A linguistic history of Native American place-names in Indiana
In tracing the roots of Indiana place names, Michael McCafferty focuses on those created and used by local Native Americans. Drawing from exciting new sources that include three Illinois dictionaries from the eighteenth century, the author documents the language used to describe landmarks essential to fur traders in Les Pays d’en Haut and settlers of the Old Northwest territory. Impeccably researched, this study details who created each name, as well as when, where, how and why they were used. The result is a detailed linguistic history of lakes, streams, cities, counties, and other Indiana names. Each entry includes native language forms, translations, and pronunciation guides, offering fresh historical insight into the state of Indiana.
Michael McCafferty is an Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan linguist on the faculty of the department of second language studies at Indiana University.
"Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and members of the public with passionate interest in these fields will find this book enormously valuable."--Journal of Folklore Research
“This is an important book and should not be missed by anyone interested in Native American studies or Midwest history.”--Journal of Illinois History
Contents Preface Acknowledgments Technical Considerations Introduction Abbreviations 1. The Great Water 2. <8AB8SKIG8>, Ouabachi and Beyond 3. , Ouabachi and Beyond 4. The Kankakee and its Affluents 5. The Trails to <Kekionga> 6. The White River and the People from the Dawn 7. The Northern Wabash Valley 8. The Southern Wabash Valley 9. The Driftwood and its Branches 10. The Heart of the North Country 11. Indiana's Ohio River Tributaries Notes Glossary Bibliography Index Preface The intent of this book is to present a historically clear and linguistically clean picture of the place-names in Indiana created and used by local historic American Indians. These are the oldest names on record for this land. A "historically clear picture" will show who created the names, as well as when, where, how, and why they were used. A "linguistically clean picture" will provide the appropriate Native language forms, morphological analyses, and the correct translations for them. Indiana is well endowed with historically attested Native American place-names, in large part because of the region's timely pivotal position in history. Still, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, France's royal mapmaker Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin, sitting at his drawing board in Quebec, advocated doing away with all Native place-names in formulating the European geography of North America. It was his practical wish that this land bear exclusively French-language place-names, so as to dispel, in his opinion, the confusion created among his compatriots by mobile aboriginal bands using different names for the countless rivers and places of the North American interior.* Nonetheless, as the reader will see, the everyday usefulness of indigenous place-names for the French-speaking people who actually lived and worked here carved out a future place for many of them. Then, as English-speaking people moved north and west into what is now Indiana, these newcomers interacted for many years with already established American Indian and French- speaking communities and individuals. Trade and treaties necessitated the use of names that had universal familiarity, and it was these practical interactions that created the very continuity in Indiana's oldest place-name inventory of which everyone today is the beneficiary?not only because of the names' historical value but also for their unique perspectives and beauty. A glance at a map of Indiana will show that European languages, especially English, are represented in the names of the majority of the state's cities, towns, villages, unincorporated areas, counties, townships, streets, parks, geological landmarks, and even streams and lakes. Nevertheless, Native American place-names are plentiful throughout the state. In fact, in any direction one turns in Indiana, a Native place- name beckons from very close by. * Delanglez, "Franquelin, Mapmaker," 40. Acknowledgments The author is indebted to the following people for the help they generously offered towards the creation of this book: Daryl Baldwin, Bridgie Brelsford, Lucille Brennan, Laura Buszard- Welcher, R. Joe Campbell, Wallace Chafe, Donald Cochran, Isabelle Contant, David Costa, Duane Esarey, Ya¿ves Ferland, Chuck Fiero, Ives Goddard, Noel Justice, Robert Karrow, Franz Koks, John Koontz, John Langley, Carmen Laroche, Jiyoung Lee, Philip Lesourd, Thomas Mason, Brian McCafferty, David McCafferty, Margaret McCafferty, Patt McCafferty, Robert McCullough, Gunther Michelson, John Nichols, John O'Meara, David Pentland, Stewart Rafert, Robert Rankin, James Rementer, Richard Rhodes, Blair Rudes, Walter Salts, Richard Schmal, Suzanne