Henry Zenk

Notes on Native American Place-names of the Willamette Valley Region

THE FIRST KNOWN DIRECT CONTACT between speakers of a lower–Columbia-River indigenous language and speakers of a European language occurred in 1792, when the American trading ship Columbia Redeviva, under Captain Robert Gray, succeeded in passing the treacherous shallows at the mouth of the Columbia River, anchoring near the village of Chinouk (or Chinoak) on the north bank of the river near modern Chinook, Washington. While the world now knows the great river "discovered" by Gray and his men by the name of their ship, the American and British seafaring traders who followed Gray's lead into this heretofore untapped source for the international fur market called the river by the name of the very first Native village encountered there — Chinook (historically usually pronounced \åchå-'nåk, chå, -'nük\). Like other Native names commented on here, the original narrow or local reference of the name Chinook was completely transformed as a result of contact. Originally a Lower Chehalis name of just one Chinookan village, "Chinook," in the course of time, came to designate Chinookan people in general, their tribal languages and dialects, and the intertribal hybrid lingua franca of the old Northwest — Chinook Jargon (or, following the current usage of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Oregon, where it is taught as a community heritage language, Chinuk Wawa) — not to mention a species of salmon and a warm, winter wind termed so by people from the Pacific Northwest coast all the way to interior Montana.

At the time of Gray's visit, the lower Columbia region was thickly populated by Native people speaking a diverse array of indigenous languages. That situation would change dramatically over the following forty years, as introduced diseases took their toll on vulnerable Native populations. An outbreak of malaria in 1830 sent the Native villages at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers and the greater Willamette Valley into a precipitous decline from which they never recovered.¹ The drastic social and economic marginalization of local Native people that followed has implications for the following notes on the Native presence in modern Willamette Valley region geographic names. American, British, and Canadian traders who first established permanent foreign settlements on the lower Columbia — beginning with the founding of Astoria in 1811 — devoted time and effort to learning the languages of their local Native trading partners, but they found the task daunting. Chinookan languages in particular had a well-deserved reputation for "extreme difficulty," as one early visiting scholar observed.² Communication was usually served by the easily acquired Chinuk Wawa, a hybrid medium whose ultimate origin — whether rooted in intertribal contact preceding the early seafarers' arrival or developed rapidly in response to that arrival — is still vigorously debated by scholars. The great depopulation of 1830–1834 reinforced the use of Chinuk Wawa, which became not only the usual medium of communication between local Natives and newly arrived settlers, but was also increasingly the principal medium of Native intertribal communication.

This detail of a map of tribal distribution in the greater Willamette Valley and surrounding areas is based on historical research by Robert L. Benson. Native names surviving as modern geographic names are spelled according to the recommendations of the Oregon Geographic Names Board. The usages of anthropologists and linguists may differ, as shown by many examples in this article.

"Aboriginal Oregon — Indian Tribes and Languages of Oregon, 1825, "published in Historical Atlas of Early Oregon (1973); courtesy of Judith Farmer

The main purpose of these "Notes" is to supplement Willamette Valley–region entries in Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis L. McArthur's standard reference, Oregon Geographic Names, with relevant information I have accumulated over the years from linguistic and ethnographic sources, many of which are not widely accessible.³ Those sources document the several indigenous languages originally spoken within this region as well as Chinuk Wawa. A handful of Native elders born into the era of Euro-American frontier expansion, which saw the virtual obsolescence of all Northwest Oregon indigenous languages and lifeways, are responsible for most of what we know about these languages. The professional scholars who left us written records of that knowledge were an even smaller handful, mostly divided between university professors and linguists attached to the Bureau of American Ethnology or to its successor agency, the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology. Table 1 lists the local languages they documented — excluding Chinuk Wawa, represented to some extent in all the major sources — along with the names of most of the Native elders who provided information and the scholars who preserved that information.⁴

TABLE 1: Selected Speakers and Scholar-Recorders
Languages Chinookan family: Lower Chinook Kathlamet Chinook Clackamas Upper Chinook Kalapuyan Family: Tualatin Northern Kalapuya Yamhill Northern Kalapuya Ahantchuyuk Central Kalapuya Santiam Central Kalapuya Luckiamute Central Kalapuya Marys River Central Kalapuya Southern Kalapuya (Yoncalla) Molala (isolated language)	Speakers Charles Cultee [unknown] Charles Cultee [unknown] Victoria Howard John Wacheno Peter Kenoyer Dave Yatchkawa Louis Kenoyer Louise Selkeah [unknown] John B. Hudson Eustace Howard [unknown] William Hartless Laura Albertson Tom Gilbert Stevens Savage Kate Chantelle Fred Yelkes, Sr. [unknown]	Scholar-Recorders Franz Boas (1894) W.E. Meyers (in Curtis, 1911) Franz Boas (1901) W.E. Meyers (in Curtis, 1911) Melville Jacobs (1929–1930, 1958–1959) Philip Drucker (1934) A.S. Gatschet (1877) A.S. Gatschet (1877) L.J. Frachtenberg (1915) Melville Jacobs (1936) L.J. Frachtenberg (1913–1914) A.S. Gatschet (1877) Melville Jacobs (1928–1936, 1945) Melville Jacobs (1928–1936) A.S. Gatschet (1877) L.J. Frachtenberg (1913–1914) Melville Jacobs (1928) Franz Boas (1890) L.J. Frachtenberg (1910–1911) Melville Jacobs (1927–1935) Philip Drucker (1934) Melville Jacobs (1927–1935) W.E. Meyers (in Curtis, 1911)
SOURCES: Compiled by the author; see note four for complete citation information.

On today's maps of the region, many Native words survive as English proper nouns attached to landscape features — rivers, creeks, valleys, mountains. Most modern geographic names based in tribal languages rather than in Chinuk Wawa are derived from named groups — villages and the region's loose conglomerations of villages called, for lack of a better term, "tribes." Like the name "Chinook" above, these were originally names adopted by foreigners — explorers followed by traders, traders followed by settlers — to provide orientation in a landscape already populated by established indigenous communities. They therefore reflect the interethnic milieu of early contact more than the cultures and worldview of the Native people themselves. In some cases, information about how the Native people named landscape features is available, but such information is usually lacking. Some features that foreign newcomers singled out for special attention — notably larger streams — were apparently not named at all by local Native people, or were referred to only by generic names. The Columbia River, for example, was referred to in a number of local languages as "the big water." Native people lived in a landscape filled with named features that reflected their own economic interests and religious beliefs.⁵ Few of those names were ever recorded, however, and fewer yet were adopted by the land's new occupiers.


		Victoria Howard (left) and Eustace Howard, photographed here in about 1930, were both born into the Grand Ronde community, where they lived for much of their lives. They supplied indigenous-language data to anthropologist Melville Jacobs. Courtesy of William R. Seaburg

Since Chinuk Wawa was used by both Natives and foreigners, most of the older geographic names of Chinuk Wawa origin (excluding untranslatable proper names owing their regional dissemination to Chinuk Wawa) come with meanings that were equally transparent to both sides.⁶ In those cases, the medium in which the names are preserved, rather than the names as such, betrays the original interethnic milieu of naming.

While considerable bodies of data have been preserved for the languages listed in Table 1, the work of analyzing and organizing those data still has a long way to go. Linguists would prefer to have authoritative dictionaries and grammars of all of the languages listed, but most currently available materials fall short of that standard. Additional work on the languages will no doubt cast additional light on some of the names considered here. In some cases, a better understanding of how the languages work may permit the formulation of new etymologies or the confirmation of less obvious ones. New proposals, however, should not be accepted without careful evaluation. Folk etymology — the attribution of form and/or meaning to names based on accidental or secondary resemblance — is a frequent, natural exercise indulged in by speakers of all languages. When people accept an accidental or secondary resemblance as real, their pronunciations of the affected name may be altered, blurring the distinction between a name's original form and its secondary reinterpretation. Owing to the incomplete state of our knowledge of most local indigenous languages, proposed etymologies from those languages call for special caution. Accordingly, unproven etymologies are cited in these notes only where deemed more plausible or where there is some evidence that they have influenced the historical form(s) or interpretation(s) of a name. Some names with especially problematic etymologies are listed in an appendix: Some Names of Obscure Origin.

