< PREVIOUS ] [ 1996 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Place names have always fascinated me, perhaps because they offer, in a word or two, a whole bunch of history.
For instance, I grew up in Evans, just south of Greeley. It was named for John Evans, second territorial governor of Colorado, and a major promoter of the Denver Pacific Railroad, which in 1870 linked struggling and isolated Denver to the booming main-line city of Cheyenne, Wyo.
Evans, who operated in Chicago before heading west, left his name in that area, too -- Evanston was his real-estate development. Political patronage gave John Evans his job here; his appointment came from Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois politician.
This all seems to demonstrate that, during and after the Civil War, modern Colorado was taking form as part of the Midwest -- politically, economically, culturally.
Other place names can be just as informative. Breckenridge was originally Breckinridge, named for John Breckinridge, vice-president under James Buchanan. The goal was a post office -- what politician could refuse to extend mail service to a place named in his honor? -- but when Breckinridge sided with the south (he became Confederate secretary of war), the town fathers changed the spelling.
That appears to be an early form of geographic
political correctness,
and the process is still with
us.
Minnesota recently attempted to erase squaw
from
its map. High-school students there traced the word to a
term for vagina. One county complied with Politically
Correct Creek
and Politically Correct Bay,
but
the state rejected those new names.
If this purification campaign spreads, future students
will have trouble finding the site of the 1960 Winter
Olympics: Squaw Valley, Calif. In Colorado, there's Squaw
Creek, where Zebulon Pike's party celebrated Christmas in
1806. It flows eight miles north of town, and I wonder when
it will become Native American Wymyn Cusec-Challenged
Watercourse.
And if it's improper to name features for female body parts, what's to become of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming?
Early Colorado settlers often prevented this problem.
Before they came, the 14ers above Crestone were the
Trois Tetons,
but then became Crestone, Crestone
Needle, and Kit Carson. West of Walsenburg, the old name
Wajatoya
meant breasts of the earth,
but now
they're the Spanish Peaks.
But the pioneers didn't always leave us a PC map. There's still Nipple Mountain up by Turret and Granny's Nipple near Kremmling.
Cleaning the map is going to take a while -- just the research to find all the offensive names will require years, followed by hearings to determine more acceptable nomenclature. In my dark and cynical moments, I suspect that this crusade is merely an employment program to provide publicly funded lifetime careers for enlightened geography majors, who might otherwise have to find honest work.
Devil's Tower in Wyoming is another recent target. Critics argue that it was a sacred place to whichever tribe had it last (we took it from the Sioux, who took it from the Crow, who took it from, etc.), and our infernal nomenclature constitutes insensitive blasphemy, at best.
We'll be busy in Colorado if the Devil must also be exorcised here: Devil's Slide on Rollins Pass, Devil's Thumb east of Fraser, Devil's Backbone west of Loveland, Devil's Nose in Clear Creek County, Devil's Point near Durango.
That's merely a possibility, though. Other forms of renaming are underway at the moment.
A rural mailing address used to be of the form Route
3, Box 456, Backwater, Colo.
This was meaningful only
to the Postal Service.
If you had to drive there yourself, as I did in learning
my way around Kremmling's environs years ago, you learned
to navigate by the directions you got: Go up the Back
Troublesome a couple-three miles till you get to the old
Wheatley place where they had the fire in '56, then hook
the next right, just down from where George Henricks got
caught in the slide...
In other words, you had to acquire a considerable amount of local lore to go anywhere off the pavement. This was annoying at first, but I got used to it, and realized that it served a noble purpose -- keeping people out who wouldn't bother to learn their way around. If people refuse to learn Front Troublesome from Back, or where the old Wheatley place is, they don't have any business being there.
Now, however, mainstream America is overlaying the
established rural geography with standardized addresses.
Rt 3 Box 456
becomes 78901 Generic Lane.
I've
been told this is to accelerate emergency response for
imported 911 dispatchers and the like, but it also
simplifies matters for process servers, outside police
agents, real-estate speculators and other strangers who are
seldom up to any good.
History shows us that the conquerors exercise their right to put the names on the map, and I must confess that even if I don't approve, it is fascinating to see the process at work right before our eyes.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1996 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >