A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

"Some shattered berg, that, pale and lone,
Drifts from the white north to the tropic zone,
And in the burning day
Melts peak by peak away,
Till on some rosy even
It dies, with sunlight blessing it."

This instance may be taken as a parable, suggesting the history embodied in names of localities, lakes, straits, rivers, cities, hamlets, States. Those names are the débris of a dead era; and for one, I can not escape the wonder and the pathos of these shattered yesterdays, which have a voice, calling, as in hoarse whispers sad with tears, "We are not, but we were."

Though we are little given to so esteeming the study, there is romance in geography, learned by us when lads and lasses—not because we would, but because we must—and such study was difficult and unsavory. The catalogue of names we learned, perforce, was dreary as the alphabet; and not a memory of pleasure lingers about the book in which we studied, save that, in cramped, sprawling hand, upon the margin is written the name of some little sweetheart beside our own,—and dead long since. No, geography was not romantic. That was a possession we never suspected. But romance is ubiquitous, like flowers of spring, sheltering where we little anticipate.

To a lover of history, however, few studies will prove so fascinating as a study of names in geography. Finding a few at random, feel the thrill of the history they embody—history and reminiscence: Providence, Roger Williams named the city so when himself was a refugee; Fort Wayne, named for General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, who destroyed the Indian scourge in the Northwest Territory in 1792; Raleigh, so yclept for that chiefest friend of American colonization among Englishmen, Sir Walter Raleigh; Council Grove, because, in the Indian days, there, in a grove—rare in the prairie country of Kansas—the Red Men met for counsel; Astoria, bearing name of that famous fortune-maker in the fur country of the West and North; Buffalo Lake, reminding us that there the buffalo tramped in days seeming now so remote, when the buffalo rode, like a mad cavalry troop, across the wide interior plains of our continent; Eagle River, for here this royal bird used to love to linger as if it were his native stream. These are the scattered, miscellaneous reminiscences of men and acts, and things and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light, this name embodies. What an archive of history does such a name become! Portage is a name pregnant with memories of the old days of discovery, when America was still an unknown limit. "Grand Portage" you shall see on the map, neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see, as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders when navigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over the watershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-bark canoe once more. Prairie is another word full of interest. Pampas is a word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America; while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian word for field. The words are synonyms, but come from different hemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a word descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on the flower-sown, green meadows that swayed in the wind like some emerald sea? So the Incas have christened the plains of South America, and the French adventurer the plains of North America! Though, who that crosses our prairies, sweet with green, and lit with flowers like lamps of many-colored fires, thinks he is speaking the speech of the French trapper of long ago? Savannah is an Indian word, meaning meadow, and gives name to these dank meadowlands under warmer skies, where reeds and swamp-grasses grow; and the name of Savannah in Georgia is thus bestowed. How much we owe! Who has not helped us? Nor does the traveler through the castellated steeps of the "Bad Lands" know, nor probably does he care, that this caption came from the far-traveling French trapper, whose venturesome and tireless feet have made him at home in all places on our continent. How valuable, however, must be these names to one who cares to familiarize himself with the knowledge and romance of those pioneers of geography! Of like origin is "butte." The voyager saw those isolated peaks, too high to be called hills and too low to be called mountains, and said they are buttes (knolls)—names which cling to them as tenaciously as their shadows.