Sommerville, Randolph Valentine, Robert V¿zina, Paul Voorhis, Jack Weddle, and Ray Writnour. A Clio grant from the Indiana Historical Society helped with much of the research. I would like to have given this book to several folks: Lucy Blalock, my friend Lucien Campeau, Nora Thompson Dean, Jean Delanglez, Jacob Piatt Dunn, Gabriel Godfroy, Eli Lilly, Mary O'Hair, Robert Taylor, Virgil Vogel, and my grandparents. Technical Considerations The linguistic nature of Native American Place-Names of Indiana requires the use of various technical terms. The definitions for most of these items are in the glossary. The historical recordings of American Indian words will appear between single angled brackets, e.g., <Soosoocpahaloc>. Phonemic transcriptions of Native words will be written in italic script, e.g., Miami-Illinois kihikami `big-water'. The initial characters of phonemic spellings are never capitalized?even in proper names. For example, Potawatomi wabmimi `white passenger pigeon' is the proper phonemic spelling of the name of the historic Potawatomi leader known in English as White Pigeon. French terms, are also naturally italicized, e.g., la rivi¿re des Illinois. An asterisk placed before a Native word either will indicate either an undocumented yet expected form or a reconstructed form in the case of Proto-Algonquian or Proto- Iroquoian, e.g., . Two asterisks will mark an impossible, ungrammatical form, e.g., Linguists write schwa, the sound of the unstressed initial vowel of English "adopt," in different ways. All recordings of schwa in this book will be written , as in Potawatomi `lake'. Phonetic transcriptions, which represent the actual pronunciation of underlying phonemic forms, will be written in single brackets, e.g., phonetic Miami for phonemic `at the fawn'. Glosses will appear within single quotation marks, and no comma will separate a Native term from its translation: e.g., Miami-Illinois `it is big stone country'. In the bibliography and footnotes single quotation marks will also identify the titles of historic maps. Vowel length is an essential aspect (i.e., a phonemic characteristic) of most of the Native languages discussed in this book. Incorrect vowel length in a term can change the meaning of the intended word or render the expression confusing to the native speaker. For example, in Miami-Illinois, niipi `my arrow' with a long vowel in the first syllable sounds different from the word nipi `water'. Consonant length is also an essential aspect of Unami, one of the languages that figure in this book. According to the spelling conventions adopted for the different Native languages that appear in this volume, vowels and consonants will be marked for length with either a raised dot, as in Southern Unami (*p*- `white', or by the doubling of a linguistic symbol (gemination), as in Kickapoo metemooha `old woman'. Though not a problem for linguists, gemination can lead to pronunciation mistakes by English-speaking non-linguists. For example, one might erroneously conclude that Miami-Illinois long ee represents the sound of the ee in English "meet," whereas it actually approximates the vowel sound in the word "mail". Therefore, if unsure, the reader should check the table at the end of this section to see what sound a particular symbol represents. Essentially, only four prosodic marks will occur in this work. The acute accent ( ? ) will indicate primary stress, as in Miami-Illinois phonetic [eehsípana] `raccoon'. The grave accent ( ` ) will mark secondary stress, as in Munsee `otter', but will show middle pitch in Wyandot, as in `big- river'. The breve accent ( )will mark a very short unstressed vowel, as in Munsee `it shines'. The tilde ( ) will indicate nasalization, as in phonetic Miami-Illinois [] `sugar maple tree'. The historic recordings of local Indian place-names often differ, sometimes dramatically, from their linguistic spellings. These dissimilarities generally derive from the fact that not only do the sounds of Native American languages often differ from those of European languages, but also the historical spellings of terms in the local Native languages were the work of French-, German- or English-speaking non-linguists employing writing systems that were inadequately equipped for making good recordings. That having been said, in the Potawatomi language, whose speakers first entered the Indiana area in the early 1700s, an extensive vowel shift has occurred in roughly the last century and a half. By the end of the 1800s, most Potawatomi short vowels except o had become . Then, by around 1930, unstressed short vowels were deleted altogether in non-final odd-numbered syllables. Hence, as the reader will see, strictly in terms of vowels, the Potawatomi recorded by the earliest chroniclers looks quite different from the modern language. In fact, the early recordings of Potawatomi somewhat resemble Ojibwa, which is understandable since Potawatomi can be described as an Algonquian language composed