Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/369



INDIAN WORDS IN OUR LANGUAGE 341

simmon is another tree the bright rosy fruit of which has a most unpleasantly astringent effect upon the mouths of the unsophisticated who have been induced to try to eat one. Sequoia or redwood, and tamarack or hackmatack, are well known in the west, as well as the mesquit of the plains.

Everyone is familiar with potato, tomato, cocoa, chocolate, tapioca, gauva and ocrea. The delicious grapes, catawba and scuppernong preserve Indian names which were never so as- sociated by the red men. Tolu gum is popular with many, and camas is well known in the west. When a little boy asks the riddle : If you toss up a pumpkin what comes down ? he probably has no idea that squash is an Indian word.

Indian corn is now seldom called maize, but hominy is in common usage and pone, a cake of corn bread, is also used in the south, while succotash is everywhere used for stewed corn and lima beans. Samp, supawn, or Indian pudding, and sag- amite or sagimity are becoming obsolete. Johnie cake is a corruption of journey cake, formerly made by travelers in the woods who spread corn meal dough on a piece of wood and cooked it before the campfire, a custom probably learned from the Indians.

Indian words are often unpronunciable and the early set- tlers evidently decided that Indian sugar with any other name would taste as sweet so they called it maple sugar, unscrup- ulous manufacturers also called various substances "maple sugar" prior to the passage of the pure food law. The sounds emitted by the red men are not always capable of reproduction by white men, consequently some Indian usages were adopted without the names. It may be well enough to call a spade a spade, but the rules does not apply when an Indian has named a thing, this was probably the case with the snow shoe, the white men adopted the idea but they preferred an English ap- pellation; the same appears to have been the case with clam- bake, and the Indian game la crosse with its French name. Blazing a trail and girding trees to clear land also originated with the Indians. Indian file refers to a custom of the Indians