Made In America - Bill Bryson [69]
Another approach, and one that grew increasingly common as Americans plunged still further west, was to name places and landmarks after people, usually their founders but often someone deemed to have admirable qualities. In the Midwest especially, every state is dotted with communities bearing the name of some forgotten pioneer or hero of the nineteenth century. In Iowa you can find Webster City, Mason City, Ames, Audubon, Charles City, Grinnell (named by and not for the man who took Horace Greeley’s advice to ‘go west, young man’) and perhaps two hundred others in a similar vein. A notable (if seldom noted) feature of American place names is how many of the larger cities honour people hardly anyone has ever heard of. There are no great cities named Franklin or Jefferson, but there is a Dallas. It was named for George Mifflin Dallas, who rose to the certain obscurity of the Vice-Presidency under James K. Polk and then sank from history like a stone dropped in deep water. Cleveland (originally spelled Cleaveland) is named for a forgotten Connecticut lawyer, Moses Cleaveland, who owned the land on which it stood but never bothered to visit the community that bears his name. Denver commemorates a governor of the Kansas Territory. It is not that these people were deemed especially worthy of having great cities named after them, but that the communities grew to greatness later.
Timing was all in these matters. Lewis Cass’s nearest brush with immortality was to be defeated by Zachary Taylor in the 1848 presidential election, but counties in nine states are named for him none the less. Taylor had to be content with just seven county names – though that is perhaps seven more than a longer view of history would grant him. Henry Clay, the Kentucky senator and twice failed presidential candidate, did better than both put together. He is honoured with county names in no fewer than eighteen states. You can search the West for notable commemorations of Lewis and Clark and find almost nothing, but Zebulon Pike is grandly honoured with a mountain peak he never climbed or even got very close to (he merely sighted it from afar). Even Warren G. Harding, a President whose greatest contribution to American history was to die in office, has a county named in his honour in New Mexico. Only George Washington got anything approaching his just reward, receiving the approbation of a state, the nation’s capital, 31 counties and at least 120 communities.10 Once there were even more. Cincinnati, for example, began life as Fort Washington.
Often Americans arrived in a place to find it already named. The process began with the names the Dutch left behind when they gave up their hold on Nieuw Amsterdam. The British hastily changed that to New York – in honour of the Duke of York, and not the historic English city – but others required a little linguistic surgery. Haarlem was shorn of a vowel, Vlissingen was transformed into Flushing, and Breukelyn became Brooklyn (and at one point looked like evolving further into Brookland).11 Deutel Bogt begat Turtle Bay, Vlachte Bosch became Flatbush, Thynevly became Tenafly, Bompties Hoek became Bombay Hook, and Antonies Neus became Anthony’s Nose. As with the English and French, the Dutch often took Indian names and rendered them into something more palatable to their tongues. Thus Hopoakan, a village across the river from Manhattan, became Hoboken.
Further west, the French left many hundreds