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350

T. C. ELLIOTT

Fourth, it was the custom of the Indians to use place names descriptive of some physical feature of a stream or of the region through which it flowed.

As coming from the Indians a Shoshone word Ogwa, mean- ing "water," has been most often mentioned as being relevant. This word appears in the notes of the early explorer La Verendrye (1742-44), in the form Karoskiou, which the late Granville Stuart 8 of Montana interpreted as a rendering of Kanarogwa, the Shoshone name for Green River. John E. Rees, 9 of Idaho, has recently urged the combination of Ogwa with Peon, meaning "West" as an exact Shoshone designa- tion meaning "River of the West," which name had been written in French upon maps for thirty years before Carver's time. Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor, in Bancroft's History of Oregon, also mentioned some ramifications of this word Ogwa.

Reasoning from analogy, it does not seem probable that Captain Carver heard any such name when among the Sioux that winter near the Saint Peter River. Charlevoix, nearly fifty years earlier, had closely questioned these Sioux as to any river flowing into the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean), but noted no name for the same, 10 and not one of the many other records left by the French makes any mention of it, as far as now known. Nearly thirty-five years later, Lewis and Clark spent the winter with the Mandan Sioux on the Missouri River four hundred and fifty miles further west, and were keen for any information of this sort, but their journals record nothing as to such a name being current, or even mentioned by Sacajawea, who had been born west of the Rocky Mountains. It is more likely that the name would have been communicated by Assiniboine and Cree Indians at Grand Portage on Lake Superior, but the same reasoning applies there. When, prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition, so little had become really known about the streams and mountains and valleys, between the Mandan Villages and the sources of the Missouri, does it seem probable that the Indian name of a river, beyond the Rocky Mountains, seeped through to the ears of Jonathan

8 See Vol. I, Contributions of Historical Society of Montana.

Q Printed in this issue of Quarterly of Oregon Historical Society.

10 See Collections of State Historical Society of Wisconsin, vol. 16, pp. 417-18.