Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/86

74 a map in that year, showing Coquille, and a similar map in 1863. In 1869 Harvey W. Scott "wrote up" the Coos Bay and Coquille country in The Oregonian, and brought back the pronunciation ko-keel. A recent letter from Binger Hermann, whose life-long familiarity with Coos Bay matters makes him an authority, likewise favors ko-keel. He cites the similar French word, and suggests that the name may have come from the French-Canadian trappers of the North-West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, who scoured the coast country from a time perhaps earlier than 1815. These trappers may have left the word coquille among the Indians. The latter may have imitated the word in ko-quell, which early white settlers in Coquille Valley yet pronounce that way. Frequent names in Oregon have mysterious origin, and efforts to derive them from French or Spanish or Indian forms are not satisfactory. Oregon is such a name, and Rickreall and Luckiamute and Long Tom. Meanwhile, as to ko-quell or ko-keel, the evidence seems to favor the latter. The accepted spelling is Coquille.

Mr. Bancroft, the most voluminous of Pacific West historians, may have left a fame more enduring in the long lapse of time than that of any other person who has lived and wrought in this area. His thirty-nine volumes show immense labor and perseverance, and represent large sacrifice of personal fortune. His death took place March 2, 1918, near San Francisco, at the age of 86 years.

His work did not escape criticism, for there have been many persons who delighted in picking errors or in finding fault with Mr. Bancroft's "compilation" methods history by wholesale contrasted with the "digestive" methods of more skillful historians. But the volumes are a reference library that will last for all time, and if Mr. Bancroft had not devoted his fortune and his energy to them, they would not have been published, nor would the great Bancroft Collection, now the