Made In America - Bill Bryson [74]
But then quite a number of state names are, when you pause to consider them, at least faintly nonsensical. Mississippi is a curious name for a state that possesses neither the source nor the mouth of the river for which it is named and indeed owns only part of one bank. Missouri has more of the Mississippi River than Mississippi has – but then Missouri also has more of the Mississippi River than it has of the Missouri River, and yet we call it Missouri. Rhode Island is not only not an island, but is not named for anyone or anything called Rhode. Nevada is named for a chain of mountains that lies almost entirely in California. Wyoming is named for a forgotten poem, California for a mythical queen. Maine has no particular reason for being called that. Montana and Idaho are named for nothing at all.
The explanations behind all these are various. Rhode Island originally referred only to the island in Narragansett Bay on which Newport now stands. An early Dutch explorer called it Roodt Eylandt (or Red Island, after the colour of its soil) and the name eventually evolved into a form more palatable to English sensibilities after Roger Williams founded Providence Plantation there in 1636. The state’s full official name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Maine comes from an archaic sense of main meaning great or principal. The Atlantic was sometimes referred to as the Main Sea – hence ‘to sail the Spanish main’. The use is retained in the term mainland – and, less explicitly, in the name of the twenty-third state. Missouri is named not directly for the river, but for the Missouri Territory of which it was the most important part, and Mississippi came about more or less because no one else had taken the name. It was almost called Washington.
Many states also almost went by other names. West Virginia was nearly called Kanawha. Washington state nearly became Columbia. Idaho might have been Esmerelda, Oro Plata, Sierra Plata or Humboldt. Nevada might have been Bullion or Washoe, the name by which the region was generally known before Congress decided to name it Nevada after the mountains that feature only incidentally in its geography. From the outset, the question of what names to bestow on new states was one that generated hot debate and exercised the minds of men whose talents might better have been applied to more consequential matters. In 1784, in one of his few truly misguided efforts, Thomas Jefferson drew up a list of fashionably neoclassical but inescapably inane names that he suggested be bestowed on the territories of the West. Among his choices: Polypotamia, Assenisipia, Pelisipia, Chersonesus, Macropotamia and Metropotamia.26
Jefferson never got his way with his fancy names, but he did have somewhat greater success with a second proposal, namely that western states be divided in a neat chequerboard pattern. Every state west of the Mississippi has at least two straight (or nearly straight) borders except for Oregon, Minnesota and Texas, though only two, Colorado and Wyoming, are rectangular. In terms of their interior organization, the western states had an almost brutal orderliness imposed upon them, and one that made little allowance for topographical features like rivers and mountains. Land was divided into one-mile squares, or 640-acre sections. Six sections formed a township. Sections were divided into sixteen 40-acre squares, which accounts for those familiar farm expressions like ‘north 40’. One problem with such a set-up is that a spherical planet doesn’t lend itself to square corners. As you move nearer the poles, the closer the lines of longitude grow – which is why, if you look at a map, Wyoming is perceptibly narrower at the top than at