In a word, I have found this study a breath blown from far mountain ranges of history; and this breath upon the face has made an hour of life grow young and beautiful, for which reason I now write the story of my pleasure. The North American continent lends itself with peculiar grace to such a study as is here suggested, because its story lies under the eyes of history. 'Twas scarcely an hour ago, in the world's day, since Columbus found out this continent, and, with a giant's hand, swung its huge doors inward for the centuries to enter; and all those discoveries are our commonplace knowledge. What tribes were here, Prescott and Parkman have told us in thrilling narratives; and columns of eager colonists we have seen press their way along the seashore, into forests, over mountains, across deserts, never halting, save to catch breath as a climber of a mountain does,—on, on, till a continent is white with the tents of millions. But the Indian aborigine, for whom the tepee was portable habitation, and the stretch of plain and hill and lake and river, hunting-ground or battle-ground,—the Indian is mainly the reminiscence of an old man's straggling speech; and these names he has left, clinging to lake and river and hamlet, are his memorial. In Montezuma's empire, where once a barbaric splendor held court and set in tragic splendor, lurid even yet at these centuries' remove, what is left save a vocabulary or a broken idol lying black and foreboding in some mountain stream? Or those discoverers whose adventurous deeds are part of the world's chosen treasure, what but their names are written on the streams or hills? The import of these observations is this, that from American geography we may, with reasonable accuracy and detail, decipher this romantic history. In those newer parts of our continent names have too often lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save in isolated instances. The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" are monotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short of sacrilege. In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be a scramble for names of any sort. Places multiply, imagination is asleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet, even in such a dearth of originality and poetry, scant names flash out which remind you of the morning names in our continent's history. A Springdale reminds you that colonists here found a dale, gladdened with living springs; or an Afton suggests how some exiled Scot salved his heart by keeping near his exile a name he loved. Our day will, in the main, attach names for simple convenience, as they put handles on shovels. Such names, of course, are meaningless. The day for inventing names is past, or seems so. We beg or borrow, as the surveyor who marched across the State of New York, with theodolite and chain and a classical atlas, and blazed his way with Rome, and Illyria, and Syracuse, and Ithaca,—a procedure at once meaningless and dense. Greece nor Rome feels at home among us, nor should they.

History is a method of remembrance, and names are a method of remembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end. When the Saxon, sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his new home Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so, Essex and Wessex and Sussex. In like manner, emigrants from various shores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dear land from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over those earlier colonies, you shall see names—aboriginal and imported—and so learn, in an infallible way, who first pitched tents on that soil. This tracking dead races over seas by the local designations they have left has always fascinated my thought. Those names are verily planted in the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die. Through centuries of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as a Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals, are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did minstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and where the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviating fidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped and the Roman argent eagle flashed back morning to the sun. Coin is a contraction for "colonia," indicating that at the place so designated a Roman colonia received honors at the hands of the Roman Senate. In other words, these locative terminals are as certainly bequeathed England by the Roman occupancy as is London Tower. "Ton" is historical too, but is footprint of another passing race—namely the Gaul, defeated of Caesar on many a bloody field—and is a contraction of "tuin," meaning garden, appearing in Ireland as "dun," meaning garrison, both indicating an inclosure, and so becoming a frequent terminal for names of cities, as Huntingtuin or tun, probably originally a hunting-tower or hamlet. A second form of "ton" is our ordinary "town," which, as often as we use, we are speaking the tongue of the Trans-Alpine Gauls, taking a syllable from the word of a half-forgotten people. From yet another source is the locative "ham." Chester is of Roman origin, tun is of Gaelic; but "ham" is Anglo-Saxon, and means village, whence the sweet word home. Witness the use of this suffix in Effingham and the like. "Stoke" and "beck" and "worth" are also Saxon. "Thorpe" and "by" are Danish, as in Althorp and Derby. These reminiscent instances from over seas will serve to illuminate the thought under discussion—the historical element embodied in the names of localities. As in these three locatives we track three distinct peoples through England, we may, by the same method, fall on the footprints of divers civilizations in our New World.

Thus far we have touched at random, as one does on a holiday. Now, seriously, as on a journey of discovery, may we take staff in hand to trace, if possible, the elusive march of populations by the ashes of their campfires, as Evangeline did the wanderings of Gabriel, her beloved.

