by Bill Bryson
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.
Colourful appellations are not a uniquely western phenomenon, however. Lunenberg County, Virginia, once boasted a Fucking Creek and a Tickle Cunt Branch,19 North Carolina had a Coldass Creek, and Kentucky still proudly boasts a Sugar Tit. Indeed, oddball names know no geographical bounds, as a brief sampling shows:
Who’d A Thought It, Alabama
Eek, Alaska
Greasy Corner, Toad Suck and Turkey Scratch, Arkansas
Zyzx Springs, California
Two Egg, Florida
Zook Spur and What Cheer, Iowa
Rabbit Hash, Bug, and OK, Kentucky
Bald Friar and Number Nine, Maryland.
Teaticket, Massachusetts
Sleepy Eye and Dinky town, Minnesota
Tightwad, Peculiar, and Jerk Tail, Missouri
Hot Coffee and Goodfood, Mississippi
Wynot, Nebraska
Brainy Boro and Cheesequake, New Jersey
Rabbit Shuffle, Stifflknee Knob and Shoofly, North Carolina
Knockemstiff, Pee Pee, Lickskillet, and Mudsock, Ohio
Bowlegs, Oklahoma
East Due West, South Carolina
Yell, Bugscuffle, Gizzards Cove and Zu Zu,Tennessee
Lick Skillet, Bugtussle, Chocolate Bayou, Ding Dong,
Looneyville, Jot ‘Em Down, and Cut and Shoot, Texas
Lick Fork, Unthanks and Tizzle Flats, Virginia
Humptulips and Shittim Gulch, Washington
Superior Bottom, West Virginia
Embarrass, Wisconsin
Often a prosaic explanation lies buried in an arresting name. Goodnight, Texas, has nothing to do with a memorable evening or bedtime salutation. It simply recalls a Mr Goodnight. So, too, Humble and Oatmeal (named for a Mr Othneil), Texas, and Riddle, Idaho. Chagrin Falls, Ohio, does not, as the name would seem to suggest, have any connection with some early exploratory setback, but is simply a misrendering of the surname of François Seguin, an early French trader who settled along the river from which the town takes its name.20 The town and river were both commonly spelled Shaguin until well into the nineteenth century.
In the eastern states, colourful names often have their roots in the name of a tavern or inn. Such, a bit disappointingly, is the case with King of Prussia, Blue Ball, Bird-in-Hand, Rising Sun, Bishop’s Head, Cross Keys and many other curiously named towns lying mostly in or between Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The twentieth century has seen an odd, and mercifully intermittent, fashion for giving towns names that it was hoped would somehow put them on the map. Breakthroughs in science often provided the spur, prompting towns to name (or more often rename) themselves Xray, Radio, Gasoline, Electron and Radium. Bee Pee, Kansas, after putting up for years with jokes concerning the urinary habits of honey-making insects, decided to change its name to something less risible – and opted for Chevrolet.
Changing their names is something that towns do more often than you might expect. Few communities have not changed their names at least once. Scranton, Pennsylvania, has gone through no fewer than eight names, the most notable of which perhaps was its first: Skunk’s Misery. Sometimes names are changed for reasons of delicacy – as when Screamerville became Chancellor or when Swastika, Arizona, transmuted into Brilliant – but just as often it was a desire by some real-estate developer to make the place sound more desirable. Thus Willmore City, California, became Long Beach, Roscoe became Sun Valley, Girard became Woodland Hills, and parts of Van Nuys and North Hollywood declared independence as, respectively, Chandler Estates and Valley Village. Merely changing the name can reportedly give property values an instant boost of up to 15 per cent.21 Mellifluousness is generally given priority over etymological considerations, as with Glendale, California, a name that combines the Scottish-Gaelic glen with the northern English dale to form a name that means ‘valley-valley’. Practically every city in America can boast subdivisions whose names owe nothing to anything other than their developers’ vision of what sounds
appealing: Wellington Heights, Canterbury Hills, Vista View Estates and the like. Somewhere, I suspect, there may even be a Laconia Heights.
