Excerpt from 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
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 manv cases these names were quite as designative of geographical cen ters as are the names of the towns, villages and cities which have been substituted for them. In some cases they have been wiselv retain-ed, while the specific places to which they belonged have been lost. In this work special effort has been made, firs-t, 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 interm inable forest, broken here and there by the opened patches of corn 1and-s and the Wigwams and villages of the redmen; secondly, to ascertain the meanings of the aboriginal names, recognizing fully that, as Dr. Trumbultl wrote, They were not proper names or mere unmeaning marks, but significant appella'tives conveying a descrip tion 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 mis sionaries, and especially are they disguised by the varying powers of the German, the French, and the English alphabet-s 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 for-ms by different writers. Many names, however, Ihave 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, conmums; minim Nines.
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