Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 THE PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI

ROBERT L. RAMSAY University of Missouri Two ways lie open to one who essays the formidable task of covering the field of Missouri place names. One is extensive, the other intensive. The first of these contrasting methods of approach has already been attempted in a study published by the University of Missouri in June, 1952, under the title Our Storehouse of Missouri Place Names} This was a sampling of some 2 0 0 0 of the 35-40,000 place names found in the entire State, including the names of all its 114 counties and their county seats, all its cities and towns that had a population of a thousand or more at the last census, all the larger and many of the older and more interesting rivers, lakes, and mountains, and about as many of the smaller places, including many names that have disappeared from present usage, whenever they help to fill out and illustrate the main classes of our names, or offer problems of particular suggestiveness. Its aim was to survey in selective fashion and to exemplify the five chief groups into which all our names seem to fall: namely, our borrowed names, our historical names, our local personal names, our topo­ graphical names, and what I have ventured to call our cultural names, together with a tentative list of names still unsolved, and our plans for future work. The present study constitutes the second milestone on the steep and rugged pathway to the final goal we hope some day to reach, which is a complete and comprehensive dictionary of all the place names of our State. It is an intensive study of a single central county, designed as far as may be to offer an exhaustive and defini­ tive synthesis of one important and typical portion of the entire field. It is conceived in the same way as the searching and scholarly study made in 1947 by Frederic G. Cassidy, The Place Names of Dane County, Wisconsin.2 Here I have chosen Boone County, Missouri, for much the same reasons—because it is close to the heart of the State and fairly representative of the entire common­ wealth historically, economically, and culturally, and yet has a 1 Robert L. Ramsay, Missouri Handbook No. 2, University of Missouri Bulletin, Vol. 53, No. 34. * Publication of the American Dialect Society, No. 7. 5

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 6 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

natural and organic unity of its own; because it contains the State’s educational capital; and because it includes among its approximately 2 0 0 place names examples of nearly all the cate­ gories and problems of nomenclature found in the whole of Missouri. A word of explanation may be inserted here about the sources of our information and the methods that have been used in col­ lecting it. For the past quarter of a century, the University of Missouri has been making a survey of all the place names of the State. A card file containing all the information that had been collected up till that time regarding 32,324 of our names was com­ pleted a few years ago and placed in the Library of the University, where it may be consulted by all who are interested. Another copy of it may be found at Washington, D. C., in the library of the Board on Geographic Names of the Department of the Interior. The material it contains was gathered from 1928 to 1948 by gradu­ ate students in the Department of English, in a series of eighteen manuscript theses, as yet unpublished, covering the entire State. Since then between five and six thousand additional names have been examined. Much remains to be done in the way of sifting and condensing, checking and editing. There are hundreds of tantalizing problems still unsolved, and gaps and omissions of all sorts yet to be filled. Step by step, however, we are making progress toward the construction of a comprehensive dictionary of Missouri place names, mainly by trying to exhaust the problems of indi­ vidual counties one after another. The very first of our eighteen theses, completed in 1928, was a study of the place names of the seven central counties of Boone, Callaway, Cole, Cooper, Howard, Moniteau, and Saline. Nearly seven hundred names were included, about a hundred of them from Boone County. This pioneer piece of research was accomplished by Miss Nadine Pace, 3 now Mrs. Ben Ely and a teacher in the English Department of Hannibal-Lagrange College at Hannibal, Missouri. Miss Pace began her work by noting all that had previously been written about Missouri place names, chiefly in the frag­ mentary studies of Eaton, Gannett, and others, and in scattered articles in local journals. Then she searched through all the State a Place Names in the Central Counties of Missouri (Manuscript thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the Graduate School of the University of Missouri, 1928).

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 7

and county histories for notes about names. No county in Missouri has had more informative and interesting county histories than those of Boone by E. W. Stephens, W. F. Switzler, N. T. Gentry, and Walter Williams. Then came the gazetteers, directories, laws, maps and atlases, and all other records available in our University Library and the library of the State Historical Society. It re­ mained for Miss Pace to go out into the field, visiting each county seat and all other important points, and interviewing old residents who in many cases had valuable information that had never been published and that might have perished if she had not so pains­ takingly collected it. Among lifelong residents of Boone County who were particularly helpful were J. F. Brossart, cashier of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad; M. G. Proctor, former county collector; P. S. Quinn, county surveyor; A. M. Schwabe, fanner; J. C. Schwabe, real estate dealer; Floyd C. Shoemaker, secretary of the Missouri State Historical Society; E. W. Stephens, historian and journalist ; W. D. Vandiver, the Rev. H. F. Cheavens, Mrs. Amanda Forbis, Edwin Nichols, and John W. Sappington. Since 1928 a number of other painstaking pieces of research on the place names of Boone County have been accomplished by University students. Perhaps the greatest help has come from the detailed studies that have since been made of the rest of the 114 counties in the State, where the same or kindred names are often found. Comparison and contrast of the nomenclature found in this central county with those around it has been fruitful in many ways. We have been able almost to double the number of names explained in Miss Pace’s initial study, and to reach illuminating conclusions and new discoveries, hitherto unpublished.

(2) T h e K e n t u c k y K e y n o t e Most of our Missouri counties have a certain number of foreign names, borrowed in liberal and cosmopolitan spirit from nearly every land in the world. Many of the important cities of the world, as well as a few countries, have been relocated in Missouri. We have our own London, Edinburg [sic], Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Geneva, Amsterdam, (New) Madrid, Lisbon, Moscow, Odessa, Carthage, Kimberley, Mexico, Lima, Potosi, Manilla [sic], Japan, and Çanton. But not one of these aliens is to be found within the confines of Boone County, which is perhaps the most American of all our 114 counties. Other counties have borrowed

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 8 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

freely from every other state in the Union. Within the bounds of the State may be discovered a new and better, if not bigger, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, Atlanta, San Fran­ cisco, Sacramento, and Nevada. But none of them are located in Boone County. All the borrowed names of Boone, with one sole exception, come from a single state. The keynote of our Boone County names is Kentucky. We have thirty or more Kentucky names in this single county. The county’s map really looks like a bit of the Blue Grass State trans­ planted across the Mississippi. No other Missouri county is so remarkably single-minded in this respect. Most of our thirty Kentucky names, it is true, were brought to Kentucky from Vir­ ginia, but they came to Boone in almost every instance direct from the Blue Grass. Kentucky has often been called the mother of Missouri, and Virginia its grandmother; if that is true, then Boone County is certainly the special darling of the family, and the one that shows the closest family resemblance. The reasons for this filial devotion are of course well known to all who are familiar with Boone County’s history and the origins of its early population. Before it became a county in 1820, it had been a part of Howard County, which was created in 1816. Howard, the first western county to be organized for the rapidly increasing settlement up the Missouri River, has been called the “Mother of Counties,” for out of its enormous territory were eventually carved no fewer than thirty-one of our present Missouri counties, together with at least five now included in Iowa. Howard was named for General Benjamin Howard of Lexington, Kentucky, Governor in 1810 of the Territory soon to be named Missouri. Though he served for only a portion of his term, resigning to play a distinguished part in the War of 1812, he died in 1814 in St. Louis, the idol of his fellow-Kentuckians who were then swarming into the new lands across the Mississippi. The county seat of Howard, just opposite to where Boonville now stands, was named Franklin, either for Franklin County, Kentucky, or for the Kentucky town of Franklin, county seat of Simpson. It was settled almost entirely by Kentuckians, and it grew so rapidly that by 1820 it was the second largest town in the entire Territory, with over a thousand inhabitants. Only St. Louis, with five thousand, at that time ex­ ceeded it. Unfortunately it had been located a little too close to the treacherous Missouri River, and a succession of disastrous floods swept it away, till in 1823 the county seat of Howard had

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 9

to be transferred to Fayette. The new seat of government doubt­ less took its name from Fayette County, Kentucky, which had anticipated it in honoring the immortal Lafayette. It was, of course, by the revered name of Daniel Boone that Kentucky put its most indelible stamp on the new settlements. That greatest of all American trail-blazers, after being the first to enter Kentucky in 1769, and after spending more than a quarter of a century in winning and organizing the new state, lost all his lands there because his titles were found defective. Boone never feared the face of an Indian, and he won first place for courage in the hearts of all Kentuckians, but he finally retired in defeat at the hands of Kentucky lawyers. It has been ironically observed that in 1798, just after the Kentucky Legislature had named one of its new counties for him, the last tract of land owned by him in the whole state was put up for sale because of Boone’s failure to pay all the back taxes on it. It was about that same year that he left Kentucky forever for the new territory across the Mississippi which was then under the Spanish crown. Delassus, the last Spanish governor, promised him a thousand “arpents” of land in the Femme Osage District of St. Charles County, and later made him a grant of ten thousand more “arpents,” on condition that he would bring into Upper Louisiana at least a hundred families from Kentucky and Virginia. Boone more than made good on that promise; but then in 1804, when the government was transferred to the United States, the Missouri lawyers discovered that he had failed to get all the re­ quired signatures on his Spanish deeds, and his titles were again declared invalid. Later, however, the first and smaller of his two grants was confirmed by a special act of Congress. The grand old man died on September 26, 1820, at the home of his son Major Nathan Boone in what is now Warren County, the place still known as “Boone’s Grave.” It is no longer his grave, however, for in 1845 the Kentuckians attempted to atone for their ingratitude by persuading the Missourians to allow them to re- inter his body in their new cemetery at Frankfort, Kentucky, where it rests today.

