Made In America - Bill Bryson [70]
In Marquette and Jolliet’s wake came French trappers, traders and explorers. For a century and a half much of America west of the Appalachians was under French control and the names on the landscape record the fact: Michigan, Illinois, Louisiana, Detroit, Baton Rouge, St Louis, Chicago and countless others. Many of these names are of uncertain significance. Chicago appears to be from an Indian word meaning ‘place that stinks of onions’, and Baton Rouge was evidently so called because in 1700 a party of explorers came upon a red stake – a baton rouge – marking the boundary between two Indian hunting-grounds and built a trading post there, but Coeur d’Alene, the city in Idaho, is utterly baffling. It translates as ‘heart of awl’, and quite what the founders had in mind by that is anybody’s guess.12
No less of a mark was made by the Spanish. Though we tend to associate the Spanish with the south-west, Spain’s American dominions stretched at one time across most of the continent, from the Florida Keys as far north as Alaska. Memphis was once known as San Fernando and Vicksburg as Nogales.13 But, preoccupied with their holdings in Central and South America and convinced that North America was mostly worthless desert, the Spanish never made much of the lands to the north. By 1821, when Spain withdrew from North America, its estate north of the border consisted of only a few scattered garrisons and just three towns worthy of the name – Santa Fe, San Antonio and St Augustine, though even they couldn’t muster 10,000 citizens between them. (Mexico City by contrast had a population comfortably above 150,000.) Even so, as I need hardly tell you, the Spanish left hundreds of names on the American landscape, including the oldest non-Amerindian place name in the United States – Florida, or ‘place of flowers’, so dubbed by Juan Ponce de León when he became the first known European to set foot on what would eventually become US soil, on 2 April 1513. Missions and other small settlements soon followed, among them Tortugas (the second oldest European place name in North America), St Augustine and Apalchen. This last named was never anything more than a hamlet, but the name somehow came to be applied to the vaguely defined mountainous interior. Eventually it attached itself to the mountain themselves – hence, Appalachians.
If the Spanish were modest in peopling their North American settlements, they were often lavish, not to say excessive, when it came to bestowing names upon them. To them Santa Fe was not just Santa Fe but La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco (The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis), while the California community that we know as Los Angeles went by the dauntingly ambitious name of EI Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río Porciúncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels by the Little-Portion River), giving it nearly as many syllables as residents.
Often, as with Los Angeles and Santa Fe, these names left behind by the French and Spanish had to be shortened, re-spelled, or otherwise modified to make them sit more comfortably on English-speaking tongues. Thus L’Eau Froid (’cold water’), a lake in Arkansas, was turned into Low Freight. Mont Beau, North Carolina, evolved into Monbo. Les Mont Verts became Lemon Fair. Similarly the Siskiyou Mountains