As for the Connecticut River, had not Thoreau done it the service Irving had rendered long before to the Hudson?—had he not given it a right to be set down in the geography of literature? It is well that we should be reminded now and again that the map which the lover of letters has in his mind’s eye is different by a whole world from the projection which the school-boy smears with his searching finger, since the tiny little rivers on whose banks great men grew to maturity, the Tiber and the Po, the Seine and the Thames, flow across its pages with a fuller stream than any Kongo or Amazon. And on this literary map the names of not a few American rivers and hills and towns are now inscribed.
It is fortunate that many of the American places most likely to be mentioned in the poetic gazetteer have kept the liquid titles the aborigines gave them. “I climbed one of my hills yesterday afternoon and took a sip of Wachusett, who was well content that Monadnock was out of the way,” wrote Lowell in a letter. “How lucky our mountains (many of them) are in their names, tho they must find it hard to live up to them sometimes! The Anglo-Saxon sponsor would Nicodemus ’em to nothing in no time.” It will be pitiful if the Anglo-Saxons on the Pacific coast allow Mount Tacoma to be Nicodemused to Mount Rainier, as the Anglo-Saxons of the Atlantic coast allowed Lake Andiatarocte to be Nicodemused into Lake George. Fenimore Cooper strove in vain for the acceptance of Horicon as the name of this lovely sheet of water, which the French discoverer called the Lake of the Holy Sacrament.
Marquette spoke of a certain stream as the River of the Immaculate Conception, altho the Spaniards were already familiar with it as the River of the Holy Spirit; and later La Salle called it after Colbert; but an Algonquin word meaning “many waters” clung to it always; and so we know it now as the Mississippi. The Spaniard has been gone from its banks for more than a hundred years, and the Frenchman has followed the Indian, and the Anglo-Saxon now holds the mighty river from its source to its many mouths; but the broad stream bears to-day the name the red men gave it. And so also the Ohio keeps its native name, tho the French hesitated between St. Louis and La Belle Rivière as proper titles for it. Cataraqui is one old name for an American river, and Jacques Cartier accepted for this stream another Indian word, Hochelaga, but (as Professor Hinsdale reminded us) “St. Lawrence, the name that Cartier had given to the Gulf, unfortunately superseded it.”
Much of the charm of these Indian words, Atchafalaya, Ohio, Andiatarocte, Tacoma, is due no doubt to their open vowels; but is not some of it to be ascribed to our ignorance of their meanings? We may chance to know that Mississippi signifies “many waters” and that Minnehaha can be interpreted as “laughing water,” but that is the furthermost border of our knowledge. If we were all familiar with the Algonquin dialects, I fancy that the fascination of many of these names would fade swiftly. And yet perhaps it would not, for we could never be on as friendly terms with the Indian language as we are with our own; and there is ever a suggestion of the mystic in the foreign tongue.
We engrave Souvenir on our sweetheart’s bracelet or brooch; but the French for this purpose prefer Remember. “The difficulty of translation lies in the color of words,” Longfellow declared. “Is the Italian ruscilletto gorgoglioso fully rendered by gurgling brooklet? Or the Spanish pojaros vocingleros by garrulous birds? Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only the fascination of foreign and unfamiliar sounds; and to the Italian and Spanish ear the English words may seem equally beautiful.”
After the death of the Duke of Wellington, Longfellow wrote a poem on the ‘Warden of the Cinque Ports’; and to us Americans there was poetry in the very title. And yet it may be questioned whether the Five Ports are necessarily any more poetic than the Five Points or the Seven Dials. So also Sanguelac strikes us as far loftier than Bloody Pond, but is it really? I have wondered often whether to a Jew of the first century Aceldama, the field of blood, and Golgotha, the place of a skull, were not perfectly commonplace designations, quite as common, in fact, as Bone Gulch or Hangman’s Hollow would be to us, and conveying the same kind of suggestion.
We are always prone to accept the unknown as the magnificent,—if I may translate the Latin phrase,—to put a higher value on the things veiled from us by the folds of a foreign language. The Bosporus is a more poetic place than Oxford, tho the meaning of both names is the same. Montenegro fills our ears and raises our expectations higher than could any mere Black Mountain. The “Big River” is but a vulgar nickname, and yet we accept the equivalent Guadalquivir and Rio Grande; we even allow ourselves sometimes to speak of the Rio Grande River—which is as tautological as De Quincey declared the name of Mrs. Barbauld to be. Bridgeport is as prosaic as may be, while Alcantara has a remote and romantic aroma, and yet the latter word signifies only “the bridge.” We can be neighborly, most of us, with the White Mountains; but we feel a deeper respect for Mont Blanc and the Weisshorn and the Sierra Nevada.
Sometimes the hard facts are twisted arbitrarily to force them into an imported falsehood. Elberon, where Garfield died, was founded by one L. B. Brown, so they say, and the homely name of the owner was thus contorted to make a seemingly exotic appellation for the place. And they say also that the man who once dammed a brook amid the pines of New Jersey had three children, Carrie, Sally, and Joe, and that he bestowed their united names upon Lake Carasaljo, the artificial piece of water on the banks of which Lakewood now sits salubriously. In Mr. Cable’s ‘John March, Southerner,’ one of the characters explains: “You know an ancestor of his founded Suez. That’s how it got its name. His name was Ezra and hers was Susan, don’t you see?” And I have been told of a town on the Northern Pacific Railroad which the first comers called Hell-to-Pay, and which has since experienced a change of heart and become Eltopia.
In the third quarter of the nineteenth century a thirst for self-improvement raged among the villages of the lower Hudson River, and many a modest settlement thought to better itself and to rise in the world by the assumption of a more swelling style and title. When a proposition was made to give up the homely Dobbs Ferry for something less plebeian, the poet of ‘Nothing to Wear’ rimed a pungent protest:
They say “Dobbs” ain’t melodious;
It’s “horrid,” “vulgar,” “odious”;
In all their crops it sticks;
And then the worse addendum
Of “Ferry” does offend ’em
More than its vile prefix.
Well, it does seem distressing,
But, if I’m good at guessing,
Each one of these same nobs
If there was money in it,
Would ferry in a minute,
And change his name to Dobbs!
That’s it—they’re not partic’lar
Respecting the auric’lar
At a stiff market rate;
But Dobbs’s special vice is
That he keeps down the prices
Of all their real estate!
A name so unattractive
Keeps villa-sites inactive,
And spoils the broker’s jobs;
They think that speculation
Would rage at “Paulding’s Station,”
Which stagnates now at “Dobbs.”