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Names have been changed, sometimes in innocence September 7, 2008 By MARK BUSHNELL Before Samuel de Champlain paddled out onto a large lake 399 years ago, he had heard American Indians speak of it. They knew it by various names. The Mohawks called it "Caniadari Quaront," which has been translated as "wide lake" and "gateway of the good land." The Oneida called it "Oneadalote" or "Onyatalot," which mean, respectively, "a lake" or "a wide lake."
The Abenaki name was more descriptive, "Pe-ton-bowk," which means "waters that lie between," referring to the division between their lands and those of the rival Iroquois.
Despite the perfectly good names for this large body of water, Champlain gave it a new one, his own. As probably the first white person to venture into Vermont, he was starting a trend. The settlers who followed over the next two centuries obliterated the native culture and most of the names Indians had given to the land.
But scholars have been able to identify about 200 old Indian place names, some of which have stuck. The late John Huden, an education professor at the University of Vermont, spent decades tracing such names. His work was picked up by Esther Swift, who wrote "Vermont Place-Names" in 1977.
Huden admitted the shortcomings of his efforts. In writing about his research in 1955 in Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society, Huden conceded that "(t)his glossary of Indian place-names in Vermont is woefully incomplete, demonstrably inadequate, and in several places admittedly confused." Most of the Indian names that remain in Vermont came, not surprisingly, from the Abenaki, the tribe that had the largest presence at the start of the European invasion of the region. The Abenaki created nearly 100 names that Huden identified. Next come the Mohawks with about 50, followed by the Mohicans with about a dozen. The Chippewa, Narragansett, Natick, Pennacook, Pocumtuc and Wampanoag each provided a few.
Huden and Swift note that the recording of Indian names on a map was an inexact science at best. American Indians had no written language, and they spoke a language with no linguistic connection with European languages. So imagine what the process might have been. A settler would ask a local Indian what a certain place is called. Upon hearing the answer, the settler, if he or she was literate, wrote down the name, trying to create a conglomeration of letters that would give readers some sense of how it sounded.
But given the idiosyncratic spelling of the time, there were certainly many ways the word could be read. Over time, Swift points out, the American Indian name for the Connecticut River has had roughly 50 spellings.
Of course, if the settler who first heard the word was illiterate, this created another chance for distortion as the word was passed from person to person, no doubt mutating along the way, before reaching the ear of a mapmaker.
Another difficulty was that Europeans often named places in honor of a person or place — think Rutland, which was named after either a town in Massachusetts or an English duke.
American Indians tended to name things for more practical reasons. They wanted to be able to find places again, so they named them after memorable details, like the color of the nearby rocks or the kind of plant that grew there. And settlers often assumed that, say, the name of one spot on a river was intended to identify its entire length.
For example, the Winooski River gets its name from the Abenaki word for the wild onions that Indians harvested at its delta, but today we use the name for the whole waterway. The names that have stuck seem most often to be those identifying water bodies. "Kwini-teguh," or "the long river," became the Connecticut River; "Obamaseen" or "Bomzen" and variations thereof, which may mean "keepers of the ceremonial fire," might have formed the basis for Lake Bomoseen in Castleton; and "Ottau-quechee," which could have meant "current coming out," "cat-tails near current" or possibly even "place where land near muskrat lodges trembles," lives on in the name of a river.
The Mettawee River may have gotten its name from any number of sources. Huden suggests that it might be derived from an Algonquin dialect and mean "furthest away" or from the Natick for poplar tree or from Abenaki for the junction of two rivers.
The name of Chimney Point, a spit of land that juts into Lake Champlain in the town of Addison, is also subject to debate.
It is often said to come from the chimney or chimneys that were the only remnants of a French fort that once stood on the site. But it also might come from what Huden said was a combination of Chippewa and Natick, "chemaun nayaug." The words may have sounded rather like "chimney" but they apparently meant "canoe point," perhaps because this was a spot where American Indians launched or beached their canoes.
The titillatingly named Ticklenaked Pond in Ryegate might also be the result of an old Indian word being mispronounced to make sense to a foreign ear. Huden believes its original name might have been "taugamochek," a Delaware Indian word meaning "little beaver" or "little beavers." Or possibly it comes from the word "Took-nock-ett," which means "riverbank."
Whatever its source, the pond's original name was not intended to conjure images of skinny-dipping.
Other landmark names might have had trouble sticking because of a difference of opinion between cultures. The Abenaki called a large mountain in central Vermont "Mozodepowadso," or "mountain with a head like a moose."
European settlers looked at the same peak, decided it looked like a human face looking up at the sky, and promptly gave it the less poetic name Mount Mansfield, after the town in Connecticut from which a major local landowner hailed. For all the names like Missisquoi River, Okemo Mountain and Lake Memphremagog that dot Vermont maps with obvious Indian origins, some places have ancient ties to American Indians that are less obvious. Sometimes the modern name for a place grew out of the meaning of the Indian name for it, as with the Mohawk word "Dawinehneh" and the Abenaki word "Wonokakeetookeese," both of which have been translated as "abode of the otters" and which referred to what we now call Otter Creek.
During his tour of the lake, Champlain saw the mouth of Otter Creek. A cartographer as well as an explorer, Champlain could easily have jotted his name onto this spot, but in this case he resisted the urge. In fact, he gave only the lake his name. This creek he would call "La Riviere aux Loutres," or "the river of the otters." The Indian identification of the place was good enough for him.
Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a weekly feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine.== |
