of 1609-10, they underwent what came to be known as the ‘starving time’, during which brief period the number of Virginia colonists fell from five hundred to about sixty. When Sir Thomas Gates arrived to take over as the new governor the following spring, he found ‘the portes open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty howses (whose owners untimely death had taken newly from them) rent up and burnt, the living not able, as they pretended, to step into the woodes to gather other fire-wood; and, it is true, the Indian as fast killing without as the famine and pestilence within.
²³

Fresh colonists were constantly dispatched from England, but between the perils of the Indians without and the famine and pestilence within, they perished almost as fast as they could be replaced. Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. Of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619-21, 3,000 were dead at the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.

For those who survived, life was a succession of terrors and
discomforts, from hunger and homesickness to the dread possibility of being tomahawked in one’s bed. As the colonist Richard Frethorne wrote with a touch of forgivable histrionics: ‘I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth dailie flow from mine eyes. He was dead within the year.
²⁴

At least he was spared the messy end that awaited many of those who survived him. On Good Friday, 1622, during a period of amity between the colonists and native Americans, the Indian chief Opechancanough sent delegations of his tribes to the newly planted Virginia settlements of Kecoughtan, Henricus (also called Henrico or Henricopolis) and Charles City and their neighbouring farms. It was presented as a goodwill visit – some of the Indians even ‘sate down at Breakfast’, as one appalled colonial wrote afterwards – but upon a given signal, the Indians seized whatever implements happened to come to hand and murdered every man, woman and child they could catch, 350 in all, or about a third of Virginia’s total population.
²⁵

Twenty-two years later, in 1644, the same chief did the same thing, killing about the same number of people. But by this time the 350 deaths represented less than a twentieth of Virginia’s English inhabitants, and Opechancanough’s incursion was more a brutal annoyance than a catastrophe. Something clearly had changed in the interim. What it was can be summed up in a single word:
tobacco.
To the Indians of Virginia this agreeable plant was not tobacco, but
uppówoc. Tobacco
was a Spanish word, taken from the Arabic tabāq, signifying any euphoria-inducing herb. The first mention of tobacco in English was in 1565 after a visit by John Hawkins to a short-lived French outpost in Florida. With a trace of bemusement, and an uncertain mastery of the expository sentence, he reported that the French had ‘a kind of herb dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup on the end, with fire, doe suck through the cane the smoke thereof’.
²⁶
Despite
Hawkins’s apparent dubiousness about just how much pleasure this sort of thing could bring, he carried some tobacco back to England with him, where it quickly caught on in a big way. At first the practice was called ‘drinking’ it, before it occurred to anyone that
smoking
might be a more apt term. Wonderful powers were ascribed to it. Tobacco was believed to be both a potent aphrodisiac and a marvellously versatile medicine, which ‘purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body’.
²⁷
Before long, it was all the rage and people simply couldn’t get enough of it.