I have taken special care to provide, wherever possible, phonetically-precise spellings indicative of Native pronunciations. In the case of names from tribal languages, such precision is essential for evaluating etymologies, whether historically attributed or proposed on linguistic grounds. In the case of Chinuk Wawa words, the citation of Native pronunciations underscores the fact that the Chinuk Wawa vocabulary of Natives tended to be larger, and to involve finer degrees of phonetic and semantic distinction, than that of English speakers.

The values of symbols used to indicate Native pronunciations of words from tribal languages and Chinuk Wawa are given in the accompanying guide to the phonetic alphabet (Table 2). The alphabet used is a simplified version of the technical orthographies favored by linguists, but it nonetheless still aims to show all phonetic features considered basic to the sound systems of the languages represented. The accompanying pronunciation instructions, however, should be taken only as a rough introduction to the sounds. English speakers often find certain of the sounds — especially, å, q, å, and the glottalized or exploded consonants — quite difficult to learn to pronounce correctly, lacking special training.

TABLE 2: Phonetic Alphabet

VOWELS:
a, i, u	when stressed (as á, í, ú) or long (as aa, ii, uu), these normally have the values in "father," "machine," and "loop" or "lope"; unstressed (as a, i, u), they have a tendency to "dull" to the values in "luck," "bit," and "put."
å	is the obscure vowel, as in logical. Written stressed (as å'), it usually has the value of u in "luck."
æ	has the value of a in "apple."
o	has the value of o in "note."
CONSONANTS:	as in English, except:
b, d, g	are not as strongly voiced as their English counterparts.
ch, sh	always have the contrasting values of ch in "church" and sh in "ship."
q, å	are uvular stops, made like English k, g, except with the root of the tongue touching the uvular region deep in the throat, rather than (as in English k, g) the body of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth.
x, å	are close to ch in German "icht" and "Bach," respectively, except that å is made with the tongue pulled back near the position of q, å, rather than (as in German "Bach") the tongue near the position of English k.
å	is a voiceless l made with a slight hissing sound. Try setting the mouth to say the English work "leap," but instead of saying the word, just blow gently.
tå	is like å, but made with the tongue initially in position for t.
å	is a glottal stop: that is, the catch in the throat heard between the first and second "oh" of English "oh-oh."
_'	(written in combination with a consonant letter, as in ch', t', ts', k', kw', tå', m', etc.) signifies a glottalized consonant, made by first building up slight air pressure in the throat (this is done by closing the glottis, in effect trapping air behind å), then using that pressure to add an increment of forcefulness to the articulation of the consonant in question. Just as, or just after the consonant is articulated, the glottis opens, adding to the overall acoustic effect, which varies between an audible "pop" or "crack," to a slight "catch" in the voice (the latter is especially true of Kalapuyan glottalized consonants, as well as of the so-called glottalized resonants such as m').
_w	(written in combination with a consonant letter, as in kw, qw, kw', qw', etc.) signifies that the consonant is articulated with the lips rounded (an example from English is the qu in "queen" and "squash").
SYMBOLS:
[ ]	indicate pronunciation in terms of the foregoing phonetic symbols.
/ /	indicate what linguists term phonemic spelling: the limiting of phonetic detail to features actually serving to distinguish meaning in the languages represented.
\ \	indicate English pronunciations spelled phonetically in the style of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.

BABY ROCK. According to a local source, this feature was named for an Indian tradition about dangerous beings frequenting the rock — "some animals that left the footprints of a baby." It was reported also that Charlie Tufti (see Tufti Mountain), a Molala Indian well-known in the area, would not go near the place.⁷ If, as seems entirely possible, the following information — from Fred Yelkes, Sr. (d. 1958), the last known speaker of the Molala language — refers to the same or a similarly conceived creature, Charlie Tufti's respect for the place is understandable:

/múupshææsh/ [described as:] at one time a human being, now turned into an animal, and now he has power to cause rain, or turn himself into a baby so that now you see baby tracks; or he can cause a person to lose his mind and follow him as one would a magnet and such a person attracted hopelessly to him would be lost, up in the wilderness about Mt. Hood — for example. A /háitælaufschi/ [seer] can try, if strong enough, to overpower the /múupshææsh/ and get a crowd of people to sit about, he'd "study," they would help "study" and so he'd try to find out where the lost person is. A /múupshææsh/ was not a disease. A /múupshææsh/ gets power over your mind, makes you all turned around, as if drunk. They are great to steal babies. They would turn into a fake baby or person (tho[ugh] not into animals). There are not lots of /múupshææsh/, just a few, and they have great power.⁸

BEAVERTON. The English name of this place, bestowed in recognition of "the existence nearby of a large body of land resulting from beaver dams," is basically identical in meaning to the name of the Tualatin Kalapuyan village that once stood there, /chagéip'i/ 'beaver-place'.⁹ In this as well as other instances on this list (see Cascade Range, Gopher Valley, and Sucker Creek), it is uncertain whether the convergence of English and indigenous names reflects sheer coincidence or a historical connection running one way or the other. One of A.S. Gatschet's Tualatin informants told him that /chagéip'i/ was named not only for the many beavers at the place but also because the people there resembled beavers: "tchakéipi [named so] because the people were stout, heavy-set people, hunters.... also many beavers there."¹⁰

CALAPOOIA RIVER, CALAPOOYA MOUNTAINS. In Chinuk Wawa and other local languages, /k'alapúya/ was the usual name for speakers of Kalapuyan languages, of which there were three: Northern or Tualatin-Yamhill Kalapuya, Central or Santiam–Marys River Kalapuya, and Southern or Yoncalla Kalapuya.¹¹ The name has also been more narrowly used to refer to all Central Kalapuyans or to one or another Central Kalapuyan group. In the Dayton Treaty of 1855, for example, the name "Calapooia band of Calapooias" designates the Ahantchuyuk or Pudding River tribe, which occupied French Prairie, the part of the Willamette Valley extending south from Champoeg to Salem.¹² The name evidently came into regional currency from Chinookan, where it has been recorded in the inflected forms /itk'alapúyawayksh/ (Clackamas dialect) and /itgalapúywiyuksh/ (Wasco and Wishram dialects). The stem forms themselves (/-k'alapúywa-/ and /-galapúywi-/), however, appear not to be Chinookan but of unknown origin.¹³

CAMAS SWALE. The English plant-name "camas" (for the camas lily, Camassia quamash) is applied to many geographic features in the West, including this one in Lane County. The ultimate source is clearly the Nez Perce name of the same plant, /qém'es/, notwithstanding George Gibbs's oft-cited explanation in terms of a Nootkan word he spells "chamass," said to mean 'fruit' or 'sweet'.¹⁴ The usual Chinuk Wawa form of the term, [lakamás], shows the influence of French-speaking voyageurs; although, according to Gibbs, "Kám-ass" is also an acceptable Chinuk Wawa form.