(3 ) D a n ie l B o o n e ’s N a m e -C h il d r e n Doubt has been expressed whether Daniel Boone ever set foot within the present precincts of Boone County. It would be strange indeed if the tireless old hunter never visited our happy hunting

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 10 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

grounds during the more than twenty years he spent in Missouri. Be that as it may, however, it is known that during the summer of 1807 his two sons Nathan and Daniel M. Boone left Femme Osage Creek, where the elder Boone then lived, and came up to Howard County with a few kettles to manufacture salt. They found it in abundance at a spring in Cooper’s Bottom, now called Boone's Lick Spring in the present Boone’s Lick Township, near the ferry landing opposite Arrow Rock. From that old spring came the later name of the Boone’s Lick Country. That famous name has been variously interpreted. According to E. W. Stephens, in his history of Boone County, it now applies to the nine upper counties along the Missouri River: Clay, Ray, Chariton, Howard, Boone, Cole, Cooper, Saline, and Lillard (now called Lafayette). Professor Raymond Weeks, who was formerly head of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Missouri, in his inimitable volume of humorous stories and sketches published in 1927 and entitled The Hound-Tuner of Callaway, includes only the six central counties—the “fat, lazy counties” of Cole, Cooper, Howard, Boone, Callaway, and Saline, which, he says, “lie strung along the Missouri River like a string of sausages.” In a trenchant discussion of the later term “Little Dixie,” which has been increasingly used since 1872 to replace the historic “Boone’s Lick Country,” Mr. Robert M. Crisler4 tried in 1948 to define the exact scope of the name and concluded that there are strictly speaking just eight “Little Dixie” counties: Audrain, Boone, Callaway, Howard, Monroe, Pike, Ralls, and Randolph, because these are still the traditionally Democratic counties. But all authorities agree that the heart and soul of both “Little Dixie” and the “Boone’s Lick Country” lies in Boone County. The term Boone’s Lick Country doubtless arose from the still older name of the Boone’s Lick Road, also known as the St. Charles Road or the Old Trails Highway. According to the Missouri High­ way Department, it was the first state road in all Missouri to be 4 See the Missouri Historical Review, XLII, 130-139. No one seems to have thought of settling this momentous question by studying the complexion of place names in the respective counties. The monopoly which Kentucky enjoys in Boone affords ample proof that she at least is likely to vote the straight Democratic ticket till the end of time. Here is a sidelight on the practical value of place-name study, which poli • ticians desirous of predicting election results might do well to heed.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 11

surveyed. Boone himself is said to have helped blaze the first trail, or “trace,” and by 1814 it was already a busy highway. It ran for 154 miles from St. Charles to Boone’s Lick Springs, or old Franklin, in Howard County, and passed right through the center of the present Boone County. Broadway in Columbia is a part of it. When Boone died on September 26, 1820, the Territorial As­ sembly was in session at St. Louis, absorbed over the burning question of Missouri’s admission as a State. The electric issue of the day, both in Missouri and at Washington, was whether she should come in as a slave or a free state. Most Missourians, es­ pecially those who had so recently poured in from Kentucky and Virginia, demanded its admission with the identical institutions they had left at home. The Union was within measurable distance of stumbling blindly into the same bloody abyss of civil war into which rash and short-sighted leaders were destined to plunge it forty years later. This time the tragic struggle, which I firmly believe never was inevitable, was postponed by wiser and cooler heads, chiefly under the inspired guidance of the great Kentucky statesman Henry Clay with his Missouri Compromise. 5 A minor issue before the 1820 Assembly—minor at least in com­ parison—was the necessity of breaking up the unwieldy western county of Howard into more manageable units. Cooper County had already been separated from it in 1818, and had chosen for the name of its county seat Boonville, doubtless borrowed from Booneville, county seat of Owsley County, Kentucky. The 1820 Assembly carved five more counties out of Howard, for which new names had to be found. Just then the sad news reached them of the death of Boone himself at his home in Warren County. Their busy labors were promptly adjourned in his memory for a whole day, and a resolution was passed that all the members should wear crape on their left arms for twenty days of mourning. The peti­ tioners for one of the new counties saw and seized their golden opportunity, and asked for the name of Boone. Their petition was granted on November 16. Doubtless they were thinking also of Boone County, Kentucky, from which so many of them had come. * Some readers may find the intrusion of private and personal opinion distracting, if not disturbing, in an academic study; if so, they must blame it upon the author and not upon the ADS. The issue involved certainly has an intimate connection with the nomenclature as well as the history of Mis­ souri.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 12 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

The much coveted name was also conferred upon two of the earliest settlements in the county. Boonville had anticipated them by using the most convenient suffix; but in 1828, when the townsite of Lexington was changed, they invented the name Booneton for it, at the suggestion, so it is said, of Senator Thomas A. Benton, who happened to be visiting the place just at that time. Then in 1836 another town was laid out on the eastern border of the county, and it adopted the name Boonesborough, for the famous Boones- borough in Madison County, Kentucky, which had been founded by Boone himself in 1775. Only two years later, in 1840, the envious founders of a new settlement in Howard County wanted the same name, but had to content themselves with the altered spelling of Boonesboro. Neither of these places in Boone County has survived; but there are Boone Townships in seven other counties, Boone Creeks in three, and Boone Counties in six other states besides Missouri and Kentucky: West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas. Truly the most typical of all American pioneers is well remembered by his grateful fellow-countrymen.

(4 ) L e x in g t o n a n d C o l u m b ia Equally redolent of Kentucky were the names of the two chief candidates for the coveted post of county seat. The first in the field was Lexington, which had two claims that seemed invincible: it was the oldest settlement, established in 1818 before the county was created; and it was named for the first capital of Kentucky. Its only flaw was its location on the western edge. Mainly for that reason it lost the race to another town in the center of the county that was started two years later—but not until that town had changed its first prosaic name of Smithton for Columbia. Just who proposed the change is not recorded. We need not take too seriously the light-hearted account given by Professor Weeks: “The hamlet of Smithton, which stood on the western shores of Flat Branch, a stream about two feet wide in a wet season, crossed the branch overnight, changed its name to Columbia, bought up and bribed the judges appointed to select a site for the state uni­ versity, and thus obtained the location of that famous institution.” That story sounds a bit libelous, especially in view of the fact that the location of the University was not determined till 1839, nearly twenty years later. The change of location to the east side of Flat Branch is usually ascribed to the failure of all efforts made to dig

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 13

wells on the high ground where Smithton was originally located. But there can be no doubt that the founders of Columbia were shrewd and far-seeing men, especially in their second thought about the name of their settlement. The late E. W. Stephens told one of our inquiring students that he had heard that the name Columbia was originally suggested back in old Franklin, at the time when the land on which Columbia now stands was bought by the Smithton Company. A man in the back of the room, whose name he thought was Elliott, called out the name “Columbia!” and it was at once accepted. The story sounds plausible, for there were three or four Elliotts among the earliest settlers in Boone County, and Stephens says all of them came from Kentucky. I wish we could identify the man. Probably he came from Columbia, Kentucky, the county seat of Adair County. It was hard to find a more auspicious and patriotic name than Lexington; but by a real stroke of genius, whether by Elliott or another, such a name was found in Columbia, which not only came from Kentucky but also stood, as Timothy Dwight had de­ clared, for “the queen of the world and the child of the skies.”

(5 ) P r o g r e s s iv e P io n e e r in g There is more to be said about these two famous place names Lexington and Columbia. They may be called stock names, for both of them recur, with monotonous iteration, in more than half the states of the Union. Dissatisfaction has recently been expressed by one caviling critic over what is called American lack of original­ ity in naming places. The complaint was prompted by the discovery that we have 27 Washingtons, 26 Manchesters, and 23 Lincolns. As a matter of fact, there are actually 121 cities, towns, and villages named for Washington in America, as tabulated by Professor George R. Stewart in his Names on the Land, besides a state, 33 counties, 257 townships, and well-nigh innumerable rivers, moun­ tains, parks, schools, and streets. He says the Franklins, Jacksons, and Lincolns outnumber even the Washingtons. And there are 25 Lexingtons and over 30 Columbias. And yet there is another way of looking at these favorite Ameri­ can place names. Perhaps their recurrence is due not so much to lack of originality and imagination as to our deep American sense of kinship and common inheritance. These familiar and far-traveled names are indeed in a very r^ l sense among the ties that bind us

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 14 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

together as a distinctive nation. Some day, when place-name study has advanced further in our other states and we know more ex­ actly the circumstances and dates of origin of each and every name, we shall be able to construct for all of them a set of interesting charts tracing each step in their spread across the continent, per­ haps with little arrows running from each original name-father to his brood of place-name children, which will give us a series of vivid pictures of the growth of our country. Behind every one of these apparently commonplace names there lies a story of what Mr. Allen Walker Read has happily called “progressive pioneering,, in the development of America. Lexington, one of these “unoriginal” names that is notably rep­ resented in Missouri, is an example. Our 25 American Lexingtons are all the spiritual children of an obscure little Massachusetts village that slept unnoticed by its neighbors for the first 150 years after its founding. Like most New England towns, it took its name from the old country. And yet there are no Lexingtons in England today, where the mother town from which some of the settlers had come is now written Laxton. As is so often the case, the departing emigrants used an older form of the name of the Northamptonshire town, a name that better reveals its etymology, the “place of Leaxa’s men.” But in 1775, when the first shot in the Revolutionary War was fired in that same little village, it suddenly sprang into the hearts of all Americans, as the cradle and symbol of our liberty. That very year, in Kentucky a thousand miles away, a party of hunters heard the electrifying news and decided to adopt the name. That was the second Lexington. The older Southern states, never backward in their admiration for real Yankee grit, were close be­ hind Kentucky. The name spread rapidly to Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Tennes­ see, Arkansas, and Texas, till it became every bit as much Southern as Northern. At the same time it was carried to Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania, then across the mountains to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. In 1818, as we have seen, it reached Mis­ souri, probably direct from Kentucky, and was chosen as the name of the very first settlement in the new county of Boone. When the Boone County Lexington lost out in the race for county seat, it pined away and disappeared from the map, whereupon a still newer county soon to call itself Lafayette eagerly seized the chance in 1822 to adopt the name for its own principal settlement. Mis­