of an Ojibweyan substrate and a Sauk-Fox- Kickapoo-Mascouten superstrate. However, older Potawatomi and modern Potawatomi also look different in terms of consonants. Specifically, the original contrast between preaspirated consonants and non-preaspirated consonants in Algonquian first showed up in Potawatomi and Ojibwa as a contrast between "fortis"/geminate consonants versus "lenis"/plain consonants respectively, with the latter only randomly voiced. When the lenis consonants were not voiced, almost all early historical recorders, such as Father Friedrich Baraga in the 1800s, would write the lenis and fortis consonants the same way?as k, t, s, and so on. Charles Hockett, an Algonquianist who worked with Potawatomi in the 1900s, typically wrote the contrast in that language as kk and k, respectively. But in the 20th century, in both Potawatomi and Ojibwa, the lenis obstruents started to become voiced more and more often. Chuck Fiero, a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and a consultant for the present volume, who has worked with Ojibwa speakers in northwest Ontario, was the first person to begin writing this contrast systematically with voiceless versus voiced letters. In other words, Fiero wrote kk as k, and k as g. This practice was later adopted by the Ojibwa scholars John Nichols and Richard Rhodes, and is now fairly standard, except for certain northernmost dialects of Ojibwa where preaspiration still exists. According to Costa, who has done some fieldwork with modern Potawatomi, the geminate/plain contrast in that language is not easy to hear, and plain obstruents are not always very clearly voiced. Moreover, he notes that, in Potawatomi, it is not at all just a simple question of a voiced/voiceless contrast. The fortis consonants are geminated, i.e., pronounced with a somewhat stronger articulation, and always voiceless; the lenis consonants are non- geminated, and pronounced somewhat softer?and sometimes voiced and sometimes not.1 For Potawatomi, this book will generally cast interpretations of historical recordings in modern Potawatomi, and will thereby have forms that reflect the contrast between fortis and lenis consonants. However, it will also include historical reconstructions when they are relevant to the discussion. Overall, I have adapted Laura Buszard-Welcher's practical orthography for modern Potawatomi to standard Algonquian transcription, hers being a modest reworking of the spelling convention employed by the Wisconsin Native Language Project.2 Entries in the Miami-Illinois language, which was spoken in Indiana starting in at least 1679, generally follow David Costa.3 However, in the present volume replaces Costa's c for representing the sound characteristically written ch in English, as in "child". Kickapoo etyma appearing herein will be written according to the spelling system developed for that language by Paul Voorhis. In addition, Voorhis' c will also appear as .4 Kickapoo was spoken in Indiana at least by the early 1700s. Shawnee language forms are transcribed according to the technical spelling convention worked out for that language by Charles Voegelin.5 Shawnee and the other Algonquian languages mentioned above are classified as "Eastern Great Lakes Algonquian languages" or "Central Algonquian languages". On the other hand, Unami, commonly known as a "Delaware Indian" language, is an Eastern Algonquian language. Northern Unami is the name of an extinct dialect of this language once spoken south of Raritan Valley and the Delaware Water Gap in what is today central New Jersey, and in adjacent areas of eastern Pennsylvania. Northern Unami was later spoken in the Indiana area in the early 1800s. Southern Unami is another dialect of this same language once spoken in New Jersey below the Trenton falls, in the adjacent area of eastern Pennsylvania, and along the Delaware coast.6 Near the turn of the 19th century speakers of Southern Unami were living in the central and southern Indiana area. Words in Unami in this book appear in the technical orthography created for this language by Charles Voegelin.7 However, the low back rounded vowels, which Voegelin writes o and o*, are herein written and * , and his long mid back rounded vowel u*, following Ives Goddard, will be written o*. Munsee, another Delaware Indian language, closely related to Unami, was spoken in prehistoric and early historic times in what is today northern New Jersey along the upper Delaware River and southern New York along the lower Hudson. It was also spoken in Indiana around the turn of the 19th century. In this book Munsee terms are written in the technical orthography developed for this language by Ives Goddard.8 Iroquoian words will appear in the orthographic system formulated by Floyd Lounsbury and Wallace Chafe.9 However, I follow Blair Rudes in writing the affricate , which some Iroquoianists write ts. In transcribing certain vowels, I also follow Rudes.10 In keeping with the general practice of modern