In traveling over the undulating prairies of many States of the Union,
huge granite boulders are seen lying solitary, as if dropped by some
passing cloud, having no kindred in the rocky formations environing,
but being absolute foreigners in a strange land. There they lie,
prone, chiseled by some forgotten art, and so solitary as to bring a
tinge of melancholy to the reflection of the thoughtful. In certain
regions these boulders are so numerous and so various in size as to be
used in building foundations, and sometimes entire habitations. These
rocks were dropped in remote centuries by passing icebergs, and are
solitary memorials of the ice-drift across our continent. The crafts
on which they voyaged were wrecked long ago. They were passengers on
"Some shattered berg, that, pale and lone,
Drifts from the white north to the tropic zone,
And in the burning day
Melts peak by peak away,
Till on some rosy even
It dies, with sunlight blessing it."
This instance may be taken as a parable, suggesting the history
embodied in names of localities, lakes, straits, rivers, cities,
hamlets, States. Those names are the debris of a dead era; and for
one, I can not escape the wonder and the pathos of these shattered
yesterdays, which have a voice, calling, as in hoarse whispers sad with
tears, "We are not, but we were."
Though we are little given to so esteeming the study, there is romance
in geography, learned by us when lads and lasses--not because we would,
but because we must--and such study was difficult and unsavory. The
catalogue of names we learned, perforce, was dreary as the alphabet;
and not a memory of pleasure lingers about the book in which we
studied, save that, in cramped, sprawling hand, upon the margin is
written the name of some little sweetheart beside our own,--and dead
long since. No, geography was not romantic. That was a possession we
never suspected. But romance is ubiquitous, like flowers of spring,
sheltering where we little anticipate.
To a lover of history, however, few studies will prove so fascinating
as a study of names in geography. Finding a few at random, feel the
thrill of the history they embody--history and reminiscence:
Providence, Roger Williams named the city so when himself was a
refugee; Fort Wayne, named for General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, who
destroyed the Indian scourge in the Northwest Territory in 1792;
Raleigh, so yclept for that chiefest friend of American colonization
among Englishmen, Sir Walter Raleigh; Council Grove, because, in the
Indian days, there, in a grove--rare in the prairie country of
Kansas--the Red Men met for counsel; Astoria, bearing name of that
famous fortune-maker in the fur country of the West and North; Buffalo
Lake, reminding us that there the buffalo tramped in days seeming now
so remote, when the buffalo rode, like a mad cavalry troop, across the
wide interior plains of our continent; Eagle River, for here this royal
bird used to love to linger as if it were his native stream. These are
the scattered, miscellaneous reminiscences of men and acts, and things
and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to
the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to
life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant
characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought,
with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his
tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and
his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light,
this name embodies. What an archive of history does such a name
become! Portage is a name pregnant with memories of the old days of
discovery, when America was still an unknown limit. "Grand Portage"
you shall see on the map, neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see,
as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders when
navigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over the
watershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-bark
canoe once more. Prairie is another word full of interest. Pampas is
a word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America;
while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian
word for field. The words are synonyms, but come from different
hemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a word
descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a
gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as
an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and
valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on the
flower-sown, green meadows that swayed in the wind like some emerald
sea? So the Incas have christened the plains of South America, and the
French adventurer the plains of North America! Though, who that
crosses our prairies, sweet with green, and lit with flowers like lamps
of many-colored fires, thinks he is speaking the speech of the French
trapper of long ago? Savannah is an Indian word, meaning meadow, and
gives name to these dank meadowlands under warmer skies, where reeds
and swamp-grasses grow; and the name of Savannah in Georgia is thus
bestowed. How much we owe! Who has not helped us? Nor does the
traveler through the castellated steeps of the "Bad Lands" know, nor
probably does he care, that this caption came from the far-traveling
French trapper, whose venturesome and tireless feet have made him at
home in all places on our continent. How valuable, however, must be
these names to one who cares to familiarize himself with the knowledge
and romance of those pioneers of geography! Of like origin is "butte."
The voyager saw those isolated peaks, too high to be called hills and
too low to be called mountains, and said they are buttes
(knolls)--names which cling to them as tenaciously as their shadows.