The Dutch, more's the pity, have left scant memorials of their American empire. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" has effectually laughed them out of court; but, notwithstanding, they were mighty men, whose idiosyncrasies we readily catch at as a jest, but whose greatness breaks on us slowly, as great matters must. "Kill" was a Dutch word, meaning creek, a terminal appearing in many of the few words they have left us, such as Fishkill, Peekskill, Wynantskill, Catskill. Along the banks of streams, with names like these, one could see ragged Rip Van Winkle, with his dog and gun, with shambling hunter's gait, or come silently on solemn Dutch burghers, solemnly playing ninepins in the shadows. Brooklyn (Breuchelin) is Dutch, as are Orange, Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, Vanbrunt, Staatsburg, Rotterdam, Hague, Nassau, Walloonsack, Yonkers, and Zurich. Wallabout, a borough of Brooklyn (Waalbogt), means Walloon's Bay, thus having a religio-historical significance. Nor dare we omit that river, noble as an epic, named after a Dutch discoverer, who, first of Europeans, flung the swaying shadows of foreign sails on its beautiful waters. Hudson is a prince among triumphant and adventurous discoverers. And I never sail past the Palisades, by summer or gorgeous autumn, when all the hills are blood and flame, without reverting in thought to Hudson, who gave the stream to our geography and his name to the stream, nor forget that he was set adrift in the remote and spacious sea, which likewise bears his name; though well it may, for it is doubtless his grave; for, set adrift by mutineers, he was crushed by icefloes, or fell asleep in death in that winter sea. But Hudson River and Hudson Bay will make him as immortal as this continent. All men shall know by them that Heinrich Hudson hath sailed this way. So much, then, for following along dim paths once trod by a Dutch burgher's tramp of empire.

Of the Swedes, who, under their victorious king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant, settled New Sweden (now known as New Jersey), are left only dim footprints, the path of them being all but lost, though, fortunately, sufficiently plain to trace the emigration of a race. These Swedish emigrants and founders of what they hoped would prove a State, never attained a supremacy, their enemies, who were their immediate neighbors and fellow-emigrants from Protestant States, so speedily overwhelming them—first the Dutch, succeeded by the inevitable Saxon. Bergen, the first Swedish settlement, in comparative isolation, still whispers the story of Gustavus Adolphus's statecraft and vision, and seems a solitary survivor of an old camp of emigrants voyaging by stream and plain, and all slain by famine and disease and Indian stealth and pioneer's hardship, save himself. Nordhoff and Stockholm and Pavonta are scattered reminders of an attempted sovereignty which is no more.

Protestantism made valorous attempt to preempt this New World of North America for civil and religious liberty and the Reformed faith. A look at their breadth of plan must be a benefit to us and a praise to those who planned so large things for the glory of God. That they acted independently of each other shows how wide-spread this thirst for liberty and this love for the kingdom of God. I know few things that stir me more. Swedish Lutherans settled New Sweden; the Dutch Walloons settled New Holland; the Baptists, Rhode Island; the Quakers, Pennsylvania; the Huguenots, the Carolinas; the Puritans, New England. The Anglican Church only incidentally, and not of intention, settled Virginia. Catholicism seized and holds South America, Central America, and Mexico, but in the United States was represented only by the colony of Maryland, planted by Lord Baltimore, and bears mark of his religious faith in naming his plantation after Mary, the Catholic queen, his own name appearing in the name of its present metropolis, Baltimore. In days when in England the Catholic was under ban, he founded this colony as a Canaan for Roman Catholics. Spanish Catholics worked their way along the Pacific Coast, and French Catholicism sailed up the St. Lawrence and down the Mississippi, though the latter territory now belongs to the Protestant faith. Admiral Coligny, an illustrious son of France, attempted planting the Huguenots in America, though this colonizing experiment has left scant memorial of Huguenot occupancy, because the destruction of this colony by Spanish Catholics was so sudden and so utter; yet the Carolinas are witness to this hazard and hope, bearing the name of the infamous King Charles IX. How terrible is the irony when we recall how this same ruler, after whom Coligny named his land of refuge for persecuted Protestants, was author of the most malignant religious massacre on record—the Massacre of St. Bartholomew! In Beaufort and Carteret may be discovered reminiscences of an expedition whose close was disastrous, yet heroic.