Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 21.djvu/333



OREGON MEANING, ORIGIN AND APPLICATION 321

Hidatsa and Sioux possessed, in their vocabularies, names for the Shoshonis which mean Grass Lodge People. 6

When visiting- with the Plains Tribes the Shoshonis talked about their own country. This is a natural supposition. No tribe could explain better, or as well as they, the great Rocky Mountain system, extending from Mexico northward for hun- dreds of miles, dividing the waters flowing east from those flowing west. They and their kinsmen occupied this region and lived all their lives in those mountains and could describe their rocky and crystalline natures better than any one. They knew better than others that the highest land west of the Mis- sissippi River was in those mountains and that there was a place within them that was the source of three very large streams, the Missouri, Columbia and Colorado, all taking their rise within a few miles of each other, and within the Yellow- stone National Park region where no Indian tribe ever dwelt, except the Tukurikas, a family of the Shoshonis. 7 That one of these rivers was a Ogwa pe-on", or the River of the West, undoubtedly meaning the "Columbia", the one flowing into the ocean, toward the setting sun. The other rivers were men- tioned, perhaps, but the "Columbia" appealed to the Shoshonis as it furnished him "Og-gi", or salmon, his principal food. They talked of the stream as the river out west or toward the west, at no time intending to give it a distinctive appellation. Had they wished to give it a name, the descriptive part of the word would have been placed first, as in the case of Snake River which, after immigration had formed the Oregon Trail, the Indian called "Po-ogwa" or Road River. As their rela- tives, the Moquis, lived adjacent to the Spaniards, the Sho- shonis had greater opportunities to know the Mexicans and became the first western tribe to possess horses which they procured from the Spaniard. They knew that the Mexican tribes possessed ornaments and utensils of gold, but such did not appeal to the Shoshoni as did bear claws and elk teeth. He knew where in these mountains this gold could be obtained, proven by the fact that he guided the white man to some of

6 Hodge's Handbook of American Indians, II, 556.

7 Ibid., 835.