Page:Oregon Geographic Names, third edition.djvu/18

 tures in another state or country, such as Portland, Oswego, Mount Horeb and many others.

It is apparent that as more names are studied, that the percentage of descriptive applications will increase, as most of the unimportant names are purely descriptive.

Errors of fact have an irritating way of creeping into a work of this sort. Every effort has been made to check all the data published, but notwithstanding this, mistakes frequently occur, and there are probably not a few herein that have not been detected. Even government archives are not infallible. Donation land claim records in the branch land office show many inconsistencies, and affidavits of a claimant made but a few months apart bear gross disagreements in dates of birth and marriage and other data. The pioneers did not worry much about such matters and did not foresee the difficulties that would befall an investigator threequarters of a century later. Other fruitful sources of error are the printed reminiscences of popular "oldest living residents," who do not realize that they cannot remember so well as they did fifty years ago.

Records of the Oregon provisional and territorial governments are not always consistent in the spellings of geographic names. Sometimes the forms used in the manuscript bills as passed are not the same as the styles used in the printed session laws and journals. Official records give both Tuality and Twality as the name of one of Oregon's original four districts and when the name was changed to Washington County, the printed law used the spelling Tualitz, possibly a printer's error. The writer has not found it possible to reconcile all these discrepancies.

Similar difficulties are found in the records of Oregon post offices. Some of the records must be used with caution. Caveat lector.

These records, kept at Washington, run back for nearly a century, and some of the entries are almost indecipherable. Then there are cases where post office records are continued from one book to another, and in the transfer minor changes have been made in the spellings of the names of the post offices and sometimes in the names of the postmasters. There are other places where it is almost impossible to follow the history of eastern Oregon post offices that have been in different counties at different times. Some post offices and postmasters jumped about like fleas.

Some years ago the writer secured photostats of the records of all Oregon offices up to the spring of 1855. Information in this edition of Oregon Geographic Names has been compared with the copies and is believed to reflect the record as kept at the time in cases where names of early postmasters are obviously in error. Where actual signatures are available at the Oregon Historical Society, the records have been corrected to match.

About 20 years ago the postal authorities provided the compiler with