In a word, I have found this study a breath blown from far mountain
ranges of history; and this breath upon the face has made an hour of
life grow young and beautiful, for which reason I now write the story
of my pleasure. The North American continent lends itself with
peculiar grace to such a study as is here suggested, because its story
lies under the eyes of history. 'Twas scarcely an hour ago, in the
world's day, since Columbus found out this continent, and, with a
giant's hand, swung its huge doors inward for the centuries to enter;
and all those discoveries are our commonplace knowledge. What tribes
were here, Prescott and Parkman have told us in thrilling narratives;
and columns of eager colonists we have seen press their way along the
seashore, into forests, over mountains, across deserts, never halting,
save to catch breath as a climber of a mountain does,--on, on, till a
continent is white with the tents of millions. But the Indian
aborigine, for whom the tepee was portable habitation, and the stretch
of plain and hill and lake and river, hunting-ground or
battle-ground,--the Indian is mainly the reminiscence of an old man's
straggling speech; and these names he has left, clinging to lake and
river and hamlet, are his memorial. In Montezuma's empire, where once
a barbaric splendor held court and set in tragic splendor, lurid even
yet at these centuries' remove, what is left save a vocabulary or a
broken idol lying black and foreboding in some mountain stream? Or
those discoverers whose adventurous deeds are part of the world's
chosen treasure, what but their names are written on the streams or
hills? The import of these observations is this, that from American
geography we may, with reasonable accuracy and detail, decipher this
romantic history. In those newer parts of our continent names have too
often lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save in
isolated instances. The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" are
monotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short of
sacrilege. In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be a
scramble for names of any sort. Places multiply, imagination is
asleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet,
even in such a dearth of originality and poetry, scant names flash out
which remind you of the morning names in our continent's history. A
Springdale reminds you that colonists here found a dale, gladdened with
living springs; or an Afton suggests how some exiled Scot salved his
heart by keeping near his exile a name he loved. Our day will, in the
main, attach names for simple convenience, as they put handles on
shovels. Such names, of course, are meaningless. The day for
inventing names is past, or seems so. We beg or borrow, as the
surveyor who marched across the State of New York, with theodolite and
chain and a classical atlas, and blazed his way with Rome, and Illyria,
and Syracuse, and Ithaca,--a procedure at once meaningless and dense.
Greece nor Rome feels at home among us, nor should they.
History is a method of remembrance, and names are a method of
remembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end. When the Saxon,
sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his new
home Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so,
Essex and Wessex and Sussex. In like manner, emigrants from various
shores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dear
land from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over those
earlier colonies, you shall see names--aboriginal and imported--and so
learn, in an infallible way, who first pitched tents on that soil.
This tracking dead races over seas by the local designations they have
left has always fascinated my thought. Those names are verily planted
in the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die. Through
centuries of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how
some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as
a Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals,
are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did
minstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and
where the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviating
fidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped and the
Roman argent eagle flashed back morning to the sun. Coin is a
contraction for "colonia," indicating that at the place so designated a
Roman colonia received honors at the hands of the Roman Senate. In
other words, these locative terminals are as certainly bequeathed
England by the Roman occupancy as is London Tower. "Ton" is historical
too, but is footprint of another passing race--namely the Gaul,
defeated of Caesar on many a bloody field--and is a contraction of
"tuin," meaning garden, appearing in Ireland as "dun," meaning
garrison, both indicating an inclosure, and so becoming a frequent
terminal for names of cities, as Huntingtuin or tun, probably
originally a hunting-tower or hamlet. A second form of "ton" is our
ordinary "town," which, as often as we use, we are speaking the tongue
of the Trans-Alpine Gauls, taking a syllable from the word of a
half-forgotten people. From yet another source is the locative "ham."
Chester is of Roman origin, tun is of Gaelic; but "ham" is Anglo-Saxon,
and means village, whence the sweet word home. Witness the use of this
suffix in Effingham and the like. "Stoke" and "beck" and "worth" are
also Saxon. "Thorpe" and "by" are Danish, as in Althorp and Derby.