CASCADE RANGE. The Cascade Range was named by association with The Cascades, the great lower falls of the Columbia River submerged by Bonneville Dam in 1938.¹⁵ The Chinookan name for The Cascades was /kíshachk/ 'falls', providing another example of a feature bearing cross-translating indigenous and English names (see comment under Beaverton). Near the modern site of The Dalles in 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark heard Indians refer to falls on the Columbia River there as "timm" — that is, evidently, as [tåm(m)], a Chinookan onomatopoeic particle also used in Chinuk Wawa (see Tumwater). Since [tåm] is not the usual Chinookan word for 'falls', it is likely that Lewis and Clark heard it as Chinuk Wawa, which would make this the earliest documented use of a Chinuk Wawa word to refer to a geographical feature. Clark also christened Mount Hood "timm mountain," in effect predicting the future name of the mountain range in which it stands.¹⁶

CHAMPOEG. According to some historical sources, this was originally a Kalapuyan village name.¹⁷ Gatschet has "tchámpuik" as the name of "a little town in French Prairie" located near a hill called in Tualatin /chachímabúichuk/ 'place (in front of?) /búichuk/ (yampah, Perideridea sp.)'.¹⁸ While the name of the town and the name of the hill appear to be related, Gatschet's note is ambiguous as to whether "tchámpuik" is really a proper Kalapuyan form or just a Tualatin-speaker's pronunciation of the name of the town (pronounced variously by the early settlers: for example,åcham-'pü-ek\,åcham-'poåig\). The historical variants "Champooich" and "Champoicho" suggest that the name of the plant may explain the name of the town. On the one hand, many Kalapuyan place-names consist of a plant or animal name plus the Kalapuyan place-name marker, which in Central Kalapuya would be /cham-/ before /b/. On the other hand, the Central Kalapuya form of the plant name is recorded only as /-tbúichuk/, which should be preceded by /chan-/, not /cham-/. In common with other Oregon schoolchildren of my generation, I grew up hearing the name as åsham-'pü-å\, a pronunciation lent historical authority by Alexander McLeod's journal of 1828, where the name is spelled "Sam pouyia" and "Sampou yea."¹⁹ This pronunciation probably reflects the influence of French-speaking voyageurs (compare Willamette), who recognized a site in the vicinity they named campment du sable 'camp of sand'. A confusion or conflation of names, or an old folk etymology attributing the Indian name to French, may ultimately explain this more French- than Indian-sounding variant pronunciation. According to Gatschet, Native people gathered at Champoeg during summer to dig /búichuk/ at a particular nearby hill.

George Gibbs drew this picture of Champoeg, looking across the Willamette River from the north, in 1851. The park-like landscape of prairies interspersed with woodlands, which generally characterized the indigenous Willamette Valley, was a legacy of the Kalapuyans, whose practice of burning over the valley floor at the close of each summer had only recently discontinued when this drawing was made.

OHS neg., OrHi 444495-A

CHEHALEM CREEK/VALLEY. /chahéeålim/, meaning 'place to the outside', was the name of the Tualatin village at Chehalem Valley, which is now dominated by the town of Newberg.

CHEHULPUM CREEK. /cha(n)hálbam/ (/cha-/ yielding the Northern Kalapuya form, /chan-/ the Central Kalapuya form) refers to someplace 'upstream' or 'upland'. There was a /chanhálbam/ village on the forks of Santiam River, according to Gatschet.²⁰ The Kalapuyan name usually given for the Santiam tribe is /a(n)hálbam/ 'upstreamers' or 'uplanders'.

CHEMAWA. In Santiam Central Kalapuya, /chaméewiå/ means 'place of low-lying, frequently overflowed ground'. There are at least three different Willamette Valley locations to which Kalapuyans applied this term: a prairie north of Salem, located by Jacobs at Lake Labish (formerly a marshy lake just north of the city; Chemawa Indian School is not far away); a place at or near Forest Grove, west of Portland; and a place at or near Independence, south of Salem.²¹ It would not be surprising if there were originally more places so named, considering that, before being diked and drained for agriculture, the Willamette Valley was more or less one big /méewiå/. /méewiå/-places frequently had an abundance of camas, the most important Kalapuyan root crop.

CHEMEKETA. /chamígidi/ was the name of the Santiam village at Salem.

CHINTIMINI.Oregon Geographic Names identifies Chintimini as the "Indian name" of Marys Peak (see also Mouse Mountain).²² Gatschet recorded "tchatímanui" as the Tualatin name of a large mountain west of Corvallis; the corresponding Central Kalapuya form would have chan- in place of "tcha" (cha-).²³ Apparently in reference to Marys Peak, William Hartless — who dictated the Marys River dialect section of Kalapuya Texts— used /chanchínduu/, which is also the Central Kalapuya form of the name for Spirit Mountain near Grand Ronde.²⁴

CLACKAMAS. According to Michael Silverstein, an authority on the Chinookan languages, the Chinookan name for the Clackamas River region and people was /q'ímash/, recorded in the inflected forms /niq'ímashix/ 'Clackamas region' and /gitåáq'imash/ or /giåáq'imash/ 'people of Clackamas'.²⁵ In Chinuk Wawa, the name is usually heard as [åák'amas], which is the likeliest immediate source of the name's English form.

CROOKED FINGER PRAIRIE. The name Crooked Finger appears on the list of leading Molala men who signed the unratified Champoeg Treaty of 1851.²⁶ According to a highly dramatized account attributed to Dee Wright, a well-known local "character" of the turn of the last century, Crooked Finger attempted to organize a multi-tribal conspiracy against the country's new American settlers, who responded by ruthlessly attacking and massacring Indian men, women, and children. The precise nature of the fight Wright was apparently referring to — the so-called "Battle of the Abiqua," which took place at Abiqua Creek (see Appendix) in 1848 — has never been satisfactorily settled. The most comprehensive account of the event mentions neither a conspiracy nor a massacre.²⁷

DEVIL'S LAKE FORK. This stream drains the former Devil's Lake (sec. 31 T2N R5W, Washington and Tillamook Counties) and should not be confused with the coastal Devil's Lake (Lincoln County).²⁸ This Devil's Lake was about four miles north of South Saddle Mountain, called /chawáålakchi méffu/ 'forked mountain' in Tualatin (and not to be confused with Saddle Mountain to the northwest in Clatsop County). Gatschet has /chawáålakchi méffu/ as the locale of a lake inhabited by a monstrous being, whose abduction of children is described in a folktale dictated to him in three versions.²⁹ Granting that the folktale provides a plausible identification of this particular Devil's Lake, the lake also has a Tualatin name: /amhúulukw madúmmai/ '/amhúulukw/'s abode'. The monstrous being named /amhúulukw/ was "very large," spotted, four-legged, had a large spotted horn or horns and porcupine-like legs, and was accompanied by spotted dogs.³⁰

GOPHER VALLEY. A small "pocket" valley in the Coast Range (Yamhill County), Gopher Valley is drained by Deer Creek. The round hills surrounding the place could be taken to resemble dirt as it might be thrown up by a gopher. On a sketch map accompanying the unratified Champoeg Treaty of 1851, the valley has the name "Gopher Hole"; it also has lines drawn around it designating an intended (but never instituted) "Reservation of the Yamhill Band of [the] Callapooia Tribe."³¹ According to Gatschet, the valley was called /úufpiå dúnnu/ 'gopher's place' in Tualatin.³² This name is another case of convergent English and indigenous names, whether by sheer coincidence or some historical connection running in one direction or the other.

IMAGE CREEK. This stream is named for Image Rock, which lay between Table Rock and Rooster Rock at the head of the Molalla River in Clackamas County. As far as I was able to ascertain, Image Rock no longer exists or, at least, not in recognizable form. According to local tradition, it was an Indian-made stone sculpture said to represent, variously, "an Indian maiden with a cougar on her back" (Jack Young, a BLM employee I interviewed in 1978), "a woman, with claws-arms reaching around in front of her" (David Wilcox, a timber-cruiser I also interviewed in 1978), and "an image of an Indian woman... looking up at Rooster Rock and a bear had jumped on her back" (undated manuscript by Charles W. Hardy). Hardy adds: "now that [sculpture] was very nicely done, by an Indian it was said. It was plain to see it was an Indian woman."³³ All sources agree that the sculpture was vandalized, and most said it was shot by hunters.

Image Rock was photographed by Dave Scholl between 1897 and 1901.

Courtesy of Aurora Colony Historical Society

KI-A-CUT FALLS. These falls are named for [q'áyaq'ach], who was a Tualatin tribal chief during treaty negotiations and the tribe's subsequent removal to Grand Ronde Reservation in 1856. The form Ki-a-cut may be from a misspelling appearing in treaty documents. Smoke Signals, the official newspaper of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, led its issue for July 15, 1999, with an article by Oscar Johnson on the naming of the falls. The article, "Tualatin River waterfall named after Tribal Chief," reads in part:

Grand Ronde tribal officials and Sherwood community environmental activists last month gathered to name a recently discovered waterfall after a 19th century Grand Ronde chief.
Leon Chip[s] Tom, Council member; Lindy Trolan, cultural resource specialist; Donald Day, archaeological monitor and Tony Johnson, language specialist, joined members of the Tualatin Riverkeepers in naming the approximately 100-foot falls after Chief Ki-a-kuts [note correct spelling: Kalapuyan /ch/ actually falls in between the English "ch" and "ts" sounds, resulting in considerable inconsistency in English transcriptions of Kalapuyan names].
The Wapato Lake, Tualatin Kalapuya leader signed the 1853 [1855?] Willamette Valley Treaty ceding the vast territory that encompassed the falls before moving to the Grand Ronde reservation with his people....

