Oregon

[Mike Cleven]

janilta wrote:
>
> Aron, Mike,
>
> Well, I never thought of it before...
> And Aron, you're right, this could be an interesting theory ie 'the land
> of the moose'... ;-)

in Basque.....

> But in fact, even if the origin of Oregon is apparently quite obscure,
> its earlier forms were Ouragon, Ourgan, Ourigan which tends to show that
> the hard 'g' sound was always present, which is not the case in
> 'orignal' where it is only a writing convention to represent the 'n +
> tilde' sound... (the final 'l' becoming 'n' is quite common in
> linguistics though)...

That's what I meant; that the 'g' in "Oregon, etc" has no relation to
the orthographic 'g' of "orignal".

> Mike, you're right, 'our(i)gan' has a form close to French 'ouragan'
> (hurricane) but I cannot really figure why the explorers would have
> given such a word to a river...

Oh, I can.  Have you ever been to Prairie Canada, Yann, or the Great
Plains of the US??  IIRC the guides of the French explorer who recorded
the word said that it was a large river - or body of water - to the
Northwest that was constantly best by raging wind; he had the impression
that this river led northwest but also says he did not understand his
guides clearly..  This could just as easily be the Assiniboine or
Saskatchewan Rivers as Lake Winnipeg, which is one historian's guess as
to what's being referred to; even the upper Missouri is a candidate.
They are beset by regularly westerlies, including the famous Chinook.
It seems a long way to bother mentioning the Mackenzie, although if the
guides were talking in the context of a route to the sea, it's possible
they meant the Bow, which issues from the eastern portal of the Kicking
Horse Pass; or the Croswnest, for that matter.  But by this time, La
Verendrye had already been out that way; so I can't understand why the
hope that this river might be the "great river of the northwest" of
explorers' legends.  It's just by happenstance that there happen to be
famously ferocious winds in the lower Gorge of the Columbia - hence the
identification of the mysterious name with this new-found river route
and its region.

> Wisconsin misspelling is thus the official theory, but not so satisfying
> though...

Still, a name born in legend is just that.  I prefer the one about the
raging wind, rather than the cartographical copyist's mistake.
Historically, of course, there was no "one name" for the region west of
the Rockies, despite its unique and isolation, neither in native
languages or in those of the colonizing powers.  "Oregon" was a
latecomer in the name-forging that is part of the essence of the
landgrab, the Americans being the last to the table; an term coined by
distant powermongers to give shape to newly-claimed lands; not even in
the language of the locals, but of already-conquered peoples in the
eastern Plains......