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 15

souri men helped to carry it on westward to Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, till at last it reached the Pacific coast in Oregon. Surely the thread that ties all our Lexingtons together is a potent strand in the very fabric of America. Columbia, unlike Lexington, started not from a place but from a poem. It was first used, so far as we have been able to discover, by Philip Freneau in his youthful poem entitled “American Lib­ erty,” written in 1775 when Boston was still under siege. He coined it deliberately as a new name for the new country. Formed on the familiar model of Britannia and Virginia, his happy invention appealed to his fellow-countrymen as a welcome substitute for the awkward United States of America. Now they could call themselves Columbians, instead of Americans, an invidious term in that it covers too much territory, or Yankees, which takes in too little. For a time, Columbia seemed in a fair way to be accepted. In 1784, the chief institution of higher learning in New York City, which in pre-Revolutionary days had been known as King’s College, changed its name in a burst of democratic fervor to Columbia University. Two years later, in 1786, it was adopted as the name of the new capital of South Carolina. Probably it came nearest to complete success in 1791, when the commissioners appointed to lay out the national capital at Washington decided to call its neu­ tral federal territory the District of Columbia. But Freneau’s coinage incurred a fatal set-back in 1819, at least in its hopeful progress toward acceptance as the name of our nation. One of our good neighbors to the south took it away from us in that year by deciding to call itself Colombia. Columbia and Colombia were altogether too much alike. Since then as a national name it has been increasingly relegated to high-flown poetry and silver- tongued oratory. Perhaps Columbia was always too poetical a name for our practical-minded people; or perhaps Freneau was not quite a great enough poet. In some ways its failure to win adoption was a profound misfor­ tune. The far clumsier “U.S.A.” is regrettably plural in form, though it has become increasingly singular in meaning. Although few people realize it, our Civil War was really fought over that very question of grammar: Is the name United States singular or plural? The Southerners followed Jefferson, who had written in his Decla­ ration of Independence: “We, the United Colonies, are ...” It took four years of bitter fighting to convince them that our nation is

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 16 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

singular now, in defiance of grammar. Today at last we say without a qualm: “The United States is---- ” But for smaller units the name Columbia has enjoyed an immense success, spreading over the land like an epidemic, till it was adopted by towns in 32 states, not to mention innumerable counties, town­ ships, schools, parks, and a great Western river. We do not yet know the exact order of dates for all the other Columbias; but when it first reached Missouri in 1819, as we have seen, it undoubtedly came by way of the earlier Columbia, Kentucky. Several other places in Missouri have tried to take it away from us, without suc­ cess. At some undetermined time before the Civil War, the exten­ sive district in St. Louis County between the city boundary and the Missouri River adopted the name of Columbia Bottoms, which it still retains. A hamlet there, near the junction of the Missouri and the Mississippi, called itself Columbia for a while, till one of the rivere washed it away. There was once a Columbia in St. Francois County, now known as Esther. But our Boone County Columbia still stands, and still can say, in the exuberant words used by Fre- neau when he coined our name: What madness, Heaven, has made Britannia frown? Who plans or schemes to pull Columbia down?

(6 ) O t h e r C h il d r e n o p K e n t u c k y Another grand old Kentucky name is Bourbon, which took root in the northern part of our county. That region seems from early days to have been known as the Bourbon Neighborhood. Its chief settlement was at first called Buena Vista, from one or both of the towns so named in Lewis County, Kentucky, or Amherst County, Virginia. Then its name was changed to Bourbonton or Bourbon. That post office was established in 1849, and lasted till 1856, when it was merged with the nearby community of Sturgeon. Meanwhile in 1854 Bourbon Township was created out of the upper parts of old Perche and Rocky Fork Townships, and has ever since retained its name. Old Bourbon County in Kentucky has had a romantic history. It acquired its name during the Revolutionary War, as a token of the new friendship felt by Americans for the royal house of France because of the aid the French king was giving them in their struggle for independence. Forgotten were the days not long before, during the French and Indian War, when the colonists had fought the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 17

forces of the Bourbons desperately. The Declaration of 1776 changed all that, and the lilies of the Bourbons now flew side by side with the Stars and Stripes. Our sudden enthusiasm for our French friends brought a wave of French names. American villages everywhere were baptized as Versailles or Paris, and a little later as Lafayette. The city of Louisville in Kentucky, named for Louis XVI in 1780, is only one of many testimonials to the fervor of our short-lived love affair with La Belle France and French royalty. Before long, however, Bourbon County, Kentucky, became even more famous for its noble liquor than for its royal origins; and some have been malicious enough to suggest that the Bourbons of Boone chose their name chiefly for its associations with the sort of Bourbon that comes in bottles. A similar suspicion attaches to the name of Ginlet, near Deer Park in Cedar Township. The inhabitants of this village maintain that the name they wanted was Gimlet, but a mistake was made in its spelling when they sent it in to the Postal Department in Washington. Their contention is confirmed by the fact that there is a Gimlet in Elliott County, Kentucky. But one wonders whether the error did not arise from the reputation of the place for its liquid hospitality. The name of Rock Bridge Mills was borrowed either from Rock­ bridge in Monroe County, Kentucky, or from Rockbridge County in Virginia (or from both), because of a fancied resemblance in the peculiar formation of the cave and natural bridge there spanning Little Bonne Femme Creek. When the application for a post office was made, however, it was discovered that Rockbridge had already been used for similar reasons in Marion, Douglas, and Ozark Coun­ ties. So they compromised on Pierpont, which is obviously just a translation of the name into French. A visiting professor from the University of Missouri is said to have suggested this clever substi­ tute. Several fine old Kentucky names have now vanished from the map. Petersburg, a little village that once stood on Silver Fork, laid out in 1836, was taken from Petersburg in Boone County, Kentucky, or the more famous Petersburg in Virginia south of Richmond. Lebanon in Rocky Fork Township was named in 1836 for the county seat of Marion County, Kentucky, or that of Russell County, Virginia. Providence, founded to take the place of old Nashville when that town was swept away by the river in 1844, came from Webster County, Kentucky. Eureka was lifted from

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 18 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

Livingston County, Kentucky. Summerville, plotted in 1848 be­ tween Deer Park and Englewood but never actually built, was probably borrowed from Summersville in Green County, Kentucky. The extinct town of Burlington, laid out by Colonel Thad Hickman in 1856, took the name of the county seat of Boone County, Ken­ tucky, and its neighbor Melbourne that of another Kentucky town on the Ohio River. Both have since been swept away by the insa­ tiable Missouri. Old Richland Church and School in Cedar Town­ ship doubtless came from Richlands in Virginia or West Virginia. It is likely that a good many other names of the old churches in the county were likewise borrowed from churches left at home in Kentucky or Virginia, though this is difficult to check. Four other Boone County places which are usually explained as having personal names may more plausibly be assumed to have been Kentucky borrowings. Silver (or Silver’s) Fork is said to have been named for Hugh Silvers, who settled there in 1816; Butler, once a thriving center near Harrisburg, for its founder John Butler, a business man from New York; Sturgeon, laid out in 1856, for Isaac H. Sturgeon of St. Louis, an official of the North Missouri Railroad who promised to put a station there if the town were named for him ; and Oldham, near Ashland, for a neighboring fam­ ily of Olds, or alternatively by an apocryphal story about a store­ keeper who kept a stock of delicious “old hams” for sale. This last yarn sounds like part of our recent propaganda about Boone County’s famous hams. But there is a Silver Creek in Madison County, Kentucky, from which old Hugh Silvers came. The natives of Boone County would never have named a town for a New York man unless they had remembered Butler County in Kentucky, or for a railroad promoter if there had not been a Sturgeon back in Owsley County, Kentucky. There is likewise an Oldham County in the old Blue Grass State. Next to Daniel Boone, the most revered of all Kentuckians was Henry Clay. Boone County was always the banner Whig county in the State, and when Clay ran for the Presidency in 1824, 1832, and again in 1844, he nowhere had warmer supporters. Switzler’s history tells of the intense excitement in the county at the election in 1844, when Clay clubs, complete with ’coons and banners, were organized in every township, and a tall ash flagpole was raised in Columbia near the office of the Statesman, around which flowed un­ quenchable oratory and liberal potations of good old Bourbon

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OP BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 19

whiskey. When, on the night of November 20, the sad news came in that Clay’s hated rival Polk had been victorious, the disgusted Whigs laid an ax to the base of the flagstaff and the entire county went into mourning. It was that same year that Claysville, named for their idol, as Claysville in Harrison County, Kentucky, had already been, was laid out on the Missouri River, to become for many years the most important steamboat landing along the stream. The great statesman died in 1852, at his home called “Ash­ land” in Lexington, Kentucky, and when a new town was laid out the very next year in Boone County, his devoted admirers honored his memory by naming it Ashland. The Kentuckians had already done the same at Ashland in Boyd County, Kentucky. The practice of naming towns for presidential homes is wide­ spread in Missouri. Five counties vied for the name of Mount Vernon till it finally fell to the lot of Lawrence. Two Monticellos, in Howard and Chariton counties, were swept away by the Mis­ souri River in succession, whereupon Lewis County stepped in and secured the name of Jefferson’s home for its county seat. Jefferson County was bitterly disappointed at being just too late to win the coveted prize, but made the best of it by naming its county seat Hillsboro, which is a roughly equivalent English version of Monti- cello. Andrew Jackson’s home, the “Hermitage,” was appropriately chosen for the county seat of Hickory County, which had been named for “Old Hickory.” Martin Van Buren’s home was the old Dutch town of Kinderhook, New York, and the new county organ­ ized in 1841 when he was running for re-election was named Kinderhook in his honor; but three years later, after Van Buren had been defeated and had lost his popularity with his party, the name was changed to Camden. Ashland is the only case, so far as I have been able to discover, where a town was named for the home of an unsuccessful candidate after his defeat. Evidently the Boone County folk felt, and quite rightly, that even if Henry Clay was never elected President, he should have been. The solitary exception to Boone County’s shining record of tak­ ing all its thirty borrowed names from Kentucky is supplied by the village of Englewood, near Ashland. On the testimony of Mr. Ed­ win Nichols of Ashland, that community was named by Miss Lizzie Smith, who taught school nearby, for Englewood, Illinois. She had just returned from a visit to Illinois when her uncle estab­ lished the first store in the place. If this story is true, it surely speaks

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 20 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

well for the high respect Boone County has always had for its teachers that one of them was suffered to stain its Kentucky shield with this single alien name from one of the “lesser” states.

