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552 tained or came to use it lie entirely in the field of interesting conjecture. Four theories are advanced from which the student can choose, or to which he can add. The first is that Rogers invented it. This theory may be dismissed as unlikely because unnecessary. A second is that it is an Indian word used by a tribe residing north of Lake Superior to designate a bark plate or platter... . How or why this restricted name should have been applied to a river of the western plains and mountains is yet to be explained....A third theory is that the term was the French word ouragon, meaning wind-storm, applied to a river in a country where such storms prevailed in a peculiar manner. Indians could have told Rogers about the climate of the region, and the description would have been accurate. ... The fourth theory is that the name is Rogers’ corruption of the Indian Ouinipegon, the earliest form of the name Winnipeg.... This is based on the famous Ochagach map of about 1728... . This map was published at Paris in 1754, only ten years before Rogers arrived in London. It is entirely possible that a copy would have been available to Rogers at London; perhaps before then in America.... The name Ouragon appears only in the Rogers document—nowhere else....

The name “Oregon” has such a background of romance, history and literature as is not known to any other on the roll of States. It was synonymous and contemporaneous with the mysterious “River of the West.” It symbolized the road to the Pacific. It was first uttered by a soldier whose daring and achievements in battle were magnificent, first printed in the most popular book of the period, and immortalized by one of America’s most cultured poets. It savors of the frontier and the pioneer. It is the mother-name in the entire Pacific Northwest.

Even more than in Oregon, local and state history is emphasized in Texas. At least when the writer of this book once attended a district school there, he thought it a little odd that the curriculum