moose/orignal

[Aron Faegre]

Mike Cleven wrote:

> Aron Faegre wrote:
> >
> > Klahowya Yann,
> >
> > Klonas wake siah copa Wawa.  Have I got one for you!   The origin of the
> > word 'Oregon' has not been pinned down last I heard.  Lewis McArthur's
> > classic 'Oregon Geographic Names' admits as much and spins around a couple
> > ideas, without much success.  It does say: 'We believe it probable that the
> > name Oregon arose out of some circumstances connected with western
> > explorations of the French' (pp.640), but I don't see that he ever tries out
> > Orignal!  If you've ever seen a herd of Oregon elk, you should (and still
> > can) -- they are impressive.  Not a bad animal to name a region after. What
> > do you think?  Now for an initiative to rename the state 'Moolack'?
>
> That would be OK if the nasal 'g' in orignal had any connection with the
> hard 'g' in Oregon.  The accounts I've read centre on a misspelling of a
> tributary of the upper Mississippi and/or confusion with the existence
> of Lake Winnipeg or another body of water or river to the northwest of
> the Mississippi headwaters; "riviere de l'ouragon" appearing
> speculatively on one map; "ouragon" here meaning "raging wind", perhaps
> a reference to the waters of the Manitoba lakes or of the large flowing
> rivers west of the there; I've never been able to find that as a
> dictionary-defined French word, so it, too, may be of
> Metis-native/French origin.  When the voyageurs came down the Columbia,
> supposedly the roaring winds of the Gorge brought "l'ouragon" to
> mind......someone (maybe Jeff Kopp) sent me a historical circular on
> this published by the State of Oregon.  The basic idea is that the word
> referred to a large river with lots of wind....this could just as easily
> have been the Bow or Missouri, of course....

Mike,

You've got a good memory -- and you're probably right.  Just for fun I called
Lewis McArthur (who I know a little) to test the Orignal/Oregon idea -- he didn't
like it.  He's convinced that the name Oregon is a mapmakers misspelling of the
Wisconsin River that showed a great westward flowing river.  He thinks
Arrowsmith's 1798 map somehow picked this up and while using Broughton's survey
(who called it the Columbia) renamed it the River Oregan.

By the way, he has the following geographic name in his book:

Kotan. Klamath County. Kotan was a station on the Cascade line of the Southern
Pacific. Railroad officials say the name is an Indian word for horse. It is
probably an adaptation of the Chinook jargon word cuitin, from the Chinook
ikiuatan, a horse. There does not appear to be a Klamath Indian word of this
sound.

Aron Faegre