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.

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