(7) S om e F r e n c h F o r b e a r s Before the Kentuckians came the French. Their bold coureurs de bois and boatmen knew well the wonderful hunting countiy of the future Boone County, and they have left us four of its oldest and most interesting names: two of its principal streams, now com­ monly known as the Perche and the Little Bonne Femme, and two of its earliest settlements, the towns of “Persia” or Perche- town, now extinct, and Rocheport. Each one of them presents an intriguing problem. The Perche appears in the early records as the Rocher Percé, ap­ parently with the meaning of “pierced or perforated crag or cliff,” which of course referred to a conspicuous landmark at the mouth of the stream. That at least was the sense in which the explorers of the Lewis and Clark Expedition understood it, when they went up the river in 1804. In their invaluable journals, they always tried when they could to translate the French names into English, giving them no doubt the interpretation they heard from the French boatmen and the incoming American trappers. Very enlightening is the entry set down by Captain William Clark when they reached the mouth of the Perche on June 6 , 1804: “passed a Creek Called Split rock Creek at 5 Ms on the S.S. [i.e., on the starboard or north side of the river] psd a place to the rock from which the Creek 20 yds wide takes its name, a projecting rock with a hole thro a point of the rock.” This is good evidence that the French name was then interpreted as meaning “split or perforated rock,” and perhaps that the American pioneers were already using what they consid­ ered to be its English equivalent. It does not follow, however, that Clark’s informants were always correct in their interpretation. No one has ever been able since then to identify any such strange formation in the cliff at the mouth of the Perche. It may, of course, have been washed away soon afterwards by the rapacious river. On the other hand, the natural French for “split rock” would have been rocher fendu rather than rocher percé; and the prevailing later pronunciation of the name has always been [,ro$ lparSi], which points to a French

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OP BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 21

original of Roche Perchée, i.e., a stone that was “perched” some­ where over the water. In correct French, roche is feminine and means stone or boulder, whereas rocher is masculine and signifies rock, crag, or cliff. Ths latter term is familiar to us today in the surname of the famous baseball manager Durocher (the “cliff-dweller”), who comes, I believe, from an old Missouri French family. Apparently there were two schools of thought among the French boatmen about the name: one, perhaps the earlier, took it as referring to a perforated crag or cliff ; the other, not finding the perforation, made the name mean just a big stone or boulder that seemed to be “perched” or roosting there. Such boulders can be found easily almost anywhere along the river bank; and so it was the form Roche Perchée that prevailed in the spoken language, though Rocher Percé, or the un­ grammatical Roche Percé, was usually written. Both forms are attested in the even more curious name of the early settlement on the stream, made in 1820, which for a short time threatened to be a serious rival to Columbia for the county seat. The very first advertisement for a sale of lots in the projected town, printed in the Franklin Intelligencer of April 1,1820, calls it “The Town of Persia, Situated on the Rocher Perce Creek.” Later, when it had lost the coveted prize and the bright hopes of its founders had faded, “Persia” too faded away. Before it disappeared entirely shortly after 1825, it was commonly known as Perchetown. The grand name of “Persia” was obviously a popular etymology conceived by some classically minded settler for Perche. If we re­ member that the name of the ancient country was then generally pronounced ['par5a] or ['parSi], not ['par3 9 ] as most of us now pro­ nounce it, then the substitution of Persia for Perche will no longer surprise us. And it was just as easy for the creek called ['piSi] in the early 19th century to take on later the more fashionable pro­ nunciation ['parÇa] or ['par3 9 ] as for Missouri to become [ma'zura], as it does today in the mouths of most Missourians. Rocheport offers a puzzle of a slightly different sort. The town at the mouth of the Grand Moniteau was not laid out till 1825, more than twenty years after Lewis and Clark passed by. But they visited the site of the future town, and found it a den of rattle­ snakes. Captain Clark was much interested in the remarkable rocks near by, now known as the Pictured Rocks, which have attracted

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 2 2 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

so many visitors ever since and which doubtless supply the clue to the town’s name. Here is Clark’s account, in his own quaint spell­ ing, of the visit he paid the place on June 7, the next day after he had passed the mouth of the Perche: “breakfast at the Mouth of a large Creek on the S.S. of 30 yds wide called big Monetou . . . a Short distance above the mouth of the Creek is Several Courious paintings and carving on the projecting rock of Limestone inlade with white red & blue flint, of a verry good quality, the Indians have taken of this flint great quantities. We landed at this Inscrip­ tion and found it a Den of Rattle Snakes, we had not landed 3 Minites before three verry large Snakes was observed in the Crev- ises of the rocks & killed.” Some jealous Columbians have wondered whether Rocheport got its name from those rattlesnakes, which is of course absurd. The name must have come rather from that strange old pictured rock. Probably the excellent boat landing there had been known as Rocheport by the French long before the Ken­ tuckians settled there in 1825. For this reason, the statement made in several county histories that the name of the place was first intended to be Rock Port, but was changed to Rocheport at the instance of a French missionary who was in the neighborhood, must be regarded with suspicion. In the first place, the French came before the English, and so invari­ ably did the French names. To have an English Rock Port changed back into French would be like reversing the current of the Mis­ souri River. In the second place, -port is a French suffix. Had the Americans been the first to name the place, they would probably have called it Rock Landing. What the French missionary, if there was one—his name is never given—probably did was to urge the retention of the original French name Rocheport. Last of the four French names in the county is that of the Bonne Femme or Little Bonne Femme Creek, called by the French the Petite Bonne Femme to distinguish it from the Grande or Big Bonne Femme in Howard County. Captain Clark calls it “Good- Woman’s Creek” ; but here again the older French name has pre­ vailed. Its meaning is clear enough, but not its origin, which is truly a mystery—perhaps the greatest mystery we have encountered in our investigations. No one has been able as yet to explain satisfac­ torily why such a name should have been conferred upon the stream. It is preposterous to suppose that a single good woman was ever so rare a phenomenon, either among the Indians or the whites,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 23

that the discovery of one in that neighborhood had to be signalized by naming a stream for her. There are of course some obviously ex post facto stories, such as one about a wounded Frenchman who was cared for by a kind-hearted Indian squaw living near by. The place-name Btudent meets so many pretty pieces of fiction of this particular sort that he soon learns to greet them with a smile and pass on. The real roots of this strange name run far back, I believe, into the Indian past, and require considerable acquaintance with Indian habits of thought and religious beliefs. Its ultimate explana­ tion must be sought in the significant Indian heritage of the county, which requires fuller explanation.

(8 ) T h e I n d ia n H e r it a g e Before the French there were the Indians. Lewis and Clark met only Sauks and Foxes still inhabiting the whole Boone’s Lick Country, with occasional glimpses at Kickapoos, Potawatomis, and Iowas. There are two unmistakable Indian names left in Boone County, the names of the two most important streams that bound it on the south and west, the Missouri and the Moniteau. Both of them are from the language of that indomitable Algonquian tribe known as the Fox Indians, which gave the white man more trouble than any other, and perhaps for that reason left him the most im­ portant place names. The great Mississippi itself is the Fox mesisi- piya, meaning “Big River”—not, as is so often romantically affirmed, “Father of Waters.” The Missouri was the Fox name for the tribe that once lived at its mouth, and probably means “People with Big Canoes.” Moniteau is the French spelling of the term used by the Fox and all the other Algonquian tribes for God, or the Great Spirit, more usually written as manito or manitou. It signified, as Hodge declares in his Handbook of American Indians, “the myste­ rious and unknown potencies and powers of life and of the uni­ verse.” At least two tributaries of the Missouri bear the name Moniteau: one lower down, called by the French the Petite Moni­ teau, coming in from the south between the present Cole and Moniteau counties, and giving its name to the latter; the other, the Grande or Big Moniteau, on the north, running out of Howard into Boone and emptying at Rocheport. The way in which the sacred name became applied to these little Missouri streams is clearly explained by Captain Clark, who says of the Little Moniteau that “it takes its name from a strange figure

