During this period Audubon sojourned with him for some time and spoke of him not only as an agreeable companion but also as a friend who gave him valuable information and enthusiastic assistance. One of his frequent companions at Fort Union was the Belgian priest, Father De Smet. Their correspondence was continued after De Smet had returned to Belgium. (See Life, Letters and Travels of Father De Smet, Chittenden and Richardson, 4 vols., New York, 1905.)
Several plausible but nevertheless quite unsatisfactory etymologic interpretations of the name, Assiniboin, have been made by a number of writers. Among these interpretations are “Stone Roasters,” “Stone Warriors,” “Stone Eaters,” etc. These are unfortunately historically improbable. It appears that difficulty arises from a misconception of the real meaning of the limited or qualified noun it contains, namely, boin. This element appears in literature, dialectically varied, as pour, pouar, poil, poual, bwân, pwan, pwât, etc. Evidently, it was the name of a group of people, well known to the Cree and the Chippewa tribes, whom they held in contempt and so applied this noun, boin, bwân, pwât, etc., to them. The signification of its root bwâ(n) or pwâ(t) is “to be powerless, incapable, weak.” So that Pwâtak or Bwânŭg (animate plurals) is a term of contempt or derision, meaning “The Weaklings, The Incapable Ones.” This name was in large measure restricted to the nomadic group of Siouan tribes in contradistinction from the sedentary or eastern group of Siouan peoples who were called Nadowesiwŭg, a term appearing in literature in many variant spellings. The name Dakota in its restricted use is the appellation of the group of tribes to which the name Bwânŭg, etc., was applied. This fact indicates that the Assiniboin, or Assinibwânŭg, were recognized as a kind of Dakota or Nakota peoples. Nakota is their own name for themselves. The rupture of the Dakota tribal hegemony thrust some of these peoples northward to the rocky regions about Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan and Assiniboin rivers. So it was these who were called Rock or Stone Dakota (i. e., Bwânŭg). It would thus appear that the rupture occurred after there were recognized the two groups of Siouan tribes in the past, namely, the nomadic or western, the Dakota, and the sedentary or eastern, the Nadowesiwŭg of literature.
Traditionally, the Assiniboin people are an offshoot of the Wazikute gens of the Yanktonai (Ihañktonwanna) Dakota.
Dr. F. V. Hayden in his “Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley” says that Mr. Denig was “an intelligent trader, who resided for many years at the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers as superintendent of Fort Union, the trading post for the Assiniboins.” Of the vocabulary of the Assiniboin language, recorded by Mr. Denig, Doctor Hayden wrote that it is “the most important” one theretofore collected. From the citation from Mr. Denig’s description of Fort Union in a preceding paragraph it appears that Doctor Hayden is in error in making Mr. Denig superintendent of the fort rather than of the office of the American Fur Co. at that point.
In one of his letters Reverend Father Terwecoren wrote that Mr. Denig, of the St. Louis Fur Co., is “a man of tried probity and veracity.”
From references in Audubon, Kurtz, De Smet, Hayden, and Schoolcraft, and as well from a perusal of this manuscript, it is evident that Mr. Denig was an exceptional man, and for more than 20 years was a prominent figure in the fur trade of the upper Missouri River.
In this summary report to Governor Stevens Mr. Denig has succinctly embodied in large measure the culture, the activities, the customs, and the beliefs of the native tribes who occupied the upper Missouri River 75 years ago, more than 75 per cent of which has been lost beyond recovery by contact with the white man. For more than 40 years the native life with which Mr. Denig was in contact has been largely a thing of the past, so that it is futile to attempt to recover it from the remnants of the tribes who formerly traded with Mr. Denig at Fort Union.
In addition to preparing this report to Governor Stevens Mr. Denig also recorded a Blackfoot Algonquian vocabulary of about 70 words, a Gros Ventres Siouan vocabulary, and an Assiniboin Siouan vocabulary of more than 400 words, which was published by Schoolcraft in his fourth volume.
From a letter written February 27, 1923, by Dr. Rudolph Denig, of 56 East Fifty-eighth Street, New York, N. Y., the following interesting biographical matter relating to the ancestry of Mr. Denig is taken:
The Denigs, or “Deneges,” trace their descent from one Herald Ericksen, a chieftain, or “smaa kongen,” of the Danish island of Manoe in the North Sea, from whose descendant Red Vilmar, about 1460, they derive an unbroken lineage. They were seafarers, commanding their own vessels, and engaged in trade in the North and Baltic Seas.