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THE NAME OREGON’
HISTORICAL OREGON
BY WALT CURTIS
What does it mean? No one knows for certain. There
has been much speculation down through the years. Everything
from “bark dish" to "beautiful water” to “long ears." Take your
pick! It seems more like a Spanish name than an Indian one.
Did an early Spanish explorer name our desolate coastline after
Aragon? Your guess is as good as mine.
What do Alfred Powers and Malcom Clark Jr., have to
say? Two of my favorite and most reliable Oregon historians
and men of letters. The History of Oregon Literature by Powers
and The Eden Seekers by Clark deserve immediately to be put
back into print — or we are a second-rate, ungrateful, Podunk
state! Such great scholars of our region would be lionized in a
civilized nation.
It is likely a poet, William Cullen Bryant, popularized the
name Oregon in his famous poem “Thanatopsis.” (Power to the
poets!) This meditation on nature and death went through many
editions, starting as early as 1817. God knows how many
Oregon writers and poets have alluded to it or quoted directly
from it, including Samuel L. Simpson and Harold Lenoir Davis.
Geographically speaking, there never was a river named
'Oregon' except in the imagination of the bard. “Thanatopsis"
is a wonderful and reassuring lengthy poem on mortality, as kind
as anything Whitman ever apostrophized on our demise in the
cosmos. Here are the famous lines:
Take the winds
Of morning, pierce the barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings —
(Portland's first poet laureate, Simpson, holed up in a
cabin near Jacksonville Trying to sober up he scribbled a now
lost collection, Dashings of Oregon.)
Where the heck did William Cullen Bryant come across
the name? He must have read Jonathon Carver or as Malcom
Clark speculates, extrapolated from Major Robert Rogers'
ravings’. The Concise Accounts (1765) by Rogers mentions
no westward flowing river. Carver and he met briefly and
planned an abortive exploration of the upper Mississippi River.
Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America
was published in 1778. Mostly bogus, except for a few stolen
maps. In 1792 Captain Robert Gray sighted the mouth of our
“Great River of the West," the Columbia, naming it after his
ship.2 The Chinook Indians simply called it 'Wauna' or the
“big river." Bryant's poem mythicized our territory or bioregion,
giving our state its name when it came into the union in 1859.
Ten years earlier it was called the Oregon Territory.
When Joaquin Miller returned to Oregon, after seeking
gold behind Mt. Shasta and almost getting hanged as a horse
thief, he rhapsodically speculated on its origins. Oye aguaf
“Listen to the water!" Water on the brain, water in the veins:
Miller would write wonderful things about bears and longhorn
cattle in the Willamette Valley and the heroic old pioneers who
minted their own money (Beaver coins) and raised a militia (to
slaughter the natives who were sick of the interlopers killing
them with alien diseases). Miller was a true mythmaker, a poet.
Read The Selected Writings of Joaquin Miller edited by Alan
Rosenus from Union Press. Study the past, if you would have
a future.
I am tempted to quote from Miller’s paean to our fair
state in the essay, entitled “The New & The Old." He skewers
a money-grubbing speculator in Portland who asks, “Can't you
put this city into poetry. What’s poetry good for if it can’t raise
the price of land?" The weight of the rain is bending the man's
umbrella, running down his face. Miller says, “Mother Nature
comes to the aid of the inhabitants and makes the webfooted
like the waterfowl." Slop, slop! Drip, drip. The money-grubbing
stranger protests, "It don't really rain much in Portland." But
that down about the mouth of the Columbia, at Astoria, it does
“sometimes rain a-right smart.” Joaquin has the gift for gab,
making him a great wordsmith. In his marvelous little poem
“Mt. Shasta," he coins a musical phrase ubiquitous in our times.
He heard the mountains “rock and roll."
I stood where the thunderbolts were wont
To smite thy Titan-fashioned front,
And heard the dark mountains rock and roll;
I saw the lightning's gleaming rod
Reach forth and write on Heaven’s scroll
The awful autograph of God!
Hooligan, ooligan, Aragon, ouragan, huracan, wauregon,
orejon, origan, onagaon, oye-el-agua, oregano. You sing along.