[q'áyaq'ach] is the subject of a Tualatin-language biographical sketch originally dictated to Gatschet in 1877 by Peter Kenoyer ([q'áyaq'ach]'s nephew) and subsequently reviewed, first by Leo J. Frachtenberg and later by Melville Jacobs, with Peter Kenoyer's son Louis Kenoyer.³⁴

LONG TOM RIVER. "Long Tom" shows just how far speakers of one language can go in order to make their own linguistic "sense" out of a name that originally belonged to another language. The original name was evidently the name of a Kalapuyan band, recorded historically as Lamitambuff, Longtabuff, Lumtumbuff, Lung-tum-ler, and so on.³⁵ The latter spelling already suggests a degree of English speakers' secondary reinterpretation, which is far more apparent in the variants "Long-Tongue-buff" and "Long Tom Bath."³⁶ It has been suggested that /lámpdumbif/, or "Blind Ben," a southern Willamette Valley Kalapuyan who lived at Grand Ronde Reservation during the late-nineteenth century, bore the name; but information recorded by Jacobs from John B. Hudson, a younger Kalapuyan resident of Grand Ronde, casts doubt on this identification.³⁷ Hudson translated the name into his local English as 'spank-his-ass', citing /-bif/ 'buttocks'.³⁸ The man who bore this name had suffered an unfortunate encounter with a grizzly bear, possibly explaining the nickname — unless the reference was to some terrible fate suffered by the Native people of Long Tom River. Alternatively, Hudson may have provided us with a Kalapuya-speaker's secondary reinterpretation of a forgotten name of a group of people. In Northern Kalapuya, the Long Tom River area was also called /chalámalii/ and its people the /alámalii/.

"Molala Kate" Chantelle (Molala name [múswi]) was photographed in about 1930. Her cheeks are painted, she holds a feather fan and beaded flat bag, and she wears a belted, open-sleeved skin dress; a beaded yoke; bead necklaces; and a headband adorned with dentalium shells. Chantelle supplied Molala texts to Melville Jacobs and ethnographic data to Philip Drucker.

OHS neg., OrHi 65285

LUCKIAMUTE RIVER. /aláak'mayut/ (Northern Kalapuya) or /aláak'mayuk/ (Central Kalapuya) was the name of a Kalapuyan "tribe" — that is, of a cluster of related but autonomous villages.

MOLALLA RIVER. Like /k'alapúya/ (see Calapooia/-ya), this is a name of obscure origin and significance that came into regional currency from Chinookan and Chinuk Wawa. The reference here is to speakers of Molala, the dialects of a number of small hunting bands that once ranged the slopes of the Cascade Range from the headwaters of the Clackamas River south to the headwaters of the Rogue River. Boas's Molala fieldnotes show the name as [moláalis]. Variants are /mulálish/ (Chinookan, Jacobs) and /muléelis/ or /múleelis/ (Kalapuyan, Jacobs).³⁹ I have heard the form [mólala] from Grand Ronde elders. Isolated by their wilderness surroundings and hunting way of life, Molalas had very little contact with the first waves of foreign explorers and traders, no doubt explaining why their presence has left so little impression on Oregon geographic names (see Tufti; and, in the appendix, Chucksney and Tuckta/Toketee).

MOUSE RIVER/PEAK. This mid–nineteenth-century name of Marys River and Peak is cited in Oregon Geographic Names as an English translation of an Indian name (see also Chintimini).⁴⁰ Jacobs recorded Central Kalapuya /chantp'úshak/ as the name of a village on the west side of Willamette River, located somewhere around Independence and Buena Vista.⁴¹ While this name was given without translation, the stem form on which it is based matches Northern Kalapuya /tp'úshak/ 'mouse', lending credence to "Mouse" as a genuine local name of Indian origin.

MOOLACK MOUNTAIN. That name for 'Elk' Mountain is from Chinuk Wawa [múlak] 'elk', derived from Chinookan /imúlak/ 'elk'. It is a post-contact–era Chinuk Wawa name, bestowed to disambiguate the original English name, "Elk Mountain," from the Northwest's many other "Elk"-named features.⁴²

MULTNOMAH. Originally encountered by Lewis and Clark as the name of a village on Sauvie Island, the name was also applied by them to the Willamette River, which enters the Columbia at the island. This is an early example of how newcomers extended the original reference of local village or ethnic names to provide orientation in an unfamiliar landscape. In this case, however, the extended reference is preserved today only in the name of the Willamette River's western mouth, known as Multnomah Channel. The river as a whole owes its name to another source (see Willamette). Boas explained the name with reference to Chinookan /nímaånumaå/, translated 'downriver'.⁴³ /-maå/ is a Chinookan plural suffix, hence Silverstein's reconstruction as /máånumaå/ as 'those towards the water', that is, 'those closer to the Columbia River'.⁴⁴

OLALLIE MOUNTAIN. This name appears within the Willamette Valley region as the name of a mountain in Lane County but more famously as the name of a lake and butte at the summit of the Cascades north of Mount Jefferson. It is from Chinuk Wawa [úlali] or [ólali] 'berries', which in turn is derived from Lower Chinook /úlali/ 'salmonberry'. There has been a tendency to narrow English "olallie" to the mountain huckleberry, for whose local abundance the places in question were indeed named. Chinuk Wawa [úlali] meant both 'salmonberries' and 'berries' in some localities.

John B. "Mose" Hudson (left), his wife Hattie Hudson (next to him), three of their children, and Hattie's mother Martha Jane Sands (seated) were photographed in about 1905. The baskets shown were woven entirely from hazel shoots, a traditional material, but the carrying handles and the hamper-shaped basket in the foreground were responses to Euro-American buyers.

OHS neg., CN 22570

QUINABY. This name belonged to one of the old Willamette Valley commuter-railway stations. While not going back to an original Kalapuyan place- or group-name, it does have an authentic connection to an Indian who was once well-known around Salem, probably the same individual listed as "old kuínabi" on Gatschet's record of Santiam Kalapuyans alive in 1877.⁴⁵

SANTIAM RIVER. This name, recorded as /sandyám/ by Jacobs, appears as an alternate name for the Santiam tribe. Kalapuyan noun stems usually bear stress on the first syllable, making this form irregular and suggesting, in turn, that it may not be indigenously Kalapuyan. The usual Kalapuyan name of the Santiams was /a(n)hálbam/ (see Chehulpum).

SCAPPOOSE. The form [sqå'pus] appears without translation in Franz Boas's Kathlamet Texts, identified as a place on the Columbia River "below St. Helens."⁴⁶ According to Curtis's 1911 Chinookan village-names list — the first and only systematic geographical survey based on interviews conducted with surviving speakers of Chinookan languages — "Skáppus" was a Chinookan village located at modern Scappoose.⁴⁷

John Wacheno (left) and John B. "Mose" Hudson pose at Grand Ronde in 1934, with Spirit Mountain behind Hudson. Wacheno was the last Grand Ronde Indian whose head showed the effects of frontal-occipital flattening during infancy, a practice once customary for high-born northwest Oregon Natives; he provided Clackamas Chinookan ethnographic data to Philip Drucker. Hudson dictated Santiam Kalapuya and Chinuk Wawa texts to Melville Jacobs.

