Footprints of the Red Men / Indian geographical names in the valley of Hudson's river, the valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: their location and the probable meaning of some of them.

Author of History of the Indian Tribes of Hudson's River.
Indian place-names are not proper names, that is unmeaning words, but significant appellatives each conveying a description of the locality to which it belongs. — Trumbull.
PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES
OF THE
New York State Historical Association.
Copyrighted by the
NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION.
1906.
The locatives of the Indian geographical names which have been handed down as the names of boundmarks or of places or tribes, are properly a subject of study on the part of all who would be familiar with the aboriginal geography of a district or a state. In many cases these names were quite as designative of geographical centers as are the names of the towns, villages and cities which have been substituted for them. In some cases they have been wisely retained, while the specific places to which they belonged have been lost. In this work special effort has been made, first, to ascertain the places to which the names belonged as given in official records, to ascertain the physical features of those places, and carry back the thought to the poetic period of our territorial history, when the original drapery in which nature was enveloped under the dominion of the laws of vegetation, spread out in one vast, continuous interminable forest, broken here and there by the opened patches of corn-lands and the wigwams and villages of the redmen; secondly, to ascertain the meanings of the aboriginal names, recognizing fully that, as Dr. Trumbull wrote, They were not proper names or mere unmeaning marks, but significant appellatives conveying a description of the locatives to which they were given. Coming down to us in the crude orthographies of traders and unlettered men, they are not readily recognized in the orthographies of the educated missionaries, and especially are they disguised by the varying powers of the German, the French, and the English alphabets in which they were written by educated as well as by uneducated scribes, and by traders who were certainly not very familiar with the science of representing spoken sounds by letters. In one instance the same name appears in forty-nine forms by different writers. Many names, however, have been recognized under missionary standards and their meanings satisfactorily ascertained, aided by the features of the localities to which they were applied; the latter, indeed, contributing very largely to their interpretation. Probably the reader will find geographical descriptions that do not apply to the places where the name is now met. The early settlers made many transfers as well as extensions of names from a specific place to a large district of country. It must be remembered that original applications were specific to the places which they described even though they were generic and applicable to any place where the same features were referred to. The locatives in Indian deeds and original patents are the only guide to places of original application, coupled with descriptive features where they are known.