Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/70

Rh as well as Algonquin form. The terminal syllable in the different dialects is variously pronounced gan, gun, and gon. In the Shoshone language occur two words bearing some relation, if not a very near one, to the subject. O-gwa, says Stuart in his Montana, means 'river,' and Oo-rook-un 'under,' 'on the bottom; ' and a word of a similar sound in Algonquin has a similar meaning. Schoolcraft mentions that o is a common prefix to the names of various parts of the body. Besides these various analogous sounds and meanings in several of the native languages, we have in the Oregon territory one river with the prefix o and the terminal gan—the Okanagan. After all this research we arrive at nothing nearer than that the word gan relates in several dialects to water in some form, and might possibly be used to signify a river, any river, but not necessarily the Columbia.

A popular theory, and one frequently advanced as new, concerning the origin of the word, is that the first European discoverers called the Columbia River, and country adjacent, Oregon, from the abundance of origanum, or wild marjoram, a plant possessing some medicinal virtues. This conjecture is open to several objections, the first that the plant mentioned grows a long distance from the coast, the only portion of the country visited by the early navigators; nor is the presence of it very conspicuous anywhere. Mengarini, a writer in the New York Ethnological Journal, i., 1871, advances the idea that the word comes from huracan, the Spanish for hurricane, founded on the fact that at some seasons of the year strong winds prevail on the Columbia River. The Spaniards derived their word 'huracan' from a native American word found among the people of the central parts; 'hurakan' is the name of a Quiché god, meaning the tempest. The English hurricane and the French ouragan are forms of the same word; but as the French had little to do with the earliest history of the Northwest Coast, the origin of the name has never been ascribed to them.

Of all the conjectures hazarded by writers from time to time, the one that suggests a Spanish origin from orejon, meaning 'a pull of the ear,' but for this purpose often interpreted 'long ear' or 'lop ear,' seems to have been most popular, though not supported by facts or probabilities. It has been often repeated, with not so much as a qualifying doubt, that the Spaniards travelling up the northern coast met a tribe of Indians with ears of extreme length, weighed down by heavy ornaments, and from this circumstance the Spaniards called them 'Long-ears,' and the country La Tierra de los Orejons, which became corrupted into Oregon by Englishmen and Americans. Others assert that while the derivation is correct it was not properly applied by these first-named writers, but that it signifies the country of lop-eared rabbits, this animal abounding there as well as in California. So popular became this theory in the mining times of 1848–9 that the Oregonians went by the name of 'Lop-ears' among the Californian miners. Indeed, I suspect this opportunity to ridicule their obtruding neighbors, proving too good to be lost, really first gave currency to the idea. From jest it grew to earnest; soberer-minded people then began to look for a more distant origin. On investigation it does not appear that any tribe upon the Oregon coast was ever