Courtesy of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Cultural Resources Department

SOOSAP PEAK. Local tradition has it that this peak in the Cascades east of Molalla was named for Joseph Andrews, who was also called Soosap or Suisap. He was a well-known resident of Oregon City during the late nineteenth century.⁴⁸ "Soosap" (or "Suisap") may be for a pronunciation of "Joseph" influenced by Chinuk Wawa [sosep], derived in turn from French "Josephe."⁴⁹

SPIRIT MOUNTAIN. The graceful profile of this tall butte, which dominates the Grand Ronde Valley from the north, may be seen on the official logo of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, in which the mountain appears in the center of a Native American shield from which also hang five feathers. Five was the ritual number of Northwest Oregon indigenous people, governing the number of times water was thrown on the hot stones piled in a sweathouse, the number of times Coyote usually got to pull off one of his escapades in the traditional myths, and, in the early days of Grand Ronde Reservation, the total number of nights a pre-pubescent seeker had to keep up solitary all-night vigils by a fire high atop Spirit Mountain. Such vigils were crucial rites of passage, marking the moment in life when a young person actively sought relationship with one or more of the helpful spirits whose aid was considered essential to long and productive life.⁵⁰ In Chinuk Wawa, these active spirits and the powers they confer are both termed [t'åmánåwas]; one of the Grand Ronde elders I interviewed referred to Spirit Mountain as [t'åmánåwas lamåtáy] 'spirit-power mountain'. Gatschet, whose Tualatin hosts showed him the questing place on Spirit Mountain in 1877, gave the mountain's name in Tualatin as "tchatchénto" (/chachíntu/ in Jacobs's reinterpretation).⁵¹ Frachtenberg also recorded /chanchínduu/, the Central Kalapuya form of what appears to be the same name, but apparently for Marys Peak, not Spirit Mountain (see Chintimini). There is no obvious explanation for this application of the same name to two mountains.

SUCKER LAKE/CREEK. Before being dammed and fed with water from the Tualatin River, Lake Oswego was far smaller than today and, together with its associated creek, bore the name of the humble sucker fish. This is probably the same Sucker Creek named "tch'aká mámpit ueihépet" by Gatschet's Tualatin informants.⁵² The word-form "aká," which was not verified by later-surviving Kalapuyan speakers, is one of three Tualatin words translated as 'sucker' or 'chub', yielding the translation 'sucker-place creek' (/mámbit/ 'stream'; "ueihépet" remains to be explained). See also Waluga, in the appendix.

TAKENAH. This early name of Albany may be identical to the Central Kalapuya name /chantíkini/, given by Jacobs as a place identified only as south of Salem.⁵³ A Kalapuyan village located at or near Albany was /chanchémank'lákwa/, perhaps meaning 'place (in front of?) arrow-wood, Holodiscus discolor'.⁵⁴

TAPALAMAHO. This old spelling, purporting to give the Indian name of Mount Angel, evidently identifies Gatschet's "tcha tábal améffu," given as the Tualatin name of a mountain (/méffu/ 'mountain') near Pudding River.⁵⁵ Kalapuyan [f] is bilabial (produced with friction between the two lips), rendering the indicated equation with English "h" quite plausible.

TUALATIN. Another Kalapuyan tribe name, Tualatin appears as Northern Kalapuya /atfálat'i/ and Central Kalapuya /antwálat'i/. The Chinuk Wawa form of the name, [twálat'i] or [twálati], matches the historical variant Tuality, preserved in the name of Tuality Community Hospital in Hillsboro and elsewhere.

TUFTI MOUNTAIN. Charlie Tufti, a Molala Indian, was a well-known personality around Pleasant Hill during pioneer times.⁵⁶ Tufti is also a contemporary Warm Springs Reservation family name, said to go back to a man known as Molala Tufti, who came to Warm Springs before the beginning of the twentieth century and married into a local Wasco family.⁵⁷

TUMWATER. This mid–nineteenth-century name of Willamette Falls is preserved today as an Oregon City street name. The name means 'falls' in Chinuk Wawa, being a compound joining the Chinookan onomatopoeic particle [tum] or [tåm] 'thump' with the English noun "water." An alternate form of the word has both of its elements from Chinookan: [tå'mtsåqw] or [tå'mchåqw], with the Chinookan noun stem /tsåqw/ or /chåqw/ 'water'. It is interesting that in Jacobs's Clackamas Chinook Texts, which documents the Chinookan dialect spoken along lower Willamette River, Chinookan /kíshachk/ 'falls' appears in myth for Willamette Falls, while Chinuk Wawa [då'mwáda] appears in reminiscences about historical events.⁵⁸ /kíshachk/ was also the Chinookan name of the Cascades of the Columbia at modern Cascade Locks, which, like Willamette Falls, supported a major indigenous salmon fishery. By the time the Willamette Falls Chinookans were removed to Grand Ronde Reservation in 1856, both /kíshachk/s were under the authority of a single Chinookan chiefly family.⁵⁹ [tåm] is identifiable with Lewis and Clark's "timm," heard by them with reference to falls at The Dalles (see Cascade Range).

WAPATO LAKE. A former shallow lake, since drained for agriculture, Wapato Lake was located at Gaston, Washington County. Gatschet gives the Tualatin word /chachíif/ 'crawfish place', as the name of both a harvest camp on the north end of the lake and the lake as a whole.⁶⁰ The lake was once an important site for the entire Tualatin tribe, which gathered there every fall for the annual wapato harvest. Wapato, the English common name of Sagittaria latifolia (the starchy tubers of which were an important Kalapuyan staple, sometimes called "Indian potato"), corresponds to Chinuk Wawa [wáp(å)tu], which means both 'S. latifolia' and 'potato'. A number of explanations of this word have been proposed. The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, explains it with reference to Cree /wapatowa/, meaning literally 'white mushroom'. More recently, William Samarin, pointing to Lewis and Clark's occasional spellings of the word with p- (rather than the more usual w- also recorded by them), has proposed a Spanish or Portuguese word for 'potato' as the source, pointing out that those words would have been common knowledge to crews of early trading ships visiting the lower Columbia River.⁶¹ David French proposed that the word is a Chinookan term based on a Kalapuyan stem; /wa-/ is an Upper Chinook nominal prefix denoting the feminine singular, while S. latifolia is /-pdu/ (full form: /mámpdu/) in Northern Kalapuya, and /-pduå/ (/gámpduå/) in Southern Kalapuya.⁶² A particular super-abundance of wapato once grew on Sauvie Island, which in pioneer times was known as Wapato Island.⁶³

WILLAMETTE FALLS/RIVER/VALLEY. By the Astorian period (1811–1813), the Willamette River was referred to by a name variously spelled Wallamat, Wolamat, and Wolamut.⁶⁴ A number of the earliest citations, including some explicitly attributed to Indians, appear to have been recorded with specific reference to the mouth of the river. According to Curtis's Chinookan village-names list (see Scappoose), [wálamt] (also [gaåawálamt] 'the people of [wálamt]') was the name of a Chinookan village on the west bank of the Willamette River at Willamette Falls.⁶⁵ A number of other sources confirm a local connection to the falls.⁶⁶ Before the catastrophic malaria depopulations of 1830–1834, Willamette Falls was a major center of regional intertribal contact and commerce, possibly explaining why local Natives would have extended the name of a village there to the whole lower part of the river. Similar indigenous applications of local names to parts of (as opposed to entire) major streams are exemplified elsewhere in the region. The extended or modern reference to the entire river, which also dates to the Astorian period, may have come about through the medium of Chinuk Wawa; one of Gatschet's Tualatin informants understood [walámt] as Chinuk Wawa for the Willamette River, a usage he believed did not predate the earlyånineteenth-century arrival of fur traders.⁶⁷ An even earlier-recorded name for Chinookans in the West Linn vicinity is /tåawiwála/ or /åawiwála/.⁶⁸ We have no record indicating what, if anything, any of these names meant to Chinookans.⁶⁹

The Hartless family of Grand Ronde was photographed in about 1905. Christine Petite Hartless is seated at right. William Hartless, who dictated Marys River Kalapuya texts to L.J. Frachtenberg in 1913 and 1914, is seated at the left.