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 24 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

resembling the bust of a man with the horns of a stag painted on a projecting rock, which may represent some spirit or deity.” An­ other member of the expedition, Floyd, who evidently believed with John Milton that the gods of the heathen were all devils in disguise, writes of the Grande Moniteau: “a Creek on the N Side Called the River of the Big Devil, one mile past a rock on the N Side whare are the pictures of the Devil and other things. We killed 3 Rattel Snakes at that Rock.” The good Captain, who has even left us a crude drawing of the mysterious figure, evidently took the more charitable view of St. Paul, namely, that even the “unknown god” whose image he found in Athens showed the pa­ gans to be seeking after the true God, “if haply they might feel after Him and find Him.” But we can go even further back than these Algonquian names of the fierce Fox tribe will take us. We now know that the Algon­ quian tribes were comparative newcomers in Missouri, which not long before the white man came was the sole possession of an entirely different kindred, the Sioux. Missouri is indeed notable as the meeting-place of the two greatest families of Indian tribes in all North America, two distinct confederacies speaking languages that were mutually unintelligible, being as much unlike each other as our English is to Chinese or Arabic. To the Sioux, who came first, belong the closely related tongues of the Osage, Missouri, Kansas, Omaha, Iowa, and Dakota tribes. The alien Algonquians, who began to pour across the Mississippi only in the latter part of the eighteenth century, included the Shawnees, Kickapoos, Potawato- mis, Delawares, and above all the Sauks and Foxes. They almost annihilated the Missouris, who had once been one of the most warlike tribes in the State, and nearly caused their rightful name to be forgotten altogether. Missouri is the name their enemies knew them by; they called themselves the Niutachi, which prob­ ably meant “People who Dwell at the Mouth of the River.” They split the Sioux Confederacy into a northern wing, mainly the Iowas, Omahas, and Dakotas, and a southern group, chiefly the Osage and the Kansas, with the remnants of the once great Mis­ souris, all of whom were driven forever south of the Missouri River. Portage des Sioux on the Mississippi in St. Charles County tradi­ tionally marks the spot where the defeated Sioux escaped their deadly foes, who were lying in wait for them at the mouth of the Missouri, by carrying their “big canoes” across country where the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 A n O s a g e "‘G ood M a n ” a n d “ G ood W o m a n ” This Osage chieftain and his wife and child were painted from life about 1835 near the Neosho River by the famous American artist George Catlin. The chief, whose name was Clermont, wore a beautiful robe, his leggings fringed with scalp locks, and in his hand his favorite war-club. His wife was richly attired in costly cloths. Catlin says the Osage were the tallest race in North America, either of red or white skins. Few of the men were less than six feet in stature, many being six and a half, and others seven feet tall. The women were well proportioned and good-looking, extremely graceful, and quick in their movements. Clermont, when older, may w^ell have become a “Honga” or “Good Man”, and presided over the Osage war dance. His wife may have been a “Good Woman” and led their stately dance of peace with the other women of the tribe.

Captain Clark’s Copy o f t h e M anito P ainting When Lewis and Clark passed the mouth of Moniteau Creek in June, 1804, they were much struck by a painting left on a rock nearby. It was clearly intended by the Algonquian Indians as a picture of their deity, the Manito or Great Spirit. Captain Clark himself copied it in the adjoining sketch, which is preserved in his Journal. 25

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 2G AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

two rivers approach each other, some ten or twelve miles above their junction, and thus getting away south of the Missouri. The absolute difference in language between these sworn enemies is well illustrated by their respective words for God or the Great Spirit. All the Algonquians called him, as we have seen, Manito or some closely related word. The Osage branch of the Siouan tribes, on the other hand, knew him as Wakonda, and their name has like­ wise become attached to a number of streams and other places, such as the Waconda or Wyaconda River in Clark and Lewis counties (sometimes rendered by the whites as Devils’ or Big Devils' Creek), Wakenda in Ray and Carroll, and others. The Siouan term for water or river was m, found abundantly in south and west Missouri, as in Niangua, Neosho (Main River), Nebraska (from Nibtha^ka, Flat River); they called the Mississippi Ni-tonga (Great River) and the Missouri Ni-shodse (Muddy Water). Those who think that Missouri means “Big Muddy” are not entirely wrong after all; they are merely preserving a correct reminiscence of its lost Siouan name Ni-shodse, instead of Missouri, which has an entirely different meaning and history.

(9) S h a d o w s o f t h e S io u x Are there any similar traces of the mighty Sioux people and their language in the names of Boone County, where we know they once ruled supreme? I believe there are some shadowy memories of them still surviving, in two names where they have never yet been sus­ pected, because they have come down to us in French disguise: namely the Perche and the Bonne Femme. For the ultimate origin of these two oldest names in the county I am venturing to propose an entirely new theory, which may be taken for what it is worth. The famous Osage nation, noblest of Indian peoples ever to live in Missouri, whose legends and religious chants have been collected and preserved more fully than those of any other branch of the Siouan Confederacy, have kept an ancient story of their origins. It is told in the absorbing volumes edited by Francis La Flesche in the Bulletins of the Bureau of American Ethnology issued by the Smithsonian Institution, which ought to be better known than they are. In Bulletin No. 101, published in 1939 and entitled “War Cere­ mony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians,” La Flesche recounts (p. 201) in the following words the memories the tribe has preserved:

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 27

For an indefinite period in the past, the people of the Wazhazhe or Osage tribe have lived in three separate villages, each village moving from place to place. The largest of these village groups is called Pa$i-ugthin, Dwellers on the Hilltop; at the present time these people are living in and around the town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma. The village next in size is Qondse-ugthin, Dwellers in the Hillside Forest; these people are now living in and around the town of Hominy, Oklahoma. The smallest of these villages is Waxaga- ugthin, Dwellers in the Thorny Thicket; these people are today living near the town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma . . . According to tradition, the Wazhazhe once dwelt beside a large river when a flood came upon them from which they fled, some to a hilltop where they erected their wigwams: hence the name Dwellers on the Hilltop. A forest covering a hill is called by them $ondse, as distinguished from a forest along a river, and so the people who fled to the forest covering the hill were called Dwellers in the Hillside Forest. Some of the fleeing people happened to push their way into a thicket of thorny trees, where they set up their wigwams and so were called Dwellers in the Thorny Thicket. Tradition is silent, says La Flesche, as to the identity of the river where the flood took place. But we who dwell today where they once dwelt, beside the insatiable Missouri, which within living memory has so often swallowed up white villages on its banks, such as old Franklin, old Stonesport, Nashville, Burlington, Mel­ bourne, and others, have no difficulty in detecting the criminal. Only two summers ago we have seen history repeating itself, and the white tribes of our twentieth century once more driven to take refuge on the hilltops or in the upland forests or in the thorny thicket. And I believe the names the Osage nation used in that ancient catastrophe for the three different asylums that saved their lives are still discernible on the Missouri map along the northern bank of the rapacious river. My venturesome theory is this: that in the Osage word pagi, meaning “hilltop,” we have the ultimate source of the name which the French made into Percé and we call the Perche. When the first French hunters arrived at the stream and asked its name, the Indians gave them the name they used for their village on the con­ spicuous hilltop near its mouth. The Frenchmen made the best they could of the strange word, and then looked round for a “pierced” or, alternatively, a “perched” rock to justify the name. Just so the modem rustic hears the big unfamiliar word asparagus and turns it into “sparrow-grass,” or the serviceman, ignorant of French, twists au revoir into “olive oil” and camouflage into “camel flags.”

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 2 8 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

The second place of refuge, the upland forest or fondse, is, I be* lieve, the source of the odd name Cdte Sans Dessein in Callaway County, which etymologists have needed so much ingenuity to explain. It would seem to mean “hill without design” or “without shape.” Professor McDermott of Washington University in his invaluable Glossary of Mississippi Valley French has tried, not too convincingly, to interpret it as meaning “hill without purpose.” He says it is “a hill so located that there seemed no reason for its being. Apparently the Missouri River once flowed on tbe north side of this long, narrow hill and later cut a new channel to the south, so that the hill was cut off from the hills or bluffs that one would ordi­ narily expect to find with it.” It is really simpler to explain it as another, rather forced, effort of the French to put some sort of sense into the name of the second Indian village. After all. the Osage pmdsi must have sounded in French ears not too much un­ like their own Sans Dessein as they pronounce it. They always turned, by the way, the Indian sound denoted by La Flesche as $ into s, as in Kansas from Osage Konge, or Nebraska from Nib- thagka. I believe the French made another stab at this same Osage word which accounts for that standing puzzle among Missouri place names, the 1 0 2 River. We have identified the oldest form of that name as Cent Deux, and established a probability that as late as 1847, when the Mormons came through Iowa on their famous trek to the Far West, the French name was still used and was then ap­ plied to an Indian settlement, later transferred to the nearby stream and translated by the Americans into the One Hundred and Two River. The hardy French trappers and hunters sent by Joseph Robidoux through the Indian country after he founded St. Joseph in 1834 must have found a settlement which the Sioux up there called Qondseugthin, i.e. “Dwellers in the Upland Forest.” To them the first part of the Indian name, gondseu-, sounded not too much unlike Cent Deux; and that is why 1 0 2 is the present name of the river in Nodaway County that has stirred up so much speculation. These daring identifications prompted a search for the third an­ cestral Osage village, the Waxaga or “thorny thicket” ; and I be­ lieve we have found it also. Down on the lower part of the Mis­ souri’s course, in Monroe, Ralls, and Pike counties, there is a stream originally known as the Ohaha (Oahaha, or Auhaha), now called Salt River. The French turned the original name of the great Siouan

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MI88OURI 2 9

tribe, Wazhazhe, into Osage; and they came about as close to Waxaga in their Ohaha, though mercifully they never tried to force some far-fetched French meaning into that guttural name. It must be remembered that just such “folk etymologies,” as they are called, are found everywhere in the history of place names, though nowhere oftener than in Missouri. Hence it may not be too audacious if we try to discover a few that have not been hitherto recognized. We Americans manhandled the French names reck­ lessly enough, as when our cowboys in Colorado turned the Rivière du Purgatoire into the Picketwire. The early Missourians meta­ morphosed Bois Brulé into Bob Ruley, Chemin Couvert into Smackover, and Chenal Hubert into Sniabar. Why may not the French have done the same sort of thing before them with the long unintelligible Indian names they found in the land? As a matter of fact, we know they did so in the case of Des Moines, long accepted as the French version of the Indian tribal name of the Moingonas; and if they made monks out of these wild warriors, they may just as easily have changed hilltop villages into pierced rocks, or upland forests into “Sans Dessein” or “Cent Deux.” There is nearly always something unnatural or whimsical about these popular etymologies, which are subject to no known phonetic laws. But after all they are only to be expected in a region like Missouri, where three different tongues followed each other in quick succession, each one trying to make some kind of sense out of the strange speech of their predecessors. Indignant etymologists are prone to call them “corruptions.” They do not deserve such an invidious description, any more than we have a right to say that an Italian or a German or a Chinaman who makes himself over into a good American in his dress and manners has been “cor­ rupted”—even though he does not always improve himself in the process. But surely there has never been a stranger instance, if our derivation be accepted, than the transformation of Paçi, the Osage hilltop, into the French Percé or Perché, and then into the American Persia.

