Siouan place name (Macy)

[Koontz John E]

Along the lines of Norfolk and the Elkhorn, another somewhat vexed case of
place naming is Macy, NE.  There are two competing accounts here, as there
are for Norfolk, though in the case of Macy they are both explicit.  I am
not really in a position to elucidate the matter much, in that I don't
have the references necessary to trace the history of the two accounts.

One version is that Macy is a contraction of oMAha agenCY.  The original
Omaha Agency was, as I understand it, Omaha, NE.  When the Omahas were
relocated under the Treaty of 1854 to Thurston County in the north, the
Omaha Agency was moved with them.  At some subsequent date the Post Office
complained of the confusion that arose from distinguishing Omaha and Omaha
Agency and someone suggested calling the latter Macy.  When I spoke with
Jerry Mariott in 1985 he reported that the story in his family was that
this renamer was one of his ancestors.  His family had operated the
general store and post office in Macy for some years.

The other version is that Macy is a rendition of Omaha(-Ponca) Maazi
'Cedar', the Omaha name of Matthew Tyndall, on whose allotment the town of
Macy was located.  At least one individual I've discussed this with in the
past has told me that the town was not on the allotment of Matthew
Tyndall, making the story of the contraction of Omaha Agency the more
plausible, but I have just verified in the map in Fletcher & LaFlesche
1911:652 that his allotment was Nr. 1670, the one directly south of the
block labelled Omaha Agency.  His allotment was bisected by the Blackbird
Creek, which means, I believe, that the town, which is still north of the
creek, hasn't moved much if any from its location on the title map in
Fletcher & LaFlesche.  Presumably it would have been possible to refer to
the agency as "near Maazi," leading to the settlement there being know as
Maazi.

One thing I can't verify is what the Omaha name of Matthew Tyndall was.
It seems plausible that the English name Matthew might have been assigned
because of its similarity to maazi, which some folks in the old days
apparently pronounced maadhi.  The edh in this contrasted with the nominal
dh (more of an l) that Omaha-Ponca has for *r.  I can't even verify that
maazi is in use as a name or nickname, however, so perhaps the Omaha
interpretation is actually a pun on Matthew.

It's not impossible that both versions of the name have about the same
age, though presumably one mechanism or the other was the original.