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Although there is a certain satisfaction in saying I
told you so,
there are also times when you don't want
to be right. About seven years ago, I speculated that the
forces of linguistic purification could assault Colorado's
map someday, and that day might have arrived.
In last Sunday's Post, one John A. Wickham of Evergreen
wrote that it was time to remove the word squaw
from
the Colorado geographic lexicon.
While his intentions may be noble, his reasoning leaves something to be desired.
Wickham writes that the word squaw is considered
offensive to women and Indians, and roughly translates to
the English word 'whore.'
The current virtuous assault on squaw started in 1995, when two students in Minnesota announced that it was a French corruption of an Indian word for vagina, and so therefore Minnesota should purge its maps.
Search as I might, though, I can't find any more about
this alleged etymology. The other references at hand --
three fat unabridged dictionaries -- all say pretty much
the same thing: squaw comes from an Algonkian language, and
just means woman.
In the linguistic realm, Algonkian refers to a family of languages with a common ancestor, just as Romance refers to languages like Spanish and Italian which had a common ancestor, vulgar Latin. The Algonkian languages apparently originated in New England, but spread widely -- the Cheyenne and Arapahoe of 19th-century Colorado spoke Algonkian tongues.
Nothing in any of these dictionaries indicates that any
of the Algonkian languages used ussqua
or
esquaw
or the like to refer to a prostitute.
Perhaps Wickham is a better scholar than I, and he has access to a proto-Algonkian glossary, but his understanding of Colorado history doesn't indicate much in the way of scholarship.
He observes that a popular mountain road crosses Squaw
Pass and Squaw Mountain to 14,264-foot Mount Evans, which
is named after the state's first governor.
Not even close. The first governor the state of Colorado was John L. Routt. John Evans, appointed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was the second territorial governor of Colorado. On account of the Sand Creek Massacre, he was removed from office in 1864.
He founded the University of Denver, and was the main mover on Denver's first railroad connection, the Denver Pacific line to Cheyenne -- which once had a station named Evans, where I grew up.
But according to Wickham, it was Gov. John Evans in
the late 1800s who ran on an election ticket promising to
cancel a generous land treaty with the Ute Indians to kick
them off the rich mining regions of the state.
He must be confusing Evans with Frederick W. Pitkin
(namesake of Pitkin County, whose seat is Aspen), who was
elected governor in 1878 on a platform of the Utes must
go.
Whatever his other flaws, Pitkin was one
Republican who kept his promises -- in the wake of the
Meeker Massacre of 1879, the Utes were expelled to a
reservation in Utah.
Then Wickham writes that we'll never know
whether
it was some legislator's idea of a sick joke to forever
mock our Indians as we ascend majestic Mount Evans.
Actually, we do know. It wasn't anybody's idea of a joke. During the 1859 gold rush, the Evans massif was known as the Chicago Mountains, presumably named by homesick prospectors. The famous landscape artist Alfred Bierstadt visited the peaks in 1863, and got inspired by a storm he saw while camped at Chicago Lakes.
That resulted in a monumental painting, Storm in the
Rocky Mountains,
and he christened the highest summit
Mount Rosalie,
for his wife.
But that name did not endure. Both the mountain and John Evans were prominent. On John Evans' 81st birthday, March 5, 1895, the Colorado General Assembly formally resolved to change the name of Mt. Rosalie to Mt. Evans.
(Rosalie went to a nearby 13,575-foot peak, and the adjacent 14,060-foot peak was christened Mt. Bierstadt in 1914.)
Now, if Wickham wants to be offended at our map, that's
his right. He's welcome to come lobby the Chaffee County
Commissioners into changing Squaw Creek (where Lt. Zebulon
M. Pike camped on Christmas Day, 1806) to something more
acceptable to his tender ears -- perhaps Native American
Womyn Cusec-Challenged Watercourse
would work.
But as for me, I prefer to take offense at people who have no idea what they're talking about, but who still insist on telling us how we should sanitize our maps.
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