(10) T h e G ood W o m a n o f B o o n e Quite as strange a story, though this time one of ancient custom rather than of popular etymology, attaches to the Bonne Femme. To understand the full significance of this mysterious lady, we must consider along with her a whole group of similar primitive Osage

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 30 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

names that bear an obvious family relationship: the Bon Homme in St. Louis County, the Femme Osage in Warren and St. Charles, the other Bonne Femme in Randolph and Howard who is distin­ guished from our Boone County Petite or Little Bonne Femme by being called the Big Bonne Femme, and another stream in Howard that goes by the weird name of Hungry Mother (or earlier, Hun­ ger’s Mother) Creek. For each one of these some apocryphal inci­ dent has been invented, about some particular virtuous man or woman whose memory was signalized by the naming of a stream for him or her. But as a rule we Missourians are too familiar with these old names to realize how remarkable they really are. For a true understanding of them I believe we need to know more about the religious rites and beliefs of the Osage people; and for that purpose we must delve again into La Flesche’s fascinating collec­ tions of their oldest chants and ceremonies. Everywhere in his volumes we find mention made of the all- important place in Osage society that was held by the class known as Good Men, or Nika-donhe. They presided over the most sacred rites, and had special charge of matrimony. Before an Osage could rightfully claim this most honorable of all their tribal titles, he must himself have been married according to established customs, must have successfully reared and married off his own children, and must have become a grandfather. It must have been one of these ancient and respected dignitaries who lent his name to the stream in St. Louis County. Another title that recurs on almost every page is Honga, which seems to mean the sacred person or particular Good Man who led the ceremonials. In La Flesche’s detailed description of the solemn Calumet Dance (his “Rite of the Chiefs,” in the 36th Annual Re­ port of the Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 419), we even find the title repeated in three successive lines, which surely supply the clue we want for Howard County’s Hungry Mother Creek: Honga Monthinka-zhinga wi atonhe in da, a bin da, tai ga, Honga Monthinka-gaxe wi atonhe in da, a bin da, tsi ga, Honga Monzhon-gaxe wi atonhe in da, a bin da, tsi ga. which La Flesche translates: A Honga (a sacred person), The Little-Earth by name, am I who stand here. A Honga, Maker-of-the-Earth by name, am I who stand here. A Honga, Maker-of-the-Land by name, am I who stand here.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 31

Whether the special Honga who gave his name to the Howard County stream was known as Little-Earth, Maker-of-tb e-Earth, Maker-of-the-Land, or some other honorific epithet beginning with “Month .. or “Moth . . can hardly be determined. But it must have been he whose venerable title was taken over by the American settlers as Hunger’s Mother or Hungry Mother. Equally revered among this profoundly religious people was the Bonne Femme or Femme Osage. She was usually the wife of the Honga or Good Man, and she had a prominent part in the beautiful Peace Ceremony. She led the women of the tribe into the lodge and conducted the supplicatory rite by which, we are told (p. 271), “the young mother appeals to the Power whence issues all forms of life to give to her little ones the same thoughtful care that is bestowed upon the animals that wander, shelterless, over the earth.” Among the Osage, the woman held no less honorable a po­ sition than the man. She represented the potential powers of the tribe through its warriors, who were bom of woman, and therefore her part in all aspects of its life was considered no less important than that of the man who faced death upon the fields of conflict. While the duty of procuring the buffalo for their food, shelter, and clothing devolved upon the man, that of planting, cultivating, and harvesting the com fell to the woman. She it was who presided over the elaborate corn-planting ritual. With her sisters in festal attire, she sang those beautiful chants to which La Flesche devotes an entire volume. One of them begins with words that even in translation still have power to move us: The touching of the earth is an act divine. I, the female, go forth longing to dig into the earth. My footprints—th$y are sacred and mysterious. No wonder streams were named for these worthy Osage women! At least let us hope that we have silenced those base detractors who say there has never been but one good woman in Boone County, and try to support the allegation by our lonesome place name. Perhaps it is fanciful to note that the first institution of higher learning in all the Boone’s Lick Country, opened in 1829, and the worthy predecessor of the State University, was named the Bonne Femme Academy. It was located six miles south of Columbia on Bonne Femme Creek. From 1838 till 1843 it was incorporated as

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 3 2 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

the Bonne Femme College, and the year it finally closed its doors was the same year when the main building of the University was completed and dedicated. Some day a sculptor, if ever one suffi­ ciently inspired can be found, ought to carve a marble statue of the Good Woman of the Osage in all her Indian dignity and grace, planting her sacred footprints upon the fields, and we should set it up in the entrance hall of our College of Agriculture.

(1 1 ) T h e F o u n d in g F a t h e r s Leaving at last these dim ancestral memories of French and Indian days, let us come into the clear light of recorded history. The personal names for places in Boone County, as is usually the case, outnumber all the rest. The history of the county begins with the close of the War of 1812. During that conflict, the white settle­ ments in central Missouri were reduced to a few fortified and closely beleaguered stockades, all within the confines of our present Howard County. After peace was made in 1815, and a treaty had been executed by which the Indians relinquished all claims to territory north of the Missouri River, the Kentuckians poured in like a flood. Between that year and 1820, when Boone was made a separate county, came the men who may be considered the founders of the county. Twenty of them, nearly all Kentuckians, left their names behind them on our map, for a time at least. First on the list is General Thomas A. Smith, who resigned his commission in the U. S. Army in 1818 to accept appointment in old Franklin as Register of Public Lands. By his public-spirited efficiency, he made himself universally admired and loved by the incoming settlers, who called him the “Cincinnatus of the West.” A better title for him would perhaps have been “Father of the Boone’s Lick Country,” for he sold and gave first title to a large portion of the land occupied in this whole section of the State. Much of the new land he allotted was on what were then known as “Madrid locations.” These were claims granted by the Territorial Assembly to inhabitants of the New Madrid country whose lands there had been destroyed or damaged by the great earthquakes of 1811. Their certificates were often purchased and used by the new­ comers from Kentucky who streamed across after 1815. At the very first government land sale held in Franklin, on No­ vember 18,1818, General Smith sold the land on which the future town of Columbia was to be built to a group of his devoted admirers

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 33

who called themselves the “Smithton Company.” Their town was originally laid out, in the spring of 1819, under the name of Smith­ ton. It stood on the elevated ground about half a mile west of the present Courthouse, on what was later known as the Garth prop­ erty. The eastern boundary of old Smithton ran near the line of the present First Street, north and south. (Probably, though of this I have obtained no sure confirmation, that is why it is our first numbered street.) Smithton stood for nearly two years, though it never had more than twenty inhabitants. In May, 1821, partly because of the difficulty of digging wells on the original site and partly, as we have seen, for other reasons, the town was moved east­ ward across Flat Branch to its present location, and its name was changed to Columbia. In some ways it is to be regretted that the plain and sturdy Smithton, conferred in honor of a man who well deserved to have his name kept alive among us, was exchanged for the more spec­ tacular Columbia. There are just too many Columbias in the country, as some of us have learned to our sorrow when mail has gone astray to Columbia, Miss, or Mont. or Nev.; and Columbus did not really need our tribute on his overcrowded pedestal. It is interesting to note that Smithton, the name we discarded in 1821, was later adopted in three other counties, though for different Smiths: by Worth in 1861, by Pettis in 1876, and by Mississippi in 1891. All the Smithtons, however, have been small and short-lived. Perhaps the name is unlucky. The very first settlement and post office in the county, just across the border of Howard, was established in 1816 and named Thrall’s Prairie, for Augustus Thrall. About the same time came Robert H. Hinkson, who gave his name to Hinkson Creek near Columbia, and William Callahan (or Callaham), thought to have been part Indian, who is commemorated by Callahan Creek and Callahan Lick in Perche Township. All three men were from Madison County, Kentucky. Old Joseph Persinger, a famous hun­ ter who was reared among the Indians, came about the same time, though the station of Persinger near Columbia was probably named for a later member of his distinguished family. So did Hugh Silvers, who settled on Silver Creek, which, as we have seen, may have been named either for him or for the Kentucky home from which he came. Ira P. Nash of Virginia, who had already made a hunting trip