These reminiscent instances from over seas will serve to illuminate the
thought under discussion--the historical element embodied in the names
of localities. As in these three locatives we track three distinct
peoples through England, we may, by the same method, fall on the
footprints of divers civilizations in our New World.
Thus far we have touched at random, as one does on a holiday. Now,
seriously, as on a journey of discovery, may we take staff in hand to
trace, if possible, the elusive march of populations by the ashes of
their campfires, as Evangeline did the wanderings of Gabriel, her
beloved.
The Dutch, more's the pity, have left scant memorials of their American
empire. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" has effectually laughed
them out of court; but, notwithstanding, they were mighty men, whose
idiosyncrasies we readily catch at as a jest, but whose greatness
breaks on us slowly, as great matters must. "Kill" was a Dutch word,
meaning creek, a terminal appearing in many of the few words they have
left us, such as Fishkill, Peekskill, Wynantskill, Catskill. Along the
banks of streams, with names like these, one could see ragged Rip Van
Winkle, with his dog and gun, with shambling hunter's gait, or come
silently on solemn Dutch burghers, solemnly playing ninepins in the
shadows. Brooklyn (Breuchelin) is Dutch, as are Orange, Rensselaer,
Stuyvesant, Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, Vanbrunt, Staatsburg, Rotterdam,
Hague, Nassau, Walloonsack, Yonkers, and Zurich. Wallabout, a borough
of Brooklyn (Waalbogt), means Walloon's Bay, thus having a
religio-historical significance. Nor dare we omit that river, noble as
an epic, named after a Dutch discoverer, who, first of Europeans, flung
the swaying shadows of foreign sails on its beautiful waters. Hudson
is a prince among triumphant and adventurous discoverers. And I never
sail past the Palisades, by summer or gorgeous autumn, when all the
hills are blood and flame, without reverting in thought to Hudson, who
gave the stream to our geography and his name to the stream, nor forget
that he was set adrift in the remote and spacious sea, which likewise
bears his name; though well it may, for it is doubtless his grave; for,
set adrift by mutineers, he was crushed by icefloes, or fell asleep in
death in that winter sea. But Hudson River and Hudson Bay will make
him as immortal as this continent. All men shall know by them that
Heinrich Hudson hath sailed this way. So much, then, for following
along dim paths once trod by a Dutch burgher's tramp of empire.
Of the Swedes, who, under their victorious king, Gustavus Adolphus, the
Protestant, settled New Sweden (now known as New Jersey), are left only
dim footprints, the path of them being all but lost, though,
fortunately, sufficiently plain to trace the emigration of a race.
These Swedish emigrants and founders of what they hoped would prove a
State, never attained a supremacy, their enemies, who were their
immediate neighbors and fellow-emigrants from Protestant States, so
speedily overwhelming them--first the Dutch, succeeded by the
inevitable Saxon. Bergen, the first Swedish settlement, in comparative
isolation, still whispers the story of Gustavus Adolphus's statecraft
and vision, and seems a solitary survivor of an old camp of emigrants
voyaging by stream and plain, and all slain by famine and disease and
Indian stealth and pioneer's hardship, save himself. Nordhoff and
Stockholm and Pavonta are scattered reminders of an attempted
sovereignty which is no more.
Protestantism made valorous attempt to preempt this New World of North
America for civil and religious liberty and the Reformed faith. A look
at their breadth of plan must be a benefit to us and a praise to those
who planned so large things for the glory of God. That they acted
independently of each other shows how wide-spread this thirst for
liberty and this love for the kingdom of God. I know few things that
stir me more. Swedish Lutherans settled New Sweden; the Dutch Walloons
settled New Holland; the Baptists, Rhode Island; the Quakers,
Pennsylvania; the Huguenots, the Carolinas; the Puritans, New England.
The Anglican Church only incidentally, and not of intention, settled
Virginia. Catholicism seized and holds South America, Central America,
and Mexico, but in the United States was represented only by the colony
of Maryland, planted by Lord Baltimore, and bears mark of his religious
faith in naming his plantation after Mary, the Catholic queen, his own
name appearing in the name of its present metropolis, Baltimore. In
days when in England the Catholic was under ban, he founded this colony
as a Canaan for Roman Catholics. Spanish Catholics worked their way
along the Pacific Coast, and French Catholicism sailed up the St.