Ding dong. You tell me. The place is in our dreams. The name
resounds. Oregon is a song.
Bark dish, Shoshoni for River-West, smelt or grease
trail, beautiful water, hurricane, big ears. The tum-a-lum of its
name tumbles, trills in my head like a bad hangover. Did I get
smashed last night, wake up this morning and stare with blood
shot eyes at O-R-E-G-O-N? Yes, I did and all the Oregon
Historical Quarterly articles, history books, scholarly research
by Rees, Vernon Snow, T.C. Elliott, Lewis A. MacArthur's
Oregon Geographic Names, Malcom Clark and Alfred Powers,
NOTES
(1) Infamous Indian killer and founder of Rogers
Rangers during the French & Indian War
(2) The name ‘Columbia’ egregiously comes from
Christopher Columbus, the Italo/Spanish navigator who was a
rapist and murderer of indigenous peoples. Poet Joaquin Miller
wrote a wretched jingoistic poem to Columbus with the hideous
refrain, ‘Sail on! Sail on!" Too bad the Catholic killer didn't sail off
the edge of the world Or into a fatal hurricane. The New World
might have had a sanguine future.
(3) Alice Roosevelt (later Longworth), famous for her
unfettered behavior and sharp quips, such as 'If you've got
nothing good to say about anybody, come over here and sit by
me"
(4) A Washington artist is attempting to change that
state’s name to 'Cascadia' because he is tired of its confusion
with Washington, D. C. Cascadia has also been used as a name
for a secessionist nation comprised of Pacific Northwest states.
and Milleresque poetry goes down the drain. Onomatopoeic
madness! West is the direction of the big water. I listened to
a waterfall and angels sang. The Cree Indians of the Great
Lakes do not use the ‘L’ sound in their language. Smelt
(ooligan), a highly prized oily rich fish, was traded all the
way from the West Coast. They called it “oorigan," two
anthropologists from the University of Oregon surmise.
I’m not sure I buy this most recent theory for the name
Oregon. Bynam and Lewis claim they have paid attention to
native oral history and trader journals to substantiate a consider
able native trade in the “grease" or oil from smelt. Perhaps it’s
true. The distance seems extensive, but the oil was medicine,
canoe sealant, and it brightened potlatch fires. When I was
growing up in the 1950s there were magnificent spring smelt
runs on the Sandy River and other tributaries of the Columbia.
People dipped nets on poles, but also used garbage pails, pots
and pans, there were so darned many fish. You could fill a
gunny sack in an hour. In 2001 The Oregonian claimed a
substantial return of the storied smelt. A guy told me at the
mouth of the Sandy, he got one silvery candlefish. That's how
pathetic the ecology of Oregon has become.
I wrote a poem back in the 1970s and smeared paint on
a fish, making smelt drawings on paper. Drips of blood. Scale
patterns. Slime. In bright colors. I even put some in a toilet bowl
(I was a janitor), surreally showing the connection between clean
flush water and the river. I bought the thin silvery fish in a super
market; already the Sandy runs were scant. The fish probably
came from the Cowlitz River in Washington State.
So Alfred Powers in the Junior Historical Journal states
that the first man to write “Oregon” was Jonathon Carver in his
Travels. He variantly spells it ‘Oregon’ or 'Origan'. He claims
interior Indian nations told him of four great rivers which start in
the center of the continent. “And the river Oregon, or the River
of the West," flows into the Pacific Ocean. Malcom Clark Jr.
demolishes Carver’s geography in “Oregon Revisited,’ an
Oregon Historical Quarterly article in 1960. Clark said the River
of the West was simply another version of the mythical North
west Passage. But the idea sticks. The name sticks. William
Cullen Bryant pours the glue, decades later, as “Thanatopsis”
becomes a most popular poem in the 19th century.
“Shall we ever know the genesis of the name? It seems
unlikely," writes Malcom Clark. “Perhaps it resulted from the
application of Major Rogers’ phonetic spelling of the word
‘Aragon’, a name sometimes given to unexplored reaches of
Northwest America." Aragon is a name used by both Spanish
and French explorers. Pretty good guess, I'd say.
