Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/368



340 J. NEILSON BARRY

Alabama is an unusually pleasing Indian word and means thicket clearings in allusion to the agricultural efforts of the aborigines. The name of Indian tribes have been preserved in Utah ; Oklahoma, red people ; Iowa, sleepy ones, and Illinois, men, the two latter having French spelling. And lastly while Indiana is not of Indian origin, it refers to that race.

Other Indian place names have given rise to a class of words in our language which have entirely changed their original meaning. Hobo applied by early New Yorkers to the poorer whites who settled across the Hudson at Hoboken, the pipe country, where the Indians had obtained clay for their pipes, and in a similar way Tuckahoe, a vegetable substance eaten by Indians became an epithet for the poor whites of southern Virginia. Wabash, gleaming white, was applied to the river which flowed over limestone beds and became a synonym for cheat on account of alleged delinquencies of some of the first white settlers.

When the mineral springs known to the Indians as Saratoga became a fashionable resort, that name was applied to the potato chips which were first popular there, and also to the huge trunks in which the belles of that day transported their hoop skirts. In a similar way a fashionable coat was named from Tuxedo, wolf, in New Jersey, while Rockaway, sandy loam, in the same state became the name for a carriage. Conestoga in Pennsylvania, named from an Indian tribe, gave its name to the huge wagons used before the advent of rail- roads and also to the draft horses which drew the conestoga wagons, while a shortened form, stogie, is the name for a kind of cigar. Podunk, a neck or corner of land, has become familiar through its use by burlesque writers.

It is natural that the white men should have retained the Indian names of things peculiar to this country, such as ter- rapin, made famous by Uncle Remus ; mahogany, chinkapin, a small chestnut greatly prized by children in the south ; pecan, a nut of wider popularity; catalpha and pohickory, or hickory, which became the nickname for one of our presidents. Per-