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Home , Wabash River

Wabash, Its Meaning and History

MICHAEL MCCAFFERTY University

This paper discusses the origin of the hydronym "Wabash ". Its intent is to provide a historical overview and a linguistic analysis of the original native forms of this place-name, not only because the 31 st annual Algonquian Conference is meeting on the Wabash River, but also because the exact meaning of this term has remained opaque over the years. "Wabash" has never enjoyed a proper explication in the many books and articles in which it has appeared. The 17th century French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle would not have been able to include viewing the Wabash on his resume. He was far too busy causing trouble everywhere else he went in the Pays d'En Haut to swing down to the banks of this river. But even while he was single-handedly precipitating the second Iroquois war in 1680, leaving international political problems and a grave humanitarian crisis in his wake, he managed to secure for himself a modicum of onomastic fame. La Salle was the firstt o coin for Europeans the native names of the River, the Kankakee River and the of Indiana, all three between 1669 and 1683. In addition, he was the first person in history to record the precursor of the native hydronym "Wabash," which he wrote (Ouabanchi) in 1681. The French explorer was also the first European to tell where the stream was located.1 However, his initial attempt to do so roiled in utter geographical confusion: he thought the Wabash flowed from near the western end of directly west across what is today , south of the Great Kankakee Marsh, to meet the upper River below Chicago. Such a wildly outlandish hydrology for the Wabash is not unexpected since in La Salle's nearly twenty years among the Indians he never learned to speak a single native tongue. In fact, he relied exclusively on interpreters possessed of varying degrees of ability, as for example some eastern Algonquian Indians that he employed as translators in his dealings with the Miami and the Illinois Indians in the 1680s. It is therefore little wonder that La Salle's place-name data often

' Pierre Margry, ed., Decouvertes et etablissements des Francais (1974, 2:244). WABASH, ITS MEANING AND HISTORY 225

sound like stand-up comedy. For instance, he asserted that the Iroquois name for the upper Mississippi was (Gastacha).2 But this is no hydronym; it is Old Seneca *(o?)kastdhoe 'it isn't there' (Blair Rudes, personal communication 1998). We can only guess that La Salle's Iroquois informant was trying to tell him that whatever he was looking for was not there — at the same time that the explorer thought the person was giving him the name for the . We can lay La Salle's language problems squarely at the feet of his animosity toward the Jesuits, who fled the upon his arrival. It was precisely these missionaries who, if not the linguists of their day, were certainly its polyglots. Yet, despite his linguistic shortcomings, by 1684 La Salle had succeeded in gathering additional information about the Wabash. He not only improved upon his form of this hydronym with his new (Ouabachi), but he also had, by this time, a relatively good idea of the river's geographical position, as evidenced by the map he designed with his cartographer Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin in Paris that year.3 In 1700 Jacques Gravier, a Jesuit missionary living among the Kaskas­ kia in the Illinois Country, became the second Frenchman to record the Miami-Illinois term for the Wabash, which he wrote (Ouabachi).4 Moreover, Gravier not only provided a linguistically cleaner form than had La Salle, but his hydrological conception was far more precise. He tells us that the name (Ouabachi) was applied to a waterway that today is the Wabash River plus the lower below the Ohio-Wabash con­ fluence, i.e., the Wabash all the way from its source in western Ohio right on down to its juncture with the Mississippi. This peculiar hydrology, corroborated by other Frenchmen of the times, should not come as a surprise.5 It is a grave error to assume that our modern hydrological conceptions mirror those of historic American Indians. In this case, the primacy of the Wabash River over the Ohio River in claiming the lower Ohio as its own was the result of two factors. First, the Wabash was over 400 yards across at its mouth in early historic times. Second — and more importantly — it ran directly through the heart of the Algonquian

2 Margry, ed., Decouvertes(l914, 2:245). 3 Franquelin, Carte de la Louisiane ou des voyages du Sr de La Salle (1684). Jesuit Relations 65:106-7. 5 Jacques-Charles de Sabrevois de Bleury in Collections of the State Historical Society (Wisconsin), 16:364-5, 376. 226 MICHAEL MCCAFFERTY midcontinent before the devastating Iroquois cataclysm of the mid-1600s. Any kid in those days knew that if you followed the western bank of the Wabash, you would arrive in seamless fashion at the Mississippi. Interestingly enough, Gravier did not translate (Ouabachi), an oversight that has turned the word into a conundrum for linguists and historians ever since, particularly because it does not jibe with the modern Miami-Illinois form of the place-name recorded in the 1800s. However, there is a good reason why Gravier did not translate this term - - it was already in the Illinois-French dictionary that he helped compile6 There we find (8abachi8i) 'pierre transparente, argent...' ('transparent stone, silver...'), a recording that represents phonemic waapaahsiiwi, a third person singular inanimate intransitive independent verb. The constituent morphemes of this term are the prenoun waap- 'white', the final -aahsii- 'shine', and -wi, the requisite independent suffix. Moreover, this term was not only the name of the river; it was also a popular Miami-Illinois personal name, first recorded by La Salle in the 1600s7 and then again by Jacob Dunn, an Indiana attorney, librarian and amateur linguist who worked with native speakers of the Miami-Illinois language in the early 1900s.8 The Miami-Illinois final -aahsii- is a reflex of Proto-Algonquian *-a-?6e-- 'shine'.9 In Miami-Illinois we see the same finali n (misc8achiki kipikat8i), 'metail rouge' ('redmetal'), phonemic Old Illinois miskwaahsii- ki kiipihkatwi), (8abachi8i atta8ane) 'bois transparent' ('transparent wood'), phonemic waapaahsiiwi ahtawaani,10 and in (8abanteiachi8i) 'metail lumineux' ('luminous metal'), phonemic *waapaanteeaahsiiwiu. The term is also attested as a medial in the form -aahs- in (8abachite8i) 'metail blanchi au feu' ('metal whitened in the fire'), phonemic