Iroquoian linguistics, Iroquoian citations will in most cases include their morphophonemic, segmented forms. For example, for the Huron-Wyandot phrase "standing rock," is the morphophonemic form of phonemic , while is the phonetic (surface) form of this term. As I am not an Iroquoianist, I am indebted to Blair Rudes, Gunther Michelson, and Wally Chafe for the help they provided with the Iroquoian material appearing in this volume. The following is the technical alphabet used in this book along with the nearest equivalent sounds in English, with the exception of the sound x, which is not a sound native to English. p `pat' b `bat' t `tag' d `dog' k `cat' g `get' ? `button' (represented here in English by orthographic -tt-) h `hand' `chip' j `jar' `think' s `sit' z `zero' `shall' `measure' (represented here in English by orthographic s) x `Bach' (pronounced as in German) r (presumably a tap in Old Miami-Illinois and Huron-Wyandot.) l `lap' m `map' n `nap' `sing' (represented in English by orthographic ng) w `win' y `yore' a `altitude' `at' `father' e `ate' `set' `another' `up' i `eat' ? `it' o `boat' `off' u `boot' ? as in Parisian French sans ? as in Parisian French saint <epsilon tilde> an Iroquoian nasal vowel pronounced with the tongue lower than in the case of French ? ? as in Parisian French son The reader will also occasionally see the symbol 8. This is actually a digraph composed of a circle surmounted by a crescent. It is very common in early historical French Jesuit documents. Hurried missionaries and later printers simplified this letter for convenience sake by writing it in the shape of an eight (8), as I shall do in this book. See chapter two for a detailed description of how this symbol was used by Jesuit missionaries who recorded the Miami-Illinois language. In addition, the linguist Albert Gatschet, whose recordings of Miami-Illinois place-names appear herein, used this symbol for short o. Many of the recordings of French terms in the primary sources often lack the accent marks typical of modern French spelling. In this book historical French spellings will be reproduced exactly as their 17th- and 18th-century scribes penned or printed them. Therefore, such spellings may not necessarily reflect the modern orthographic standards for that language that readers are familiar with. Finally, English phonetic transcriptions are generally written for standard American English. However, the reader should note that the English phonetic transcriptions herein appear in a broad transcription style, and do not portray dialect-specific diphthongs. Introduction The Sources The primary-source documents that preserve Native American place-names for Indiana are the maps, itineraries, letters, and reports composed by French missionaries, explorers, soldiers, traders, cartographers and travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as English language maps, military reports, trade ledgers, treaties, surveys, settler records and travel diaries from the 18th and early 19th centuries. German missionaries working for a short time near the turn of the 19th century in what is now central Indiana also saved a few important local place-names from the Delaware languages. Finally, primary- source place-name data for Indiana were still being collected even in the early 1900s from native speakers of Miami-Illinois and Potawatomi. For Indiana, the single richest primary sources of American Indian place-names are the works of Jacob Piatt Dunn (1855-1924) and Albert Gatschet (1832-1907). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Dunn, an Indiana historian and librarian, collected local Native American place- names. His principal place-name consultants for the Miami- Illinois language were waapanahkikapwa, a well-known and highly respected Indiana-based Miami tribal leader whose European name was Gabriel Godfroy; wiikapimia, a Wea woman whose European name was Sarah Wadsworth; and kiilhsohkwa, a granddaughter of the famous Eel River Miami warrior mihihkinaahkwa known historically to English speakers as Little Turtle.1 Dunn's place- name work, however, has some shortcomings. He often did not indicate which individuals supplied which names, and he often failed to supply the complete place-name, leaving out terms for "river" and "creek" in the case of some hydronyms.2 In a couple of instances, Dunn's Indian place-names appear to be his own inventions. Albert Gatschet, a Swiss-born linguist who immigrated to the United States in 1868 and worked for the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, also recorded important local Miami-Illinois language place-names, most of which Dunn did not get. Around the turn of the 20th century Gatschet traveled to Oklahoma to record the language of native speakers of Miami-Illinois, a couple of whom in their youth had lived east of the Mississippi. His principal informant for Indiana place-names was the Wea woman wiikapimia mentioned above. Both Dunn's and Gatschet's recordings