THE INDIAN. "Lo, the poor Indian!" Pope. PROVIDENCE seems to have ordained that by an act of poetical justice many races that have been conquered and even exterminated by foreign invaders, should nevertheless survive in the names of the great landmarks of their native land. Thus the ancient Briton still speaks to us in the mountains and rivers of England, and the Indian in the geography and natural history of the United States. The prairie and the backwoods, once the home of the Red man, are full of his memory, and objects abound there, known to us by names which are indigenous and peculiar among so much that is of foreign origin or common to many countries. The North American savages play no unimportant part in our literature; they have their war-whoops and yells, their paint and their feathers, in prose as well as in poetry, in Hiawatha and in Cooper's novels. These names and these things-though, perhaps, not legitimately included in a very strict definition of the term Americanisms-are almost the only really old things which we have, the only relics left to remind us that human beings roamed over our hills and floated on our waters before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth and brave Captain Smith sailed in his frail boat up the Potomac. It is much to be regretted, that the proportion of these really ancient names is not larger, especially in our geography; for we could well have submitted to it, that the unfortunate race, after becoming the victims of Anglo-Saxon enterprise, should have taken their conquerors captive and imposed upon them their own favorite words. Their names are so musical and full of meaning, and ours so harsh and commonplace, that we should have been the gainers by the exchange. There is music even in the roughest of Indian names; and some like Susquehanna, Iowa, Hochelaga, Minnehaha, Dahlonega, and Taloolah, are smooth and melodious almost to perfection. They were at one time much more numerous in the land, although, as J. K. Paulding already wrote: "the first settlers of an Indian country not only took away from the copper-colored villains their lands and rivers, but gave them new names, like the gypsies, who first steal children, and then, to disguise the theft, christen them anew." (Letters from the South, II. p. 17.) After the successful struggle for independence, an evil taste for modernizing set in, and, as a British writer says complacently, "æsthetic loyalists in the mother country must have felt avenged for their defeat in the substitution of names like Adamstown and Gainesville for such melodious syllables as heretofore graced the village." Even Pawcatuck (the river which divides Connecticut and Rhode Island), and Wut-a-qut-o, properly Wicataquoc, are less grating upon the civilized ear than Ovid and Palmyra, to say nothing of Sodom and Babylon, which the old Puritans inflicted, they alone knew why, upon some places in their new dominion. There is a slight compensation for this injury to be found in the fact that this double nomenclature at times proves the history of certain localities. Thus we find that in Pennsylvania the older counties bear English names, since the English colonists used their own names by preference in those parts of the State with which they came in contact. Northampton, Lancaster, York, Somerset, and Chester (for Cheshire), counties in the eastern and southern part of that State, show clearly that they were the first to be colonized and named. Lehigh and Delaware, Susquehannah and Alleghany, Juniata and Erie, on the contrary, prove by their Indian names the change in public opinion produced by the War of Independence. Later still came the Germans, and not by conquest but by superior industry and great thrift, became the owners of large tracts of land on which they built their towns of Womelsdorf, Mannheim, and Hannover. Even the religious body of Moravians, large numbers of whom settled in this State and built here their missions and their convents, left their mark behind them in Bethlehem and Litiz (perhaps from laetitia?), in Shiloh and Canaan, Salem and Ephrata. In another instance, that of Virginia, the history of the State may be read in bright letters in its local names. The first settlers, headed by that paragon of romantic adventurers, John Smith, "Of name Most homely, yet unmatched in fame By those of Arthur's Table Round;" when they found themselves amid the fairest scenes of nature in her prime, with coast, river, and woodland expanding around in all her magnificence of novelty and extent, remembered that they were still patriots, and their loyalty prevailed over their poetical taste. Hence they replaced the stately and sonorous name of Powhatan (Father of Waters) by that of the reigning monarch, and their first permanent settlement was "Old Jamestown, on the river James." This inauspicious opening was followed up through all the succeeding years, while Spenser dedicated hist wondrous allegory to "The most high, mighty, and magnificent Empresse, renowned for pietie, virtue, and all gracious government, Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, France, and Virginia"-while the colony faithfully adhered to the Stuarts and was honored with the title of the Old Dominion-and while she remained an ill-treated colonial dependence. There are no less than sixteen princes and princesses inscribed on her broad lands in as many counties, called after these royal personages, beginning with Henrico, the first of the eight original shires. By their side stand