Lawrence and down the Mississippi, though the latter territory now
belongs to the Protestant faith. Admiral Coligny, an illustrious son
of France, attempted planting the Huguenots in America, though this
colonizing experiment has left scant memorial of Huguenot occupancy,
because the destruction of this colony by Spanish Catholics was so
sudden and so utter; yet the Carolinas are witness to this hazard and
hope, bearing the name of the infamous King Charles IX. How terrible
is the irony when we recall how this same ruler, after whom Coligny
named his land of refuge for persecuted Protestants, was author of the
most malignant religious massacre on record--the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew! In Beaufort and Carteret may be discovered reminiscences
of an expedition whose close was disastrous, yet heroic.
Everybody has contributed to giving names to the States; therefore
attention to them as a class is fitting. England gave name to
Maryland, as suggested in another paragraph; to New York, named in
honor of the Duke of York, afterward known as James II, of evil memory;
Virginia, so styled by Sir Walter Raleigh, that pattern of chivalry, in
honor of his queen, Elizabeth; New Jersey, after Jersey, the island;
Rhode Island, after the Island of Rhodes; Delaware, after Lord de la
Warre, early governor of Virginia; Pennsylvania, after William Penn,
the good; New Hampshire, after Hampshire, in England, as New England
was, in love, called after the motherland; Georgia, named for George
II, by philanthropic General Oglethorpe, who brought hither his colony
of debtors,--such the contributions of England to our commonwealth of
names. America has supplied one State a name, Washington; and who more
or so worthy to write his name upon a State as George Washington, first
Commander-in-chief and President? Spain has christened these
Commonwealths: Florida, the land of flowers; California; Colorado,
colored; Nevada. We must thank France for these: Maine, for a province
in France; Vermont, green mountains; the Carolinas; Louisiana, a name
attached by the valorous La Salle, in fealty to his prince, calling
this province, at the mouth of the river he had followed to its
entrance into the ocean, after Louis XIV, the then darling of the
French people. Mexico is remembered in two instances: New Mexico and
Texas. Italy has a memorial, bestowed in gratitude by America. The
District of Columbia, with its capital, Washington, reminds men forever
that Columbus discovered and Washington saved America. Besides this,
to Italy's credit, or discredit--I know not which--must be charged the
giving title to two continents. Amerigo Vespucci has lent his name to
one hemisphere of the world. Other States bear Indian captions. Those
wandering hunters have lost their hunting-grounds; but we can not
forget whose hunting-grounds they were so long as the Indian name
clings to the Territory where he is not, but his name shall remain as
his monument. Indiana is generic, the land of the Indian. With this
exception, the States are called after tribes or by some Indian name:
Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas,
the Dakotas (who will forget when Hiawatha passed to the land of the
Dakotahs for his wooing?), Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and the like. With
such names, we are once more sitting in the woodland, by the wigwam, as
we did a century ago. The memory haunts us. Thus much for the racial
element in cognomens of States.
Now again to set out on the journey on the trail of vanished peoples!
The Spanish invasion of America, now, as we recall its story, big with
pathos and remorse, the pathos predominating, now that the last rag of
a province has been torn from their feeble hands,--the evacuation of
Havana, with its sorry pomp of exhuming Columbus's dust, is one of the
saddest sights history has called men to look upon. Columbus, a
foreigner, gave Spain a New World; and foreigners of still another
blood have taken away what by right never belonged to Spanish
sovereignty. Just as this fate is, we can but feel the immense pathos
of the Spanish evacuation of the New World. French discoverers hugged
the rivers, as by some deep affinity. Spaniards, conversely, made
march without thought of riverways. They were accustomed to deserts in
their own land, and feared them not in a remote hemisphere. They
swarmed in the desert. Nothing daunted them. Spain's best blood
poured into the New World, a fact which doubtless accounts, in part,
for the devitalized energies and genius of this mother country of their
birth and hopes and initiative. "Florida" is a Spanish tide-mark.
