Cariboo Country.....

[Mike Cleven]

Not directly Jargon, but the Cariboo was the first district of BC's
Interior to be opened up to heavy-duty colonization, and therefore
implicitly a part of Jargon culture (Kamloops is at its southeastern
corner, the Thompson River pretty much being the Cariboo's southern
boundary).

Anyway, I'd always wondered about the etymology of the word, i.e. its
unusual spelling.  There _is_ a subspecies of caribou in the region - the
woodland caribou - which today is mostly confined to the inward lea of the
Coast Mountains; in the upper Chilcotin Plateau; although at one time the
region was thick with them.  That's what I'd thought was the origin of the
term, through some kind of declasse frontier-era mangling of the spelling.....

But according to a BC government SchoolNet website on the Cariboo Road
(http://www.tbc.gov.bc.ca/culture/schoolnet/cariboo/wagonroa/cariboo.htm):

"Cariboo"

"The name Cariboo, was first given to the region around Quesnel and
Barkerville during the Gold Rush, and has since been extended to identify
the region between Prince George and Cache Creek. The spelling is traced to
an 1861 dispatch from colonial governor Sir James Douglas where he mentions
the popular term for the area which should, he said, be properly written
"carboeuf." "

"Caribou, part of the reindeer family, were plentiful in the northern part
of the region at the time and recieved that name from French
interpretations of the Algonguin word "xalibu," for pawer or scratcher. "

That the word is originally Algonkian is not too surprising ("moose" is
Cree), but I don't understand Douglas' insistence that the word was
"properly written 'carboeuf'".  "Car" is a French preposition meaning
something like "because of" or "according to" or "by means of".  Douglas
was an "old company hand" within the HBC and probably had a reasonable
command of half-breed French (as well as CJ).  It may be that he was trying
to confer on a perceived-as-coarse term ("Cariboo") some kind of "couth"
with a fancier French name.  For surely, the Cariboo Plateau is fine ranch
country, and did become the heartland of BC's beef industry (although both
the gigantic Douglas Lake and Gang Ranches are not in the Cariboo proper),
so he may have been trying to promote that prospect by recommending such an
interpretation of the name.....