hold significance for Algonquian linguistics. For example, without them we would neither have a sense of the full grammatical range of Miami- Illinois place-name morphology, nor would we be aware of the anomalous grammatical nature of Miami-Illinois "noun + noun" place-names within Algonquian. In addition to Dunn's published works on American Indian place-names, a limited amount of additional onomastic material collected by him is located in the Indiana State Library and in the National Anthropological Archives. Gatschet's Miami-Illinois language material is also at the N.A.A. For the N.A.A. data collected by Dunn and Gatschet, as well as for the small amount of place-name material collected by another early linguist, Truman Michelson, I have used the files of David Costa, the world's authority on the Miami-Illinois language, and of Daryl Baldwin, director of the Myaamia Project at Miami University. A curious mix of primary- and secondary-source data describes the works of Daniel Hough (1827-1880) and Hiram W. Beckwith (1833-1903). Hough was an Indiana Quaker known for his rather extensive book collection which is now housed at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.3 The map he drew, titled "Indian Names of Lakes, Rivers, Towns, Forts of Indiana," is an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of local Native place- names. Exactly when Hough made his map is unknown. It was published after his death by Beckwith, a historian and a contemporary of Hough, who added some material to it and then included it in his 1882 article titled "Indian Names of Water Courses in the State of Indiana".4 Beckwith, the first president of the Illinois Historical Society, wrote extensively on the Wabash valley and was particularly interested in the river's aboriginal past. In the course of his historical research he collected a number of Native American place-names and discussed them not only in the Indiana county histories he authored, but also in his 1884 book, The Illinois and Indiana Indians.5 It has been impossible to determine exactly where Hough and Beckwith obtained most of their Indiana place-names. Dunn states that Hough consulted the Miami themselves. Beckwith exchanged letters with Mary Ann Baptiste, a longtime resident of the Wabash valley Wea community and later the wife of the famous Peoria leader "Batticy" Baptiste. Beckwith even visited her in Paola, Kansas, on 30 November 1878 for the expressed purpose of obtaining Indian place-name information for the Wabash valley.6 Like Dunn's work, Hough's and Beckwith's have their shortcomings. Both occasionally ascribed place-names to the wrong languages or supplied faulty translations for some names.7 In addition, Hough's map contains some egregious copy errors, which Dunn attributed to Hough's engraver. In this, Dunn appears to be correct. For example, Hough's map has "Pemsquahawa" for what was surely originally *Tensquatawa, the name of the famous Shawnee Prophet commonly written Tenskwatawa. Since this American Indian leader's name was as well known as that of any indigenous person in Indiana in the first half of the 19th century, it is inconceivable that the well-read Hough was the source of this error. Useful secondary-source documents worth noting which contain locally created American Indian place-names include county and state histories, all from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries,8 as well as a map designed by E.Y. Guernsey (1883- 1975).9 An important figure in the early days of Indiana archaeology, Guernsey brought together information from old maps and books and sometimes, it surely seems, from his own imagination in order to design a map in 1932 that, among other things, includes historic Native American and French hydronyms and toponyms in Indiana. His chart has enjoyed widespread dissemination in Indiana through the state's Department of Natural Resources. However, one should approach Guernsey's map with a great deal of caution because of the mediocre quality of its linguistics as well as its numerous ethnographic inaccuracies. Furthermore, nearly the entirety of Guernsey's place-name inventory is undocumented, and several of his so- called Delaware language place-names are of questionable authenticity. That having been said, the complex grammatical nature of some of the Native names he collected indicates that they are genuine and could not be his own creations. The Value What's in a place-name? What value can we find in analyzing these utterances that human beings use to organize their external world? In truth, place-names are a repository of meaning that can offer a view of a people's relationship with its world. In some cases, place-names can even provide a glimpse of the symbolic or spiritual realities of those who created the names. Place-names can thus help us understand what is important and meaningful to a particular culture, what some of its values are, or were. Certainly, in Indiana, European-American