OHS neg., OrHi 56429

A number of unsubstantiated explanations of Willamette have been proposed. Perhaps the oldest attributes it to a French diminutive form for "William," hence "Willa(u)mette" (where "straight" French would have "Guillaumette").⁷⁰ Secondary reinterpretation by local French speakers, whether or not reflecting this patent folk etymology, no doubt explains the variant pronunciation \åwilå-'met\, which I heard from the late David LaChance, a descendent of one of Grand Ronde's French-Indian families.⁷¹ Even the modern English pronunciation (\åwi-'la-måt\) may betray French influence.⁷² Other explanations cite the Sahaptin term /lamt/ 'blue, green'. In the judgment of Bruce Rigsby, an expert on Sahaptin, these too are probably also secondary reinterpretations, in this case attributable to Sahaptin speakers. One such explanation cites /wala/, the diminutive form of /wana/ 'water' in Sahaptin, as the source of the rest of the name, while another cites /wi-/, a plural prefix, giving rise to the reinterpreted pronunciation [wílamt] with the meaning 'blue (or green) ones'.⁷³

YAMHILL. A tribe name, recorded as Northern Kalapuya [ayámil] and Central Kalapuya /ayámhala/, is the source for this geographic name.⁷⁴ The former form was subjected early on to secondary reinterpretation, yielding English "Yamhill" and even "Yam Hill." The Pacific Northwest is not known for its crops of yams.

YONCALLA. This is a tribe name, recorded as Southern Kalapuya /yángalat/, Central Kalapuya /yánkalat/, and Northern Kalapuya /ayankéelt/. A local settlers' tradition claims that the name means "home of the Eagles."⁷⁵ Unlike many settlers' traditions about Indian names, this one may have some truth to it. In Kalapuyan, /yank/ means 'high', /-la/ (Central/Southern Kalapuya) and /-éelt/ (Northern Kalapuya) mean 'house'.⁷⁶

APPENDIX: SOME NAMES OF OBSCURE ORIGIN

ABIQUA CREEK. This looks superficially like it could be a name with the Tualatin nominal prefix /a-/; however, no sources have preserved a Kalapuyan name for Abiqua Creek, and no obvious "fits" spring forth from the Kalapuyan noun lists. The word for 'hazelnut' (Central Kalapuya /ámpgwíå/) looks like it could offer a near match, but the Tualatin word for 'hazelnut' is recorded as /mámpgwi/ (Gatschet) and /ámpgwi/ (Jacobs).

CANEMAH. While this name looks like it could be indigenous in origin, no Native-given forms are on record confirming it as genuine. [kåním], from Lower Chinook /ikaním/, is Chinuk Wawa for 'canoe'. The Chinookan term /k'áni/ 'mythic' appears in at least one local (Clackamas Chinookan) place-name, /ik'ánixwitxwíla/, 'where the myth stands', given as the name of a large rock in the Willamette River above Willamette Falls.⁷⁷

CHUCKSNEY MOUNTAIN. It seems possible that this name is for the Klamath word /chakgeenknii/ 'serviceberry-area people', which was often used to refer to Molala bands roaming the Cascades to the east and southeast of Eugene. Northern Molalas sometimes referred to these bands in English as the "Eugene Molala."⁷⁸ Chucksney Mountain is in the High Cascades roughly east of Eugene.

COLLOWASH RIVER. This waterway is possibly named for the Wishram chief [q'álwash], a signer of the 1855 Yakima Treaty. [q'álwash] is a traditional Wishram Upper Chinook personal name, still in use (with the spelling "Colwash") as a family name.⁷⁹ This raises the possibility that Collowash River could have been named by association with any member of the Colwash family. While [q'álwash] himself is thought to have contributed his name to Colowesh Basin in Washington state, there is no known historical association linking the chief to the Clackamas River region in Oregon, where Collowash River is located.⁸⁰ The name also resembles Sahaptin /k'alúwas/ 'braided rim (of a basket)' but, here again, there is no evidence of historical association to support an etymological conjecture.⁸¹

HALO CREEK, Lane County. While evidently ultimately from Chinuk Wawa [hílu] (also pronounced [hílo] or [héilo]) 'lacking, nothing', this feature is close enough to the home ground of "Chief Halo" — a mid–nineteenth-century Yoncalla Kalapuyan leader well-known to local settlers — to have been bestowed in his honor. According to non-Indian local tradition, the man's name is indeed from the Chinuk Wawa — by one account, because he was generally destitute and, by another, because of the desertion of his wives, leaving him "lacking."⁸²

PUMPKIN RIDGE. This mountain ridge forms the eastern edge of Dairy Creek Valley north of Mountaindale, Washington County. Robert L. Benson, a local historian, suggested that "Pumpkin" originated as a secondary reinterpretation of /bánaxdin/, the name of the Tualatin village thought to have been located at or near Mountaindale. Benson pointed out that, to an English-speaking ear, the Tualatin word would sound something like \'pånåk-tin\, which, in turn, could have suggested non-standard English "punkin." As far as I know, the area has no historical association with pumpkins. Gatschet recorded the Tualatin name of the place as /chabánaxdin/ and the people of the place as /abánaxdin/.⁸³

"Old Man Halo" was a leading man of the Yoncalla Kalapuyans during the late-nineteenth century. Thanks to the sponsorship of a local white family, Halo and his family were able to continue living in their Yoncalla homeland while most other surviving Kalapuyans were forced to move to the Grand Ronde Reservation after 1856.

OHS neg., CN 022580

RICKREALL CREEK. The oldest known document giving a name for this stream, dated 1833, has the form "Creol R.," suggesting that the stream may have been named for an individual or individuals of locally-born white or mixed heritage.⁸⁴ The Kalapuyan names for Rickreall Creek and the Dallas vicinity, all from Gatschet in 1877, bear little resemblance to either this or the modern form: "tchínchel - Dallas Creek" (Luckiamute dialect) and /chachínchaal/ 'Dallas' (Tualatin dialect).⁸⁵

TUCKTA TRAIL/TOKETEE FALLS. "Tuckta" is a Warm Springs Reservation family name.⁸⁶ The name also suggests Toketee, applied to a falls on the North Fork of the Umpqua River some distance to the south of Tuckta Trail, which is located in the Cascades northeast of Oakridge. The association with Toketee Falls has some plausibility because Toketee "is pronounced Tuck-et-tee, with the accent on the first syllable."⁸⁷ That observation casts doubt on the derivation usually given for the name — from a Chinuk Wawa word for 'pretty' spelled "tóke-tie" in Gibbs's dictionary.⁸⁸ As far as I have been able to determine, "tóke-tie" has never been recorded as part of the Chinuk Wawa used by local Indians. If it were, we would expect the pronunciation [t'úkdi] (with [t'ókdi] as a permissible variant), since the ultimate source is clearly the Chinookan noun-stem /t'úkdi/ 'good'. An English speaker bestowing the same word as a name would have had to lift it from one of the old "Chinook" dictionaries, which merely copy the word from Gibbs, who has the first syllable with "o" [o] not "u" [å]. In other words, the attribution to Chinuk Wawa may just be a folk etymology. Molala /táaqti/ 'high up', assuming it could have been supplied by a local Indian in response to a request for a place-appropriate meaning, seems plausible (albeit unproven) as a source-word of appropriate meaning and form ('täk(å)-åte\ or 'tåk(å)-åte\, the values [a] and [å] tending to be closely related in local indigenous languages).

WALUGA PARK/SCHOOL. I am at a loss to identify this old name of Lake Oswego, said to be "an Indian name for wild swan."⁸⁹ /wa-/ (or /a-/) is a marker of the feminine singular in the Upper Chinook dialects, including Clackamas, the best-documented of the vicinity. While /wa-/ appears in Chinookan names of plants and animals, the available noun lists offer no obvious matches. The Clackamas word recorded for 'swan', /iqilúq/, shows the masculine singular marker /i-/. The same Chinookan noun-stem is the source of the usual Chinuk Wawa word for 'swan', [qilúq]. The Kalapuyan word for 'piliated woodpecker', recorded as Tualatin /háåluk/ and Santiam /aålúk/ and /aålúku/ is suggestive, albeit most likely only coincidentally so.

YAPOAH CRATER. While this feature is located in northwestern Klamath County far from the Willamette Valley, the name has also been recorded as an early name of Skinner Butte in Eugene.⁹⁰ At least one Kalapuyan term occurring in a number of place-names around the Willamette Valley suggests it: /(am)búiåwa/ (Central Kalapuya, Jacobs); and /(a)búåyuu/ (Tualatin Northern Kalapuya, Gatschet/Frachtenberg), meaning 'pocket prairie (small prairie in woods)' or 'island'. The lack of any other confirmation, however, renders this equivalence speculative at best.