MacArthur's Oregon Geographic Names quotes Abigail
Scott Dunaway's brother Harvey Scott extensively. He says
“Carver had no scholarship." His book was cribbed in London
“partly from the records of French and English exploration." T.C.
Eilliott in the OHQ is partial to Major Rogers’ use of “ouragan,"
the French word for storm. As a poet, I am partial to the notion
that many of these similar sounding words, homonyms, syner-
gized themselves into the name Oregon. Overtime. If you say
something often enough, it sticks. The word sounds like it’s of
Spanish derivation. And if the French used the Spanish word
too, so much the better to reinforce the name. We forget that
spelling wasn't standardized. Ben Franklin and Shakespeare
were whacked out spellers!
I found a worm-eaten ledger with yellowing newspaper
clippings pasted-in at a garage sale in Oregon City. Many of
the clippings were pre-Worid War 1. Some fascinating, others
mundane. “Pioneer Woman Dies After Long Illness." ALICE
PLAYS PART OF ROWDY? In 1905 Teddy Roosevelt’s
daughter3 behaves like a whooping cowboy. Sam Simpson's
poem “Beautiful Willamette.” The Cliff House, built in the 1840s,
to be razed by Hawley Pulp & Paper Co. JOHN LIVING STON
DIES SUDDENLY — former slave and playmate of Mark Twain
who rode hidden in a box on a wagon with his master to Oregon
in 1864. PROHIBITION KILLS RED — Joe Suisap, Klickitat
Indian and baseball player for O.C. team in 1874. Dies because
he couldn't obtain a drink of whiskey, according to physicians.
Bizarre! He was carrying wood for them. Why didn’t they give
him a drink? Goddamnit!
An egregious poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. “Smile a
little, smile a little / Even through your tears.” It sucks'. \NeTe
almost to the war effort.Thanksgiving Proclamation by President
Wilson. I've almost lost my frame of reference. No! Here it is:
OREGON DERIVED NAME FROM"OREJONS," LONG
EARED INDIAN. July 7,1910 (Oregon Journal) newspaper
clipping. Pioneer railroad man P.P. Shelby of San Francisco
holds forth. His son visiting Fundacion, Peru, sends photo of
native Indian with large ears and ornament, called Orejon.
Shelby continues: “Bishop Blanchette of Oregon got in debt....
went to South America in 1838... A distinguished English scholar
told him Spanish navigators in 1592 stopped at the mouth of
the Columbia River... and designated the Indians they saw as
“Orejons'. The Spanish for 'large ears' — from the habit of wear
ing large ear ornaments. This is 200 years before Captain Gray
named the big river ‘Columbia’ after his ship. I don’t know. I kind
of like it. Did the Chinook Indians on the lower river wear large
ear ornaments? We know they flattened their heads.
To conclude, a poet named the territory and state known
as Oregon. (You can call it Cascadia if you like.4) William Cullen
Bryant struck the name from our largest and most obvious geo
graphical feature, which had mythical earlier associations, the
River of the West. Made it sing! Oregon is a song. The bardic
tradition gives us the name of the place in which we live. Never
forget. And shall die. And be dispersed back into Nature. “And
to lie down to pleasant dreams." Forever. With all the other
creatures who have come before. Bryant impassions the mortal
process so eloquently it deserves repeating here, once again.
I love 19th century poetry for its rhythms and reassurance,
bombast and moral messages. We live in a swinish epoch,
heartless and anxious, a virtual hell of technology and capitalist
hype. Thank God for soothing sentiment.
Earth that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements —
(Thanatopsis)
ASTORIA: A GLIMPSE IN TIME
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW CIER
PAINTINGS BY RON JENESEN
RIVERSEA GALLERY 1160 COMMERCIAL
Walt Curtis is regarded by many as Oregon’s unofficial
poet Laureate. He is author of the famous Mala Noche as well
as Peckemeck Country, Mad Bomber's Notebook and 77ie
Roses of Portland