place-names reflect discrete cultural priorities: religion, exemplified by the hagionyms Maria Creek, the St. Joseph River, the St. Mary's River, and St. Leon; history, represented by the toponyms Lafayette, Vincennes, Alamo, and Monroe County; "Old World" memories, embodied in the names of towns and villages such as Vevay, Otterbein, and Leopold; Graeco-Roman cultural roots expressed by such names as Argos, Arcadia, Attica, and Mt. Etna; whimsy and humor, as seen in the names of places such as Carefree, Birdseye, and Stone Head; and, finally, exotica, found in the names of a host of localities, including Peru, Cuba, Angola, Montezuma, Morocco, and Buddha, to name just a few. In contrast, locally created American Indian place-names in Indiana fall into four main categories: 1) those that refer to a physical and/or spiritual attribute of the phenomenon in question, be it a river, a lake, or a site; 2) those that refer to whatever particularly noteworthy plant or aquatic animal lived in such a place; 3) those that refer to the location of a tribe; and 4) in rare cases, those that include the personal names of historically important residents. Most Native American place-names in Indiana tend to be descriptive expressions related to the immediate physical environment, labels created by hunting-gathering-farming peoples specifically for practical geolocational purposes within a complex natural world. In fact, the penchant that such names possess for communicating direct, meaningful, and typically very useful information, most often geophysical, biological, or ethnonymic in nature, is their most common characteristic. In this light, one should never underestimate the significance of place-names for these indigenous societies. For instance, kiteepihkwanwa, the Miami-Illinois word for buffalo fish (Ictiobus cyprinellus and Ictiobus bubalus), and the origin of "Tippecanoe," the name of a major Indiana river, indicated an abundance of these animals in this particular stream. Therefore, this river's Miami-Illinois name served the function of defining this waterway as a source of a particular kind of food. In Indian America, examples of such information-laden place-names are legion. Not only is a Native group's knowledge of its local geography organized by place-names vital for its survival, but also its geographical understanding quite often extends far beyond its own neighborhood. Kari and Fall remind us of the awareness that Native Americans have had of places that lie even at great distances from their homes. They write about a hunter who spoke Dena'ina, an Athapascan language of northwestern Canada and Alaska, who knew 600 localities by name in a roughly 13,000- square-mile area?territory over a third of the size of Indiana.10 Likewise, surviving historical aboriginal maps as well as numerous historical accounts in French or English of the complex system of trails, rivers and portages throughout the eastern North America amply support the notion that Native peoples of the 17th and 18th centuries in this part of North America routinely possessed comparable geographic and place-name knowledge. In 1703, in speaking of the Indians living in the land known today as the northeastern United States and Canada, La Hontan observed that "?they draw the most exact Maps imaginable of the Countries they are acquainted with."11 Of course, this really should come as no surprise, since such competency is precisely what one expects of semi-nomadic peoples. In general, knowledge of the early historical natural environment can often help explain a place-name's meaning or establish its authenticity as well as reveal its significance for the original inhabitants. In a physical sense the land now called Indiana has been radically altered since the early 1800s, so much so that in many instances the referents for Native place-names no longer even exist. In fact, were prehistoric or historic Indians to return to Indiana today, they would feel as if they had arrived on another planet, or had stumbled into a dream. Many aspects of their former world would be irrevocably lost. It is for this reason that accurate and successful research of local indigenous place-names requires an understanding of the historical natural realities in which the Native peoples lived and in which they conceived these names. Moreover, one must also be able from time to time to shed personal prejudices about how those realities were defined. In so doing, one allays the shock that may come from discovering, for example, that in the minds of many prehistoric and early historic Indians the Wabash and the lower Ohio below the mouth of the Wabash were the same river, while for others the Ohio and the lower Mississippi were one and the same. *** The Work When dealing with Native American place-names, as with other historical phenomena, one needs to avoid hasty explanations and, in fact, bristle with questions at every turn. Lacking this essential attitude, the researcher will invariably