By the late nineteenth century, America had accumulated so many names for towns, lakes, mountains and other topographical entities that the situation had grown confusing. Many states had as many as five towns with the same name, causing constant headaches for the postal service. Hundreds of other features on the landscape went by two or more names, like the mountain near San Diego sometimes called Cloud Peak and sometimes called Cuyamaca. Then, too, there were hundreds of places with variant spellings – like Alleghany, Virginia; Allegany, New York; and Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
In 1890, to sort out the mess, President Benjamin Harrison founded the ten-man Board on Geographic Names. The board was chronically underfunded – it didn’t get its first paid secretary until 1929 – and had no great authority. It could order government offices to use its spellings, but no one else had to, and at first many people didn’t. Gradually, however, most communities gave in to its decisions whether they liked them or not, rather in the way that most people have quietly acceded to the Postal Service’s insistence on two-letter abbreviations for state names.
Early on the board established thirteen guiding principles. The first of these was the sensible conclusion that in general it would be best to follow local custom. Unfortunately, this was not consistent with the other twelve, all of which called for some deviation or other from historic practice. One ruling was that places should be shorn of unnecessary punctuation, so that Coeur d’Alêne lost its stately circumflex (though not its apostrophe) and San José was deprived of a sliver of its Spanish heritage.22 At the same time, all towns terminating in -burgh were instructed to change to -burg, while all those ending in -borough were henceforth to read -boro. Deviant spellings like Centre were ordered Americanized. City and Town, the board decreed, should be removed from place names, and names involving multiple words should be made one word, so that all the New Castles and La Fayettes became Newcastles and Lafayettes. Many hundreds of names were changed or shortened so that a place as formidably unpronounceable as Popocatepetl Mount in Oregon or Nunathloogagamiutbingoi Dunes, Alaska (at twenty-three letters, the longest name on the American landscape today), is now a rarity.
All of this would have been fractionally more tolerable had it been applied with some degree of consistency, of which the board seemed wholly incapable. It couldn’t even settle on a name for itself. After starting as the Board on Geographic Names, it became the Geographic Board, then the Board on Geographical Names and now is once again the Board on Geographic Names.
In consequence of its decisions, American toponymic spelling lost much of its distinctiveness and charm, and a good deal of its clarity (an outsider could make a better stab at pronouncing Wilks-Barré than Wilks-Barre), without gaining anything much in the way of uniformity. Its decisions had an air of whimsicality. It took the apostrophe out of Pikes Peak, but left it in Martha’s Vineyard. It ordered hundreds of communities to amalgamate their names – making all the El Dorados into Eldorados, for instance but quickly realized that no one would accept Newyork or Losangeles or Elpaso. It threw out hundreds of Indian names, but kept hundreds of others. Almost its only act of incontestable virtue was to try to ameliorate racist names – changing Chinaman’s Springs to Chinese Springs, Nigger Creek to Negro Creek and so on – but even here it didn’t generally begin to act until the 1960s, long after they had become an embarrassment.23
On the matter of -burg and -boro terminations, however, the board was nothing short of relentless, and even now you can search a gazetteer long and hard before you find an exception to these two terminations. The main and most obvious one is Pittsburgh, which, curiously, often styled itself Pittsburg before the board came along and got the city’s collective dander up. (Pittsburgh was named, incidentally, for the British statesman William Pitt by a Scottish immigrant who almost certainly intended it to be pronounced ‘pittsburra’.) In 1891, in one of its earliest decisions, the board ordered the city to call itself Pittsburg. The Post Office diligently followed its instructions, but almost everyone else became resentful, and most of the city’s leading institutions – the University of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange, the Pittsburgh Gazette newspaper – refused to buckle under. After twenty years of squabbling, the board finally reversed its decision and on 19 July 1911 the city officially became Pittsburgh.24
Just as hundreds of towns have changed their names, so too have states. Maine was once New Somerset. New Jersey was briefly called Albania and later bore the alternative name of New Cesarea. Vermont was called generally New Connecticut until the inhabitants came up with the contrived, and inescapably nonsensical, name Vermont. If, as is apparent, their intention was to name it for the Green Mountains, they should have called it Les Monts Verts. As it is, in so far as it means anything at all, it means ‘worm-mountain’.25
But then quite a number of state names are, when you pause to consider them, at least faintly nonsensical. Mississippi is a curious name for a state that possesses neither the source nor the mouth of the river for which it is named and indeed owns only part of one bank. Missouri has more of the Mississippi River than Mississippi has – but then Missouri also has more of the Mississippi River than it has of the Missouri River, and yet we call it Missouri. Rhode Island is not only not an island, but is not named for anyone or anything called Rhode. Nevada is named for a chain of mountains that lies almost entirely in California. Wyoming is named for a forgotten poem, California for a mythical queen. Maine has no particular reason for being called that. Montana and Idaho are named for nothing at all.