Notes

^1. Robert Boyd, "Demographic History, 1774–1874," in Northwest Coast, ed. Wayne Suttles, vol. 7 of Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 139–40.

^2. Horatio Hale, "Ethnology and Philology," vol. 6 of U.S. Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1846), 562.

^3. Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis L. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 7th ed. (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2003). Some of the supplementary information presented here also appears under my name in William Bright, ed., Native American Placenames of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). This article corrects a number of errors that crept into the latter compilation.

^4. I compiled the list of scholar-recorders and dates in Table 1 from the sources below, which contain the raw data underlying standardized spellings of Native words appearing in this article (refer to Table 2). W.E. Myers was the recorder responsible for much of the linguistic data appearing in Edward S. Curtis's monumental work, The North American Indian, including probably all such data appearing in vol. 8 cited here; I have not yet seen Myers's field-notes, which may reveal the identities of informants. Most Tualatin Northern Kalapuya data cited were first recorded by A.S. Gatschet in 1877. L.J. Frachtenberg went over Gatschet's notebooks with the last known speaker of Tualatin, Louis Kenoyer, in 1915, modernizing Gatschet's rather archaic orthography and restoring missing phonetic detail; he entered his results as red-ink corrections written into the original notebooks. Melville Jacobs, working with Louis Kenoyer in 1936, went over many of these corrections again, further sharpening their phonetic accuracy.
Sources: Franz Boas, Molala field-notes, 1890, Ms No. 999, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. [hereafter National Anthropological Archives]; Boas, "Chinook Texts," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 20 (1894); Boas, "Kathlamet Texts," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 26 (1901); Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, ed. F.W. Hodge, vol. 8 (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1911); Philip Drucker, Clackamas field-notes and Molala field-notes, 1934, Philip Drucker Papers, Ms No. 4516(78), National Anthropological Archives; Leo J. Frachtenberg, Molala field-notes, 1910–11, Ms No. 2517, National Anthropological Archives; Frachtenberg, Yamhill field-notes, Ms No. 1923-e, National Anthropological Archives; Frachtenberg, Marys River field-notes, Mss No. 1923-a, 1923-c, 1923-d, National Anthropological Archives; Frachtenberg, red-ink notations in Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes (below), 1915; Albert S. Gatschet, Luckiamiut and Ahantchuyuk vocabularies, 1877, Ms No. 473, National Anthropological Archives; Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, Ms No. 472-a, National Anthropological Archives; Melville Jacobs, Molala linguistic slip-files, 1928–1935, Melville Jacobs Collection, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle [hereafter Melville Jacobs Collection]; Jacobs, Yoncalla field-notes, 1928, field notebook No. 45, Melville Jacobs Collection; Jacobs, Santiam field-notes, organized ethnographic notes, and slip-files, 1928–1936, including field notebooks Nos. 33–37, 46–47, 76–90, Melville Jacobs Collection; Jacobs, Clackamas linguistic slip-files, 1929–1930 [data], 1949–1950 and 1953–1954 [files], Melville Jacobs Collection; Jacobs, Tualatin texts and data, 1936 (texts recorded by Jacobs, with re-elicitations of data originally collected by A.S. Gatschet, L.J. Frachtenberg, and Jaime DeAngulo with Lucy S. Freeland), Melville Jacobs Collection; Jacobs, Kalapuya Texts (Seattle: University of Washington Publications in Anthropology Vol. 11, 1945); and Jacobs, Clackamas Chinook Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics Publications 8 [part 1], 11 [part 2]), 1958–59.

^5. On how Native peoples' naming practices reflected their world view and relationship to the land, see Eugene Hunn, "Native Place Names on the Columbia Plateau," in A Time of Gathering: Native Heritage in Washington State, Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum Monograph 7, ed. Robin K. Wright (Seattle: Burke Museum and University of Washington Press, 1991), 170–77.

^6. The qualification "older" is meant to exclude names bestowed by (presumably) well-intentioned mapmakers and other post-pioneer bestowers, who usually raided secondary sources (usually the old "Chinook" dictionaries) for Native-sounding names.

^7. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 42.

^8. Jacobs, Molala linguistic slip files.

^9. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 66.

^10. Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 291.

^11. Henry Zenk, "Kalapuyans," in Northwest Coast, 547–53.

^12. A map of Kalapuyan groups named in the treaty is in 53rd Congress, 1st Sess. Senate Executive Document No. 25 (Serial No. 3144), 1893, page 58. This includes the "Calapooia band of Calapooias," whose indicated territory identifies them with the ethnographic Ahantchuyuk tribe. On Kalapuyan treaty-signing groups removed to Grand Ronde Reservation, see Harold Mackey, The Kalapuyans: A Sourcebook on the Indians of the Willamette Valley 2d ed. (Salem and Grand Ronde, Ore.: Mission Mill Museum Association and The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, 2004), Appendix A [contributed by CTGR staff], 217–21.

^13. Zenk, "Kalapuyans," 552.

^14. George Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or Trade Language of Oregon (New York: Cramoisy Press, 1863), 7.

^15. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 175.

^16. Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, 8 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904–1905), 3:143, 144.

^17. See John A. Hussey's Champoeg: Place of Transition (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1967), 17–19.

^18. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 267, 282. The identification of /búichuk/ as Perideridea sp. (most likely, P. oregana [S. Wats.] Math.) was made by Professor David French of Reed College, Portland, based on Gatschet's and Jacobs's following descriptions: /abúichuk/: blossoms white, root 1–2" long, dug; eaten boiled or raw; stalk 2–3', joints on; grows in prairie bottoms (Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 196). /antbúichuk/: a kind of root having two or three parts, white flowers; "a kind of camas," root 1–1/2" long and "shaped like a sweet potato" (Jacobs, Santiam field notebook 33 page 53, 84 page 39).

^19. Alexander McLeod, "Particular Occurrences During a Voyage of About Three Months, Southward of the Columbia" [1828], in Maurice Sullivan, ed., The Travels of Jedediah Smith (Santa Ana, Calif.: The Fine Arts Press, 1934), 112, 116.

^20. Gatschet, Luckiamute and Ahantchuyuk vocabularies.

^21. Jacobs, Santiam field notebooks 33 page 53, 46 page 74. Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 94, 291; and Gatschet, Luckiamute and Ahantchuyuk vocabularies.

^22. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 614.

^23. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 357.

^24. Hartless originally dictated Mary's River Central Kalapuya texts to Leo J. Frachtenberg in 1913–1914. Melville Jacobs reviewed and edited these texts, finally publishing them in his Kalapuya Texts, 204–350; the reference to Marys Peak is on page 221.

^25. Michael Silverstein, "Chinookans of the Lower Columbia," in Northwest Coast, 544.

^26. Records of the Oregon Superintendency of Indian Affairs; Records Pertaining to Relations with the Indians, January 24, 1851—November 18, 1856, Microcopy No. M-2, Roll 28, National Archives, Washington, 73–97.

^27. References are given in Henry Zenk and Bruce Rigsby, "Molala," in Plateau, ed. Deward E. Walker, Jr., vol. 12 of Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 444.

^28. In the information attributed to me on page 135 of Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States, the location is erroneously given as Lincoln County.

^29. The originals (from Gatschet's Tualatin fieldnotes) were reviewed by Frachtenberg in 1915, then reviewed again and, finally, edited and published by Jacobs in Kalapuya Texts, 156–60.

^30. Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 72, 85–86, 89–91.

^31. Manuscript in National Archives, Washington, Cartographic Records Division, Map 195, Tube 458.

^32. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 279.

^33. The Hardy manuscript bears the title Early History of Molalla and Nearby Areas. I saw it in the possession of the late Robert L. Benson.

^34. Published by Jacobs in Kalapuya Texts, 163–73.

^35. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 590.

^36. Alexander Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River (London: Smith, Elder, 1849), 236; and Joel Palmer, Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountains to the Mouth of the Columbia River (Cincinnati: J.A. and U.P. James, 1847), 94.

