Made In America - Bill Bryson [71]
Odd pronunciations are by no means exclusive to communities with a foreign pedigree. Often founders of towns selected an exotic name and then either didn’t know how to pronounce it or decided they had a better way. Thus we find Pompeii, Michigan, pronounced ‘pom-pay-eye’, Russiaville and Peru, Indiana, as ‘rooshaville’ and ‘pee-roo’, Versailles, Kentucky as ‘vur-sales’, Pierre, South Dakota, as ‘peer’, Bonne Terre, Missouri, as ‘bonny tar’, Beatrice, Nebraska, as ‘be-at-riss’, Dante and Fries, Virginia, as ‘dant’ and ’freeze’. (The joke in Fries is that it is ‘fries’ in summer and ’freeze’ in winter.)
If America had a golden age of place-naming it would be the middle portion of the nineteenth century when in quick order Oregon fever, the California gold rush and the opening of a transcontinental railway saw hundreds of new communities spring up practically overnight. Often, as we saw at the start of the chapter, the naming of towns was left to the railways, which not only arbitrarily bestowed titles on new communities but sometimes took the opportunity to rename existing ones. Marthasville, Georgia, had its new name – Atlanta – forced on it entirely against its wishes by a railway official in 1845. Occasionally, as Mencken notes, the first passengers on a new line were given the privilege of naming the towns along the way.16 Post Office officials also enjoyed free rein. One official, Stewart relates, was said to have named post offices all over the West ‘for practically all the kids and babies in his immediate neighbourhood’.17
When the naming was left to unofficial sources, as with the towns that sprang up around the mining camps in California, the results were generally livelier. California briefly revelled in such arresting geographic designations as Murderer’s Gulch, Guano Hill, Chucklehead Diggings, Delirium Tremens, Whiskey Diggings, You Bet, Chicken Thief Flat, Poker Flat, Git-Up-And-Git, Dead Mule, One Eye, Hell-out-for-Noon City, Puke and Shitbritches Creek.18 The practice was by no means confined to California. The whole of the West was soon dotted with colourful nomenclature – Tombstone, Arizona; Cripple Creek, Colorado; Whiskey Dick Mountain, Washington; Dead Bastard Peak, Wyoming; and others beyond counting. Often the more colourful of these names were later quietly changed for reasons that don’t always require elucidation, as with Two Tits, California, and ShitHouse Mountain, Arizona. Once, doubtless in consequence of the loneliness of western life, the West had more Nipple Mountains, Tit Buttes and the like than you could shake a stick at. Today we must make do with the Teton Mountains, whose mammary implications are evident only to those who are proficient in French.
Colourful appellations are not a uniquely western phenomenon, however. Lunenberg County, Virginia, once boasted a Fucking Creek and a Tickle Cunt Branch,19 North Carolina had a Coldass Creek, and Kentucky still proudly boasts a Sugar Tit. Indeed, oddball names know no geographical bounds, as a brief sampling shows:
Who’d A Thought It, Alabama
Eek, Alaska
Greasy Corner, Toad Suck and Turkey Scratch, Arkansas
Zyzx Springs, California
Two Egg, Florida
Zook Spur and What Cheer, Iowa
Rabbit Hash, Bug, and OK, Kentucky
Bald Friar and Number Nine, Maryland.
Teaticket, Massachusetts
Sleepy Eye and Dinky town, Minnesota
Tightwad, Peculiar, and Jerk Tail, Missouri
Hot Coffee and Goodfood, Mississippi
Wynot, Nebraska