The explanations behind all these are various. Rhode Island originally referred only to the island in Narragansett Bay on which Newport now stands. An early Dutch explorer called it Roodt Eylandt (or Red Island, after the colour of its soil) and the name eventually evolved into a form more palatable to English sensibilities after Roger Williams founded Providence Plantation there in 1636. The state’s full official name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Maine comes from an archaic sense of main meaning great or principal. The Atlantic was sometimes referred to as the Main Sea – hence ‘to sail the Spanish main’. The use is retained in the term mainland – and, less explicitly, in the name of the twenty-third state. Missouri is named not directly for the river, but for the Missouri Territory of which it was the most important part, and Mississippi came about more or less because no one else had taken the name. It was almost called Washington.
Many states also almost went by other names. West Virginia was nearly called Kanawha. Washington state nearly became Columbia. Idaho might have been Esmerelda, Oro Plata, Sierra Plata or Humboldt. Nevada might have been Bullion or Washoe, the name by which the region was generally known before Congress decided to name it Nevada after the mountains that feature only incidentally in its geography. From the outset, the question of what names to bestow on new states was one that generated hot debate and exercised the minds of men whose talents might better have been applied to more consequential matters. In 1784, in one of his few truly misguided efforts, Thomas Jefferson drew up a list of fashionably neoclassical but inescapably inane names that he suggested be bestowed on the territories of the West. Among his choices: Polypotamia, Assenisipia, Pelisipia, Chersonesus, Macropotamia and Metropotamia.26
Jefferson never got his way with his fancy names, but he did have somewhat greater success with a second proposal, namely that western states be divided in a neat chequerboard pattern. Every state west of the Mississippi has at least two straight (or nearly straight) borders except for Oregon, Minnesota and Texas, though only two, Colorado and Wyoming, are rectangular. In terms of their interior organization, the western states had an almost brutal orderliness imposed upon them, and one that made little allowance for topographical features like rivers and mountains. Land was divided into one-mile squares, or 640-acre sections. Six sections formed a township. Sections were divided into s
ixteen 40-acre squares, which accounts for those familiar farm expressions like ‘north 40’. One problem with such a set-up is that a spherical planet doesn’t lend itself to square corners. As you move nearer the poles, the closer the lines of longitude grow – which is why, if you look at a map, Wyoming is perceptibly narrower at the top than at the bottom. To get around this problem, longitudinal lines were adjusted every twenty-four miles. That explains why north-south roads in places like Nebraska and Kansas so often take a mysterious jag where they intersect with state highways.
Debates over state names often dragged on for days and never failed to inflame passions. Among the names suggested for Colorado were Colona (a rather odd feminization of the Spanish for Columbus, Colón), Jefferson, Franklin, Jackson, Lafayette, Yampa, San Juan, Lula, Arapahoe, Tahosa and Idaho. Idaho had a strange and almost mystical popularity among some Congressmen. Despite having no meaning whatever, it was suggested over and over again for thirty-one years until it was finally adopted for the forty-third state in 1890. Once it was out of the way, other names took its place in the line-up of hopefuls. Among those considered for Arizona were Gadsonia – after James Gadsden of Gadsden Purchase fame – and Pimeria. For New Mexico the suggestions included Hamilton, Lincoln, Montezuma and Acoma (after a local Indian tribe).