moose/orignal

[Mike Cleven]

Aron Faegre wrote:
>
> 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.

Remember that rumours of a great river in the Northwest had been around
since the days of Juan de Fuca and even before, and both Cook and the
early Spaniards on the NW felt they had missed a great river; whether or
not this river was connected with the half-legendary Straits of Anian
(evidently the Straits of Juan de Fuca) or the ever-sought-for Northwest
Passage was not known, but it was certainly hoped.  Maps often showed a
waterway or bay opening speculatively onto the North Pacific roughly in
the latitudes of the British Columbia coast (49-55N); it was hoped that
the Plains opened directly onto the Pacific (which certainly would have
made the imperial enterprise of canal-building a notion of
consequence!).  Arrowsmith's map, I believe, was one of those that drew
on the speculations and lore  about such a river; actual contact with
the headwaters of the Columbia had only just been made; the eastward
US-bound limits of its basin were still virtually unknown to whitemen.
The Shoshone and Ktunaxa were in contact with Plains peoples, but as yet
there could have been no knowledge of the Columbia per se.  Not even the
French had gotten as far as the Continental Divide in this region; and
Alexander Mackenzie had just missed making contact with the Columbia
when he crossed the Rockies via the upper Fraser.

The Wisconsin river in question was mentioned on a TV documentary in the
last couple of weeks; the version of the name's origin given there was
that it was a mis-reading of the archaic script on the explorer's map of
the area, which I can't recall exactly.  I think the native name of the
stream in question was dropped in favour of some colonialist name like
"Washington River" or something of the kind.  The version of the story I
heard was associated with the exploration of the same region, with some
(French, I think) explorer's native guides telling him of a large river
to the Northwest, but because of weather or supplies they did not
proceed and turned back, with there being some confusion as to how far
and how big the "great river of the west" might be.  But it seems clear
from the area the story was encountered that the reference must have
been to one of the Prairie rivers or lakes; unless the local Ojibway and
Sioux had knowledge of the Columbia and its destination.  Certainly
we've figured out that Ojibway and Cree words can be found in the
Jargon; but does this mean that natives From Beyond The Mountains came
to the Oregon/Columbia country?


> 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.

Railway usages of native names can be deceiving; you never know what
vowel that 'o' was supposed to be; could have been an Irish surveyor, or
a Scot or German;  What one writes downb as "kotan" another might well
write "ku(i)tan", I think, depending on how you "hear" the word
according to your respective dialect/spelling choices.  I still wonder
at the initial 'a on the Kamloops Wawa "aias" (hyas, hayash) and "aioo"
('aioo) etc.; whether this was a French-influenced prononciation; given
that between the HBC employees and the Oblates the primary transmitters
of Jargon in the Interior were French, and that the languages of Central
BC _do_ include the initial 'h' sound.  Does someone have another
reason, maybe, as to how the initial 'h' on such words became dropped as
the Jargon moved from the Columbia-Puget region into the BC Interior?
The French influence seems like a good bet, but maybe there's another
linguistic tendency I'm missing out on that might account for dropping
the 'h' on the word's journey from Astoria to Kamloops.

One railway sign that you'll see in BC that's hard to guess the correct
prononciation of, on the BCR between Shalalth and Lillooet - Ohin.  It's
not pronounced "Oh-hin", but rather "Oo-hwin", with a fairly sharp
"ch"-like 'cut' on the 'h'; it means "frostbite" in St'at'imcets,
although I'm sure that's an older orthography than the current official
one.

Variations of Jargon words are legion: taghum/tahum/tokum/tohum,
hyas/hayash/aias etc. etc.

Mapmakers mistakes can be bad even for English names:  on the
tourist-topo map that includes the Lillooet area, "Seaton Creek" (an old
spelling of Seton Creek) is given as "Section Creek".  I'd like to think
that's a mechanical OCR mistake, but it probably _was_ a human
editor.....