Why were so many states, counties, cities, and towns named for native Americans? At the time of their naming, native Americans weren’t exactly held in high esteem. If they weren’t actually hated, there was the desire for them to just go away.
Oops, this maybe should have been in General Questions :smack:
Here in Montana it’s to recognize the fact that native Americans had settled this land first. I’ve seen places listed on maps with both their American and Indian names next to each other.
I think there was more respect for native American culture in the past than you think. I’m talking about the early 1900’s as opposed to the mid 1800’s.
I don’t know if it will answer your questions, but George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States is definitely worth a look.
Often, the Natives outnumbered the settlers. They already had names for the area, so the settlers just used them as the moved in and displaced the natives.
If left to their own devices, the settlers would have named everywhere ‘Springfield’.
Seriously, as others have already said, the First Nations peoples lived side by side with the European settlers for many years. There’s not a lot of point in inventing new names for places that you’re likely to need a First Nations guide to find.
America is a huge place, and was colonized by Europeans pretty quickly, overall. The new colonists would have had their own names for places, of course, but seriously, you run out of names pretty quickly that way. Picture the following conversation:
In most states the Indians already had names for places. The new arrivals adopted those names when they knew them. In the early years of shared occupancy there would have been some level of interaction and the language difficulties would not have been so great as to prevent the sharing of names.
What’s almost as interesting is how the names change from state to state. Look carefully at Louisiana for a good example. Also note how -ville, -boro, -town, -burgh, etc., help define the tendencies with a state or nearby states. The heavy Spanish influence in The West (and Florida) is also worth noting.
It’s when you get to places like Only, Slapout. Skullbone, Goose Creek, Frog Jump, and such quaint names that the question about how places got their names gets to be a real mystery. Whenever the Storm Alert radar is on for a tornado warning the places that get mentioned as “in the path” would be funny if it weren’t for the seriousness of the situation.
One of my all-time favorites is a place which takes its name from the Indian name for it, though it’s been translated into English:
Yes, it’s a real place. Yes, that’s really it’s name.
(Dave Barry originally brought this wonderful name to my attention.)
The period of not holding the Indians in high esteem was a fairly brief period in relation to namegiving. The French and other early explorers had mostly tried to transliterate the Indian names rather than inventing new ones. And eventually there’s a romanticism attached to the now-vanished noble savages, leading to an era of self-conscious Indian namegiving. The period in between—when newly settled farmers still nervous about the recently moved Indians gathered in a tavern to choose a name for their new post-office—only lasted a few decades. So Indian names for towns are less common than Indian names for natural features, unless the places already had names (as fords, portages, or Indian villages) that got preserved. Chicagou comes to mind.
An interesting comparison is Australia, which seems to have a very high percentage of town names with aboriginal origins.
You always name the cities and such after the people you effed over to get the land.
Check out all of the Spanish cities and streets in California…
Santa Ana, Cruz, Ynez, Paula. San Diego, Francisco, Jose, Marcos, Mateo.
Los Angeles, Las Cruces, El Segundo
Huh? Those California names were given by the Spanish, not the Indians. Mateo and José were saints, not Indian chiefs.
They definitely ran out of names by the time they got to Texas.
“What shall we name this place, Uriah?”
“Hm, all I see is a little puddle over there.”
“Then we shall call it…Shallowwater!”
“Any ideas for naming this place, Jedediah?”
“There’s nothing here but dirt!”
“Then we shall call it…Brownfield!”
“Any more name ideas, Amos?”
“Just another damn field. Smaller than the last one, too.”
“Then we shall call it…Littlefield!”
“How about this place, Ezekiel?”
“This has to be the flattest goddamn place I’ve ever seen.”
“Then we shall call it…Levelland!”
“How shall we refer to this place, Ezra?”
“There’s not a single notable thing as far as the eye can see!”
“Then we shall call it…Plainview!”
The lack of imagination just staggers me sometimes.
The OP isn’t looking at it right, at least for the initial settlers on the East Coast – Indians were in far greater numbers than the settlers, and were a formidable force. They actually helped many of them stay alive through the first years. They might have been feared, but you wouldn’t say they were looked down on. It’s not surprising the settlers took over many of the local names (many of which preceded the settlers – they’re on the explorer’s maps, from before the time of the settlers). After all, if you renamed a place “Lake George” you and your friends might know it by that name, but anyone coming by ship from elsewhere and expecting to end up there wouldn’t know which Lake George of the many. Even if you did use suchj a name, it might have been pegged to another local site that located it – The Lake George near Minisink.
The town I now live in still bears its Indian name of Saugus, and it’s so marked on maps dated to before the settling of the area. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode island, New York, New Jersey, and other states abound in such names. You don’t need to blame lack of settler creativity for it – people simply used the already-existing names.
Nor did the european-descended settlers hold Native American names in contempt. Certainly in the early 19th century there developed a romanticism and nostalgia for the american Indian, spurred by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and later by Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. so you ended up with places like “Norumbega”, named after a legendary Indian (although some thought it might be Viking!) city:
I lived in your town for 20+ years Max and often laughed over those descriptive names. But you left out my favorite a little further south:
"Lookit here Red, they ain’t no trees 'round this here place,
Let’s call it …Notrees!
I also got a chuckle from the combo man/wife names.
First settlers: Ida and lou…let’s call the town Idalou!
Floyd and Ada …Floydada!
What creativity!
I did some genealogy research on a branch of my family that settled on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the 1620s and the changes in the place names there were interesting. At that time you had some English place names (James Towne, Elizabeth City, Martin’s Hundred, etc.) but many places were still called by their Indian names largely because that’s what they were referred to on the maps of the area made by John Smith and other people (and remember- no printing presses or skilled cartographers and engravers meant making a new map everytime a name changed was a bitch). My ancestors settled in Accomack, an area that comprised most of the Eastern Shore peninsula today and where the major population was in the southern part of the peninsula.
When Cromwell came to power he ordered all Indian names changed due to the Indians being pagan, and so Accomack became Northampton. This irritated many of the residents because, godless red pagans or not, Accomack was a known name and quantity, and when Cromwell died many changed back to Accomack. However, many people who had settled on the peninsula AFTER Cromwell ordered the name change had always known the place as Northampton so they kept it. To this day the northern half of the Virginia part of the E. Shore is Accomack and the southern part is Northampton.
Anyway, I would guess this has much to do with why so many places kept their Indian names: that was the name on the early maps and it was a pain in the ass to change a place’s name once it became known.
I grew up near two places in very rural Alabama called Chaney’s Creek and Holman’s Creek. There was never a Chaney family in Chaney’s Creek but it’s name was originally Channahatchi, a Creek Indian word that mean [whatever Channa meant] creek (hatchi always means creek- don’t ask me why they weren’t called the Hatchi Indians though). For a time it was called Channahatchee Creek, but apparently at some point somebody learned this was calling it Channa Creek Creek and it became Channa Creek (1860s maps) and then evolved into Chaney’s Creek. The Holman Creek was because the original name translated from the Creek Indian words for “Holy Man’s Creek” (no flute music necessary- there were actually several places called that in Alabama/Florida/Georgia and it probably originated more in something like “this is where the shaman says is a good place to get water” (similar to the word BIBI on Roman maps, which became the surname and place name Bibby in England) and later got changed from Holy Man to Holman, which happened to be and probably not coincidentally the surname of a very wealthy landowning family in the county (though they didn’t own land there).
Point: a lot of times even English sounding place names have native origins. There are lots more examples of this (including a couple of famous ones that I can’t call to mind at the moment).