a) go astray in the wilderness of copy errors and misspellings committed by less than meticulous scribes and mapmakers down through the ages; b) get hopelessly lost amidst the fantasies fabricated by old settlers; c) fall prey to whimsical folk etymologies spun by pioneers or even by American Indians lacking an adequate command of their language(s); or d) believe that certain Native place- names are genuine when in truth they are just earlier guesses that became established in the literature as truth. In other words, American Indian place-names have been piquing the American popular imagination for a long time, and strange things have happened to some of them along the way. One can hope to deal effectively with the multi-layered challenge they present only by taking into account the precepts laid down by the great Iroquoian language scholar Floyd G. Lounsbury, which correctly place the emphasis in this type of work on its linguistic aspect.12 Lounsbury pointed out that one must first of all know the original language that a particular place-name comes from in order to determine if the name as recorded is a real Indian utterance, if it is one that observes the grammar and word- formation rules of the Native language. Second, it is essential to determine the time period in which people created and used the name. Third, it is necessary to ascertain the term's actual meaning and its original Native language form?not a historical European language version of it. Fourth, one must figure out if the translation?French, German, or English as in the case of Indiana's Native place-names?has escaped tampering by those who would deign to cast it in a conveniently constructed European language phrase. Fifth, it is important to have the name verified, ideally by a native speaker of the language, or at least by the best scholars who have worked with native speakers. However, in the case of this book, it was not possible to meet this last requirement for Miami-Illinois or Huron-Wyandot, since neither have native speakers any longer. Even so, in these and all cases, one must equip oneself with the very best information on the language(s) in question and then consult as carefully as possible the historical record, all the while keeping in mind the age of the source, the ability of the person who recorded the place-name, and the recorder's native language. In Indiana, a number of so-called Indian place-names fail to comply with one or more of the basic criteria outlined above. However, only by trying to satisfy all of these requirements can the researcher hope to analyze a place-name successfully as well as position it in the proper historical context. Indeed, it is the question of context that contributes to making the present work not simply a gazetteer, an informal coffee-table-book inventory of Indian place-names and their translations, but also a historical study. The reader will notice that on rare occasions in this volume I have ventured into the realm of the speculative. I do not view such speculations lightly. However, they do arise naturally during research. The reader should note then that the few that appear herein are offered only in view of the fact that knowledge is a transpersonal affair. Thus, my intent is simply to present my research into these place-names and hopefully guide other scholars who also might choose to grapple with them. Finally, I hasten to add that the responsibility for all the Native language forms and their translations appearing in this book, as well as all theoretical considerations, is mine alone. *** The Names A plethora of ancient names, spun from many different languages, has blanketed this land known today as Indiana since humans first saw it near the end of the last ice age. In fact, an untold number of place-name realms fashioned by a host of ancient societies spanning the millennia preceded those recorded by the first Europeans in this area.13 Thus, the Native American place- names in the state that have survived to the present day represent merely the last layer of aboriginal names to cover an area where, in late prehistory, the place-name matrices of at least Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan language groups overlapped.14 Indiana's oldest place-names are at least three hundred years old, and most come from an Algonquian language known as Miami-Illinois. Speakers of this language are known to have arrived in the area around 1679. However, the ancestors of these people probably lived just to the north and/or northeast of what is now Indiana prior to the mid-1600s, and probably hunted all the way to the Ohio River.15 One Miami-Illinois place-name?for the Ohio River itself?is verifiably prehistoric. In this connection, the important and revelatory work on the Miami- Illinois language done by David Costa in the past twenty years now affords the researcher new perspectives and opportunities for the analysis of Miami-Illinois language terms that was not possible