6 Illinois-French Dictionary [ca. 1695]. 7 Margry, ed., Decouvertes (1974, 2:159). 8 Dunn, MS 47. 9 Hewson (1993: 242) Compare Menomineesa-pua?new(II) 'it shines through, it is transparent' (PA sa-pw- 'through) and *Plains Cree cahkaste-w (II) 'it shines, gives light'. Also, note PA *wa-6e-wi -> Miami-Illinois waahseewi, Cree waste-w 'it is light, it is dawn'. 10 Le Boullenger, French-Illinois dictionary (ca. 1720). 11 Illinois-French Dictionary [ca. 1695]. WABASH, ITS MEANING AND HISTORY 227 waapaahsiteewi.12 The reader should note that in all of the above historical French recordings the glyph 8 represents phonemic w. In addition to the many attestations of this place-name in French and English documents of the 18th century, where it essentially has the same form given initially by La Salle and Gravier, this same hydronym appears again — but in a protracted form — in the mid-1800s in the work of an Indiana book collector and onomastic researcher named Daniel Hough, who wrote the term (Wahbahshikka). For his original spelling of the river Dunn recycled Hough's spelling, although he transformed the latter's antique final (-a), which stood for phonetic [e], to orthographic -i.13 Dunn later revised his form of this place-name after working more extensively with native speakers of Miami. His later renditions, which he glossed 'it is bright white, silver', include (wapachiki) and (wapaciki). In the meantime, Albert Gatschet, a Swiss linguist working for the Bureau of Ethnology in the late 1800s, had also recorded the Peoria cognates (wapaxshiki), (wapa'hshiki), as well as the name for the Wabash River, (wapashike sipiwi).14 In the terms noted directly above this particular form of the hydronym is phonemic waapaahsiiki (siipiiwi), 'it-shines-white (river)', where waapaahsiiki is a third-person singular inanimate intransitive conjunct verb. Another appropriate translation for the hydronym would be 'it is a white-shinmg river'. It is clear that, like the inanimate noun recorded by Gravier, these verbal forms refer to the luminescence of concrete objects in general. And in the case of our place-name, there is no reason to doubt the claim made by Gabriel Godfroy, a Miami leader of the late 19th and early 20th century and a fluent native speaker of Miami, that the referent is the dolomitic limestone that comprises the bed of the upper river between Huntington and Carroll Counties, Indiana. Certainly, the naming of the Wabash after one of its most striking geographical features is congruent with indigenous place naming practices.In fact, in a speech that Godfroy gave just up the

12 Illinois-French Dictionary [ca. 1695]. Cf. Miami-Illinois -ite- from PA *-ete; 'by heat'. As a medial in Eastern Algonquian, the morpheme appears as -ahs- m Maliseet: aldhsiydk 'they go around shining a light' (Phillip Le Sourd, personal communication 1998). 13 Dunn, "Names of the Ohio River" (1912) 8:169. 14 Dunn's and Gatschet's forms are cited in Costa's unpublished dictionary of Miami-Illinois (1998). 228 MICHAEL MCCAFFERTY

road at the Tippecanoe Battleground on June 16, 1907, he stated that the Miami name for the Wabash meant "White Stone River,"15 a translation that nearly brings the place-name full circle, back to the meaning Gravier atttested among the Illinois for (8abachi8i).

15 R. P. Dehart, Past and present in Tippecanoe County (1909) 1:120.

REFERENCES Costa, David J. 1998. Dictionary of the Miami-Illinois language. MS Dehart, R.P. 1909. Past and present in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Indianapolis: B.F. Bowen. Draper, Lyman C, and Reuben G. Thwaites. 1 855-1911. Collections ofthe State Historical Society. Madison, Wisconsin. Dunn, Jacob Piatt. 1912. Names of the Ohio River. Indiana Magazine of History 8- 166-170. Franquelin, Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin. 1684. Carte de la Louisiane ou des voyages du Sr de La Salle. The original is lost. A copy is in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 63, frontispiece. Margry, Pierre, ed., 1974 [1876-86]. Decouvertes et etablissement des Francois dans I'ouest et dans le sudde VAmerique septentrionale 1614-1754, Memoires et documents inedits recueillis et publiees par Pierre Margry. New York: AMS Press. Hewson, John. 1993. A computer-generated dictionary of Proto-Algonquian. Canadian Museum of Civilization, Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper 125. Hull. Faries, Richard, ed. 193 8. A dictionary of the Cree language as spoken by the Indians in the province of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Toronto: Church of England. Illinois-French Dictionary [ca. 1695]. MS 4871. National Anthropological Archives Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Le Boullenger, Antoine-Robert. [ca. 1720]. French-Illinois dictionary. MS at John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Manuscript 4871, N.A.A. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1886-1901. Jesuit relations and allied documents. Cleveland- Burrows Brothers.