Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/375

 Moosilatikc.

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��And then came some intolerable degenerations, the first of wiiich we find on Dr. Dwiiiiit's map, 1824, of dividing the name into two words, thus: IMoose Hillock. J. R. Dodge's map of New Hampshire, 18")4, map of Grafton county, 1860, and Wat- son's map of New England, also so divide the name. This is a bad mis- nomer, for the mountain is not a hil- lock — little hill — at all, but a grand crest nearly a mile high.

For variety, Morse's Geography, 1811, and J. E. Worcester's Elements of Geography, 1832, make the name "Moose-hillock," — worse yet.

Morse, in his American Gazeteer, as we have seen, gives the origin of the name. From his account we should judge that he, as well as Dr. D wight, got his information from some imaginative gentleman of New- bui-y, ^'t. Yet there is a grain of propriety in the name Moose-hillock, for all the early settlers in the region round about the mountain testified that " it was a remarkable ranse for moose," the last of which were killed in 1803. But we think Goodrich is right, when he says "Mooshelock " is called by a corru[)tion " Moosehil- lock."

We once read a newspaper article by some romantic writer, wlio had seen Holland's Moo-se-lock and Bel- knap's Moo-she-lock. It stated that an Indian hunter, traversinor the dark forests high up in a ravine of the mountain, came across two bull moose. They had been fighting, and had got their horns inseparably in- terlocked. They had eaten nothinor for many days, and being much ema- ciated, the hunter easily killed them for their hides. Tellins: the storv in

��poor English, he said, — "Moose he lock his horns up there ;" and Hol- land, hearing it, gave to the peak the name "Mooselock Mount"." To the writer this probably was a beautiful legend, but to us i)ure fiction.

In 18.-)2, Judge C. E. Potter, in the " Farmer's Monthly Visitor," Vol.

XII, p. 354, said, — '* The name of the towering Moosilauke, with its bald peak of rock, is an Indian word, meaning the ' Bald Place,' derived from moosi, bald, and auJce, a place, the letter I being thrown in for the sake of euphony." The judge was a great student of the history of the Indians, and of their manners, customs, and language.

In Cotton's Vocabulary' of Indian, Language, Mass. Hist. Coll., Vol. XXII, p. 1G8, he found the name ■moosi, bald, and in Roger Williams's Key to the Indian Language, iJem, Vol. Ill, p. 220, aaJce, a, place ; and having seen Holland's "Moo-se-lock," and Belknap's "Moo-she-lock," he concluded, with Goodrich, that Moose- hillock was a corruption, and that Holland's JMoo-se-lock was identical with the Indian <words Moosi-l-auke (idem sonans) ; and that Holland so spelled the word Moo-se-lock, l)ecause he was not well acquainted with Cot- ton's and Williams's Indian si)elliug- books. Any one familiar with the spelling of Indian names knows that there are as many wavs of snellino- them as there are learned wu'iters who try to write them.

Potter's " jNIoosilauke" came into use slowly. He spells it Moosilauke again in 1853 in his Visitor, Vol.

XIII, p. 323 ; and in 1857, in a letter to the writer, he said, — " Moosilauke is from moosi (bald) and auke (a place),

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