Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/372

 364 W. H. ABBOTT years it ought to be possible to have at least 10 Silver Creeks, that seeming to be the favorite. Can any greater prostitution of an opportunity occur than to deliberately saddle a town or a river with a name already worn threadbare in dozens of other localities, when a vast store house of words rich in historical association and the growth of that particular section lies open for use ? It is like choosing a corn tassel as the state emblem for Oregon, or a sunflower for Ire- land in place of the shamrock. Surely the spirit which slaugh- tered millions of buffalo just to see them dead, and burned up half of the timber of the Northwest just to get pasture for cows, is abroad in other fields. The disease then, is lack of imagination ; lack of reverence of the past; ignorance; mental laziness. What is the remedy? None of the past methods such as the study of local history, the organization of historical societies, or the collecting and distributing of historical books will suffice. Clearly anything that will combat the above causes will help, but in the meantime the, cities and villages will be named. We will have forty Lovers Leaps instead of only fifteen. Little Silver Creeks will come winding out of dozens and dozens of canyons. Wolf Creeks will run over the country in such numbers as to make it possibly unsafe to go out. Of all of the above causes I believe the one which weighs heaviest with the present generation is lack of knowledge. The present generation is not prejudiced against the Indian as were their forefathers. Neither are they ashamed to hear their towns called by Indian names. We do not glory in the fact that we have not enough originality to make up a new name or in being the forty-ninth imitation of a poor original. But lacking it, we also lack the knowledge of what is available and appropriate. If Indian words and therefore the Indian languages are to be preserved and at the same time the towns and rivers yet to be named are to have some originality, something of the spirit of the region in which they are situated, show in their