earlier. Indeed, this book could not have been done without Costa's work. Hydronyms, the names of bodies of water, are the most commonly occurring Native American place-names in Indiana. They have survived in impressive numbers because Indiana's many lakes and streams were vital to the aboriginal inhabitants as sources of food, delineators of the natural world, and containers of spiritual presence. In addition, these streams and lakes served as highways?travel ways, trade routes and warpaths. In the 17th century, with the arrival of the Frenchman, whose name in many Algonquian languages translates to "wooden-boat person," these waters became the fundamental connective tissue of the Indian- French relationship.16 In fact, the use of American Indian river names was an everyday experience in the lives of all the Native peoples and of all the French military personnel, traders and missionaries. The Miami-Illinois name for the Wabash River, for example, was as well known in the 18th century as the moniker "Interstate-65" is today. Later, in the late 18th and on into the 19th century, local interactions of every sort involving local Indians and a host of newly arriving Europeans, all of whom used these lakes and rivers for similar purposes, assured the useful continuity of a great many American Indian hydronyms. Thus, in view of their universal importance throughout Indiana's prehistory and early history, it is little wonder that the names for streams and other bodies of water comprise the majority of the state's surviving indigenous place-names. Across the Indiana landscape, eponyms derived from European languages are almost exclusively patronymic in character, most commonly family names of important historic figures, such as we see in the names Mooresville, Montgomery County, and Logansport. But local place-names referring to flora and fauna are far more commonly American Indian in origin or reference than European?and they are commonly eponyms, i.e., names based on the personal names of important historic Indian individuals who lived here. In this connection, the reader may notice throughout the book the absence of several well-known and indisputably Indian- related place-names, including such notables as Squirrel Creek, Flowers Creek, Metocina Creek, Washonis Creek and Weasaw Creek. Even though these place-names and many others like them refer to local historic American Indians, they do not appear in this book since there is no known documentation that supports their being indigenous creations. It is impossible to determine, for lack the documentation, if the area's historic Indians actually created these particular place-names and used Native language forms of them, or if these place-names were simply the inventions of early American militia and settlers who used them to indicate the locations of Indians familiar to them. The perennial problem in dealing with place-names of this nature does not lie in recognizing them as living memories of the underlying Indian- woven cultural fabric, but in proving that they are actually part of the aboriginal weave. That having been said, most genuine local Indian place-names are still in use today, either as transcriptions of the original Native American language terms or as translations into English. Indeed, the most defining features of the land of Indiana bear the names with the deepest roots in time?and these roots are, naturally, Native American. In providing references for the material in this book, I have cited the most easily available published documents whenever possible. Nevertheless, in some cases, citations of original French manuscripts or of published editions in French have been necessary because of either the lack of English editions or translations, or the lack of satisfactory English translations.17 In sum, Native American Place-Names of Indiana will be successful if it brings to a halt the litany of errors that has plagued the interpretation of local indigenous place-names for nearly two centuries. Hopefully, it will also open a small window onto the original namescape. <insert Maps 1 and 2 here?between end of the Introduction and beginning of Abbreviations> List of Abbreviations Source abbreviations AGS American Geographical Society AMAE Archives du Minist¿re des Affaires Etrang¿res ANQ Archives nationales du Qu¿bec ASJCF Archives de la Soci¿t¿ de J¿sus Canada fran¿ais BHM Biblioth¿que historique de la Marine BNF Biblioth¿que nationale de France IHS Indiana Historical Society ILS Illinois State Historical Library IUGL Indiana University Geography Library NL Newberry Library PAC Public Archives of Canada SHB Biblioth¿que Service Hydrographique TCHS Tippecanoe County Historical Society Miscellaneous abbreviations C consonant Fr. French AI animate intransitive verb II inanimate intransitive verb lit. literally ms. manuscript obv. obviative case PA Proto-Algonquian PI Proto-Iroquoian pl. plural sg. singular V vowel
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