Native American Placenames in the Louisiana Purchase

The sudden expansion of U.S. territory brought about by the Louisiana Purchase, along with the greater number of American Indian tribes who came under the American flag, brought with it many new words borrowed from Indian languages (Cutler 1994, 79-91). The journals of Lewis and Clark alone added half a dozen new Native American nouns to the English language, such as tamarack 'larch tree', introduced from Algonquian through Canadian French, and camas 'an edible root of the Pacific Northwest', borrowed from Chinook Jargon. New words also began to enter English through Louisiana French, such as bogue 'creek', from Choctaw book. However, an especially productive area for loanwords was that of placenames, including several that became the names of states: Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska.

It is necessary to define more accurately the scope of the material indicated in the title of this article. First, the term "Native American placenames" does not refer to the large number of placenames used by American Indians in their own languages; it refers only to those names which have been adopted for use in English. Second, my list does not include the many placenames that have entered English usage since the date of the Louisiana Purchase; it consists only of those names which were adopted by whites during the period of French rule and which have been used in English since that time. This means, in effect, that all the toponyms listed here were borrowed twice: once from Indian languages into French, and second from French into English. The decision to include a given name depends on the date at which it was first recorded and sometimes on the use of distinctive features of French spelling, such as <ou> for [u]. Names like Nebraska, which are known to have entered English somewhat later without the French intermediary, are not considered here.

Finally, "the Louisiana Purchase" refers in geographical terms to the territory between the Mississippi and the Rockies; but names from the ambiguous area of Minnesota are omitted. A large number of Indian/French placenames occur in the Great Lakes area, such as Illinois; these have Canadian French as intermediate language, rather than than the French of Louisiana.

Note that, when I speak of "borrowings," I refer not only to phonological transfers of words between languages, as in Eng. Arkansas < Fr. Arcansas < Algonquian /a:rkansa/ , but also to "loan translations" or calques, when the morphological elements of one language are translated into another.¹ An example of the latter process is Eng. Baton Rouge < Fr. Baton Rouge, a translation of Choctaw itti homma 'red pole', from itti 'stick, tree, wood' and homma 'red'.

An overall look at our data shows the following geographical patterns: a large number of toponyms are found in what is now the state of Louisiana, mostly borrowed from Choctaw, a Muskogean language. The main source of data here is the work by Read (1927), with corrections and improved transcriptions from my colleague Pamela Munro (pers. com., 2002) (these sources will not be repeated below). Another cluster of names occurs in Missouri, mostly derived from southern Siouan languages; here the main source is Ramsey (1952), with refinements from Robert Rankin (pers. com., 2002). A scattering of other placenames, to the west and the north, are mostly drawn from Caddoan and Siouan languages.

The list of placenames under consideration is, then, as follows:

• Adois ( Natchitoches Par., La.) [ædióus] Earlier recorded as <Adayes>; originally a French or English plural form of Adai, a Caddo subgroup, said to be derived from <hadai> 'brushwood'. The local pronunciation apparently results from a confusion with Spanish adiós 'goodbye' (Read 1927).

• Arickaree Point ( Campbell Co., S.Dak.) [əríkəri:] This name refers to an Indian tribe of the Caddoan linguistic family living in the northern Plains; the term is now more often written Arikara. It has been claimed that the name comes from Pawnee (Caddoan) /arikará:ruʔ/ 'elk, stag' (DeMallie 2001, 388), but this may be a folk etymology. The same name is spelled elsewhere as Arikaree Peak ( Grand Co., Colo.); see also REE, below.

• Arkansas The name of the state reflects that...