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 34 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

into the Bonne Femme country in 1804, came back in 1817. Two years later he founded on the river bottom land, just below the present site of Providence, the now extinct town of Nashville. Noah Sapp of Delaware also arrived in 1817, and bequeathed his name to the later village of Sapp, originally known as Whoop-Up, which took the place of Nashville after the flood. The streams still known as Bass Creek for Peter Bass, Cave Creek for Reuben Cave, Fowler’s Creek for James W. Fowler, Jamison (or Jimmerson) Creek for John Jamison, Kelley Creek for J. M. Kelley, Reeder’s Creek for John Reeder, and Slack’s Branch for John Slack of Pennsylvania, were all named for pioneers who settled on their banks before 1820. Sexton’s, later replaced by Everett, was laid out in Perche Township by George Sexton; and Spencer, the name of which was later changed to Wilton, was named for Gilpin P. Spencer. Johnson’s Branch in Bourbon Township was named for Alfred Johnson, said by his admiring neighbors to have been the largest man in the world. Captain William Ramsey, who had served as an officer in Washington’s army, gave his name to Ramsey’s Bluff near the later site of Claysville. Not the least among the founding fathers was Asa Stone, for whom was named Stonesport on the Missouri River. By 1822 Stonesport had already become such a busy and thriving boat land­ ing that when the great question of selecting a site for the State Capital came before the Legislature in that year, it was one of the foremost competitors for the supreme honor. Just at that propitious time the discovery was made that it was on the exact geographical center of Missouri; and on the strength of this interesting fact it is said, on one doubtful authority, that Stonesport came within just five votes of winning. Perhaps it was as well that the solons decided in favor of Jefferson City, for the deluge of 1844 wiped Stonesport completely out of existence. These rugged pioneers were followed by a long list of able leaders who have left their imprint on the life as well as on the map of Boone County. Ten of them, who may well be called the “Grand Old Men” of the county, may be listed first. Of these, five were on the judicial bench. Judge John W. Hall of the County Court is remembered in the town of Hallsville, laid out in 1866, where he was the first postmaster. Hallsville absorbed an adjoining com­ munity named Hickam, for Judge Joseph W. Hickam, to make a

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 35

station on the Columbia Branch of the Wabash Railroad. Judge John W. Hinton, for many years a steamboat captain, elected pro­ bate judge of Boone County in 1872, and also a member of the University Board of Curators, is commemorated by the Hinton community seven miles north of Columbia, as well as by the Hinton Road. Judge Squire Turner of the County Court was hon­ ored by the name of Turner Station near McBaine, where the Uni­ versity Fruit Farm is located. The town of Wilton, formerly known as Spencer, on the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad took its present name in 1872 from J. D. Wilton, Prosecuting Attorney of the County. Harrisburg was named for a prominent farmer. Major John W. Harris, proprietor of the “Model Farm” on Thrall’s Prairie, re­ ceived in 1870 a prize for having the best managed farm in the en­ tire State. His town was laid off about the same time, shortly after the abortive Chicago and Alton Railroad survey which promised to make it one of its main stations; but when the plans fell through the town declined. Rucker in Bourbon Township is named for Major John F. Rucker of the Confederate Army, who came from Virginia and was long an influential business man at Sturgeon. James L. Stephens of Kentucky, merchant and philanthropist, had a large part in the construction of the Columbia Branch of the Wabash Railroad, and has left his name at Stephens Station. He will be far longer remembered, however, as the name-father of Stephens College, to the endowment of which in 1870 he contrib­ uted with royal generosity. Two of Boone’s “Grand Old Men” were editors of Columbia’s newspapers. Colonel William Franklin Switzler of Kentucky founded the Statesman in 1843 and edited it for 43 years. In 1871 he became a member of the University Board of Curators; and he was also a distinguished historian. His name is preserved at Switz­ ler, a station on the Columbia Branch, and likewise by Switzler Hall, oldest building now standing on the University campus. Last but not least of the twenty was Major James Sidney Rollins of Kentucky, the first editor of the Patriot, published in Columbia since 1836. He was a member of the State Legislature when he drafted and introduced, on January 24, 1839, an “Act to Select a Site for the State University.” It was largely through his efforts that Columbia was finally chosen on June 24, 1839. He was Presi­ dent of the Board of Curators from 1869 till his death, and in 1872

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 3 6 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

was formally awarded the title of “Father of the University of Missouri.” Present-day students know his name best by Rollins Spring near the campus. Rollins Lake, east of Centralia, known also as Dutcher’s Lake for the engineer who dug it, lies on property formerly owned by Major Rollins. The Major once came close to an even more eminent use of his name. The enterprising founders of Sturgeon in 1856 advertised that a new county was soon to be organized out of parts of Boone, Audrain, Howard, and Randolph ■ ounties, and that its name was going to be Rollins County. But* these ambitious plans never materialized. Fortunately Major Rol­ lins stuck to Columbia, where he will always be remembered at the institution which acknowledges itself his grateful offspring.

(12) O u r o t h e r N a m e -F a t h e r s A good many other enterprising citizens of our county have left their names behind them. These include two of the county’s best­ loved physicians: Dr. J. A. Points, for whom the community of Points in Rocky Fork Township, now extinct, was named; and Dr. Leonidas Bobb Brown at Brown’s Station near Columbia, established in 1876. Both of them came from Kentucky. Three were millers: John W. Ammon, whose steam sawmill at A m m on in Perche Township was established in 1879; Thomas J. Gallup, who operated a grist mill near the community once known as Gallup’s Mill; and S. T. Stapleton, who had a flour and lumber mill at Stapletown in the west of the county where much of the lumber for the State University was sawed and dressed. All three of these places have now vanished from the map. Seven places were named for local business men who were also postmasters, and therefore had a natural advantage in getting their names adopted. Easley, a station on the Missouri, Kansas, And Texas was named for W. G. Easley, though the railroad has persisted in using the station name Rutland, for one of its officials. Riggs in Bourbon Township was named for Shelton Riggs; Rileys- burg on the border of Howard County for John Riley; and Wilhite in Perche Township for John Wilhite. The mining village of Pra- thersville near Columbia was named for William Redmond Prather; the small community of Murry northwest of Columbia, established in 1914, for John Murry; and Harg, established in 1917 two miles west of Columbia, was shortened at the request of the Post Office

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 37

Department from the name of Archibald McHarg, who came to Boone County from Ireland. Twelve of the county’s later landowners have contributed names for places built on their land. Hartsburg, which took the place of Burlington, washed away in 1887, was named for Luther D. Hart. Other stations on the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas include Hunts- dale (1892, for William Birch Hunt), McBaine (1899, for J. Turner McBaine), Brushwood (also Brushwood Lake, for John Brush­ wood), Limerick (for Thomas B. Limerick), and Daniel. The resi­ dents of the last of these villages had some difficulty in honoring its founder, Daniel Webster Hunt. His surname had already been used at Huntsdale, and when they suggested Webster they learned that there was another post office by that name in Oregon County. So they compromised at last on his first name Daniel. On the Columbia Branch of the Wabash are the stations of Per- singer (for John Pereinger), Bush (for C. C. Bush) and Hickman (for David H. Hickman, son of Captain David M. Hickman of the Black Hawk War). Hickman was later abandoned, but Hickman High School in Columbia still keeps his name alive. Ridgeway School in Columbia commemorates John W. Ridgeway, who gave his life for his country as a soldier in the First World War. Moore’s Switch, now a part of Columbia, was named for Colonel E. C. Moore. Shaw, one mile west of Columbia, was named for S. M. Shaw. Everett, near Dripping Springs, was laid out in 1860 by Charles Sexton to take the place of Sexton’s founded by his father George. It too is now extinct, and I have been unable to find any record to identify the Everett for whom it was named. This long list of Boone County’s name-fathers who have earned that most lasting of all forms of immortality, a place on the map, has some conspicuous omissions. An equally long list could easily be compiled by older residents of worthy men who amply merited the honor but failed to receive it. As the poet Chaucer noted long ago, in his “House of Fame,” the capricious goddess has always distributed her prizes for quite inscrutable reasons: But thus I say you, trewely, What her causes were I nyste; For of this folk ful wel I wiste They hadde good fame each deserved, Although the}r were dyversely served.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 38 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

It is strange indeed that certain whole classes of names abun­ dantly drawn upon elsewhere in the State are totally unrepresented in Boone County. There is not a single famous foreigner in the list, unless we count Columbus as the ultimate source of Columbia. There are not even any famous Americans or Missourians from outside the county, at least for our towns, although the Columbia schools have done their best to remedy this glaring omission by honoring Grant, Lee, Jefferson, Benton, the poet Eugene Field, and the Negro leader Frederick Douglass. No preachers have been remembered by name in this county, as has been done elsewhere, e.g., by Joplin, Marvin, and Glennonville. There is not a single German name to be found, in contrast to the dozens that dot the maps of so many other Missouri counties. We did once have a village named Germantown, laid out in 1858 by two industrious German storekeepers whose names are said to have been Schultz and Fretter; but it was burned down during the Civil War and never rebuilt, so that our Anglo-Saxon purity remains unimpaired. There is not even one single woman’s name to be found, though the rest of the State has a hundred or more such beautiful names as Elizabeth, Margaret, Susanna, Sedalia, Louisiana, and Maiy- ville. It is indeed reported that there was once a country post office up in Bourbon Township called Minnie, for the wife or daughter of its proprietor; but it has long since vanished. The county has always taken a certain pride in being the home of the State University, but it has never named a single place for a teacher or a professor. Two names said to have been suggested by teachers, Pierpont and Englewood, were accepted. But none of the names of these social parasites themselves have ever been permitted to sully the fair map of Boone County.