names of historic note, still sounding grand in their ancient renown: York and Lancaster, Warwick and Northumberland, all redolent of Shakespeare and Rapin. Then come the governors, each one commemorated by a county, and Patrick Henry honored by two. "Happily most of the rivers. have been allowed to retain their original appellation, and the majestic Potomac, the Opecquon, the Rappahannock, the fourfold Ma-Ta-Po-Ni, its banks famous as our bloodiest battle-ground on this Continent, the Pamunkey and the Appomattox, immortal as the closing scene of a woful struggle, and the Roanoke, all rejoice in the beauty and dignity of their aboriginal names, hereafter to afford full scope to the acumen of the historian and the philologist." (Hugh Blair Grigsby.) For it is not only the euphony but also the historical interest and the moral weight of these Indian names, which should have made them sacred to our forefathers. It is the duty of the brave man to honor the enemy whom he has conquered, and rarely has such a conquest called forth greater virtues and more heroic courage than the long and fearful struggle between the Red man and the Saxon. What sad memories are not associated in the minds of all Americans with the dark and bloody ground, as the present State of Kentucky, and part of upper Ohio, were called for many a generation! First, the ill-fated locality was shunned by the Indians with superstitious dread, because their ancient traditions spoke of a frightful carnage which had taken place centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, on the beautiful banks of the river. Then immigrants settled here and there in the bloodstained region, had suddenly been assailed and overwhelmed by the treacherous Indians, and once more the locality became the scene of a long, relentless struggle between two hostile races. But not only here-everywhere in the great West-the sonorous names of rivers and mountains are full of bright memories of matchless heroism and resistless perseverance, and these beautiful words ought to be treasured up and held as precious as an inheritance of gold. The giant Himalaya would lose half its dread majesty, if it were rechristened Wellington, and Chimborazo would be reduced from its grandeur under the name of Pizarro. How much more, however, was lost when Horicon was dubbed by flattering loyalists Lake George, when the silvery Winooski received the odorous and incongruous name of Onion River, and the hills, of which the poet sings: "Then did the crimson streams that flowed, Seem like the waters of the brook That brightly shine, that loudly dash Far down the cliffs of Agiochook," Lovewell's Flight. began to bear the common name of White Mountains! It is true, that occasionally efforts have been made to secure the Indian nomenclature of well-known points, and even to imitate the process in forming new names. Mr. Schoolcraft, himself a master of the Ojibway dialect of the Algonquin, acted both systematically and judiciously in this matter, when his position as Commissioner of Indian Affairs enabled him to assume authority. He tells us in one of his admirable and most interesting reports, that whenever a place in the Northwest was to be named, its exact situation, and the particular tribe of aborigines that inhabited the neighborhood, were first carefully ascertained. Then the most striking features of the landscape and local peculiarities were considered, and some expression describing them was chosen and translated into the dialect of the original occupants. Thus the name of the lake which forms the source of the Mississippi, was successfully formed. Mr. Schoolcraft had established the fact that all the fanciful derivations of the name of the river were far more poetical than true, and that Misi-sepe, as it was originally written, meant simply Vast River, just the title which such a magnificent river ought to have. The Misi, he taught us, was the same in Missouri, in Michili Mackinac-which Father Hennepin actually wrote Missili Mackinac and in Michigan. How much more imposing and suggestive this Indian name than the Rivière Colbert of Hennepin's Louisiana, the Rivière Saint Louis of La Salle, and the Hidden River of the Spanish discoverers! To this noble term, a worthy companion was to be found in naming its first fountain. Mr. Schoolcraft had discovered the latter himself when ascending the river with his party, but too modest to give it, after the example of other discoverers, his own name, he took the Algonquin word totosh, a woman's breast, and adding to it the usual local termination of Indian words, he fused the parts into the beautiful and appropriate word Itasca, typifying the support and sustenance which the lake affords to the great river at its very birth. How different was this systematic and suggestive method of the enthusiastic philologist and philanthropic explorer, to the popular way of bestowing names! States are created by Congress, and encumbered with the name of the martyr president; new counties are formed within the older States, and have to bear the name of the lucky member of the local legislature who proposed the measure, and towns built up by the energy and enterprise of successful men become known as Titusville, or Bungtown. The absurdity of such nomenclature was once unconsciously exhibited, when a great poet, unfortunately not yet known to the world at large, incorporated in perfectly good faith, the following local names in his National Poem: "Hard Scrabble, Fair Play, Nip and Tuck, and Patch, |