^37. F.W. Hodge, ed., "Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30 (1907–10), 760. The name appears there as "Laptambif," which is from the Northern Kalapuya form of the same name.

^38. Jacobs, Santiam slip-files.

^39. Zenk and Rigsby, "Molala," 445.

^40. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 614–15.

^41. Jacobs, Santiam field notebooks 34 page 9, 46 page 150.

^42. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 658.

^43. Cited as information to the editor, vol. 2 of Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30, ed. F.W. Hodge (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1907–10), 956.

^44. Silverstein, "Chinookans," 545.

^45. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 368. Several pictures of Quinaby are on file in the photographic archive of the Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. According to information provided with one, Quinaby, "chief of Chemekatas," died in 1883.

^46. Boas, Kathlamet Texts, 219.

^47. Curtis, The North American Indian, vol. 8, 181.

^48. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 896.

^49. Compare with Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States, 457.

^50. The Guardian Spirit Complex, as anthropologists have termed the quest and its associated ceremonialism, is documented in ethnographic descriptions and in indigenous-language texts dictated by older Natives. See, for example, Verne Ray, Lower Chinook Ethnographic Notes, University of Washington Publications in Anthropology 7:2 (1938): 78–85; L. Speir and E. Sapir, Wishram Ethnography, University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, 3:3 (1930): 236–44; Jacobs, Kalapuya Texts, 56–72, 179–84, 345–48; and Jacobs, Clackamas Chinook Texts, part 2, 505–26.

^51. Those of Gatschet's Tualatin texts specifically devoted to Spirit Mountain are published in Jacobs, Kalapuya Texts, 180–81.

^52. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 193.

^53. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 12; and Jacobs, Santiam ethnographic notes.

^54. Jacobs, field notebook 34, page 9; and Frachtenberg, Mary's River ethnologic notes, cited in Mackey, The Kalapuyans, 39.

^55. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 663; and Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 225.

^56. Beulah Harden Carrothers, "Indian Lore," Lane County Historian 4:2 (1959): 42–44.

^57. Kathrine French and Yvonne Hajda, personal communications, 1999.

^58. Jacobs, Clackamas Texts, part 2, 375, 550.

^59. This information is from family letters of Grand Ronde elder Marianne Michelle (d. 1956), a granddaughter of Chief John, tribal chief of the Willamette Falls Chinookans during the early years of Grand Ronde Reservation. Manuscripts in the possession of the Michelle family.

^60. Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 70, 93.

^61. William J. Samarin, "Jargonization Before Chinook Jargon," Northwest Anthropological Research Notes 22:2 (1988): 233.

^62. French, a professor at Reed College who is now deceased, suggested this etymology to me in 1976. See also Howard Berman, "An Outline of Kalapuya Historical Phonology," International Journal of American Linguistics 56:1 (1990): 54. Note that Tualatin /mámpdu/ 'wapato' is mis-translated as 'camas' in Jacobs, Kalapuya Texts, 190 (paragraph 6, subsections (4)-(5)), rendering the description there (which is actually of the annual wapato harvest at Wapato Lake) completely misleading.

^63. See Melissa Darby, "The Intensification of Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) by the Chinookan People of the Lower Columbia River," in Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner, eds., Keeping it Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 194–217.

^64. Robert F. Jones, Annals of Astoria: The Headquarters Log of the Pacific Fur Company on the Columbia River, 1811–1813 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 29–30, 79, 85, 101, 135. Gabriel Franchère, Journal of a Voyage on the North West Coast of North America During the Years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814, ed. W. Kay Lang, trans. Wessie Tipping Lamb (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1969), 82, 94, 112. I am indebted to Robert Boyd, Portland, for pointing my way to these references.

^65. Curtis, The North American Indian, 8:181.

^66. Robert Newell, "A Report on the Indians of Sub-Agency First District South of the Columbia" [1849], in Dorothy O. Johansen, ed., Robert Newell's Memoranda (Portland: Champoeg Press, 1959), 148; William A. Slacum, "Memorial of William A. Slacum" [1837], Oregon Historical Quarterly 13:2 (June 1912): 201; H.S. Lyman, "Indian Names," Oregon Historical Quarterly 1:3 (September 1900): 320; Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 70; and Drucker, Clackamas field-notes. William F. Tolmie, who was at Fort Vancouver during the 1830s, appears to place the village at Oregon City as opposed to West Linn, but he does confirm its association with Willamette Falls. "Walamt was the name of the Indian village on the right bank of the river at what is now Oregon City," Tolmie said. H.H. Bancroft interview with Tolmie, "History of Puget Sound and the Pacific Northwest," Victoria, 1978, University of Washington Microfilm 190.

^67. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 31.

^68. Silverstein, "Chinookans," 545. Silverstein has reconstructed the form from various historical recordings beginning with Lewis and Clark's "Clowewalla."

^69. Chinookan words tend to be complex formations, often based on elemental constituents of only one consonant, vowel, or syllable each, and nouns (the class to which both of these names would belong) present difficulties that gave pause even to Franz Boas, the linguist to whom we owe our only published grammar of Chinookan: "On the whole the derivation of the numerous polysyllabic nouns in Chinook is obscure. Evidently a considerable number of nominal affixes exist, which, however, occur so rarely that their significance can not be determined." Boas, "Chinook," in vol. 1 of Handbook of American Indian Languages, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40 (1911), 612.

^70. Matthew P. Deady, "The True Name of Our Beautiful River," Morning Oregonian, October 15, 1874.

^71. Mr. LaChance's parents were both of voyageur parentage, and local French was the language of his childhood home. The pronunciation of "Willamette" cited is the one he grew up with.

^72. Such a form would appear to be [walámét], given to Gatschet with two referents: Willamette Valley and a place at Willamette Falls. Gatschet, Tualatin fieldnotes, 70.

^73. With respect to the first proposal, Professor Rigsby comments that the "almost invariant phrasal order in all the Sahaptin dialects is adjective-plus-noun (dependent-plus-head)," rendering the hypothetical noun-plus-adjective phrase /wála lámt/ 'streamlet blue' "forced, if not actually ungrammatical." With respect to the second proposal, he notes that /wi-/ pluralizes certain nouns derived from verbs, a word-type which he believes excludes /lamt/.

^74. Gatschet's form "ayámil" appears in the corrected form "ayámhil" in a number of sources, including as an editor's correction to my Kalapuyans, 553. As far as I have been able to determine, however, "ayámhil" is a scribe's correction, Gatschet having clearly originally written "ayámil." George Gibbs wrote the name "Si-yam-il" in 1851 (National Anthropological Archives Manuscript 475-a-b).

^75. Anne Applegate Kruse, Yoncalla: Home of the Eagles (Drain, Ore.: Drain Enterprise, 1950).

^76. A note from L.J. Frachtenberg incorporated in Jacobs, Kalapuya linguistic slip-files, is the source of this observation.

^77. Jacobs, Clackamas slip files.

^78. Zenk and Rigsby, "Molala," 445.

^79. Bruce Rigsby, personal communication, 2007.

^80. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 218–19.

^81. Bruce Rigsby, personal communication, 2007.

^82. Jesse Applegate, The Yangoler Chief (Roseburg, Ore.: Review Publishing, 1907), 1–2; and Anne Applegate Kruse, The Halo Trail: the Story of the Yoncalla Indians (Drain, Ore.: Drain Enterprise, 1954), 1.

^83. Gatschet, Tualatin field-notes, 95, 150, 291.

^84. Map on verso of John McLoughlin letter to "Mr. Desportes," Apr 3 [1833], John Ball Papers, Grand Rapids Public Library, Michigan; copy: Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Mss 195.

^85. Gatschet, Luckiamute and Ahantchuyuk vocabularies; and Tualatin field-notes, 69.

^86. Yvonne Hajda, personal communication, 2007.

^87. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 960–61.

^88. Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 26.

^89. McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 1007.

^90. "Yapoah, signifying an isolated hill, was the Indian name for Skinner Butte in Eugene. Prof. Edwin T. Hodge of the University of Oregon applied the name to this isolated crater [near the Three Sisters] in 1924." McArthur and McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 1064.

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