(13) T o po g r a ph y a n d L a n d s c a p e No county in the State has more beautiful or more varied land­ scapes than Boone. A goodly share of its place names have been inspired by the distinctive features of its natural loveliness. First in this group are its names of location and situation. Centralia, the second largest town in the county, has what has been called its most ingenious and appropriate name. It was de­ liberately coined when the town was laid out in 1857, but the name of its inventer has unfortunately not been recorded. Obviously he devised it on the model of Vandalia, Idalia, or Sedalia, to denote

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 39

its central location. Just what it is the center of has been variously explained. Switzler says the name was chosen because the first railroad through the county, the North Missouri (now the Wabash) ran from St. Louis to Ottumwa, Iowa, and the station at Centralia lay just halfway between them. Gentry thinks the reason was rather that it is the center of the “Grand Prairie” between Mexico and Huntsville, Columbia and Paris, the vast level plain which it was once proposed to make into a separate county by the name of Rollins. The name might perhaps have been more appropriate for old Stonesport, if, as has been affirmed, it is true that that vanished community, now in the middle of the Missouri River, occupies the exact geographical center of the entire State. Or it might have been a happier name for the State itself, in which East and West, North and South, have always met and mingled as nowhere else in all the Union, than our accidental and historically inappropriate name of Missouri. The same idea of centrality lies behind the name of Midway in Missouri Township, which is the mid point between Columbia and Rocheport, or as Gentry says just halfway between the east and west borders of the State. There was likewise a Middletown in Rocky Fork Township (now vanished, though Middletown School remains to mark the spot), which was about midway on the road from Columbia to Sturgeon. Boone County has several other prairie regions besides the Grand or Great Prairie around Centralia. On its western edge is Thrall’s Prairie and its extension known as Terrapin Neck, named for its peculiar shape. Along the Missouri are rich bottom lands suitable for raising the tobacco which the settlers from Kentucky brought with them. On its eastern border lies Two-Mile Prairie with some of the county’s most fertile farms. It runs north and south not far from Cedar Creek, and is nowhere much more than two miles wide. Names of situation that well befit these spacious level stretches are Prairie City, Prairie Fork or Creek, the two Prairie Grove Churches, and Far West Church and School. Other descriptive names, all of which explain themselves, are Clear Creek and Good Water Creek, Dripping Spring and Flat Branch, Lick Fork and Long Creek and Mud Creek, Flint School and Grindstone Creek, Red Rock, Rocky Fork, and Rock Bridge, The Pinnacles, Richland School and Grassland School, Sunnydale

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 4 0 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

Academy and Valley Springs School. Named for their outlook are Prospect School, Grandview School, and Lakeview School. Red Top Church was named for its red roof, and Twin Churches because old Prairie Grove Baptist and Methodist Churches face each other there across the road. From the flora come the names of Cedar Creek and Cedar Town­ ship, Oakland Church and Oak Grove School and White Oak School, Elm Tree, Walnut Grove, Hickory Grove, and Locust Grove Churches, Sugar Creek (for its sugar maples), Linden and Sycamore Schools, Brush Creek and Woodlandville; from the fauna, Deer Park and Bear Creek, Goose Creek and Turkey Creek, Panther Creek and Cave, Coon Branch and Terrapin Neck. Many of these names of animals and of trees are very old, and may have been inherited from the Indians. Among both Sioux and Algon- quians there were clans or gentes which bore the names of the deer, the bear, the wildcat or panther, the goose, and the turtle; and the cedar, oak, and elm were especially sacred in their chants and ceremonial worship.

(14) C u l t u r a l N a m e s The last group of names left to consider may be called cultural. They reflect the ideals and aspirations of the citizens of Boone County, their artistic and literary interests, their religious inheri­ tance, and their distinctive sense of humor. The ruling ideal of the people of the county, as shown by their history and names alike, has always been a deep-rooted and stead­ fast patriotism. It is revealed all the way from their early choice of such national place nam es as Lexington and Columbia, down to their recent adoption of the name of a soldier who gave his life for his country in the First World War, for Ridgeway School, in mem­ ory of John Cleveland Ridgeway. Other aspirations are conveyed by such names as Star School, Union Church and School, Friend­ ship Church, and the vanished town of Eureka. Missourians seem particularly fond of pleasant places such as Mt. Pleasant Church and Pleasant Grove Church. We have counted more than four hundred places in the State which have our favorite adjective “pleasant” in their names. Our practical minded county has no high regard for art or litera­ ture. We once had among us George C. Bingham, perhaps the most famous painter Missouri has yet produced, who opened his studio

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 41

in Columbia in 1835 and worked here and taught in our University till his death in 1879; yet we never thought of placing his name upon our map. The theater has flourished here ever since the first play, given by a company of amateurs, was performed in Columbia on Christmas Eve, 1832. It was Pizarro-, or, The Death of RoUa, by Sheridan, translated from the German dramatist Kotzebue. The swashbuckling hero of this old melodrama, which was immensely popular and was then being performed all over the country, was so much admired that quite a number of Missourians named their sons for him. Yet we left it to Phelps County in 1858 to name a town for him, or for one of his namesakes, which has since become the seat of an important branch of our University. Washington Irving visited Columbia the same year, but left no name-children behind him. For literature, however, we have done a little better than for any other art. It is true that we have few if any place names drawn from the classics, ancient or modern. Our sister counties have their Hannibal and Herculaneum, Avon and Elsinore, Ivanhoe and Waverley, Arkoe and Darien, which give ample proof of well- stocked libraries and liberal reading tastes in early Missouri. But we have borrowed, though without knowing it, from the unknown Indian bards who sang of the Perche and the Bonne Femme; and we have honored indirectly the decidedly lesser bards Freneau and Field, in the names of Columbia and of one of its schools. There is one book, however, with which our ancestors were well acquainted. Such good old Bible names as Bethel and Salem, Gilead and Goshen, were full of meaning for them. They were especially fond of the Bible mountains, and founded churches named for nearly all the hills in the Holy Land. There is Mt. Zion Church, where a battle was fought during the Civil War almost as bloody as those on Mt. Zion of old; and also Mt. Horeb, Mt. Tabor, Mt. Nebo, Lebanon, and Olivet. Boone County would have no part in the State that produced Mark Twain had its people not possessed a keen sense of humor. That they did so is abundantly evidenced in such names as Whoop- Up and Smackout, Ginlet and Terrapin Neck, Blackfoot and the Devil’s Backbone and Icebox. Ginlet and Terrapin Neck have already been discussed. Whoop-Up, early name of the village of Sapp, must have been a lively place. Its name was originally coined, though doubtless its inhabitants never knew it, by no less a lum­

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 42 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY

inary than Shakespeare. He was the first ever to use the word in literature, in his drama The Winter’s Tale, where he made the pickpocket Autolycus declare: “Had not the old man come in with a whoo-bub . . . I had not left a purse alive in the whole army.” Shakespeare picked up the rowdy vocable, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, from an Irish war-cry. Later its spelling was altered to the more conventional hubbub. But our early Missourians restored it to a form almost as boisterous as was used by the Elizabethans. The village of Smackout, now vanished, was another example of the robust humor of our fun-loving forefathers. They thought it amusing to invent mocking names for nearby settlements like Lick Skillet, or Paincourt, i.e., “short of bread,” once used for St. Louis, implying that their neighbors did not always have enough to eat. Missouri at one time had d o fewer than eight Lick Skillets and seven places known as Hardscrabble. There was another Smackout in Cedar County, now known as Pacetown, and two more called Slapout. We have in our files a letter from the founder of Slapout in Butler County, now known as Fagus, which explains exactly how it acquired its “hungry” name: “The railroad grading crew boarded at the only shack there. The crew would come in tired and hungry, and the proprietor would serve them a dish of beans and bread, always apologizing by saying that he would serve meat, only at that particular time he was ‘slap out’ of it. This happened at about every meal, with the result that the word became the name of the place.” Even the staid and sober British were once addicted to just such “hungry” names, as for example Starveacre and Coldharbour. Blackfoot was a jesting term once applied to the people of Perche Township, taken from the name of a western tribe of Pawnee Indians who wore black moccasins. Its origin in Perche is disputed, the most plausible story being that a dance was once given in the neighborhood in which the boys and girls danced barefooted, and bantered each other on the comparative blackness of their pedal extremities. The citizens of Perche at first resented the nickname as an aspersion, and Switzler says an election was once lost there by a candidate who made the mistake of announcing himself as “coming from Blackfoot.” But, according to the same authority, they have become reconciled to the name and glory in it. It is not surprising that His Satanic Majesty has title to two

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 43

places in Boone County, for, if place names are sufficient proof, he owns a large part of the entire State. There are more than thirty places that attest the healthy respect for the Devil which Missouri­ ans have always entertained. The Devil’s Backbone, a razor-edged line of hills southeast of Englewood is not monopolized by Boone County. There are five other pieces of it in Phelps, Montgomery, Ripley, Oregon, and Jackson Counties, the name being applied in each case to particularly rough and dangerous ridges. Both of the Devil’s Elbows, his Horn, and one of his Boots are authentically located in other counties. There is also the Devil’s Kitchen in Barry, and three Devil's Dens in Webster, Iron, and Warren. His Tollgate has been discovered in Iron County, and two of his Tea- Tables in Miller and Cape Girardeau. His Washpan is found in Barry County, two of his Washboards in Dunklin and Wayne, and three of his Washbasins in Warren. He has a Race Ground in the Missouri River, mentioned with awe by Lewis and Clark, and even a school in Scotland County with the exciting name of Devil’s Half Acre. Elsewhere in the State we encounter a Devil’s Branch, Run, Ridge, Well, Chute, Island, and Riffle. But Boone is the only county that owns the Devil’s Icebox—a sinkhole out near Rock Bridge. This concludes our survey of all we have so far discovered about the place names of Boone County, together with other names that are connected with them or the existence of which throws light upon their origin or significance. But the task of the place-name worker is never done; and we are well aware that problems remain and that more light is still needed on some dark places. We should still like to know for just whom the village of Everett was named, just which “Split Rock” along the Missouri was the one identified by Captains Lewis and Clark as providing the source of the name of oux Perche Creek, and just which Elliott it was who was the first to shout, back at that fateful meeting in General T. A. Smith’s office in Franklin on November 18,1818, the magic name “COLUMBIA!’

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021