Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 21.djvu/361



JONATHAN CARVER AND THE NAME OREGON 349

of the Woods, one of which rivers was the Oregon; and it is apparent that he did not personally visit those sources. Such a statement seems on the face of it ridiculous, but at the period of the Revolutionary War, very few people in England knew about that part of our continent, and such a proposition ap- peared as a great discovery and helped the sale of his book wonderfully. A map in the book shows this river as emptying into the Pacific Ocean at an opening in the coast marked "discovered by Aguilar" and along the lower course of the stream appears the name "River of the West." It may be re- marked that he does not say in direct words that the Indians told him the name for this river.

In arguing that the name Oregon was an Indian place name, several fundamental facts are to be taken into account.

First, to the Columbia River proper it is not known that the Indians applied any particular name. Probably no ex- plorer more intelligent as to Indian life was ever on the Co- lumber River than David Thompson, who discovered its source in 1807, and traversed its entire length in 1811 ; and nowhere does he mention any Indian place name as applied to it.

Second, it was not the custom among the Indians to use the same name with reference to the entire length of any river; often on a short stream one name was used near its mouth and another nearer its source. The Walla Walla River is a case in point : where it emerges from the foothills it bore the name Tum-a-lum. Captain Carver, on the plains of Minne- sota, would have heard only a name of one of the tributaries to the Columbia; the Snake, Salmon, Missouletka (Clark Fork) or the Saleesh (Flathead). And Green River may be added to the list as then being considered a possible tributary to the Columbia.

Third, the English letter "R" is not common to Indian dialects of the tribes of the Rocky Mountains or the plains. Captain Carver set down in his book a vocabulary of Sioux and Chippeway words directly obtained from those tribes, and in but one of his words does the letter "R" appear.