Mountain Beaver & Jargon & Chehalis & ... ?

[ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU]

Mike,

The thing is, "mountain beaver" is only so-called.

It isn't a beaver, nor is it a muskrat.

Apparently somewhere along the line, it used to be called "mountain boomer",
some kind of continuation of a North American anglophone tradition of naming
mysterious noisy animals of the forest "boomers".  (Viz. certain squirrels
and birds farther East of here.)

Weird, huh?

Dave

On Tue, 1 May 2001 21:33:24 -0700, Mike Cleven <ironmtn at BIGFOOT.COM> wrote:

>"Alan H. Hartley" wrote:
>>
>> Bates, Hess & Hilbert's _Lushootseed Dictionary_ (1994) (Puget Sound
>> Salish) has:
>>
>> s^áw'kwL [s-hacek, a-acute, laryngealized w, labialized k, barred ell]
>> 'mountain beaver'; also recorded as s^aw'L and s^Ew'L [E = schwa]
>
>What I'm really not figuring out here is why the term "mountain beaver";
>don't y'all Yankees and Hiyu Bostons have the word "muskrat" in your
>vocabulary or am I missing something here?  It would strike me as odd
>that HBC posts south of what became the 49th would ever confuse real
>beaver with muskrat; sure they both have smelly tails but the fur
>quality's quite a bit different IIRC.  What I mean here is you'd think
>that fur-bearing animal terms would relate more either to HBC usage or
>to the local argot (eena and nenamooks etc.); where the heck did
>'mountain beaver' come from?  East of the Rockies, or is it a NW
>invention?
>
>MC