Who christens rivers? By what authority do they bless or curse harmless moving water?
My interest in such questions goes back years, to a time when I lived in Marquette and one of the liveliest streams near my home was the Dead. Local historians claimed it was a name given in reference to a Chippewa burial ground located on its banks, but I suspected such a fine trout river had to have been named by an angler hoping to disguise its virtues. Had he been the protective father of a beautiful daughter he might have used the same impulse to dress her in dungarees and a baseball hat and call her Ralph.
Most rivers, I'm afraid, are named for less imaginative reasons. Here in Michigan we're stuck with no less than five rivers named the Black. Colors have always been a popular and shamefully unchallenging source of river names. When you consider all the melodious and charming possibilities, mundane monikers such as the Black, the White, the Red, the Yellow, and the Green become inexcusable.
Scan an atlas and you can get a pretty good idea of the state of imaginative resource in North America. It's heartening to note that there are plenty of rivers with the kinds of lovely and lyrical titles you sometimes find on watercolor paintings, poems, or old-time folk songs --names like the Sweetwater and Firehole in Wyoming, the Swift Diamond in New Hampshire, the Neversink in New York, the Vermillion in Illinois (a color name with panache), the White Top Laurel in Virginia, the Looking Glass in Michigan, and Marais des Cygnes ("Marsh of Swans") in Missouri.
On the other hand, some waters, like the Misery in Michigan, the Stinking Water and Dismal in Nebraska, and the Skunk in Iowa are burdened with names that seem to have been bestowed by people bent down by hard luck and disappointment.
Naming rivers after animals has always been popular, probably among the same folks who so heavily favor colors. There are entire herds of Buffalos, Rabbits, Bulls, Bears, and Turtles; whole flocks of Turkeys, Owls, Crows, and Swans. In Oklahoma there is a Wildhorse, Montana has a Beaverhead, South Dakota a Dog Ear, and Texas a Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red.
Names derived from Native American sources are a fine thing when the results are as melodious as the Kickapoo in Wisconsin and the Klickitat and Skookumchuck in Washington. Others, like the Ichawaynochaway in Georgia, Conococheague in Pennsylvania, and Ompompanoosuc in Vermont can be a source of serious frustration for tourists and cartographers.
Most of the rivers I'm personally acquainted with -- the Jordan, Rapid, and Crystal, for instance -- have pleasant, if uninspired, names. The Au Sable has an elegant, continental air to it, though it loses something in translation ("River of Sand"). Others, like the Boardman and Platte, are less enchanting. Names of people should never be tacked on rivers. They should be left in telephone books or hung on a shingle: Platte and Boardman, Attorneys at Law.
I once set out to discover the source of one of America's loveliest and best-remembered river names, the Two Hearted. Located in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, that river attained superstar status soon after the publication of perhaps the most famous short story in 20th century America, Ernest Hemingway's, "Big Two-Hearted River." Almost everyone knows by now that the river in "Big Two-Hearted River" is not the Two Hearted, but the Fox, which is located some 40 miles south of it. The reason for the deception should be obvious. As Hemingway explained once in a letter to his father, he chose the Two Hearted because "it's poetry."
Indeed. I agree with my whole heart. With two hearts, if I had them. In certain moods I once imagined the river named by a Chippewa warrior whose breast was cleaved by love. Or, perhaps, named by someone who stood on the dunes at the mouth of the river, witnessed the expansive horizons of Lake Superior, and was overcome with the need for twice the heart to perceive and hold so much beauty.
It was a pilgrimage, then, that took me to the Two Hearted. I came to canoe it, to camp along it, to fish for brook trout in the quick, shallow rapids in the upper reaches. I came to burrow to the heart of the river and comprehend first hand the impulse behind its name.
Near the river, at the end of the long, dusty, gravel road that is the main thoroughfare in that portion of the U.P., I stopped at a party store and gas station for supplies. It is country dominated by pine forests and cedar swamps, where rusted pickups with gun racks are standard transportation, and the narrow two-tracks leading to hidden cabins, or "camps," are grown over most of the summer with weeds and underbrush, and covered over most of the rest of the year with many feet of snow.
The attendant in the store was a young man with a stylish haircut and a Guns-and-Roses T-shirt. He said he was a native and had spent his entire life near the river. I asked him about its name.
"Hemingway never fished the Two Hearted," he said.
"I know that. I'm just curious about the source of the name."
"I guess the French explorers named it, or something," he said. "Well, the Indians named it first, I guess, but the French messed up the translation, or maybe the English messed up the French translation. I forget."
"What was it?" I asked. "What was the original name?"
"I don't know. Something like, 'Place Where the Fat Eels Spawn.'"
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.
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