"St. Augustine" is a gravestone of history, marking the mound where
lies the dust of the first permanent colony planted in America. The
Spaniard headed toward the southern provinces of America, as the
Englishman to the east, and the Frenchman to the north and central
provinces. Spain held southward. Though the colony of Florida was
retained till, in the year 1819, the subtle diplomacy of John Quincy
Adams added this peninsula of flowers to the Union of States, it had no
aggressive value as a basis of discovery or colonization. The base of
Spanish operations was Mexico, the fair land of their conquest. Spain
exploited her energies in Mexico and Peru. She was mad with a lust for
gold. Her galleons made these lands bankrupt. But Spaniards dared to
lose themselves in desert or forests. The discovery and conquest of
Peru is mad with turbulent courage and adventure. This we can not
deny; and the discovery of the Amazon by a brother of Pizarro is a
story to thrill a sluggard into a sleepless waking. We see these
heroic days, and forgive much of Spanish misrule and avarice. De Soto,
crowding through jungles of undergrowth and miasms, through tribes of
hostile men, though stimulated by the wild lust for gold, is for all a
brave chapter in the world's biography; and to see him buried in the
massive river he discovered is to make other than the tender-hearted
weep. To see on the map of the Union "Llano Estacado" is to give, as
it were, the initials of heroic names. Spain, which staked these
plains, will walk across them no more. They did this service for
others. Were they fine-fibered enough to feel these losses, the sorrow
we feel for their exit would be intensified; but their centuries of
misrule have certified to their all but utter lack of any finer
sentiment or sense of high responsibility. Give them what honor we
may. Recall their departed glory, and let it light the sky, if only
for a moment, like a flash of lightning. Spaniards were little less
given to naming their settlements "Saint" than the French. From
Mexico, up the long Pacific Coast, they affixed names which will remain
perpetually as the sole memorial that once these banished dons held
sway in the United States. These names cluster in the Southern United
States, touching immediately on their chief dependency, Mexico; but are
still in evidence farther away, though growing scanter, as footprints
in a remote highway. Rio Grande, Del Norte, Andalusia, and the
charming name affixed to a charming mountain range, Sierra Nevada,--how
these names rehabilitate a past! Nevada and Andalusia! One needs
little imagination to see the flush that gathered on the dusky cheek of
the old Spanish discoverer when he calmed, in part, his homesickness by
giving his wanderings the name of the dear home from which he came, and
kindled his pride into a fire, like the conflagration of mountain
pines, by telling the New World the names of his ancestral land. But
his "San" and "Santa" are frequent as tents upon a battle-field when
the battle is spent. "Corpus Christi"--how Spanish and Catholic that
is! San Antonio, Santa Fe, Cape St. Lucas. In Florida: Rio San Juan,
Ponce de Leon, Cape San Blas, Hernando, Punta Rosa, Cerro de Oro, are
indicative of the growing communities in that peninsula after the
invasion located at St. Augustine. But of all the parts of the United
States, New Mexico is most honeycombed with Spanish locatives. Passing
that way, one seems not to be in America, but in Spain. Spain is
everywhere. Their names are here strewn thick as battle soldiers
sleeping on the battle-field: Las Colonias, Arayo Salado, Don Carlos
Hill, Cerillos, Dolores, San Pambo, Canon Largo, Magdalene Mountains,
San Pedro. Thence these names creep up into Utah, though there they
are never numerous: Santa Clara, Escalante Desert, Sierra Abaja; and
farther north, reaching to all but hand-clasp with the French Du Chasne
River, is San Rafael River. St. Xavier, San Miguel, Santa Monica,
Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Gabriel,--can you not in these names
hear the Spanish languishing speech and see the Jesuit pioneer?
Eldorado, Sacramento, El Paso, Los Angeles, are footprints of the
Spanish discoverer. And Cape Blanco, in far-away Oregon, probably
represents the farthest campfire of the Spanish march. In his area the
don was indefatigable. De Soto marched like a conqueror. Coronado
found his way into Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. La Junta, in
Kansas, may mark the subsidence of the wave of Spanish invasion, and
Kansas was part of the kingdom of "Quivera." Eugene Ware, the Kansas
poet, who, under the _nom de plume_ of "Ironquill," has written
graceful and musical poems, has told of Coronado's excursion into this
now populous and fertile region: