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 espuration1 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.
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 papers1 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. Williamson2 and Joseph A. Gilfillan3 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 Alabama6 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 southwa
rd 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. Tooker2 and others.3 Also, there have been monographs on various individual names, e.g., Manhattan,4 Poughkeepsie5 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
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